Battlezone Plus

As I suspected Battlezone Plus is a fun casual shooter. The game is 3/4 isometric view and runs at a fixed 1024x768. I dug through the options and config files and couldn't find a way to change that. The game is easy enough to get installed if you've installed anything at all by this point. Click the Game Start on the website and go through the activeX installs and the launcher. Next next your way until it is finalized. Once it is done, hit the Game Start again and wait a moment. For some reason the anti-cheat seems to take a little extra time to fire up on this one. It is a small download though at only 190MB.

When the game fires up you'll be given a choice of creating a character or bailing. Create your character. It is fairly easy. You pick one of several stereotypical classes and customize a few things like their face and clothing color. Pick a name and you're good to go. It will offer you the tutorial, I'd say skip it. It wasn't that helpful and overly slow. Basic knowledge is this: click to shoot, move with WASD you can crawl by pressing E, if you have a special item like a health kit hold Q to make it happen, and when you are reloading there is a quick time event to let you load faster. You'll see it a couple times in the video. I hit it a couple times and miss it once or twice. You can double tap a direction to dash that way. To join a channel you have to first select one, I'd choose regular, and then choose the individual channel before you can join. Once you're in you can get on with blasting hippie gangsters, skinheads and your fellow man.

There are two play styles in the game. Deathmatch and Mission. Mission involves killing a boss and his cronies, the aforementioned hippie gangsters being one variety, several times. If you kill the cronies enough times they stop spawning and you can deal with the boss all by themselves. When you defeat them you get some XP, gold and a random item. I've mostly gotten bolts and arcade coins. No idea what the bolts do yet. The deathmatch pits you against one or more enemies, and seems to be just a team deathmatch. For as simple as the game is, it is a pretty fun and an intense deathmatch.

Interesting things of note in the missions is that enemies will drop random power-ups and traps. Things like mousetraps or mushrooms can mess you up. Other items can heal you. You can also sometimes get a grenade refill as a drop. Enemies can stun you so you're confused. Your direction keys will get messed up. They'll even randomize one or two more times so if you think you've figured it out, it won't last long. As you go up levels you can increase the level of the missions you do. You can also change the various levels difficulty level, but I found no difference between an easy Rank F mission and a normal Rank F mission.

All in all, it is fun, cute and you can get into it pretty fast. There are a host of upgrades, but I didn't actually see any cash items yet. The training area let's you upgrade your character. Speed, strength, other things like that. Even at 1024x768 the graphics are fine. The controls work well, I had the odd accidental dash, but I got used to it pretty fast. If you want a casual shooting game to play when you're not up to something more serious, this might be your game.

Jang-gi

Jang-gi is Korean Chess. If you've played western chess at all, you can probably learn Jang-gi quite quickly. I learned to play it on my cell phone and in a couple of weeks of playing it on the subway I learned the moves well and could play a decent game against the second lowest level. It can sometimes be hard to find real opponents to play against, and if you want to play against a friend who is far away you might need an online venue to do that. Since Pmang even allows foreign sign-ups for people not in Korea, with a little fudging, you can play against people back home too. I'm not going to talk about the rules here, but more how to get the application up and running and annotate all the various options. If you want to read the rules you can read about it here and here

First up after you cruise to the site you'll get a menu with various town choices. These indicate a level of play. If it is your first time I recommend free play or the beginner level. After you choose one you'll get a couple pop-ups and the pmang installer will do its thing. As always if this is your first time to the site, you'll have to install a few activex controls. After choosing a town you'll get the main lobby. If you want to you can change the room, but unless you're meeting someone in a specific room you probably don't need to. There are various options including the ability to watch a game in progress. This lets you jump into any game which isn't limited to 2 players and observe it. While in the game you also have the option of rewinding it and watching the moves up to that point. You can report a room, but I don't know what that entails and it is probably unnecessary. Also you can create your own room. There is a chat at the bottom. If you click on create a room you'll get a little pop-up. You can pick a title for the room, set the limit on how many people can join, and set a password. The join limit is for limiting observers. The minimum you can set is 2, or you can choose 4, 10 or unlimited. I can't possibly imagine why you'd want to arbitrarily limit a game to X amount of observers but you can.

Once you're in a game you'll have a choice to set things like take-back, time limits, move limits, etc. You can also switch your horse and elephants position if you like before the game starts. I'm not exactly sure what 접장기 is. I believe you can also use the grayed out button to switch sides. In this particular game I think the room owner took his side and I was forced to play the other side. As well there are various buttons you can do things with down on the right hand side. They includes help (in Korean), options, invite another player, and screenshot. If you are watching a game you will see controls under one players name where you can back up moves or move forward to see current moves.
Of course I won't be posting a video of this because it is a board game. Not very exciting to watch. The interface is fairly simple to use and if you're interested in playing Janggi this is probably a good choice. I tried to play it on Hangame but that site required some strange verification process before you could start, I think because on hangame you can play for real money. I couldn't do the verification because my Korean cell phone is not in my name a friend helped me create the account and I used my foreign ID to create the hangame account. The names don't match. I'd have to make a new account using my friend's ID.

If you have an SK cellphone and want to play Jang-gi on the go, I recommend World Chess/Janggi 2. It includes western chess and Jang-gi in one game. Practice games of various levels and tournaments. If your phone is bluetooth enabled you can play a bluetooth game against a friend who has the same.

Taan Part 2 - Gameplay

Taan's gameplay is fairly similar to that of an old PC game called "Scorched". It is based around several players competing on a 2D field and throwing highly destructive and explosive things at each other. The ground itself can be destroyed which means the layout of the playing field can change drastically in the course of a game. If you're not careful you can get dug in to a hole that you can't get out of. The enemy will be able to peg you as you can't change your position and you will be quickly defeated. Taan has two main types of gameplay.

The first type of gameplay is mission mode. Upon entering the main menu screen you'll see a flashing icon telling you to click the mission mode. This mode is a single player mode where you do battle against the AI. You must defeat 3 waves of scarecrow birds (new evidence suggests they're scarecrows, but they look like birds to me). On the easy level this is seemingly trivial. You have 40 shots to kill a number of birds. In the 4th round you must defeat the boss in 10 shots. I haven't had a situation arise where I haven't managed to beat this. You will acquire various power-ups during the gameplay you can use, but other than the boss they're not really needed. Even against the boss I haven't found them overly necessary unless I want to kill him in the first 3 or 4 shots. After the game concludes you will receive some experience and get to pick a card. The card gives you some random chance of getting gold, 10, 20, 50 or 100. If you're playing in a PC방 apparently you get a 50% bonus. I think many of these games give bonuses if you play it in a PC방. Perhaps the idea is that if you are playing it there other people will play it and it may earn them more money.

The second type of gameplay is player versus player. You can compete in rooms of up to 8 players on the same screen. Each person takes a turn making a shot and it cycles. Prior to play you can push a button to change weapons. The weapons are similar but have different effective ranges and patterns as far as I can tell. Press "무기선택" in the game room itself to change your weapon. It literally means "Weapon Selection". At some point during the gameplay you'll end up dying. If you die, instead of the game being over you have a new role to play. As a ghost you can fly around and pick up various power-ups. If you want you can then add them to a team member's shot. Making it possible to add 6 power-ups to a single shot. Just be sure to push the button for it before your team member shoots. After each shot you can fly a short distance towards a power-up. Just click on the one you want to head towards. If the enemy also has dead players, they will also be trying to get them. The game will end when one side has been defeated and you will again get some experience (much more than the single player game) and some more gold.

As a casual game this is pretty fun. You can jump in to the game pretty quick and play a match or two if you have a few minutes to kill. You can easily play it with friends if you have some you want to play with as there is the ability to create password protected rooms as well. Below is part of a round I played.

Taan Part 1 - Install and Menus

I'd like to think I could be perfect and update every day, but occasionally days are going to get missed. Up next is a more casual style game. It is called Taan and it is a Scorched clone. This game is a turn based game where people lob explosives at each other, individually or in teams. Head over to Hangame and look in the "캐주얼게임" section. You want to find the game called "슈팅대전 탄" This is a fairly straight forward install, similar to the other hangame games. Look for the download link in text on the left underneath the big giant green bomb. I didn't experience any surprises during the installation. Most of the installations will be fairly typical and unless there is something unusual about it, or a new unexpected screen or something of that nature I won't comment in too much further detail on them other than to point out links to get things kicked off. After the installation you'll get the typical hangame updater after you click start.

First thing you'll have to do is create a character. "새로 만들기" will let us do that. 새 is often used to mean new, and 만들 is often used to mean creation.Go through the basics of choosing a gender, hair style, shirt color, etc. This will be your in-game avatar for the battles. While it is a scorched clone, it seems to be based on cute kids hurling dynamite and nuclear ordinance at each other. This is the premise for many Korean games. On the next menu you can choose a server (level based or free play, not really sure of the big difference yet) and a channel. The next screen is nice because there is a high amount of english on most of the buttons which explain the basic premise of what things should do. You can refer to a more annotated version on the left.

This game has a couple of play modes that are significant. One is mission play where you play against some predefined mission and hurl dynamite at birds. The other one is where you hurl dynamite at other children. The mission button will take you to the bird slaughter. From this menu you can do all kinds of things including buy some things with the money you earn from matches, work on your level with missions, and apparently play bingo. I haven't gotten in to the bingo yet, but apparently designers here have a thing for bingo. A note on the resolution, the best you're going to do is 1024x768. Unfortunate but the graphics still look good enough for this style of game. The menu for this is reasonably straight forward. There are again cash items and regular items for purchase. A lot of aesthetic items. I'm not sure if any of them have any effect on gameplay or not. I haven't gotten that far in to it. I'll post some gameplay info tomorrow so you can get further in to it.