The Orions: Legend of Wizards Strategy Guide & Thorough Spell & Creature Chart
You may already have heard of Orions: Legend of Wizards, without doubt the best Windows Mobile game released so far this year - and, I'd say, the best turn-based strategy game for the Windows Mobile game ever released. It’s one of the very few games you MUST buy – believe me, if you don’t mind wasting some time on learning the rules and getting known the cards, you WILL love it.
There already are some Orions: Legend of Wizards reviews out there; I really recommend that of Ben Stanley here, that of Doug Goldring here, that of Allistair Lee here and that of nonstandardized here. I've also posted some remarks / comments on the first two reviews in their Comments section, which may also be worth checking out.
What I have always wanted to do is creating an objective, easy-to-use, chart-based unit / spell comparison as I did some 8.5-9 years ago for Blizzard's Starcraft (I’ve published quite a few articles on Starcraft, the different units etc., mostly in a similar, tabular format). Knowing what your creatures and spells are capable of and when they are best used is the best way to beat your opponent. Therefore, what I present here is not “another” generic review, but more of a supplement to all these already-existing reviews, containing a lot of never-before-published, “advanced” stuff.
Please note that the rest of this guide assumes you already know the game at least at a basic level. That is, I won't explain how the cards are placed in the empty slots / spaces, how spells should be used, what elements there are, how the cards are randomly selected in Duel and need to be purchased in Campaign etc. This guide is written for players that do know the basics of the game and only need some expert gaming help, recommendation, strategy advice & clarification. If you need a quick recap, please read, strategy-wise, Doug Goldring's review and the comments.
As with other, decent strategy games like Starcraft (let’s now forget that Starcraft is a real-time strategy game, not a turn-based one – a decent Starcraft player will still play Starcraft as a turn-based strategy game and will always beat a less experienced player doing less turn based-like micromanagement), every unit and spell has a counter-unit or spell of, in general, less (!) price. This means if you have all or most of the recommended cards, you will be able to, to a certain degree, successfully counter-attack the cards / spells of your enemy. Everything depends on how thoroughly you know what spells and creatures you and your enemy have, what they are particularly sensitive to and what are the sometimes very important side-effects of summiting a card (in most cases, adding HP to friendly and/or stealing HP from enemy cards).
Yes, this game, strategy-wise, is as advanced as, say, Starcraft, which also requires a lot of learning to become a decent player. This also means you’ll need at least a week to master this game – assuming you play at least 2-3 hours a day (which isn’t a hard thing to do because the title is so damn enticing and gripping – you’ll love pulling out your PDA to continue playing while, say, you’re waiting for something, particularly if you can also enable the in-game music).
Unfortunately, the in-game creature / spell explanations are, in general, far from verbose and, in some cases, are very hard to understand (see for example the in-game explanation “Steal Spell” of Death / Darklord). As, after playing the game a LOT, I know all these units and spells, this was also one of the reasons I’ve spent quite a lot of time compiling this chart (and writing this guide). I hope it is WAY more informative and cleaner than the in-game help, particularly when it comes to comparing and mentioning the alternatives to a given unit / spell (particularly enemy owner HP decreasing-wise).
The chart can be found here. Make sure you open it in a maximized browser window.
I don’t think much explanation is needed for the chart; therefore, I only elaborate on some of its columns. Let me know if the meaning of some of the columns can’t be understood; then, in a later version of this guide, I’ll elaborate on them too.
The most important column will be the “Recommended?” one. In there, I’ve explained whether the card is recommended and if it is, when, under what circumstances you must consider using it. This column is of extreme importance to achieve the goal I’ve outlined above: to find the cheapest and, therefore, most economical solution for a given task. For example, if your opponent summons a Death / Grim Reaper, which costs 12 Death points, you can easily counter-attack this creature by quickly summoning Life / Paladin and casting Exorcizm. In addition to having only spent 8+2 Life points (that is, 2 less than with the enemy’s Death spell) on the summoning and the casting, you will still have a moderately-strong (4 damage done to non-Death opponents) Paladin with (still) 10 HP on the board, also ready to quickly kill (via the above-mentioned Exorcizm spell) another Death creature. Now, think of how much it would have cost you to get rid of Grim Reaper WITHOUT relying on Life / Paladin (and, assuming, you don’t have (or, currently can’t afford) Air / Black Wind or Fire / Fireball, two of the other, excellent instant killer spells) – yes, you would have spent much more. (Incidentally, this is how a decent Starcraft player, putting special emphasis on casting advanced spells, plays. A simple Plague spell from the Zerg Defiler can cause, resource-, micromanagement- and time-wise, orders of magnitude more loss to the enemy than the original price of a single Defiler, even including climbing the tech tree to be able to produce it at all.)
Also, in order to make looking up information as quick as possible, I’ve also tried to separate information belonging to different categories. For example, this is why I’ve created a separate column about “Increasing / decreasing elemental”. For example, if you need to quickly look up which creature will help in increasing an elemental (mostly the one it’s belonging to, except for Life / Apostate, which increases Death instead of its Life home element), you just look at this column in the section of the given elemental (sections, in order to save horizontal screen estate, are separated in the first column; I’ve denoted a new elemental section with bold there) and search for any entry. For example, if you look at the Water section, you’ll see there are two creatures to increase Water: Nixie and Ice Wizard. (While the otherwise very strong Hydra will actually decrease it each turn by two – until it reaches zero. I’ve also included these cases in here.)
Another example: when you want to be absolutely sure you summon a creature to an empty slot, you choose the slot (the opposing creature) taking the “Particularly vulnerable to...” column into account. For example, if there is an empty slot with an opposing Fire (enemy) unit, you won’t want to put a Water / Ice Wizard or Ice Guard in there because they sustain 200% damage from any Fire creatures or spells. Taking this further, you will also want to consult the “Immune to...” column in there to see whether there are any creatures immune to Fire creatures (as can clearly be seen, Red Drake is, in addition to the well-known, low-cost example of Earth / Forest Spirit). Finally, you’ll also want to consult the “Delivers extra damage to..." column to see whether there are any creatures (or spells) that deliver some extra damage to Fire creatures. (As can clearly be seen, Water / Nixie is one of them; that is - if you don’t use any modifiers like Earth / Dryad in the next slot or Fire / Salamander anywhere else - it’ll deliver 2*3, that is, 6 damage.)
Similarly, if you need to counter-attack a very powerful Water creature spending as little money as possible with the best outcome, you (in addition to the joker-of-all-trades Earth / Forest Spirit, preferably backed up with an Earth / Dryad in the next slot in order to bump up its attack by not less than 2) may want to look up a unit immune to Water spells / creatures. Just a quick glance at “Immune to…”: yes, Water / Ice Wizard (only 1 damage only taken from any enemy Water unit) is one of your best choices in this case. (Let’s only hope that, seeing this, your enemy won’t use Fire spells like Fire Spikes or – for you, even worse – Fireball to quickly get rid of your Ice Wizard - don’t forget the two ice-based Water creatures are particularly sensitive to fire. Or, it won’t use a cheap, but, in this case, pretty powerful (2*2 base damage to Ice Wizard and Guard) Fire / Cerberus in the next slot of the opposing one in order to protect it from your direct attack.)
Also, if you quickly want to further decrease the health of the enemy’s owner but don’t have (currently – because of the lack of elemental points – access to) the traditional HP decreasing spells like Death / Steal Life, just summoning a middle-priced Death / Banshee will inflict 8 damage to the enemy owner right at summoning. In order to quickly find this information, you’ll need to scrutinize both the “Increasing / decreasing opponent health” and the “Effect on enemy owner” columns (these columns are pretty similar in meaning; I still wanted to keep them separate to better separate spell- and unit-based damage).
Note that the “Price when produced” column refers to the Campaign mode. In Dual mode, it has no meaning as, unfortunately, you can only have 4 randomly selected cards in each element in Dual games. This is one of the most annoying shortcomings of the game, in addition to, in Campaign mode, 1. the inability to destroy buildings and 2. to get rid of unwanted cards in order to be able to purchase other ones. Implementing a solution to the latter two would be really beneficial because you can easily reach the maximal number of the structures on a given Orion (see the PS section below) and you will always want to use other cards than is currently available. I will definitely ask the More Games Entertainment folks to add the possibility of more cards for example playing Dual games – it’ll greatly enhance for example multiplayer gaming.
PS: just a remark. None of the reviews I’ve read so far mentioned the fact that you can’t build an unlimited number of structures on a given Orion. This MUST be kept in mind when you, for example, in Hard games, only possess 2-3 Orions and allocate most of your experience points to, as is also discussed at the comment section here, “Power” in order to quickly get some of the better cards, even at the beginning of the game, as the only way to defeat much better opponents. Then, if you fill up your words with resource harvesters / converters like in this screenshot, after reaching the building number threshold, you won’t be able to build anything else (see this screenshot showing this), even when there would still be plenty of space to build your new structures on.
Incidentally, the screenshot above also shows the optimal number of each resource harvester / converter. As can clearly be seen, you’ll need the most Crysols harvesters to bump up Crysols production (otherwise, an Orion only produces 20 Crysols a day). The number of Sulmors converters should be slightly (about 50-70%) less than those of the Crysols harvesters. Then, the number of Goldius converters should be about 5-15% of that of the Crysols harvesters, while Eractus converters should be about 2-4%. If you fill up 2-3 Orions (almost) entirely with resource harvesters / converters, you won’t likely to ever run into resource shortage – actually, most of the time, your Crysols will still remain at 9999 (the maximal level).
PS 2: as you may have already noticed, in the chart, I’m referring to the six elementals using italic; also, when referring to a particular spell / creature card, I always name the elemental it belongs to so that you can more easily find it. Finally, when referring to a spell of a particular creature, I also mention the creature, along with its elemental to greatly speed up the lookup.
Related
Review & Strategy Guide: the best game add-on this year (so far): Orions: Deckmasters
The new add-on, Orions: Deckmasters, for probably the best (native) Windows Mobile game of all times, Orions, has just been released. It not only adds 45 (!) brand new cards, but also implements most of the custom features I’ve asked for in my previous Orions articles.
I’ve been playing it for more than three weeks and, now, I feel I’m able to write a very thorough guide and tips. Please consult my two, related articles HERE and HERE for more info on what the game is all about, how it should be played; in this article, I only elaborate on the new cards and new modes.
In addition to the new cards, there’re brand new duel modes:
A "Custom Decks" feature, which allows to build your own deck and use it for fighting in duels. You can put any cards (at most, 24 and, at most, 5 for each element) on these decks. There are some 10 individual decks you can use.
By using these customized decks and utilizing my favorite cards (more on them later, in the Appendix), it was only in about 2% of cases that the CPU was able to defeat me in regular duel games played in Hard mode. Just a comparison: in the standard mode, the same figure is about an order of magnitude higher.
There’s also a new "Draft" mode, where players pick cards out of randomly generated "pool" before each game, and then use these cards as their fighting decks. This also makes the game less random (and you also know, before starting to playing, what cards the enemy has if you pay attention to watching him selecting the cards), while it still isn’t so restricted as with the before-explained custom deck mode.
Note that there’s an unofficial PDF manual downloadable HERE; the PMG folks don’t plan to publish a similar, updated one for the new game. Also note that the developers promise a touchscreen-less MS Smartphone (AT LAST!) and a BlackBerry(!) version of the game. Incidentally, BlackBerry means Java MIDlet. Java MIDlets mean out-of-the-box (or, at least, after some VERY simple conversion steps) compatibility with standard MIDlet environments; this may also mean other advanced MIDlet-capable platforms (for example, Symmbian S60) may also be able to run the game some day.
The game is, of course, a must to buy. I've too purchased it in order to support the developer (I've previously had it so I didn't really need a new license, but I've found it so excellent that I though to myself the developer definitely deserves this).
Now, let’s take a thorough look at the best new cards.
The best new cards
Creatures
Air / Lord Lighting (Level (price): 9/ Health (HP): 22/ Attack (strength): 5): Whenever attacks Air / Zeus, kills it. That is, if you want to kill Zeus because you have a lot of units on the deck with less than level 7, want to defend them from Zeus’ pretty effective and cheap lighting spell, the opposing slot to Zeus is free and and also have some way of making sure you can stop Zeus attacking in the next turn (by, for example, Earth / Spider’s Web), using this card is excellent.
Its spell is a bit less powerful than that of Zeus if you have little Air (the damage delivered equals to the current air) or some other direct, comparable spells like Life / Knight’s pretty powerful spell attacking all the other cards; but can be cast on any other enemy, even over level 7, unlike Zeus’ spell.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Lordlightn.jpg
Life / Monk (7/ 16 / 1): probably the best, new card; highly recommended. While its attack is pretty bad, its auto-healing effect and, even more importantly, its spell is probably the most handy of all spells. The spell decreases of the target creature’s hit by 2 until 1 until 1, it’s already at 1 and with, say, Fire / Salamander or Earth / Dryad increased or in the very few cases when the damage is pure magical and can’t be decreased – see the brand new Death / Evil Sorcerer. With it, you can quickly decrease the direct attack of even the most lethal opponents.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Monk.jpg
(Note that this was a lvl6 card during the closed betatest. I was one of the testers that pointed out it was far too powerful for being lvl6 only.)
Death / Shadow (5 / 10 / 3) is particularly useful in that it only takes half the damage from non-Life cards.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/DShadow.jpg
Death / Assassin is very important if your enemy has a Life / Etherial on the board and you quickly want to get rid of it – even if the opposing slot is taken. Of course, you still have the other, already-known ways of killing of Life / Etherial. It’s also excellent at instantly killing any other creature.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Assassin.jpg
Life / Kermit’s (6 / 8 / 2) spell (Gift of Life) is really-really useful to make sure your high-level cards like Life / Chimera or Water / Kraken are reborn after being killed. This way, by only spending 10 Life, you can even restore cards of level 13…15.
Beware: as it’s a good spell, it can be stolen via Death / Darklord.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Kermit.jpg
The biggest advantage of Water / Water Troll (6 / 16/ 4) is delivering 4 damage to three opposing creatures at the same time – for 1 Water only. Really useful if you don’t want to spend 13 Water on the similarly-working Hydra (which, in addition, would leave your Water at 0 all the time, unless you have additional ways of quickly increasing it – via, for example, Nixie)
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/WaterTroll.jpg
Air / Soul of Winds (6 / 200 (decreasing by 20 each turn) / 4 (default)) is THE card against strong card - and pretty much useless against weak cards like Earth / Dispercer or Life / Monk. The latter also means you’ll want to put very weak cards against it if your opponent brings this card to the deck.
The initial (but, in 10 turns, fully emptying) health means if it’s put against a very strong card, the damage caused by the opposing card will deliver little total damage. As the strength of the card equals to that of the opposing card, it’ll be pretty damaging to the opposing card. That is, if it’s put against, say, a Life / Chimera (13/30/10), it’ll only lose 10 + 20 HP every turn, while it, delivering 10 damage every turn, will kill Chimera in no more than three rounds (unless Chimera is protected / rehealed). And it’s really cheap!
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/SoulofWinds.jpg
Life / Valor is really useful if you can make sure (with, for example, Elven Archers or other spellcaster cards) there’re no opposing cards when it attacks the enemy owner; then, it’ll 14 damage (by default). Otherwise, its damage (to an enemy card) is 7 only.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Valor.jpg
Death / Evil Sorcerer is useful if you’re afraid of getting hit by Life / Kermit’s spells, decreasing your strength. Also useful against other spells and magical attacks.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/EvilSorcerer.jpg
Fire / Berserker (7 / 20 / 5) isn’t particularly good unless you need to quickly get rid of a very dangerous card causing huge damage (for example, an Air / Fairy or an Earth / Elven Archer) and it doesn’t have more HP than 12.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Berserker.jpg
Earth / Kobold (6 / 10/ 5), because of its blocking any damage under 5, can be very useful when you, for example, play against the CPU and it uses Water / Scylla. Then, by reducing Scylla’s hit to, say, 3 by using the new Life / Monk, you will have a constant source of water. (The AI is still "dumb" not to see Scylla is useless and keeps rehealing it when it reaches too low levels, giving you a lot of free Water). Of course, there are several other cards you can use the same trick with – for example, Air / Gargoyle with the Petrification spell or Air / Astral Cloud.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Kobold.jpg
Fire / Wall of fire (3/ 25/ 0) is one of the best cards. I consider it much better than the similar (3-level, dealing 3 damage) Fire Spikes if you want to quickly put a card on the deck, while quickly dealing 4 damage to all your enemies. Note that the card itself doesn’t attack; that is, if you need to take out the opposing card and don’t have other means like Earth / Elven Archer, forget it.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/WallOfFire.jpg
Earth / Dispercer (5 / 13 / 1) isn’t particularly strong (deals 1 damage only) but, when it dies, you receive one element each. For example, against a non-speller / non-positive-side effects unit, it’s a good choice.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Dispercer.jpg
Blade Master (9 / 30/ 8) should also be your preferred card because of its dealing 1 damage to all the enemy cards upon getting hit and its free (!) Shuriken spell dealing 2 damage to the other owner.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/BladeMaster.jpg
Water / Giant Turtle (8 / 20 / 3) is useful against low-HP cards (typically, cards under or around 10 HP) because, once the card’s HP decreases under 10, it’ll be instantly killed.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/GiantTurtle.jpg
Water / Elementarist (7 / 18/ 3) is a very useful card to quickly kill very dangerous, powerful cards like Chimeron: the card you cast Magic Link on will receive the same damage Elementarist suffers from attacks hitting her. That is, if you want to get rid of a card really quickly, place it against a powerful, strong card and link immediately. Note that the Magic Link spell is very expensive; that is, use with caution.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Elementarist.jpg
Earth / Elven Archer (7 / 19 / 0) is also one of the cards I consider the most useful. It can not only attack any other card, even right after summoning, but also increases Earth by one each turn. I’ve found bringing 3 or, in cases, even 4 archer to the deck pretty much lethal, particularly if the opponent doesn’t have mass-killing spells like Fireball: any new enemy card brought to the deck by the opponent can be instantly killed (in most cases, right in the next round). As it has no direct attack, you’ll need another card to directly attack the enemy owner, though.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/ElvenArcher.jpg
Spells
Air / Wings of Wisdom: particularly useful spell to quickly bump up all the elements by 2. Note that the official description states this doesn’t apply to Air; this isn’t true as yet because of a bug, which will only later be fixed. Until then, you’ll want to use it if you don’t have other spells to cast or cards to place on the deck. Particularly useful when you have Life / Chimera on board, with its halving the cast cost.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/WingsOfWisdom.jpg
Life / Armor of God is also very useful for quickly healing, blessing your card and removing negative spells (like poison or strength reduction) from them.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/ArmorOGod.jpg
Air / Moonlight is a very-very good spell if there are very few enemy cards on the board (it heals them too) and you quickly need to fully heal all your cards.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Moonlight.jpg
Fire / Blood Ritual: particularly useful for quickly bumping up your fire elemental; particularly if you have a Chimera on the deck, making this spell even cheaper.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/BloodRitual.jpg
Death / Enslave is also very useful to quickly steal the strongest enemy card. You can even have a gain of 8 by stealing a level 15 card (for example, Water / Kraken) with this level 7 spell. In this regard, it’s much more useful than the more expensive (lvl 8), comparable Air / Black Wind because the latter doesn’t steal the enemy card.
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/Enslave.jpg
Life / Pure Heart: another very useful (and comparatively cheap – lvl5 only) card. Especially useful against the CPU when it starts using Death / Black Mage’s Extract Soul to change all its cards into Death / Ghosts because of the extra 10 damage delivered to Death cards. (Incidentally, this seems to be a bug with the AI – sometimes, it changes far more expensive and powerful cards into Ghosts when it would be absolutely unnecessary. Using ghosts, BTW, should be avoided whenever possible because of the owner’s also taking damage from direct attacks. That is, I don’t see why the AI likes it so much, particularly when spending 2 Death elements on Extract Soul spells.)
http://www.winmobiletech.com/062008orions/PureHeart.jpg
Appendix: my favorite (no-spell) cards
With these cards, I was able to beat the AI in the vast majority of cases – in Hard level. Note that this is just MY favorite deck when playing the AI; yours may be completely different. Also note that I don’t present a deck optimized for games with spells enabled; then, the restricted number of the in-game available cards would mean I would have needed to leave out some very cool cards. As a rule of thumb, I would have selected Fire / Fireball, Life / Pure Heart and/or Armor of God, Air / Chain Lightning and/or Moonlight and/or Wings of Wisdom and Death / Enslave - along with, of course, Life / Chimera (to halve the price of the spells) and Life / Unicorn (to protect my cards from destructive spells).
Water:
Nixie (to bump up water and to deal a lot of damage to Fire creatures)
Leviathan (to heal the owner; to deal 1 damage to all opponent cards)
Ice Wizard (to fight other Water creatures (1 damage from them); to bump up water; in need, to quickly heal owner (albeit, for this, Leviathan is preferred)
Tython (to quickly heal the cards)
Fire: Red Drake (because of the +3 damage upon summoning and not taking any damage from opposing fire creatures; that is, the most ideal card to fight Fire cards)
Diablo (mostly because of its spell, particularly when used in pair, mutually strengthening each other)
Efreet (because of the excessive damage sent back to the attacker; high HP and comparatively high strength)
Wall of fire (very cheap but, still, immensely useful). (You might want to go for Blade Master instead of this or, say, Efreet; it is also very useful and causes direct damage to the enemy owner without using any mana)
Air: Manticore (for the spell to quickly get rid of really dangerous spells like that of Monk, Elven Archer, Fairy etc.)
Zeus (to quickly get rid of cards below lvl7. If your opponent rarely uses low-level cards, you might want to go for Air / Lord Lighting instead)
Fairy (to cause immense damage to the other owner if he uses powerful, strong cards)
Nymph (to bump up air) (you might want to go for Soul of Winds instead, which is also very useful against strong opposing cards)
Earth: Satyr (the best Earth "bump-up" card - not counting in Elven Archers - particularly when deployed at the beginning of the game and particularly as the first card to deploy)
Elemental (very strong; bumps up Earth really fast; has a nice, free, protective spell)
Pyhon (suffocating is very useful, particularly if the opponent goes the Forest Spirit route)
Forest Spirit (to deploy against strong cards – if you don’t use Air / Soul of Winds against strong opponents; to heal owner)
Life: Monk (one of the best cards – both its spell and auto-healing are really worth using)
Chimera (strong; especially useful at healing owner; albeit in a no-spell game not as useful as in a game with spells)
Ethereal (to deploy against very though opponents or Scylla)
Paladin (in case you need to quickly take out a strong Death opponent like Dark Druid or Grim Reaper)
Death: Dark Druid (comparatively strong; great at healing owner)
Darklord (owner- and self-healing; stealing "good" spells, particularly that of Life / Kermit).
Nice review Menneisyys,
I've had Orions since it came out, and have both the addon's too. Its a top game, in the magic/pokemon esque mold. the deckmasters adds alot of features i had wanted to see for a long time.
The ability to duel with your own custom decks is great in its self. How ever i would like to see an improvement to the campaign game, something like HOMM would be great (i have palm heroes which is pretty much just that) with no standard cards and you have to buy all the cards you hold in your deck.
UPDATE (06/26/2008): Make sure you read JAMM's review HERE.
RE: NES Emulator Development
I wasn't quite sure of where to post this, so if it belongs elsewhere, will an admin/mod please move it where it belongs. Thanks.
This is a post below from infidelity (a well respected NES ROM dev/modder). He states that he hopes that it "spreads around the internet like wildfire", so that this information will hopefully get out to the right people.
The issue for many, in being able to play many of the best and latest NES ROM hacks, is related to whether their favorite (or any emu they try on their preferred platform) has been coded to support (arguably?) the NES' most high performance and capable mapper: MMC5. EverDrive, PowerPAK, etc. owners are currently unable to run these games, as they also haven't implemented the mapper's support, yet.
Btw, on Android, I can confirm that Robert Broglia's NES.emu runs both of these ROMs great. It's a paid app, and well worth the price. There's a free fork of it (not as good, and several revisions back, but certainly a good and capable port). That would be NES.emu Free
Both of these games by infidelity are two of the best NES ROM hacks I've seen released...ever maybe. They're both pretty dang impressive at the very least.
Zelda - The Legend of Link
Super Mario All-Stars NES
I really hope this isn't disregarded as spam. It definitely isn't. I'm not infidelity (or close buddies with him), and have had little interaction with him, for that matter. I just saw read this yesterday, and felt it was important enough to share. Just trying to help spread the info.
infidelity said:
I hope that this gets spread around the internet like wildfire. So that other sites, and forums read this, and understand my actions. So if there are non Acmlm users here that are reading this, by all means share this post, link this post, etc, however it can get across, the more that see it/read it, the better.
I've been out of the scene for a few months now, my personal life is more busy than ever. I've been sort of enjoying the fruits of my labor, over my latest two projects, "Zelda - The Legend of Link" & "Super Mario All-Stars NES"
The consensus I've come across time and time again on the internet, is the issues people have with my projects on specific emulators, or retropaks/everdrives, etc.
So what I am about to do, is name off some things I've read (paraphrasing if you will) and answer them as best I can. But first....
Why I use the MMC5 mapper
The MMC5 mapper, is the most impressive & powerful mapper ever created by Nintendo. Some will talk about the Konami mappers being just as powerful, specifically due towards it's audio power, but that's not what I'm after. The MMC5 allows the user to max out the PRG-ROM & CHR-ROM chips to 1024kb's/1mb each, making that game a full 2mb's! That is an exuberant amount of space for a Nintendo game. A vast majority of retail Nintendo games, range from the sizes of 513kb's/769kb's. With 2mb's of size, you have so much freedom in the PRG/CHR department.
Speaking purely on the PRG-ROM, take my project "Zelda - The Legend of Link" for example. Without the PRG-ROM being maxed to 1024kb, there would be no Dark World, hell the Light World wouldn't be as big. There would be no advanced sound engine, no additional space for added assembly for enemies, or other various actions such as writing massive amounts of tile tables to the vram engine. Now take my other project "Super Mario All-Stars NES" for example. Without the PRG-ROM being maxed at 1024kb, there is NO WAY, that I would've been able to cram in those 4 games into 1.
Speaking purely on the CHR-ROM, again, take ZTLOL for example. Without the CHR-ROM maxed at 1024kb, there would be no fancy CHR Swapping. By now everyone has seen my story introduction, with the Windwaker Link & Ocarina of Time Link. That is all performed by CHR Swapping. Have you ever seen or created a flipbook, using stick figures on each individual page, and on those individual pages, you have the stick figure in a different position each time you flip a page? That's basically what CHR Swapping is, the MMC5 allows you to swap out different CHR pages, to give the appearance of animation taking place. Without that 1024kb's of CHR-ROM space, that introduction would've never seen the light of day.
Those two giant paragraphs pretty much sum up why I use the MMC5. It allows for so much creativity for the user to accomplish things, code wise & graphic wise.
On top of those things, the MMC5 can allow the user to have 4 individual save pages of $6000-$7FFF! The user can either use that area for actual saving features, or, the user can use it as additional PRG-RAM, or even PRG-ROM! The MMC5 also has very advanced graphical features, making it so instead of a 16x16 block having an individual palette, you can now set all individual 8x8 tiles (like in Super Nintendo) to have their own individual palette! Me personally, I have not utilized that feature, if you want an amazing example of that in action, I highly suggest you look at kuja killer's "Megaman Odyssey."
Answers To Some Remarks I've Seen
His game doesn't work, it just shows up as garbage
Answer: This is the #1 remark I've come across time and time again. There is nothing wrong with my game. The problem is with the emulator the player is using. The emulator obviously lacks the proper emulation of the MMC5 mapper. What is happening, is that the MMC5 reads pages 00-FF for the CHR tiles. But in my game(s), i have 4 individual 00-FF pages. So the emulator does not have that setup properly, causing garbage gfx to appear. Players sometimes like to stick to what they've been using for years & years, and don't like to update, or are just casual rom hack explorers, and find the easiest emulator on the internet they can obtain. In order to play MMC5 games properly, especially enhanced ones, it's recommended to update or obtain, the latest PC versions of FCEUX, Nintendulator, or Nestopia. PC emulators ported over to video game consoles, such as Xbox, PS3, Wii, various handhelds or smartphones, the porter needs to make sure the emulator he/she is porting, has MMC5 capabilities.
Why Doesn't He Use MMC3? It's The Most Popular, They Work On Everything.
Answer: MMC3 lacks the free space I require for additional PRG-ROM & CHR-ROM. There's no huge explanation for this one. :-/
I Tried This On The N8 Everdrive. It Doesn't Work
Answer: The N8 Everdrive (and I believe the Retro PowerPak) uses two 512kb SRAM chips for PRG-ROM & CHR-ROM. I've contacted krikzz, the creator of the Everdrive devices, and he has no desire to revise his device, to incorporate 1024kb PRG/CHR-ROM chips. I even suggested I purchase the same style chips, only 1024kb's each in size, but he said there is more to it than the chips themselves. So enhanced MMC5 games will never work on those devices. It is up to the respected creators. The only way you will ever see these games on actual Nintendo hardware, is by people sacrificing crappy MMC5 games that have the required size, and destroying them so that these enhanced games can replace them.
That Mario All-Stars Game. Why Didn't He Insert The Mario World Pirate As Well?
Answer: That game alone is 769kb's in size. The 4 Mario games I had inserted into the PRG-ROM, made it impossible for that game to be alongside the others. There also would be no room for any kind of introduction screen, controller function, etc.
That's all I pretty much have to say on all of that. I don't have the freedom to rom hack like I used to anymore. I'm not saying that I'm done forever, but I have zero clue as to when i'll ever get back to it. Anyways thanks for letting me get all of this out.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Source: http://acmlm.kafuka.org/board/thread.php?id=8336
About me:
Hello!
My name is Ilya.
And I apologize in advance for my bad English.
I am the creator, programmer and designer in my small studio: Thevisioline
Throughout my life I have been helping many people: from simple advice, to great actions. I always liked to help people. But, for obvious reasons, I can not help anyone who addresses me. But one day I had an idea: almost everyone has smartphones, so why not help a large number of people with this help at the same time?
I had knowledge in programming and founded a studio to create applications on the phone - it was not a problem. But what is the studio without its own product? At this point, I decided to approach this topic from the other side: a mixture of the game and the application in one small game. So my studio appeared, and with it my first project: Endless Food.
Game description:
Every day for two months I worked on Endless Food. And even now, five months after the release of the game, work continues on it.
Let me tell you more about my game: Endless Food is a mixture of game and application. The main task was to make a game that would be useful and interesting.
So what can Endless Food help people? Can it, for example, give a second life or give immortality?
It certainly can not give immortality, but in emergency situations it can help, and often, it can save a life for you or someone around you. My first creation is able to train people in such necessary skills as Reaction. Incidentally, the game helps you to think through your moves in advance and make a decision instantly.
When you first start the game does not give you a path by which you can develop the necessary skills. It is just a tool for gaining knowledge. The game gives you only an opportunity, but how you use it, start playing and improving your skills, or you'll delete, you decide only yourself.
The user who just started the game, first of all sees how the hamburger tries to escape from the fork, moving on the plates. In appearance, mindless occupation, but do not rush to make hasty conclusions. To score more than 20 points at the very beginning will be problematic enough and only by training the necessary skills, the player will begin to correctly evaluate all his actions and possibilities, and only after that the user will be able to gain more and more points. But, despite the first successes, in order to develop these skills at the proper level, it is necessary to play this game for at least 15 minutes a day for 2-3 weeks. After this period, the player will restore these vital skills.
There are two modes in the game: Classic and Back and Forth. Each of the modes is responsible for training different skills:
- Classic - suitable for those users who feel that the reaction they have at the proper level. In this mode, the player controls the speed of the hamburger: slows the hamburger or accelerates, thereby using not only the reaction, but also the speed of decision making and the speed of thinking about the consequences. In order to gain in this mode as many points as possible, you need to think through each step.
- Back and Forth - will be more useful to beginners. This, so to speak, the first step in restoring the required level of reaction. In this mode, the hamburger and fork move in the same direction at the same speed, but at any moment the plug can change its direction. The task of the player is to have time to click on the screen, thereby changing their direction.
Endless Food will be useful not only for the younger generation, but also for a more adult audience. Because a person is over 40 years old, care begins to deteriorate, he becomes more diffused and does not have such a quick reaction as in his youth. But, after a very short period of play for 2-3 weeks, even an adult will begin to feel better.
You probably wonder where the calculations came from, if you need to play at least 15 minutes a day for 2-3 weeks? From the moment of development to the release of the game, we conducted many tests on different groups of people, in order to determine the optimal time for training. The game was tested on 50 users from different age categories. 44 of which showed an impressive result. For the remaining 6, we increased the playing time to 20 minutes per day, and after 2 weeks they showed a much better result, although it did not reach the previous 44 users, but it proved that our game can help people of all ages.
The graphics also made a special approach: our goal was to make the graphics simultaneously stylish and pleasant, to attract both young and older audiences. Therefore, we chose the approach to use low polygonal graphics, thus the game became less demanding to the power of the phone, but the graphics remained at a decent level. On the main screen and during the game, it was decided to use as few distracting elements as possible, thereby completely immersing the user in the game.
The game also has a table of records, thereby giving the player to compare their successes with the successes of other users of Endless Food.
The game is free, but the game has unobtrusive advertising, which is necessary for further research in this direction and creating more games.
Addition:
Endless Food is the first, but by no means the last, mixture of the game and the application, in the meaning of which is the help to people. New projects are already being prepared that can help a person in all sorts of life situations.
I want to help as many people as possible using games in their devices. Telephones now have almost everyone, but not everyone can find the necessary information in it. With our games, all the vital information the user can acquire and train through the phone.
To understand if such an approach is necessary for people, we need to get as many downloads and, as a result, feedback. Once in the top on xda-developers, we can quickly get a large number of reviews and complete the game, if necessary. After that, I will immediately start creating new projects and will be able to help even more people.
I plan to gather a team of like-minded people with whom we can do more large-scale projects aimed at helping people. At this stage of development, I need to get into the top xda-developers, after which Endless Food will immediately receive a lot of downloads and reviews! I'm sure that this type of games will become more useful for users every day.
Once again, I apologize for my English.
Thank you in advance and thank you for your time.
Best wishes to you!
Thevisioline
Download: t(dot)co/2zPlbh0fmB
Sword Art Online: Integral Factor for Android and iOS – Guide
Sword Art Online novels and anime series became a mega-hit due to its premise. You are trapped inside a video game, and the only way out is to finish the game. Kinda like the new Jumanji movie.
Sword Art Online Integral Factor for Android and iOS is based on the same Franchise, and we have very high hopes for it.
Sword Art Online had other games built around it, however, Bandai Namco has taken a different approach with this one.
What’s different?
Instead of playing as one of well know popular characters of the franchise, you will be playing as one of the many anonymous players trapped inside the game.
The story it tells is the same that fans would already know, yet in Sword Art Online Integral Factor, it is told from different point of view, which the fans will find very refreshing.
In the game, you come across well know characters such as Kirito, Asuna, and others. However, if you want to make it to the end and beat the game, you will need a guide.
That is what this article is about ?
Let’s get to it!!
Starting with the controls
Ok, there is not much to talk about the controls. These are the basic controls you will find in any third person perspective game.
The virtual thumbstick is on the bottom left of the screen, and to look around you just need to tap and drag anywhere on the screen.
Pinch zoom in-and-out is also available.
The Combat buttons are on the bottom right and the minimap is on the top right. To expand the map you can tap on it. And you obviously need to the map to reach your next quest.
The Hamburger icon will give you a popup menu which is made to seem like the character is accessing the in-game menu, which is pretty cool. Here you can check your status, quest info, and even find your friends.
The in-game communication bar is at the bottom, which gives players three options. Say, Party and Tell.
“Say” is for chatting with anyone available, “Party” is for chatting with people you are grouped with, and “Tell” is for sending a private message.
It’s time to fight!
The combat in Sword Art Online: Integral Factor is very simple but very clever. And we like that a lot.
The big button on the bottom right corner is for attacks. It is very simple to use, you just walk to an enemy and attack.
By holding down the button, you can continuously attack.
The four buttons surrounding the main attack button are for sword skills. And as you guessed it, you have to earn these special attacks.
Using them strategically will inflict more damage on your enemies, and after using an attack there is a cool down period before you can use it again.
The “Switch” button on top of the skills buttons, is the most powerful skill available to you. The “Switch meter” fills up as you do damage to your enemies, and once it is full, the icon will start to flash.
Same as the other skills, you can wait for the right moment to unleash this power for maximum effect.
The orange weapon icon helps you switch between weapons. This is something you need to do as your weapon of choice will depend on the type of enemy.
You need to identify the vulnerabilities of your enemy and choose your weapons accordingly.
Tip-
For instance, if all the skills in your current weapon are cooling down, you can switch to the next weapon where all the skills of that weapon will be available to use.
You will not need to use these tactics in earlier stages however, this will be really useful when it comes to boss fights later on.
The “Dash” button is also very useful to avoid attacks.
mod edit - link added
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bandainamcoent.saoifww&hl=en
im playing this game .
Developers Never Watched The Show?
I ask because this story takes place during the death trap phase of SAO. Leefa is a character that appears during the main story, but she was never in SAO, or at least not when players got trapped struggling to survive in real life through the game. Also, ALO didn’t exist yet. ALO did not start until after SAO was won and the surviving players escaped. Seeing a character like her with references to ALO literally pulls you out of the story since it breaks the story. Leefa said she just started too, which means, in the game’s story, she entered the game after the death risks were announced when no one else was allowed to enter or start the game. And lastly, all SAO avatars were altered to look like their real selves, so she violates the setting once again. So we have a character who never existed there coming from another game that doesn’t exist yet in a way that wasn’t even possible to enter SAO while not even looking like she should. Umm..this suggests whoever allowed this or created the game doesn’t know much about it. It would have to be an alternate universe where time travel is possible but that violates the story in dozens of other ways, like we wouldn’t be in the same story from the anime or manga.
Hi everyone! I’d like to tell you the story about the creation and release of our first game. I will tell you a little about our company’s background and the difficulties that we encountered during the development. I hope our story might be useful to you too.
It all started a few years ago when my brother built up a team of like-minded people who were eager to create, and this was then expressed in the creation of animation and computer graphics for various projects. The team eventually grew, as well as the number of orders from clients. Then there was a point when we decided to create our own game project. Thus, we began a long preparation process. Unfortunately, our existing knowledge base was not enough to start the project. New volunteers joined the team, the learning process started, and the project began to acquire its first outlines. The result was a prototype of Crocks Hunter, a 2D platformer.
The plot of the game was as follows: Crocodile-aliens arrive on Earth to steal the Moon from earthmen. The main characters of the game (a boy or a girl, depending on player’s choice) must go through six different locations (desert, jungle, lava, water world, ice jungle, and fairy forest), and catch — not kill, the game is absolutely violence-free and child-friendly — all the Crocodiles into boxes which are used sometimes for some puzzles, and then defeat the final boss. One of the graphics features of the game is that 3D character models were rendered into 2D to make more complex, natural and fancy animations and to keep the high quality of the overall picture, along with a light-weight installation file.
Initially, the project was planned to be released for mobile platforms, but as the development progressed, it was decided to release it for PC, and then for Nintendo Switch. This was due to several reasons. Firstly, mobile game publishers are into the free2play game model, for which platform games are not quite suitable, although we figured out how to monetize the game, and to draw the player’s interest to micro-transactions. Secondly, in order to enhance the visuals of the game with various effects, we would have to sacrifice the performance. Therefore, it was more interesting to release the game on PC and consoles but at a set price. One of the publishers suggested that we release an update with six levels and two bosses once a month. Thus, it would be possible to retain the player for a long time, but so far we have not tried this model. Although, who knows, maybe you will?
We temporarily froze the Crocks Hunter project but did not abandon it. We are writing new documentation, and designing new levels. We are open to cooperation with investors and publishers to make a global bestseller together.
Currently, we are working without an office, so the whole team works remotely. In order to complete the project and make it at a high level, we would need to gather all the team members in one place, and this requires funding. So we started looking for investors. Many publishers appreciated the great potential of the game but would invest in the project after it being fully fledged and ready for release. As it turned out, Russian investors are afraid of the gaming industry, and they are completely unready to invest in it. Perhaps, this is due to their not understanding the potential and the specifics of the industry. Many foreign investors simply don’t work with Russia. At some point in our search for investors, we were stumped. The team could no longer work on pure enthusiasm. Some team members quit. Some began to slow down the main process, saying that they’d prefer to take orders as before than “work for the fairies and unicorns”. But some determined team members still believed in the project and continued to create it. So this is how the PUSHINGAMES company was created.
Unfortunately, there is no “book for dummies” on how to achieve success from the beginning to end in video games industry. The information you may find on the Internet is very superficial. Therefore, look for according courses, literature, or even better, find some competent mentor who will guide you. Our mentor was a game designer Konstantin Savochkin
One evening, when we were discussing some details, we decided to create a little something to distract ourselves, and came up with the “Quick Week” project. The main goal of which was to create and release one mini-game within a week. It took a couple of days to write game design documents and calculate P & L. Meanwhile, our artists already made the first sketches and prototypes.
We really like the examples of the Nintendo and Marvel universes when the story of one character is woven into the story of another, thereby creating fascinating endless worlds. Maintaining the heritage of the “Crocks Hunter”, we chose the main character to be a crocodile. The result was Jumping Crock: Jellyfish Attack, an arcade retro jumper for mobile platforms, designed in the style of space comic books of the 80’s .
Download link on GooglePlay: Jumping Crock Jellyfish Attack
In total, we spent around $600 to create the game, excluding licenses and developer accounts. We spent most of the budget on localizing the game and its description in 12 languages, including Russian.
To do the translation job, we chose a small but very responsible team — Locnloader a pool of freelance video game translators with 8 years of experience and voice over actors collected in one place. They specialize in indie-games and such small teams as ours, and that affects the price in a good way. For a reasonable price, they did us translations within 2 days. Moreover, they helped us with the ASO description text and edited it to sound a little more adequate, which is sometimes hard when it comes to repeating many same keywords in one small text. What I personally liked is that their team manager had some understanding in game design (and even took a course in it), and a little in ASO. That’s what I call speaking the same language!
We are very proud of the music in our arcade in particular. We love rock! There is 8-bit Space Rock music in the game. It was written by a wonderful musician, composer, and our cousin Yevgeny Protopopov. The music takes you back to the past, especially if you played Battle Toads and Tanks as a child.
Since we created the project with our own money, the payment to our specialists for the work done was extremely symbolic and incommensurable with the level of their professionalism. Therefore we are immensely grateful to our team and believe that without them we wouldn’t succeed.
In order for the project to be successful, it is very important for the team to have a Team Lead, who could drive this train, per aspera ad astra. In our team, that would be my brother Nikita.
Many companies could have achieved well-deserved success, but they never reached it, stopping halfway through. The history of the company with the fruit on the logo is the lodestar for us on how to do things.
Of course, you always want to do something unique and ambitious like Crash Bandicoot. You might want to make the game more complex by adding many different features and mechanics, but it’s better not to do so. Make it easy! The process of creativity absorbs you. You always want to add something else, when almost everything is ready. It’s best to concentrate on the main idea and actually bring it to life, and after the release, just make an update. By making game updates after the release, you maintain players’ interest and make your app appear at the top of the search results in application stores. In the long-term development of your project, it’s very important to take a detached view. Do beta and alpha testing. Of course, this is a bit like parent-teacher nights at school, when they scold your beloved child, and it can be painful, but it will be good for you.
We made our game free-to-play. We were looking for ads SDK for a long time, and we stopped at the companies:
● Appodeal
● AdMod
As the saying goes, “Creativity is great, but sometimes hunger takes over”. The most important thing is to remember who we are doing this for. We believe that a player should stay immersed in the game as long as possible, without being disturbed by ads in the heat of the moment. And of course, you can’t go without them at all. Use all available services of GooglePlay and AppStore, in-app ads, Achievements, and Leaderboards.
After we published our game in stores, the hardest part began — promotion. Promoting the project itself is also very important. You can create a masterpiece, but in order for it to become a bestseller, you got to try your best. How can you do it when there is no budget? To accumulate link mass, you can write articles in the media and various forums. But as practice has shown, there is nothing better than word of mouth. Bloggers, YouTube and streamers are such goodwill ambassadors. Each of them makes game reviews in their particular style. Find the one you like and persuade them to do a review for free. However, you are unlikely to have luck on this one (we haven’t). Russian bloggers ask for two to three times more money than their foreign counterparts, by the way.
Before releasing your game, create your info channels and use cross-references between them. It works! We use:
● Facebook
● Twitter
● Youtube
● Instagram
● Yunoia
● Bridget Loker
● Telegram channels and chats.
Now let’s get to the final part — working with app stores and how we published our game.
Google — everything is quick and easy. The main thing is to make an agreement with your conscience and not to sign Coppa.
AppStore —an application is being checked for a long time. It feels like an eternity. But in fact, it takes a week for them to check it, despite them saying 24 to 48 hours.
Amazon — quick and easy.
AppScater — as soon as you publish on the main stores, you can start invading Greater China. Appscater is there to help you.
So it goes.
P.S.
Once again I want to say thank you to my team. And please, don’t forget to try and play our game
The author of this article and chief marketing officer, one of the brothers, Artem Pushin.
Love your journey from starting to till today. Thanks for your post. :good:
Сongratulations on the release! I would like to read about promotion steps, if you did any, except social networks cross-references..
Love it!