Your Trebuchet Pains Me
Sometimes online, casual games are good. Kongregate tends to attract more interesting games than your standard repetitions of old themes, though they have a tendency for being interesting on the surface with a drop off in reward after a while. Ran into this trebuchet simulator, things were OK, but then: The physics model seems to think,. and I may be wrong, that throwing three of a rock at once...
Sometimes online, casual games are good. Kongregate tends to attract more interesting games than your standard repetitions of old themes, though they have a tendency for being interesting on the surface with a drop off in reward after a while. Ran into this trebuchet simulator, things were OK, but then:
- The physics model seems to think,. and I may be wrong, that throwing three of a rock at once, and throwing one of a rock of the same size as one of the three, has the same force behind it, even though you could probably throw a single rock a lot farther and harder than three at once. This has a definite affect on strategy, what there is of it.
- While the targets die easily, so much as tipping over can kill them, there is this draconian time limit on the last shot that only allows for three seconds of falling of the terrain elements before it tells you you lose (and if you know you're going to lose, it won't let you hit the reset button, so you HAVE to sit through the timer). Note that you have to kill all of the targets to move on:
It even says I killed all eight in the stats there. Screw you people!3. (formatting!) Finally, the menu in the upper right lets you pick a lower detail setting for crappier computers *points to own crappy computer*. That's super, and lets me time my trebuchet shots a lot better... until I lose. Then it resets the option, so I have to sit through a jerky opening scroll animation in order to hit the menu button again to dial down the detail (which I don't really see a sign of when I turn it down).
I think this is a sort of fun game, but I get the feeling that it's been put out there without a final once-over to make things nicer for the user's side of things. They also have an achievement system which is like, defeat X amount of castles, which isn't well thought out (why not kill X amount of people with a single shot, beat a later castle with only light stones, that sort of thing).
I like what Armor Games did with this, I doubt they're the only one to do it but it sorta channels Monty Python and is fun to screw around with, but what fun there is sorta tempered by these silly flaws.