Shadowverse First Impressions

A few months ago I was walking through a train station when I saw a big poster for a new mobile game called Shadowverse.  It looked like an exact clone of digital card collecting favorite Hearthstone so until the other day I ignored it.  However due to a friend starting to play I decided to jump on and give it a go and boy Im glad I did because this game is awesome .  

If you have played Hearthstone then you have basically played this.  At its core it's the same game but there have been a few tweaks to the systems which stop it from being an exact clone.  I'm going to start talking about the game assuming you have a basic knowledge of how Hearthstone works so if you don't I'm sorry if you feel a little lost.  

So you do the usual thing of playing monsters with a health and attack value and you use these in conjunction with spells in order to try and bring your opponents life from 20 to 0, just like Hearth.  However this time around the characters don't have active abilities and instead have passive effects that do various things to their decks.  For example there's one character who's cards get stronger depending on how many spells you cast while another who has various abilities depending on how many cards occupy her graveyard.  

Each character has a unique play style and you're bound to find one that matches how you like to play.  

The other big new thing here is the evolution system which allows you after 5 turns to start buffing your monsters for +2/+2 and an added effect if the card has one.  

This allows the monster to attack the turn its played (monsters only, mind you) and can quickly change the tide of a losing battle if you're clever with your evolution points which are limited to 2 for the starting player and 3 for the guy who goes second. 

There are other slight changes but these are the two huge things and everything else is sort of taken from Hearth from there.  Of course there is online play which comes in the form of standard ranked/unranked and 2 pick mode.  2 pick is almost identical to the Area in Hearth but you pick the cards 2 by 2 instead of one at a time.  Also you aren't kicked out of the mode for losing and your reward is based on how many out of 5 you win.  

One thing I really like about this game over Hearth though is just how easy it is to access the content and get cards.  The single play story modes are avaliable from the get go and the game gives you 20 boosters just for clearing the tutorial.  You can get cards by collecting an in game currency which is awarded to you for logging in each day.  I'm still playing the story modes so I'm unsure if online matches provide this currency but even if it doesn't getting cards still doesn't feel like a massive chore like it did in Hearth.

Shadowverse is a quality digital card game that people should give some time to.  This is especially true if you're the kind of person who played Hearth and wasn't happy with some of the direction it took.  I'm playing the Japanese version on my phone but I know there's an English version avaliable on Steam so give it a try!  

Code of Joker 2.0

When I go to the arcade I'm expecting to have a good time except recently my visit was turned into a rage session as a discovered that my favorite digital card game, Code of Joker, got a big update.  Granted it's not all terrible but generally speaking the update has left me disappointed and angry.  

For those that don't know and can't be bothered to search through old posts for the info, let me briefly go over what Code Of Joker is.  Code of Joker is a free to play arcade digital trading card game made by Sega.  Imagine if you smashed Pokemon, Magic and Yu Gi Oh all into one game and you'd get a vague idea of what the game plays like.  It's a lot of fun and the fact that you can play 2 games for free as long as you own the Aime card means that playing a couple of matches every day may just become part of your daily routine. 

So, very recently version 2.0 of the game came out and with that release came A LOT of changes.  Let's first talk about the good shit.  The interface is a lot cleaner and easier to navigate.  The old interface was very busy and while not difficult it looks a lot better now.  There are also 2 new characters each with their own special powers and one of them has even come with entire new color type of card thus raising the monster types to 5. The new color comes with a mechanic where you can fill a gauge to do bullshit OP shit but the fact you need a separate gauge stops the new type from being completely broken.  Code Of Joker has also taken the advance wars approach to gameplay and made all the characters fight in pairs now.  This means that you get 2 special abilities per game and even if you use a Joker mid match, the gauge will keep charging so you can do it again, whereas before you only got 1 joker use per game.  

But now for the bullshit because oh boy did this piss me off really fucking hard.  First, they reset everyone's deck to a new starter that's been rebalanced so that it's not completely fucking useless after all the updates.  This is sort of a good thing but the game didn't tell you that it had happened so I got rocked in my first game due to having a completely changed deck full of shit.  Granted, some of the new starters are really good but some warning would have been nice.  The game also has the currency that you get from playing matches that used to be called RP but now it's been changed to a different currency with the same function but you still earn from playing matches called AC.  The problem arises when it turns out that none of my previously stocked RP was converted, so I just had ALL my in game money taken away and now I can't buy any of the fancy new shit.  It's not my stock was turned into something else, it's just flat out fucking gone, and that's bullshit.  

Now all that is super annoying but not as annoying as having the game just take a bunch of my cards away from me.  When I went to make a new deck a good deal of my cards had been taken away.  Now I can't find online what had happened but I have two guesses.  1 is that due to the balance changes these cards do not exist anymore or the game just decided to take away any card that I earned for free.  I'm leaning towards option 1 but I won't be able to test until my wife tries to make a deck later.  This is complete shit though because imagine you had a Yu Gi Oh deck but some update comes out and some guy comes to your house, shreds a bunch of your old cards and throws you a deck of mishmashed shit cards, you'd be mad. This is the digital equivalent of that.  Once again, my cards weren't converted to anything, just removed from my possession so fuck you Sega 

Despite all this bullshit the game retains its core enjoyability and at the end of the day it's still free so I'm not going to stop playing it.  Just every card played will be filled with bitterness and rage 

The Foreign Gamer Problem: Not So Bad After All

So as I've told you like a million and one times I'm a guy who lives in Japan, I'm sure you know this pretty well by now.

So today, I had a day off work and I decided to have a bit of a stint in my local game centre.  In that game centre there is a game I have mentioned on this blog before known as Code of Joker.  I did a post on code of Joker outlining what that games all about here

http://identitygaming.blogspot.jp/2013/10/return-to-game-centre-code-of-joker.html

To sum it up though its a card game that's sort of like smashing Pokemon, Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh all together at the same time.  Now my record on this game is bad, I think out of the 21 games that I've played I've won 9 of them (it might be 6 but I'm pretty sure it's 9), which is a less than satisfactory performance to say the least.

Now don't get what I'm about to say twisted, I'm not making excuses, I do genuinely suck at Code of Joker but my suckage isn't the only factor at play here.  You see, everything in Code of Joker is obviously written in Japanese and as a foreigner it obviously takes me a little more time to understand what each card in the game does.  However, when you consider how the game handles play time and credits it creates problems for someone like me.

Inserting money into the game doesn't give you a credit equal to one go, it gives you something called GP which is equal to time on the menu.  Playing one match of the game costs a set amount of GP and after each game you are given about 45 seconds of "Service Time" to make any quick changes to your deck before you start the next match.  If the 45 seconds of service time run out, then it starts ticking down from your GP.

So how does this create problems for me?  Well because I'm sort of bad at reading Kanji it's basically impossible for me to create and effective deck for myself unless I pump the machine full of money and take my time working out what each card does.  This isn't a fault of the game, it's all my fault for being terrible at Kanji.  This has become a factor in a number of my losses at the game where I think a card does one thing, and then it doesn't and the mechanic works slightly differently to how I thought I read it and this causes everything to go wrong mid duel.  I'm then left to lick my wounds and scour my dictionary to re-translate what the fuck was written on the screen.

But it's not all doom and gloom!

Obviously I don't want to lose and I do really enjoy playing Code of Joker so I do want to get better at the game and what's the one way I can do that?  Practice my Japanese more!

So by sucking at the game I'm indirectly being forced to improve my language ability in order to increase my win rate.  As someone who is currently studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, this is no bad thing.  So even though my performance at this game is laughably bad there is something positive to be gleaned from the situation at the very least.

Basically what I'm trying to say with this post is that if you're a foreigner in Japan and you enjoy going to the arcade, expect to lose...A LOT.  But don't get all sad and discouraged and use it to motivate yourself for some language study.  Doesn't matter if you've been studying it for 5 years like me or you're a beginner; if not wanting to suck at games is the kick in the ass you need to learn something new, then get to it.

Yu-Gi-Steam

This is something that popped up on Steam recently, and while I don't see the point, I fucking love it.

Steam Trading Cards is a feature that hit sometime last month I think and from what I can tell it's a feature where you can earn things like chat emoticons and other features for your steam profile. 

The system is very simple, certain games have card drops attached to them and by playing these games you get the cards.  Every game has a card drop limit of 3 or 4 but there are 8 cards in a set, so to get the full set of cards you must trade or use the steam marketplace in order to get the badge.  When you get the badge you unlock a load of stuff to use on your profile so you can customise your shit with a load of themed virtual goodies.

I personally think this whole thing is a load of shit and don't see the point, but that said all the cards are steam marketable, so I have no problem selling them off for a little bit of spare change to go towards my next game purchase, so there is some good that comes out of this whole thing even for those who don't really care.

Also if you have a Steam account above level 10 you can get foil card drops, but the only purpose I've seen for these is selling for insane amounts of dosh on the Steam market.  Still, I think they did a great job here of providing a fun and free little extra then benefits everybody, it'll be interesting to see what direction this thing takes when it comes out of beta.