My Vacation To Clint City
Just venting some exuberance. It’s okay to just be happy, right? No, of course not. What was I thinking?
I play games for the stories. Just finding a small nugget of fiction is usually enough to keep me digging for hours. When it comes to games that are just bare bones systems though, like poker, I get bored easily. I enjoy math, but if you’re going to try and pass it off as a game you need to pretty it up for me. When it comes down to it, I have no interest in seeing whether the numbers printed on your pieces of cardboard are higher than the numbers printed on my pieces of cardboard, or whether you’re pretending your numbers are higher than my numbers when they really aren’t.
Magic: The Gathering is definitely my kind of game. It’s pretty math. It’s still “who has the biggest numbers?”, but the numbers are represented by giant monsters and vengeant angels. I can support that. Until Magic comes to my iPhone though, I’ll be playing Urban Rivals. I actually learned about this game through an ad here on our own site. Thank goodness I did. Now I have something to occupy all the extra hours I used to spend sleeping.
To be honest, my first few games of Urban Rivals were a little disconcerting. The cards in my deck level up as I play with them, but when I first received them they were nearly devoid of special abilities. They were pieces of virtual cardboard with numbers on them. The only strategy came from trying to suss out how many “pills” my opponent was going to wager on each round. I had been conned into playing poker, and I was ready to get angry. Still, there was enough fiction and backstory on the cards to keep me invested a while longer. Flavor text goes a long way with me.
As my cards leveled up, their abilities unlocked and I began to see a little of the depth that could be possible within the system. The cards began to interact in interesting ways and I began to have fun. The game is still a lot more poker than Magic, but it’s got just enough Magic to hook me. Urban Rivals is a CCG and boasts “more than 400 characters”, but I have probably only seen ten percent of those in combat. Everyone so far seems to stick close to the starter pack they were given, but new cards can be bought either with real money or the in-game currency which is awarded for winning matches. In a few hours of matches you can easily win enough to purchase a couple new cards from the player market, which is very nice for poor people like me.
I started out playing on my PC and have since switched to my iPhone, but the integration between their website and the app is seamless. It just works, and it works well. Period. I hate to end this with a complaint, but the one thing that bothers me most about the game is the character art. Some of it is spectacular, but some of it is decidedly not spectacular. When everything else about the game seems so professional, the subpar artwork on some of the cards can really dull the shine. I’m sure they’ll work it out, though. Even Magic had some horrible art in its first days.
- Chase
