Bush Whacker 2 by Codename Entertainment

Bush Whacker 2 is a fun and free game by Codename Entertainment. This game has a ton of customization, mini-games and in-game events throughout the year. It is not a very complicated game in terms of skill but it definitely has some addicting qualities and game play that benefits from you having in-game friends. The main purpose of this game is whacking bushes to look for quest items and move through the story line. As you move into a new area and you start to whack bushes, you will start to find puzzle pieces. When you get all of the pieces and solve the puzzle, a new area will open up on your mini-map or you will get some sort of in-game reward like more energy or a new piece of customization to wear. When you complete all of the puzzles in your mini-map you will open up a locked location on the world map in your game.

You can have fun playing this game in a lot of different ways, like I said there is a lot of customization with the characters and they even give you property in the game to store your gifts, decorations and a house to build and decorate. I think all of the mini-games that you can play to boost your character or recoup energy are another reason to keep coming back to this game. Any game that has an in-game fishing game as a side quest, or optional way to get things is high up on my list. I used to really enjoy playing the Breath of Fire games partially because they had a great in-game fishing part of the game. I mean it was pretty cool to use a fishing rod to catch a whale in breath of fire but I'm not sure that you can in Bush Whacker 2. Another in-game treat for Bush Whacker 2 is the gambling option in the game. In the picture below you can see me winning gold for the gems I have gambled away.

When you explore the game beating up bushes you will find gold and gems, both of these items can be used in the game for gambling along with 'Bush Bucks' and 'Island tokens'. Bush Bucks are the in-game currency that you can buy with real dollars to speed up doing things in the game or just customize yourself a little bit more. The game gives you 'Bush Bucks' every 7 consecutive days of logging into the game and randomly when completing different quests, so you don't need to purchase 'Bush Bucks' to play this game but it gets more fun if you do.

My advice for getting ahead in this game is to make sure that you complete all of the in-game daily quests that they give you. Daily quests will bring you gold, gems, items to customize your character, Bush Bucks, or trinkets. Trinkets are a wearable item that gives a boost to the percentage of getting items from slashing bushes, for example you might get a trinket that would give you a 10% extra chance to find gold or energy when whacking a bush. There are also other hidden extras for players that the developers have to put out there to make sure returning players get more stuff. Once a week you can click on the following link or copy and past into your browser window: https://apps.facebook.com/bushwhackertwo/?page=weekly_reward 

In-Game rewards systems

Here is a screenshot from Sparta:War of Empires and if you can see the note "Your Forces Were Victorious...But No Spoils of War Were Recovered!" This is make the gamers who have played this game for a while crazy, even though the game still gives out great in-game rewards, just less often.

Here is another screenshot from Sparta, this time with some good in-game rewards. 

Anyone with a rational mind can go crazy reading through the comment section on any post online. People post the most ridiculous things that don't make any sense, are hateful, or just don't understand basic patience or decency. One thing that has been driving me crazy for a while playing online gaming, are the comments and complaints about in-game rewards systems. First of all most of the games that these people are playing don't cost much, or if they do cost a lot provide countless hours of entertainment. Some of these games are free, and the only way for developers to make money is to make sure you keep coming back, and if you want to get a little bit ahead offer you a paid way to do so. Well one way to get you to keep coming back to the game is to offer different levels of bonus rewards for either coming back to play, or by completing some sort of task or mission in the game. As the game gets older and players get stronger and more developed, then the developers of the game have to go through the occasional change to rewards, to try and balance out how the game has evolved. When the developers make these tweaks and make the game a little harder or a little less rewarding the trolls start to come out in packs and bash the developers for being too greedy and wanting everyone to pay more for their games. Plarium is constantly taking the heat for not letting everyone be Superman and destroy everyone else playing. What fun is a game if you just suddenly have the power to kill everyone else? These games have really evolved a lot of the years and the online games even have moderators that play the game along side the other players, offering advice on how to build up, or how to avoid being slaughtered but again just my opinion. Sometimes I really don't understand the raving sense of disappointment in these people, acting like they just got robbed when they loose some units in an in-game raid, or someone invades their castle and kills their best troops. I remember having a real reason to show rage while playing a game, the game was called Rygar, for the Nintendo platform. Rygar is a game where the player has just one life and if you say fell off of a cliff, or something it was game over. Now in order to beat Rygar you had to play for like four hours or something like that. Other challenges for Rygar, NO SAVE, yep if the system froze, or your dad walked in and turned it off, it was starting over from the beginning. So stop whining about loosing troops, and bad in-game rewards, because we kept coming back to Rygar and you should keep coming back to these newer games. Here is a screenshot from Bushwhacker 2. I will get to talking about Bushwhacker 2 later, but basically it is a game revolving around destroying bushes to find quest items, and advancing through a story line.

My adventures in Video Games with a bit from the beginning

Since I spend way too much time (or too little) online playing games, escaping my reality for something that is addicting, I thought I should create a blog about it to make myself feel better about the lost time training my brain. The real world imposes limits on what we can do based on geography, money, social norms, and how ambitious we want to be in life. The gaming world imposes challenges of how fast you can build an army to conquer others, how to use your mind to solve complex puzzles, or how to team up with thousands or millions of others in massive online communities. The level of immersion in gaming varies but being a multibillion dollar industry every year the stakes get even bigger. My gaming started in the 80s with Nintendo, GameBoy and very basic computer games. I can remember as a kid when driving on vacation somewhere, you were lucky if you found a small electronic game that could play poker or solitaire. Today every cell phone has incredibly more advanced games, but cellphones weren't very popular,cheap or smaller than a brick back then. We do 'social gaming' connecting with others online or through gaming consoles connected to the internet which is huge. There are also a few games on Facebook that I enjoy playing and a lot of my friends play as well. At the moment I mostly play 'Sparta: War of Empires', 'Bushwhacker 2' and 'Angry Birds Friends'. There are many others that I play or have played but those are probably the most interesting to me at the moment.

Sparta is a typical castle game, where you build up your kingdom and then try to go out and raid other peoples castles. There are a lot of ways to customize your place, unit strategy and overall game play. There are also coalitions where you play on a team with other allies in a goal to be better protected and help each other out especially when attacked. The graphics in Sparta are great and I think that it has a good balance between what you can do if you play the game for free or if you are spending money to do things faster. You are not going to suddenly become like Hercules and dominate the game if you spend $10, you would really have to pay a lot to be unstoppable like him. There are different systems how you can build up your castle (Pantheon) in terms of city defense and overall civilization through signing agreements. Signing agreements allows you to either build new city buildings or train new units by signing an agreement with the people who train those particular units, and having them teach your warriors the skills that they need. Sparta is one of several cool free online games by a company called Plarium. Plarium has great a great customer service system in place and they say that they will respond within something like 24 hours but it is usually just a few hours if it is during their normal business hours, this is only an issue depending on where you live in the world. In-game Sparta rewards you by being someone who comes back everyday to play and by battle rewards from raids and fighting the Persian army. It is a game that you will build yourself up over time and the developers are adding new things to the game and also creating tournaments on occasion to add more rewards to keep you coming back. Today I leave you with a shot from one of my unit training screens, there will be much more to follow.