Pieces of pipe come in various shapes and they come randomly, [...]]]>

Gas is flowing! Boss is demanding! The crowd is complaining!

Obstacles abound!

Pipe Trouble is similar to the game Pipe Mania; a game where you must install pieces of pipe that link the start point to the end point. Netbookist first encountered it at the Bit Bazaar Winter Market.

Pieces of pipe come in various shapes and they come randomly, so you would have to think how best you can assemble them such that you don’t waste various pieces.

Like Pipe Mania, Pipe Trouble pits you against the pressure of ensuring your pipeline is ahead of the gas flow. In addition, Pipeline includes two major elements which you have to care about : your boss and the people of the land. Your boss wants you to build pipelines as efficiently as possible (i.e. short and direct so as to save money), however, the people want you to build your pipes with as little disruption as possible (i.e. don’t build over their farms, forests and possessions).

Getting judged at the end of every round

These two interests conflict, and if you anger the locals, they’ll start stonewalling your project. They’ll send protest teams that will linger around your pipes and block you off. If you anger the government, you’ll get fined or they might blow your pipe up.

After every round, you’ll get judged on your performance. Your boss and the people will give you a score out of three stars each, and ideally, you would have attained six. Along with the score, a tidbit about the pipeline will be read which can range from telling you about gas prices to fears from the local population about environmental pollution, giving the game a shallow storyline.

Unfortunately, the game is not made for the PC. The full game can only be bought for the Android and iOS, although you can play a full level on the website.

Link

Steam is currently down and reports have that you must both add it to your account and install it to be able to keep the game.

Link

Do note that you will have to sign up and these three games are extremely popular. This might result in GOG’s website going down, or disallowing you to login because they are being overwhelmed.

Greenman Gaming is offering four indie games for free starting on 8th February to the 11th of February. Four games will be free, one on each day at Green Man Gaming as part of The Grand Playfire & GMG Giveaway.

8th Feb: Zombies

9th Feb: Ninja Blade

10th Feb: Unstoppable Gorg

11th Feb:  Superstars V8 [...]]]>

Greenman Gaming is offering four indie games for free starting on 8th February to the 11th of February. Four games will be free, one on each day at Green Man Gaming as part of The Grand Playfire & GMG Giveaway.

8th Feb: Zombies

9th Feb: Ninja Blade

10th Feb: Unstoppable Gorg

11th Feb:  Superstars V8 Next Challenge

Please note that you do need a Green Man Gaming account and a Playfire account, and you need to link those accounts. Instructions on website.

Click here to read the full blog post on GMG website.

Battlefield 1942 is a first-person shooter first released [...]]]>

Planes are in high demand, as proven by the number of campers in the airfield. They range from heavy bombers (B17), light bombers (Ilyushin, AichiVal, SBD-5), and fighters (Zero, Yak9, BF109).

As of writing, Battlefield 1942 is still available for free on Origin – you just have to download it via this link because it is more difficult to find it on the Origin program. Get it before 1 March 2013.

Bring the boom boom pow to your enemies.

Battlefield 1942 is a first-person shooter first released in 2002. When it came out, it represented  a breakthrough in this genre. You know a game is successful when you keep getting the same thing again and again for years – see the Battlefield series, The Sims and Call of Duty.

It added a variety of ways you can have a rampage over your enemies including blowing them up with a plane’s cannons, blow them up with explosives, or just run them over with your jeep. Have a battle on sea, land and air. Work in teams to coordinate artillery fire, or work alone and climb up a mountain to snipe your enemies.

Each class and each spawn point gives you different abilities and vehicles to choose rom

The game is primarily a multiplayer game, and single player merely means playing the game on the same maps but with really dumb bots. On this note, the game is still highly playable because there are still many servers and players online.

The game runs quite poorly, unfortunately, on a netbook with internal graphics. Playing the game at 640x480x16 with everything set at low, and a disadvantaging visiblity of 50 to 75 per cent, you get a framerate of about 5-20 depending on how many people there are and how many objects there are on a map.

On the other hand, if you have a separate graphics processor, such as an ION 2 like the netbook  that I have, you can play this game without much slowdowns. Running on the ION 2, you can play at Medium settings with a 100% visibility and get a framerate of 15-40, again the same slowdowns will apply, especially when there is a lot of action.

The game runs at a 4:3 resolution, so if you do not want to play with a stretched image, follow this link.

Overall, I’d get the game whether or not you have a discrete graphics processor. It is one of the most entertaining game to have on your computer when you are bored – in class with the university’s WiFi or when you are travelling and can’t bring your main computer.

Tanks: from heavy tanks like the TIger to tank destroyers such as the M10, and everything in between.

Like

The pioneer BF1942: still with all its lustre and nostalgia.

A great variety of weapons and vehicles

Dislike

Runs poorly on integrated graphics

If you’re used to the newer Battlefields, the features in this game might feel limited. I see it as simplicity.

Verdict

It’s free – until 1st March 2013 – you have nothing to lose, so get it. If you have an AMD C-series processor or a Nvidia graphics card in your netbook, you will have a good time. It is playable on integrated graphics, but you won’t get a good score due to a choppy framerate.

An excellent game, simple and varied.

Gameplay: GG

Graphics: Great… unless you have integrated graphics

Work needed to get game to play: Plays right out of the box.

Well. It is free, right?

Just like the screenshot I got credits to Good Old Games, you can get the two classics here.

Get it now while it lasts!

I have often triumphed a truth about games – good graphics, great sound and a great storyline is nice to have, but these elements don’t make the game. There are games out there which you play once, and then never play it again, until, perhaps, nostalgia hits you, and then there are games out [...]]]>  

Crappy screenshot? Sorry - I can't seem to take pictures in Windows mode without getting the colours all garbled.

I have often triumphed a truth about games – good graphics, great sound and a great storyline is nice to have, but these elements don’t make the game. There are games out there which you play once, and then never play it again, until, perhaps, nostalgia hits you, and then there are games out there which can be infinitely replayable. The key difference? A game’s concept.

There aren’t too many games out there that don’t follow the logic of safety. The biggest example out there is probably Call of Duty with its many iterations of pretty much the same thing.

But then there are games out there which also try something new. If we look at The Sims, which was a game that was predicted to fail, or if we look at Theme Hospital, we see how unique ideas can translate to a timeless game. People still play Theme Hospital – just look for mods that try to wrestle with Windows 7 compatibility issues.

And on that note, my friend recently introduced me to a game that is so addictive, I haven’t had time to… write on Netbookist. I’m sorry.

The game is called Lords of the Realm II. It’s a sixteen year old game that has such a good concept that I don’t even mind suffering 256 colours and 640×480. It’s a game that seems like a mix of Civilization and Age of Empires. Yes – your goal is to conquer and smite your enemies until you are the one and only left.

Every turn, you have to deal your domestic issues first, and then military issues next. A bit like Civilization.

You allocate your citizens into different industry – wheat farming, cow herding, stone and iron mining, forestry and blacksmithing. There’s a cycle to this – you feed your peasants so that they multiply and provide you with labour (and don’t overthrow you), once you have extra labour, you allocate them to resource hunting, and then putting these resources into building arms. You then raise an army with the weapons you have – all while taxing your peasants a nonsensical 5% tax that won’t put much into your coffers until your empire becomes massive.

With the army you raised, you then go out to conquer neighbouring counties. And this is where this game turns from being a turn-based strategy into a real-time strategy. Every time you fight an enemy army, you must strategize on how best you can make the full use of expensive-but-strong knights, or your archers, which are terrible at self-defense but can shoot enemies miles away. Or you can go trampling on their land, disrupting their economy and causing a displeased peasantry.

The game ramps up in intensity as you proceed from fighting just one opponent to have to deal with four of them. Things get tougher too – land starts out unarable or you might not have an iron mine in your county, causing you to need to buy it from roving caravans.

And because of this convergence of Civ-like elements and AOE-like elements, Lords of the Realm II tends to have the addictiveness of Civ, while giving you more control over battles by putting you into a real-time fight. You’ll see your time disappear as you have one more turn… and then another.

If you want to get this game, you have to search it up online – it’s considered abandonware, so I suppose you can find it really easily. I’d recommend you the place I got the game from, but I don’t want you to suffer 5kb/s speeds.

Like

Civ-like turn-based strategy

AOE-like real-time warfare

Extremely addictive, in a “one…more…turn…” sense

Dislike

Low-res graphics

Verdict

This game is so good, you probably could play it all day, all night. It’s simple but extremely fun!

Gameplay: Engrossing.

Graphics: It’s the 90′s!

Work needed to get game to play: Minimal, though getting a screenshot… oh god why…

The original Fallout is free for 48-hours on GOG.com. The download is 506mb and [...]]]>

FREE!

Fallout 3 turned out to be one of the more epic games out there with its storyline, wide range of guns and other toys. However, after playing Fallout 3, I started thinking of playing the original Fallouts. And guess what?

The original Fallout is free for 48-hours on GOG.com. The download is 506mb and you’ll need a GOG account to get it.