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.

Wolf Team Part 2 - Gameplay

Now that you're settled in to Wolf Team let's go over some of the basic controls and gameplay. There are not a lot of the finer controls you'd find in some other shooters here. For example the only gun I've found that zooms in is the sniper rifle. The mousewheel does not scroll your weapons. E is not the catch-all button for doing stuff.

I didn't get a chance to try all the various game types, because the game selector is a bit of a bring-down. It isn't possible to sort the games by game type so it makes it hard to find a game available of a particular type if you want. I jumped in to a couple open games and gave it a go. The first I tried was death match. This is team deathmatch in which you have an option to turn in to a werewolf at will. You'll probably want to try this out as soon as you can as it is one of the unique features of this game. If you find yourself in team deathmatch or other game mode where switch is allowed, you can do so by pressing 3 which selects your third weapon. 4 generally brings up your grenades. If you have more than one grenade you can hit 4 again to swap them. Each time you spawn you'll have to pick a load-out of weapons. The default load out gives you +50 weapon points. Other load-outs cost you weapon points. You also get weapon points for winning rounds and making kills. You can customize these weapon load-outs in the main menu screen. Guns, grenades, etc each have an associated cost.

One thing that I noticed is that any guns, etc you buy come with an associated time limit. You can buy a weapon for 24 hours if you want. You can also buy it for 7 days, 30 days and 90 days for reduced per day costs. This is using in-game money not real money. If you play the game a lot you can make some big in-game money and load yourself out with big guns and things for long periods of time. It is an interesting model and rewards someone for playing a lot. The games can be quick paced, with small, sometimes complicated maps. Which mean a long life is fairly rare. As a werewolf you'll have increased spead, jumping ability and a pretty sweet claw attack. A couple of swipes usually puts someone down. It takes time to switch to wolf or reload so if you're in tight with a wolf and need to do one of those you might as well go have a sandwich because you're dead.

The other game type I tried was a wolf vs human elimination style. One team is werewolves the other team is humans and you can't switch. It is one death per round play until one team wins 9 rounds. The humans have an objective but the games I played revolved around the teams ignoring that and just killing each other. The video below is from this style of game. This was a traditional temple style map. The humans appeared to be invading to set a device. Not sure if it was a bomb or what. I tried to set it once and an invisible werewolf ate me. Apparently were wolves can disappear. I am not sure how that is done because each of these games I played I never ended up as a werewolf. In the deathmatch games the werewolves cannot disappear. You'll also notice the giant turret gun one of the guys has as a main weapon. I didn't get to use it, but it seems pretty nice. In some other rounds he dropped some wolves pretty quickly with it. Over all I thought this was a pretty decent game with some unique features. The menus certainly leave something to be desired, but I'd recommend it for anyone wanting to try a shooter that is a little bit different.

Wolf Team Part 1 - Install and Menus

If you find yourself in Korea with a less than top of the line computer you might want to try Wolf Team. I'm not saying it is a bad game, just that it is less graphically demanding than say AVA with its unreal 3 engine. I don't know what engine Wolf Team uses but it does appear to be last generation. Frame rate is capped at 60. That doesn't mean it isn't fun. It has a very unique premise. You can turn in to a wolf during death match and some maps feature humans against wolves. Let's start with the install. Head over to Hangame and login. Click on the link under the FPS section for "울프팀". This is one of the places you'll notice that sometimes the transliteration of English to Korean doesn't make a lot of sense. Personally I would write "월프팀" as the name they use doesn't even include a "w" sound. Now once on the Wolf Team page look underneath the big Game Start button. This one is a little tricky. Click the right text link "수동다운로드". This is the client download, it is around 450MB. Save it somewhere you can find it. When it is finished kick it off and you'll be presented with a set of familiar install screens. Click through and when it is finished go back to the website. I ran in to a small problem here. It didn't seem to register that I had installed the game, so when I clicked Game Start, I just got a blank page. I refreshed and it seemed fine. Push start and you'll get the Hangame updater. It will probably also update nprotect. Push game start again to launch the game. Now on the first screen you'll see channel select. There are only a couple of main channels usually full, so pick one. You'll notice the resolution is off, but there is nothing you can do about the menu resolution. It is stuck at 800x600. If you click the settings button you'll be able to change the game resolution. As well as the over-all quality level. Underneath the resolution you'll see 3 check boxes. "그래픽 품질" means quality level. Starting highest to lowest from the left. As far as I can tell they apply right away and there is no need to restart. On the main menu you'll see a few buttons. They call clans "prides" in this game. You can go to the store and buy some new weapons after you get some money and change your load-out. The age of the game shows in some of the options. On the game select screen you can't sort by users in a game, which means it can be hard to find a game if the first few pages are full. In a full channel it might take you a couple moments of clicking. Alternatively you can hit quick play. Unlike AVA which has some more detailed and complicated menus, the menus for this are fairly straight forward and simple to use. The store and inventory screens are rather basic and obvious. There are some cash items here, these items are bought with "Hancoins" and again they're generally aesthetic in nature. Next I'm going to show you some screen shots, talk about game play and a video.

Hangame Registration

Let's move on to another portal, frankly one of the best portals. Hangame is separated from the rest of the portals by its high number of mobile cell phone games. If you own a cellphone in Korea, and I know you do, you may at some point have wanted to try a game on it but were probably slightly mystified as to how to go about it. Hangame allows you to browse their full catalog of cell phone games, which is rather extensive. They feature games for 3 providers, SK, KTF and LG. It also seems to be the main repository for cell phone games. If you browse for games on your cell phone you'll be taken to the same catalog. You won't have to pay data fees to browse the games list here though.

Unfortunately I don't have a second cell phone to create a dummy account on this website, so I'll walk you through the early registration. After registering for Pmang this should be slightly familiar. This site will take your foreign registration card and there is no delay in using the account. On the main page we'll start by clicking "회원가입". First you will have to choose your age. You can choose adult here. There is a simple/basic ID choice on the right. I don't know exactly what it entails, but I think it doesn't require a citizen number. The text does say something about it not being a full feature account, so I'm not sure what is not available. First you can enter your name and ID number. Up next you'll presented with the standard TOS check boxes, go through and check all those and move on. On the next screen you'll be presented with a choice about how you want to verify your registration. The top choice is to use your cell phone. Select it and hit okay. You'll get a pop-up where you can put in your cell phone number and send out a text message for verification. After this you should be presented with the standard information screen. I seem to recall there being a headache on the address section. When you get to the address section it is going to let you search for your postal code. You need to type in (in hangul) the name of your city or 동. I live in 화양동 so I typed that. Then it will present me with the postal codes from that area. I found mine and chose it. It autofilled my city, 구, etc based on that postal code. After that I could type the rest of my address. Apparently this has to do with the potential for you to win some prizes through the website. If you don't know your postal code, ask someone, or just choose anything in the general geographic area of where you live. They're not going to send guys to your place to check it out. Well they might, but no one has visited me. Now that you've finished you should be able to log in right away. As part of the installation I'll quickly point out the mobile games area. The mobile games are is the bottom left most game area. Above it is the flash game area, they have some fun ones, and then a shareware area where you can download popular shareware titles with time limits. Click on mobile games and it will take you to the mobile game site. You'll see a spot at the top where you can click your cell phone provider. Doing so takes you to the game specific to them. They'll give you the top 10 games, sort them by genre, etc. RPGs are again very difficult to play unless you know Korean well. I personally recommend Family Mart Tycoon. It is the first cell phone game I got and it is very fun. Your goal is to build yourself up from a subway vendor to the boss of a very busy Family Mart. If you want to get a game click on "다운" it will ask you how you want to pay for. Click on "휴대폰결제". Then you can type in your phone number. It will send you a text message and say "Do you want to get this game?" If you're on KTF it will send a confirmation code you punch in the website. If you're on SK you'll get a text message where you can push a button to grab the game. I don't know what it does for LG. Generally these games cost around 3,000W + data fee for download. Sometimes you can get older games around 2,000W or 1,500W.