PIC-Guam Playtest - Call for Testers

I'm participating in the playtest for Grognard Simulations' boardgame Pacific Islands Campaign - Guam. I spoke with my friend Chris today; he's the grognard at Grognard Simulations. It turns out he's looking for another couple of playtesters. Just one or two at this time. There is no compensation associated with being a playtester that I know of, but playtesters do get a playtest copy of the game and probably get a mention in the credits in the rulebook. (I'm not quite sure of this last, but it's a typical practice.)

Ideally a playtester would have good boardgaming experience with wargaming titles from Clash of Arms Games, Avalon Hill, SPI, Victory Games, MMP/The Gamers, GMT, and so on. Playtesting consists of playing the game scenarios as many times as possible with an eye towards discovering problems in the rules, in the force structure and/or in the play balance.

Contact Chris via the Grognard Simulations site. You can also contact him to get put on his mailing list to be notified when the game is available for purchase.

On a related note, I've put the PIC-Guam banner add on the blog.

Pacific Islands Campaign - Guam: Graphic and Link

I'm participating in the playtest for Grognard Simulations' PIC-Guam. I put together some HTML to promote the site and game.



Code:
<a href="http://grognardsims.com/prod01.html" target="_blank"><img src="http://i711.photobucket.com/albums/ww112/billn6/GSI/th_PIC-Guamsmallmap2.jpg" alt="PIC-Guam,PIC,GSI,Game,Playtest" border="0" /></a>

TADA! No More Ta-da Lists

I deleted my Ta-da Lists account today. I tried it out based on the recommendation at The Simple Dollar, but I found it did not work for me.

I keep track of my various todo lists in several ways. I have an ongoing developers log in a text file. I edit this in notepad, and I use it to keep track of things I do at work. This includes a rolling to do list that I copy and paste each day. I have a similar file for things I do for the PC Eylau game. I keep track of time sensitive and recurring things in Outlook. I keep some wish lists and spending plan information in an excel spreadsheet. These all work very well for me; I've been doing things this way for years, so I know where everything is.

The only thing Ta-da Lists offered was a convenient way of publishing a to do list. I prefer to blog about my intentions instead. So I deleted my account on Ta-da Lists, as it was not helping me to do anything I wanted to do.

I Beat Orbital Decay on "Hard"

I've been playing flash games on Kongregate to pass the time. One of my recent favorites is a game called Orbital Decay. It's a sidescroller in which you play the part of a lost battleship of some sort. The ship has a main gun under player control, 4 fighter bays, a dozen-odd hardpoints for laser/frag/rocket turrets, and a built in repair capability. All of these are upgradeable using resource units (RU) gained by destroying enemy ships. The game is episodic in nature. You start off with a damaged ship: only one fighter bay is working and all other hardpoints are empty. There are easy, medium and hard modes of play, and you can add unlimited RUs by typing in the cheat code "cash". Using cheat codes voids the game's high score on Kongregate for purposes of earning badges.

I just won the game on Hard without cheats. Not easy. I based the early levels on OSquared's upgrades reposted 27 Apr 09 by ddrumdrummer69. Sold the fighter bay and upgraded the main gun with the initial points, then alternated Main Gun damage and various repair drone upgrades per OSquared. Later I bought one laser turret midships and one frag turret 4th hardpoint back from front, and upgraded these to max, mixed in with more upgrades for repair drones. After that I filled all the other hardpoints with rocket turrets, and then upgraded those once I had filled all the hardpoints. On the final screen, I sold off everything but the frag turret and used the points to max drone repair (last, 500 increment was the only remaining upgrade at that point) and add 4 fighter bays with 10 fighters and first step dam/ROF upgrades. As I killed the first two ships and attendant fighers, I upgraded the bays to 12 fighters and then fighter HP as RU accumluated. After that it was a matter of killing the boss ship...the fighters are necessary in order to distract the boss ship and its fighters. There were a couple of places where it was necessary to re-run the level a few times in order to play with the weapons mix. I had to re-run the final level 5-6 times to fine tune the fighter upgrades, plus the boss ship would ignore my fighter respawns if it killed all my fighters.

One other bit of advice is to give priority of fire to mines on any level that includes them; they damage your ship too much if permitted to do so.

It's a good game. It's every bit as entertaining to me as the old coin-op games such as Choplifter or Defender. This is another great example of the proliferation of small(er) games on websites these days.