ninjabee.com

You're killin' me.

I don't trust OXM for my reliable review scores. They gave Fight Night Round 3 a 10/10! A TEN! How many people still play that game now? I wish their reviews gave more reasons to why they got that score.

Hey, lets hope that all the people who won the contest get the game early.

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I guess we should include *my* preview here as well!

Yeah, I kept meaning to include that. Do you want to go ahead and change the first post to include it? We can keep a running list at the top of this thread...

Righto!

Guess the UK OXM agrees with the US.

8.0 for Band of Bugs.
http://www.xblarcade.com/node/686

However, they gave Luxor 2 a 7...so maybe there is justice in this world?
(You guys only lost to Forza 2's 9.0)

I read the camera is supported in the game. Is it possible to turn the stream from other people off? Or just turn all streams off?


Another question: Does BoB use a point based system for choosing a army before the battle, or is you're army always the same for a given map?


Btw. OXM is pretty bad imo, so I don't care what they review games.

Camera: You can disable all streams, but you can't selectively decide to watch one person but not another. That seems like it would be useful, though. :-/

Choosing an Army: The army is always the same for a given map, including user-created maps - the designer is responsible for balancing the strength of the various parties.

Unfortunate, but I assume that's up to MS not you guys.



Hm, this my lead to people making unbalanced maps on purpose just so they can win. And even if they don't do it on purpose it could mean a lot of unbalanced maps. Still, mapmaker is a great feature.

Btw. since there's a 2vs2 mode can me and somebody on my machine as a guest go online together and play games as a team? That would be really great

I think it's something we could possibly explore in future games, but we'd have to check into it more.



One thing we should be clear about is there are hardly any restrictions or attempts to "validate" maps. The only thing we do is make sure you have bugs on at least two different teams. Making a minimal playable map is a matter of 10 seconds of work. Beyond that, all bets are off. You can make a map with units that die instantly becase they start over water, or with completely unbalanced unit numbers or unit levels, or with units that start on conveyors next to pits, or units that start on lava, or one team with powerful items next to them, etc., etc. Rather than attempt to predict all possible problems and analyze every player map for "fairness", and probably end up ruining some good map ideas in the process, we depend on the player to either make a fun map (by her own definition of fun!) or deal with whatever consequences may come from playing online with unfair maps!

By the way, some of the most fun user-created maps I've played have been tremendously unbalanced maps played against the CPU.

Note that RANKED online matches do not allow user-created maps. All of this applies to non-ranked games, whether local multiplayer, local single-player, or non-ranked Live matches.

Also note that you can filter out user-created maps when looking for an online game, in non-ranked games.



No. Band of Bugs doesn't support multiple local players in an online game. Sorry about that. We supported that in Cloning Clyde and it was a HUGE pain, and we decided early on with BoB not to deal with that. We may get a lot of flak for this, but we had so many other complexities to deal with (allowing users to share user-created content online opens up endless cans of worms) that we really needed some ways to simplify.

Great! I had never actually thought about any balancing issues until right now. The leaderboards would have gone crazy like that! This way it is a lot fairer!

Is it possible that good user-created maps might be put into ranked multiplayer at some point? Obviously the unbalanced yet fun ones wouldn't be put in, but maybe some of the more balanced fun maps?

Remember when we played that one map you created with the fire mages against all the barbarians and we tried to balance the map...and we ended up with these wickedly powerful mages just raining death upon the barbarians with no real challenge. That was fun...and hysterical.

That was cool because we had to do this weird three-way planning thing for each turn.

I love co-op maps. I've definitely got a few co-op vs. computer map ideas I want to play with when the game releases.

First thing I'm gonna do is recreate my escape puzzle-style map with the two warriors against those smaller bugs...must rack brain to remember.

Co-op maps are pretty awesome.