It may surprise those of us with… stereotypical views of the place, but the French have made some really amazing videogames. In the 90s they were at their peak; Delphine and Adeline were putting out such leading lights as Flashback, Another World, Moto Racer, and the subject of this blog post, the LBA series. (Incidentally Adeline ended up becoming No Cliché, which made one of the most overlooked games of the Dreamcast, Toy Commander. But that’s another story!)
You should listen to this while you read the post.
Only two games were made, a third has been rumored on and off over the years but nothing has ever come of it. Still, these two games are true gems; they are beautiful, whimsical adventures that truly revel in taking the player into them. The first one is isometric whilst the second introduces 3D sections, and they blend puzzle, exploration, and action very handily. But the solid gameplay is only the base on which the real thing is built, and that thing is just the beauty of all the locales, the places you visit, the characters, all these sorts of things. When you went somewhere remote, you felt isolated. Somewhere oppressive, you felt oppressed. Somewhere safe, you felt welcomed – if on edge due to the omnipresence of Dr. Funfrock, in the first game, or the Empire in the second.
I’m failing you as your blogger here, because I’m really having trouble pinning down exactly what it is that makes these games work so well. I would have to say it’s the general aesthetic that is built from design, graphics, soundtrack, and the myriad characters you will meet. It is a world that feels genuinely solid and whole (I overuse the term “solid” and for that I apologize), and it is at heart an absolutely joyous adventure that really goes to what adventures should be about, which is exploring worlds that are sometimes surreal, sometimes a little intimidating, and where the love that went into crafting them shines through every pixel.
LBA 1 and 2 are available on GoG.com for a few bucks apiece and I heartily recommend taking a look if you’ve got a free weekend at some point!
The second one also has one of my favorite endgame credit sequences ever, which is a small thing to get excited about but given how readily we skip those, finding one worth watching is rare!
So Pike found an article online with the amusing and attention-getting title The Fascist Politics of the Infinite Respawn and, because I am not doing anything better with my copious qualifications, I thought I would take a look at it and provide a critique. I shall forewarn you, this is certain to be a long post and liable to be nothing more than masturbatory self-importance and a bunch of political jargon that has little use outside demonstrating that I know what political jargon is.
Maybe some Latin, too!
Fiat equus, et pereat mundus
Now, the article isn’t without some merit. Indeed for a medium to be considered an art, saying meaningful things is part and parcel of the deal. If we look at, say, movies, it’s very easy to find a very wide range of movies that have commented very seriously on a very wide range of political and social issues, from all kinds of angles. And we can find plenty of writing about what movies which don’t avowedly take a political torch up are saying as well; whether that be a feminist perspective on why strong women always get killed or a political examination of what hyper-macho 80’s action movies are all about.
I should state that I tend to shy away from overly analyzing every single movie/book/game etc. that comes along. Yes lots have things to say, and many more betray prejudice (conscious or simply not cared about) on the parts of their creators, but sometimes a big dumb action movie is just a big dumb action movie and trying to read more into it is silly. Still, the article I linked to is one which talks about an entire swathe of game mechanics and their implications, rather than any particular game, so I feel it’s worth engaging with. The argument, essentially, is that the mechanics of your typical modern FPS are ultimately “fascist” in nature, because they simultaneously represent A) The immovable and perfect State, in the form of the player character, and B) The numberless and overwhelming Enemies, in the form of… well, the numberless and overwhelming enemies.
A word about fascism itself. Fascism is a political philosophy with a single concept at its core: That the People and Polity should be the same thing, indeed must be, and that any other scenario is quite literally against the natural order of things and will by definition lead to the destruction of “Us”. It is important to note that Fascism does not consider this the consequence of living in a chaotic world or a lack of understanding on anyone’s part – it is a deliberate and concerted effort on the part of “Them” to destroy “Us”. “We” is fairly easy to define; “We” as a Nation (the only legitimate political unit for Fascism) are the natural owners of This Land who speak This Language and have This Culture. We have existed in this form since the mythical time immemorial (cf. just about any national origin myth you care to mention) and only in recent years, usually due to internal treason, are we being undone by alien influences of some nature. I reiterate that these aliens are acting very deliberately, with full knowledge of what they are doing and it’s consequences.
This leads itself to a whole host of interesting issues for the Fascist. We can see one of the most relevant if we take a look at Eco’s writings on the matter (You will generally find yourself enlightened if you ready Eco’s writings on any matter), most specifically the following quote:
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
Eco goes to one of Fascism’s absolute core contradictions here; the Enemy (and Fascism MUST have an Enemy because it is defined entirely in terms of “Us” and “Them” and cannot exist without both) are both cockroaches and masterminds; we are both superhumanly glorious as a people and fundamentally threatened by the enemies. Both parties are simultaneously incredibly strong and completely vulnerable. This is necessary for the Fascist; the Enemy must be strong enough to necessitate the Fascist’s proposed solutions (Obviously if They were actually a bunch of feckless layabouts with barely the mental ability to read, We would never be in any danger from Them), but We must be strong because the foundation on which Fascism is built shows and requires this to be fact. We are at risk of being overwhelmed despite the fact that we are almost divine in our nature and the greatest of all nations, and the fact that our enemies are “rats” and “cockroaches” and – a perennial favorite of the Fascist – “germs”.
The Fascist narrative is a clever one however; they shift the rhetorical focus, but they can do so damned well by simultaneously appealing to an actual or imagined historical Golden Age and current actual or perceived difficulties, or usually a mix of both in both cases, coupled with identifying an Enemy. The Enemy which is identified is only one part of the true foe of the Fascist, which is essentially anything that dilutes the power of the Race and Nation. This is why they object to homosexuality. Homosexuals do not reproduce and they do not fulfill the ‘natural’ roles of men and women in their roles as breadwinners and reproducers. Here we see how Fascism uses the mythologized past as well; the past was an agricultural idyll where men did honest work on the land and women did honest work creating and raising the young. Enemies are conflated in part due to this. To use a classic example, Jews not only must own the media because they are insidious and have influence everywhere, but the media must be owned by Jews because the media is a fancy, “not real” entity which does little honest work. The contradiction of using the media for propaganda purposes need not be addressed. There is a good reason Orwell’s 1984 has Doublethink as a central conceit.
So how does all this tie into the article linked, and into videogames? The article apprehends a lot of things quite well, in my eyes, but there are a handful of fundamental issues that it overlooks, or at least fails to properly address.
Yes, games do tend to provide an endless stream of undifferentiated enemies for the player to destroy and, yes, they do tend to do so in a fashion which gives little to no insight into them as people. But this is a necessity. First, games are fast-paced and involve large numbers. It would be very impractical to give every single person you kill in your average CoD a background and some characteristics, and I sorely doubt that it would be remotely enjoyable to play. Second, and similarly, games are made on a timeline and a budget. I dearly wish there were more games which offered the player more options with greatly diverging consequences, but that’s simply not the path that was taken, a failure of the art and medium certainly but far from inherently political in any way except, perhaps, love of the dollar.
Still, whilst I feel there is merit in criticizing how games present the enemies, I find the argument that the Player represents the Fascist State/Nation to be a rather shaky one. Indeed the player’s avatar is generally a superhuman force who performs impossible feats of endurance at the very least, but what is the alternative? There are games out there where the player is a very vulnerable figure, even manshooters (ARMA II being the obvious example), and they certainly have their place but I sincerely doubt that “realism” would serve CoD very well (No matter how much they might want to proclaim themselves a realistic military shooter).
It’s my opinion that the article has things backwards. Games use an arguably fascistic attitude in order to serve their ends, and thus they must have elements of fascism in them. My interpretation approaches it from the other direction – games make use of “fascistic” elements not because they are fascistic, but because they happen to share propagandistic tools. We see exactly the same tools employed by all manner of people, from state ideologues in fascist dictatorships to comic book writers in countries where free speech is sacrosanct. That the fascists happen to make use of such rhetorical tools does not ipso facto mean that using such tools makes one a fascist, nor that the tools themselves are fascist. We can use another example brought up by the article, that of zombies, to expand on this point.
The article states,
The zombie genre, in its various media incarnations, has been using the unstoppable mindlessness of its enemies as a justification for brutality for years. There’s a definite streak of fascist thought in the vanilla concept of zombies, although it’s usually complicated and subverted by the now-cliché “We Are The Real Monsters” subtext.
Now, despite the caveat, I take considerable issue with this assessment. The zombie genre is not a pro-fascist one (Overtly or subconsciously or otherwise), but one which generally opposes the “mass” against the “individual”. The enemies are by their nature a mindless undifferentiated mass of bodies; the survivors are by their nature the ones we can identify with, if only by virtue of the fact that they can, you know, speak and otherwise emote. But again we are seeing things conflated when they shouldn’t be. The survivors in any zombie fiction are by definition individuals when measured against their foes. This is often read as a critique of unthinking capitalism, as indeed it very much was in such movies as Dawn of the Dead, but could just as easily be read as a caution of communism (A horde of creatures acting in instinctive unison to exterminate the handful of individuals still alive by either devouring or infecting them). The critiques provided by zombies are thus not inherently fascist, but rather they are inherently individualist. It is true that the Fascist at times has recourse to utilize such imagery, especially in the Anglo world with our extremely strong emphasis on individualism. For the American demographic even more so the zombie doesn’t have a fascist narrative but a survivalist, libertarian one, which emphases self-reliance, individuality, and generally a rejection of whatever structures may exist to help. There are those on the American right who have a very similar set of talking points to this, but it’s due to a similarity of perceived past and as a means of capitalization on current discontent, not necessarily an actual confluence of either goals or attitudes.
Similarly all polities utilize a mythologized past and concoct a present and national identity to some degree. These things are not natural, they hinge on collective agreed-upon beliefs about the past. Individuals may differ and disagree but the overarching narrative of any body politic has to be held to be generally true by a fair proportion of the population if said politic is to be effective. This does not necessarily have to be fictional, but human history is an ugly business and few, if any, can lay claim to a bloodless history. Still the fact that fascists utilize something everyone else utilizes does not make everyone fascist, any more than David Duke drinking milk makes all milk-drinkers Grand Wizards of the KKK.
The same thing applies, then, in their assessment of games as vehicles of fascist ideology or rhetoric. We have things that we might identify as Fascist in nature but only if we take the attitude that “Fascists do X, games do X, games = fascist”. We see in the article that the case is very clearly laid out; “I don’t mean to imply that the developers of these games are full-on fascists. In my opinion, however, their design decisions are a clear demonstration of fascist ideology expressed through the video game form.” This statement only works if my above one is held to be true, for if the game makers are not fascist, and the games don’t share fascist characteristics, the point has nothing to stand on.
None of this is to suggest that games should not strive to have more nuanced, deeper narratives, that they should not seek to humanize the other (Sometimes – but as I said, sometimes a big dumb action movie is just that and I don’t WANT Saints Row Goes Forth to have some huge thing about everyone you run over). These are very valuable things that games absolutely should be pursuing in order to grow and to begin saying more. I just think that the article in question is ascribing rather more to the current situation than it can justifiably be saddled with. Games may lack imagination and depth at the moment, but that is due to risk-aversion on the part of publishers long before it is due to fascist ideology, consciously implemented or otherwise.
Hello folks if you’re wondering where we are, well, there’s a lot of videogame to be played! Not a large number, but the ones which are there are HUGE!
First up is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which I wrote about last Friday! It’s still awesome. I’m still barely anywhere in it because there is just so much to do. I’m not sure it is possible to finish Skyrim, you just sort of reach a point where you feel that it’s enough.
Forget Tigh, Ivanova's in the game too!
Second is, of course, Saints Row The Third, which is both completely demented and completely AWESOME! I paradropped out of a helicopter into a penthouse and killed everyone until I owned the place then a helicopter chase across the city ensued and oh man you guys seriously need to play this game. Then I stole a street cleaner and pimped it right out so it reps the Row. I’m actually a little lost in this as well because it’s just SO HUGE and there is SO MUCH to do.
Also the Specialists are serious business holy crap that Deckers shock hammer is amazing.
And then there's these assholes!
What about you guys? What are y’all playing this weekend?
I’ve written previously about how strategy games give you a pretty weird angle compared to reality due to how they function, specifically that because they put you in charge of a state and they have a win condition, you become pretty psychopathic with regards to your state. It is only a means to your end.
I’m going to come at this from another angle today. I was thinking about it when I was playing GalCiv, because as I am playing as the Humans I’m sort-of-but-not-quite RPing them as they’re written in the backstory; canny traders, excellent diplomats, with an iron fist in the velvet glove. Now GalCiv has election events that are incredibly trivial. You choose a political party and have regular elections. If your party wins you keep their bonuses (Say, +20% to your influence). If they lose, the bonuses go away until you reclaim control. But if they lose you are still in control. Now from a gameplay perspective this makes perfect sense. Nobody wants to sit back and watch your civ get run into the ground by the AI over the next 30 turns or whatever. That doesn’t make it any more sensible or less jarring; ultimately in strategy games you are your state/country, and anything along the lines of elections, changing dynasties, or anything else is entirely secondary at best.
What’s weird isn’t that they do this, it’s that they try and pretend they don’t. I don’t mind being told “You are the overarching driving force behind the French Empire rather than any particular leader or government therein”. But then a game will turn around and I will be presented as being the particular leader or government, such as EU3 where every notification is addressed to “My Emir” or “My King” or what have you. But how can you address this?
Of course the problem is lessened if you're an immortal Goddess-Queen
The Tropico series has possibly the best approach. You are a tinpot dictator and one of the ways in which your score is evaluated is by how much money you have embezzled from your own country over the years. This is a brilliant little mechanic, because you are actively reducing your abilities in one field in order to bump up your endgame results elsewhere. You’re still just going for the nebulous “score” but it’s something. One idea I had was to essentially provide you with ostentatious monuments to build, of truly obscene scale (Think Bender when he becomes Pharaoh), and the larger you build it the better you are. Civ used to do something vaguely similar where a good performance would make your palace or throne room better, a nice sidebar to the main game, and there’s a mod for Civ IV where you really can lose control of your empire to the AI for a number of turns, an interesting if frustrating feature.
Do you have any examples of this issue being done well? How might a game merge leadership of an in-game actor like a country with being an individual leader? Thoughts and ideas!
In case you’ve been living under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears, Skyrim came out today. Skyrim is the latest in the ever-more-popular Elder Scrolls series, whose most basic principle is to present you with an open world and set you loose to do mostly as you please. I never played the first two, but the third one – Morrowind – because a game I love fiercely and which is deeply ingrained in my memory as an all-time classic. It wasn’t actually tremendously good in pure gameplay terms. It was just so vast, so expansive, so atmospheric and alien, so unapologetically ambitious, that its flaws were irrelevant, indeed they became charms at times.
TES IV, Oblivion, was another matter. The fighting was much improved, true, but everything else just seemed to be lacking. The better graphics were only applied to a very generic fantasy world; the portals to Oblivion were impressive at first but quickly became repetitive and tedious to explore, and presented anyway no sense of danger to the world. It was just a hollow game, and even with mods (barring Nehrim) it never became something I spent a huge amount of time with.
Here, then, is Skyrim. At first I was leery of what they were saying about it. Better AI? Better questing? Hah, okay, and I’m the Pope (Outside of Europa Universalis III, I mean). Only… that stuff does seem to be true, so far. Melee combat is much as it was in Oblivion, if a good bit more polished, but the alternatives, namely magic and archery, are truly brilliant. The interface, on the 360 at least, is slick and polished. I hear bad things about the PC’s UI though. I was worried about the simplification of skills, such as removing acrobatics and athletics (And I do still dislike that) but what is there is great, primarily because of the new perk system. Every level you get one point that you can put into getting some significant bonus in a given skill tree. I first chose, for instance, to halve the cost of my novice-level Destruction spells, and this made a tremendous difference to how I was going about fights.
What I’m finding is that I want to tell you not just about how I came upon some bandits, killed one, resurrected her as a zombie, and let her fight her former comrades while I burnt them from afar; I also want to tell you about how I found a treasure map on one of their bodies, and it was just the right amount of detail to show me where to look without being too easy. I want to tell you about how I walked into a store during an argument, asked about it, said I could help retrieve something, and this was reacted to in a natural way – they kept arguing, but the topic shifted slightly. I want to tell you about how I scarfed down a whole load of random ingredients to learn their alchemical effects, only to find I had crippled my stamina for a moment. I don’t just want to explain fighting mechanics, I want to relate stories to you, stories that I experienced in this world. And it is a world, and that is the magic of it. I ascended a fairly small mountain and as it grew stormier and snowier, I felt physically colder in my room. That’s when I decided I had enough to make a preliminary blog post on the game.
All this from two hours of play.
Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Alec Meer not only called Skyrim GOTY, but said “I’m sorry Morrowind – I love you, but I don’t need you anymore. I think, at last, there is a new Best Elder Scrolls Ever.” This is high praise indeed.
It’s very early for me to make any serious judgment on this game. But he might be right.
Also, Saul Tigh voices one of the characters. I am MORE than okay with this. Will someone turn off that DAMN MUSIC?
I look at gaming currently and I look at gaming in the past and I just see such a big gulf in terms of how important the “big new things” are. Maybe I’m somewhat abalone in this but I just can’t work up a lot of excitement over recent developments. The iterative process of making computer hardware more powerful continues, as always, and is not used for terribly much aside from better graphics, as always. But I’m thinking specifically here about control schemes.
When I was but a lad, when there were only 151 Pokemon and arcades hadn’t quite died out yet, we were very impressed by the move to 3D and saw that it had potential. (Also screw Mario 64, Jumping Flash was the best 3D platformer ever.) But what was just as amazing was this newfangled thing called a DualShock, or more properly Analog control. We sometimes forget this today but there was a time when controllers did not have such things as analog sticks, just the D-pad and some buttons. Now it’s not like analog control itself was a new thing – heck, even Pong’s paddles probably count. Not to mention the PC joysticks and meese and trackballs, all commonplace at the time; but on consoles this was something else (If you mention the neGcon I will find you and punch you).
But Sony weren’t content with just having a new thing. No, they knew they needed something to show it off, to demonstrate why this new thing battered. They needed…
And now the true purpose of this post is revealed; Puns.
Ape Escape (Another platformer better than Mario 64 incidentally) wasn’t just a great game, and it wasn’t just a demented dose of Japan for my quaint British brain, it was a game that did – or at least convincingly pretended it did – something that you could not do without analog sticks. And that was the key. Not just selling a game that needed a DualShock controller to play, but one which showed you why you needed it, why it was a serious development that would influence games. So it did. Can you imagine a console today without analog controls? Everyone who didn’t already have it on the drawing board scrabbled to ape Sony. As for the cusomters, well, it might have cost a few squid to get the new controllers but tanks to Ape Escape it was demonstrated to be worth it.
See, this is what new motion controls have failed, and are failing, to do. They aren’t showing us what they can do that our existing schemes either outright cannot do, or can only do to a much lower standard (DooM was ported to the SNES remember, no analog there!). There are games which you can’t play without the motion controller but the few which seem to actually do anything that is both a) fundamentally new and b) fundamentally engaging. It doesn’t take a brain sturgeon to see all this! Actually, we can go back to the verboten neGcon here; it offered analog controls but who the heck even had one? Now the Wii and Kinect might be successful but that is very much more down to marketing than having an actual solid library of games backing them up. The few attempts to do something that can’t be done elsewhere, like Red Steel, just seem to consistently be macaquehanded.
Of course it’s not that these things don’t actually have some potential. Wired has covered some pretty amazing things done with the Kinect. They just aren’t getting translated into games like Ape Escape. This is a real shame because gibbon half a chance these new systems could actually be the revolutionary ones they are trouted as being; or at least be a very nice compliment to what we already have.
I’m so sorry but when the opportunity arises I can’t kelp myself, no matter how out of plaice the puns might be. I will try to keep them to a minimum but I can’t promise this will be the sole post packed to the gills with such awful puns! But I shall at least try to keep them to a minimum. Shall we agree to no fish puns on any day of the week, barramundi?
… Address all complaints to – ahem – Pike.
We're not foals. We know what the mane attraction of our blog is.
We do apologize for the paucity of updates this week; Pike has had various matters of consequence to attend to (more here) whilst my Internet decided to be nonfunctional for almost a full 24 hours, then I came back online and just watched Saints Row The Third trailers until I remembered we have a blog that should probably be attended to!
Honestly I’ve not been doing much special in videogaming terms lately. I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, playing Saints Row 2, and messing around with my usual array of 4x/grand strat games. There are a couple of things that might be worth relating though!
First is that I still can’t wrap my head around how great Master of Orion 2 is. I mean I’ve heard all the hype and stuff for years, and I finally got around to playing it, and it lives up to every word. It really is that good. And it has an amazing soundtrack as well!
You may or may not have heard that Sword of the Stars 2 came out this weekend, and that the release was the very definition of a clusterfuck. Kerberos not only uploaded a beta version to Steam but, once they fixed that and had a real version up… it was no better! They’re working hard on getting it up to par, and I’m sure they will given the gulf between SotS at release and SotS today, but Kerberos + Paradox making a game was a pretty amazing recipe for disaster. I think they’re trying to top that time CCP deleted everyone’s boot.ini. Kerberos' Face When
As I said I would I’ve spent some time with Hearts of Iron 3, and I can safely say it’s really not my cup of tea. I’m not a fan at all and I feel that I have given it a fair shake now; I can see what they were aiming for but it just didn’t work out that way, sadly. Oh well, it’s not like HoI2 has gone anywhere!
But we’re moving into the busy season now, so hopefully we’ll have plenty to say over the coming weeks! And of course what we’re going to talk about is old strategy games. Funny story, when Pike and me first planned this we considered making a strategy gaming blog, but considered it too limiting. And now look at us!
Oh yes, and there was the GTAV trailer, wasn’t there? I’m blown away by the graphics and San Andreas is a great setting. I’m actually not too worried if they’re taking a serious route with it; that’s a perfectly legitimate thing for them to want to do, and R* do it very well. But I have to admit, I’m more excited for Saints Row nevertheless.
(66% of consoles have 100% of the games; #OccupyMS+Ninty)
I’ve been playing a bit of GalCiv 2 lately (mostly when I want a quick break from BGT) and in the process I’m messing around with some of the component stats and techs to make it more fun for me. I’m trying to maintain the balance of course, and I’m running test games to see how it plays out. But that’s just the preface to why I was playing GalCiv 2; the real point of this post is what happened when I played GC2.
See, Stardock, who make the GalCiv games, are kind of trolls. They’re on record as saying that the percentage bonuses you are shown on-screen aren’t necessarily accurate; they don’t think such perfect knowledge is something the players should have. I don’t know exactly how large the variables are but it means that if you see something that gives you +5% morale, you might only really be getting +3%, or you might get +7%, and so on.
The other, even bigger trolly thing that they do in GC2 is with random events. Like most Strategy games there are random events of various kinds that are intended to shake things up a bit. Unlike those in, say, Civ, where you get a free promotion or one building in one city becomes more useful, the GC2 “Mega Events” can change the face of the entire galaxy. And Stardock have set it up specifically so that events will fire that cause the galaxy to descend into batshit insane chaos. Two big alliances at peace? Random event causes war. Everyone’s peaceful and not paying much attention to military? Dread Lords show up. Huge, draining war breaks out? Income is doubled. Or halved. Either way it’s pretty huge. These aren’t your daddy’s random events. For instance, last night whilst I was trying desperately to catch up with the Altarians, this happened:
Let me put a Class 28 planet in context. Earth is a class 8. Risa, from the Star Trek series, the pleasure planet? That would be about a 15. The Fantasy Planet in Futurama, where everyone’s wildest dreams come true? Maybe 18. If you go to Church every Sunday and serve God’s will in all you do, you’ll go to a Class 23 when you die. I’d never seen a Class 28. Until now.
Class 46. How did this happen? And the astute may notice it’s surrounded by other, habitable worlds. It’s rare for so many to be so clustered. What happened? What happened was the same insane random event happened twice. This event improves the Class of every uninhabited world by 12 within a certain radius. It happened twice, in two adjacent sectors. The first time it happened I was agog and immediately switched to Full Colony Mode to grab the 20-odd worlds that just went from Class 0 (Uninhabitable) to Class 12/13-ish (I was running with some very strong Planet Quality bonuses as well, which compounded all this further). It also boosted already-habitable worlds, so a Class 9 that had been of moderate priority jumped up to Class 21. And because so many of the worlds remained unsettled between the two firings of the event, a lot of worlds went from Class 0 to Class 12, then to Class 23 or so.
But that world, the Class 46, Nesro III? Well you can see it’s “Uninhabitable” and has a little symbol beside it. You need a particular tech – in this case Barren World Colonization – to actually settle it. These techs are research intensive, but the worlds tend to be of particular quality. This here world, Nesro III, must have been about a Class 22 or so to begin with. Very much worth pursuing under most circumstances, and potentially worth teching towards all by itself. Nobody could claim it because the tech was still some time away. The event fired twice, and it got up to this.
And that, fillies and gentlecolts, is how you do random events. Take note other strategy game designers! And readers, tell us about your experiences where stuff like this resulted in, shall we say, extreme outcomes!
Dear readers I have the most dreadful of confessions to make.
I’m playing Baldur’s Gate.
Why is this so horrendous?
Because this is pretty much the first time I’ve played BG. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve had the games for years. I just… well, I sucked tremendously at them. I was hopelessly bad. Something about them just did not work in my brain and I was lucky to reach Khalid and Jahiera. I think I got to Nashkel once. Worse yet? I played actual tabletop D&D as a kid. I still remember my first adventure. I know all about hit dice and saves vs. breath and THAC0 and AC and all that stuff. But it just… it didn’t translate for me into the vidya, I guess. I am abominably small-time for not sticking with it but, thanks to this rather spiffy LP Vorgen is running over at Something Awful, I’ve finally managed to get myself into the right mindset for it. I’m actually making progress! I’ve got characters who are higher than level 1! I don’t die to individual Gibberlings who happen to stumble across my camp!
It’s pretty amazing, of course; there’s a reason the games are renowned so very thoroughly. I’m still barely anywhere in it and I’m completely engrossed. I just wish I’d managed to get my brain to understand how they were supposed to be played years ago.
Are there classics you should have played that just didn’t work out for you? Did that ever change when you tried them again? Do LPs and such help other people get into certain games like this?
This is how I react every morning when I realize I can play more BGT
When Saints Row came out, me and my vidya bro Barry Manilow weren’t tremendously interested. It looked like a fairly run-of-the-mill GTA clone with some juvenile humor. Eventually one of us picked it up used for cheap and… we were pretty much correct in that assessment.
So we weren’t jumping up and down in our seats over Saints Row 2. This proved to be a mistake, because when I did eventually get it at the behest of other friends, it turned out to be seriously awesome. I’m replaying it now to get in the mood for The Third and it’s just so absolutely mental, massive, and not-giving-any-shits about the whole thing. It’s not a perfect game by any means but it’s one of those all-too-rare ones which really puts stupid fun first and everything else second. My current Boss looks like Jesus dressed in a cheap 70’s plaid suit. I cannot begin to emphasize how hilarious this is, especially when something goes down and the camera is up in his face as he’s about to tell Maero hard or something.
They might be led by an Internet Tough Guy but the Deckers seem to be a gang straight out of Jet Set Radio. Which is nice.
And in a few weeks Saints Row The Third is out. This is a big deal, because it looks like Volition have finally just gone over the edge, said “Fuck it”, and decided that even the remotest semblance of realism has no place in their game. I’m pretty sure some of the art assets have been pulled from Red Faction: Armageddon and there is all kinds of crazy stuff like lasers and a hoverbike and I don’t even know. Annoying punk kids? Luchadores? Classy Belgians? An anime game show thing with a truck that sucks up pedestrians and fires them and a gun that fires squid that attach to people’s heads, turn them into allies, then explode? It’s got it all! The level of both customization and sheer insanity in this game looks to be pretty much peerless and I am okay with this. (I just hope there are Summoner references as well how cool would it be for Joseph of Ciran to burst into the middle of a gang fight and summon a Blood Elemental)
I’ve said things before about videogames being art and deep and meaningful and how they are things to be engaged with and all that. And sometimes that’s true. But sometimes you just need to jack a sweet ride, pimp it up, and be totally ballin’.
