Apparently when you google "Two Worlds 2 ending", one of my rants entitled "Two Worlds 2 Ending Is Disappointing" is on the first page. This search term first caught my eye that day I saw the Iraqi visitor(s) but I never got around to trying it till just now. Too bad for anyone trying to find out anything about the game from that rant because the title was the only part of it that mentioned that game.
The actual rant that described my opinion of the ending was really the following one.
Rebuild is quite an interesting game. It's a turn-based strategy game in which you reclaim your city after a zombie invasion.
I like it mainly because it requires some thinking but not a lot. More importantly, you can close it at any time and reload at the turn, ie day, you're on. The graphics may be bad even for a Flash game but I find that the gameplay more than offsets this issue.
The concept is simple. You begin with 4 tiles - a police station, 2 suburbs (low-density housing) and a farm. The police station raises your defence rating, the housing allows you to have more survivors and the farm produces food that your survivors eat each turn. Other buildings include laboratories (for research, eg fertilizer ie farm upgrade), apartments (high-density housing) and bars (raises happiness, don't ask where they get the booze)
There are many factors you need watch in this game, including food, happiness, survivors. Food prevents hunger and hunger makes people unhappy which may cause them to leave. Happiness needs to be kept high or people may refuse to work or, again, leave.
Survivors come in several types: soldiers, builders, scavengers, leaders, scientists and (useless) civilians. Soldiers raise your defence rating more when put on guard duty and makes missions they're in safer (like bodyguards). Builders can change your tiles into more useful buildings more quickly and reclaim tiles with better speed. Scavengers find more food when sent on scavenging missions in tiles containing food. Leaders guarantee success when put in recruitment missions in tiles where other survivors have been spotted, and raises the happiness more when they throw parties in bars and churches. Scientists are the only ones who can do research in the labs you reclaim. Finally, civilians can be retrained into more useful people in schools that you have reclaimed.
The game prevents you from just remaining in a comfortable position with multiple factors.
1) You need more tiles for farms to have a steady food supply. There is only so much food that your scavengers can find around you.
2) Zombies tend to be attracted by your reclaimed buildings. When you reclaim a tile, you increase the perimeter of your territory. Larger perimeter means more zombies can attack you from more tiles.
3) Random events happen, usually bad ones. Disease can strike, killing your survivors. Bad weather kills crops. One of your survivors may steal food. Raiders may attack you. On the other hand, the Zombie Killing Squad may randomly come to your aid to clear tiles of zombies.
4) Occasionally a huge zombie horde may arrive and attack you. You will be given several turns' notice before they reach your barricades.
In other words, you can't stop trying to find more food, more survivors to defend yourself with and more tiles to accommodate the extra survivors.
The game is not too hard on Normal and Hard difficulties since I've already tried those. Harder is very difficult because bad random events keep happening and zombies are attracted to you sooner, making it very hard to spare anyone to go outside to recruit or find food. The hordes also keep coming whenever one is defeated.
One thing I've figured out is that beyond Normal, it's necessary to take big risks, even leaving your Fort's danger rating to over 40% once in a while at the beginning.
Another is that expansion needs to be planned a long way ahead to reduce the perimeter of your barricade relative to the number of tiles you have. In other words, keep your reclaimed territory as squarish as possible, leave as few corners exposed as you can.
Hospitals, farms and homes are more needed than labs and bars. Police stations and malls are also important because they raise your defence rating.
Why the heck am I typing so much about a simple Flash game?
Probably because I'm currently out of games. Which is why I'm going retro again, playing this Chinese RPG I completed once before... over a decade ago, called 仙剑奇侠传. Apparently, there have been sequels and even an online game for this title.
For a DOS game it is surprisingly playable on my 64bit Vista. The only glitch is a rather minor one that prevents the words from displaying on unimportant messages like random objects I find (old RPGs, y'know, you can find random stuff on random cupboards and shelves) and the text that tells me what I got after each (turn-based) battle. Except the numbers are displayed properly so I can see how much money and exp I get.
Therefore it's perfectly playable.
Despite having finished it before, there were lots of things that I didn't understand, especially since I couldn't understand most of the words. I believe my uncle who gave it to me also gave me a guide which obviously I no longer have. I don't even have the game but as far as I can tell it's now abandonware which you can download from lots of Chinese game websites.
Even now there are phrases I don't get, mostly because it's using a little of the older forms of Chinese that all martial arts novels used to use. One can easily recognize it by noticing how they express themselves using much fewer words as ancient Chinese used to do.
In times long past, Mandarin-users used to prefer single characters to express things we now use 2 characters for. This is because ever since the Revolution, they've encouraged people to write using dual-character 词 (or phrase, although that's not exactly accurate). An example one lecturer gave me was this:
we now say: 这朵花喜欢潮湿。
they used to say: 此花喜阴。
Notice the absence of a measure word (量词) and the reduction of each 2-character phrase into single characters. Which in turns makes you notice that if each of the 2 modern phrases are split into their individual characters, they've basically the same the same meanings and you're really repeating yourself whenever you say those words.
I don't know about you but I'd never noticed it until that particular lecture.
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