All posts by Mister Adequate

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

I think I had a revelation

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Not to turn this into Mr. Adequate’s Angry Blog Of Rage but…

You know how they’re destroying all our beloved old games with stupid remakes that have nothing to do with the original? FaceBook versions of complex strategy and simulation games? ‘XCOM’? Syndicate*? And so on?

We sit around whenever some such bastardized abomination is announced and wonder “Why”. Why are they doing this to our beloved SimCity? Well I think I’ve figured out one reason this happens. Now don’t get me wrong, a good chunk of it is still just because designers (And I’m looking at you Brian Reynolds) seem to not really grasp certain facts about their own game, such as the fact that nobody WANTS SMAC Effect, we want SMAC, the 4x. Otherwise it’s better left alone. Sometimes (And I’m looking at you Will Wright) they just go right off the deep end and decide that Spore needs to be an incredibly casual, cartoony disappointment instead of, you know, good. But these out-of-left-field revivals, the ones that come out of absolutely nowhere and do their best to destroy treasured memories? That I think I’ve got figured out.

I just spent 20 minutes looking for this picture so you better appreciate it

See, Pike (Because she actually takes pleasure in my suffering) linked me to this article. Now that’s a long and depressing read, but the gist of it is a guy who tells us all about why games aren’t about games anymore, but about reducing them to the most mechanistic profit possible. Now, we’re not opposed to profit here. I just think that it should be one among a number of considerations and that profit is best made through quality rather than microtransactions.

But anyway. That particular page I linked you to is what sparked my theory. See, the people making these games need monetary support. They have to go to investors, i.e. old dudes in suits, and explain to them why X is a good investment. And that’s not going to be easy because the old dudes will probably think gaming ended with Pac-Man and is still the exclusive preserve of 12 year old boys. So. What’s a prospective developer to do?

Well if you’re smart, you’d go in and say “We’ve got this videogame idea. The franchise already exists – in fact it’s 20 years old, has sold millions of copies, and is hugely critically acclaimed.” The suits won’t understand the nuances here – they’ll just see “Hey this is already a winner we just need to cash in”. It’s doing half the job for you. The players who actually played the old games don’t enter this equation at any time. It’s not a poor attempt to rouse interest through using a known name (Though they will tell the investors this will happen), that does not factor into this process until the thing is green lighted and the poor bastards in PR have to try and spin it.

Or am I just being a conspiratorial nutbird who should join the ranks of those who think we need to return to the gold standard and that the moon landing was faked?

*In this edit: I forget that I had intended to append something. Syndicate is being made by Starbreeze, so it’s likely to be a damned good game. Just not, you know… Syndicate. Maybe. Who knows.

The Android's Distracted Boss (Casual/Flash), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

I am legitimately angry about this and you should be too.

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Games are no stranger to controversy. We’ve had Carmageddon, we’ve had Mortal Kombat, we’ve had Postal, and these are just games the media gets worked up about. Of course a lot of this is just nonsense, it may be crude but it boils down to “old people don’t get hip new things”. Or they tell outright lies. Then there’s things which actually warrant comment, such as Custer’s Revenge or Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Well we can add another one to that latter list, a list of games which probably warrant genuine criticism.

It is called Lady Popular. Kotaku has a writeup, but I will relate the gist of it here for those of you who are understandably averse to anything Gawker-related (Though it’s written by one of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun chaps so it’s not their usual drivel).

Lady Popular, explicitly billed as “A game for girls”, is a game where you play the role of a female. Or, a female in the bizarro reality-TV world that someone clearly conflates with real reality. Your first task to becoming a “smart, talented, and successful woman” is to move out of your parent’s house. You do this by completing three tasks. One is to rent an apartment – all fine and dandy so far.

The other two tasks are to get a haircut and to buy something at the mall. Getting haircuts and going shopping seems to be quite literally half of the stuff you can do in this alleged game.

But okay. Let’s stretch the definition of charitable beyond all reason and allow this. After all, people do give a lot of consideration to their appearance. It’s part of one’s identity. Being able to take care of such things and to make purchases is a part of being an adult, even if it’s not exactly up there with raising kids or paying off your mortgage. So we’ll allow it, because much worse is to follow.

An early objective sees you invited to a party. But oh no! You don’t have anyone to go with! Yes, a fundamental and early objective in this game is to seek a boyfriend. “But Mister Adequate!” you cry, “That may be poorly presented, but relationships are a part of growing up as well!” Yes, well. Put aside that acquiring a boyfriend is presented as a central objective to a young woman’s life – not as one part of it, not as an option among many options from abstinence to having many one-night-stands, not as something that tends to just happen when you meet someone you click with – a central objective without which her life literally cannot proceed – put that aside. Because do you know what happens when you do find a boyfriend?

Do you? Can you guess?

He gives you money.

Every day.

Us too, Twilight, us too.

He gives you a daily stipend. Although there are jobs in the game this appears to be a major source of income, and as far as I can gather you keep getting your girlfriend allowance as long as you’re dating someone. A core part of this game is literally to find a sugar daddy. Now I don’t know about anyone else, maybe things changed whilst I slumbered wreathed in fire beneath the earth for a hundred thousand years, but last time I checked the concept of a “successful woman” did not tend to involve finding a boyfriend for the sole purposes of attending parties and paying for your hairdressing and shopping needs. If you wanted one at all (Dear God can you imagine if these people tried to allow for lesbian relationships? That would be such a clusterfuck I’m glad they just plain pretended it doesn’t exist.) it was more about companionship, having fun together, and being a best friend. You know, equal parts of a whole. Maybe I have become the old fogey who doesn’t understand the hip kid way of doing things? But I doubt it. Of course this also means that the monetary success of the guy is THE major factor in his worthiness. Truly a good message to send to our young ladies in this straitened economic times, with unemployment rising around the world.

Another important objective, and one which seems to persist throughout the game, is to watch your weight. Now I’m a lazy neckbeard, so I freely admit that messages about good health tend to pass over my head unheeded, but this isn’t even that – this is just straight out “Remember that excessive weight loss or gain is not healthy and will make your lady unhappy”. Getting too fat will MAKE YOU UNHAPPY; this is presented not as a societal construct but a simple fact of reality.

I honestly cannot begin to fathom just who on Earth would come up with something like this, who would greenlight it, and who would program it and put the art assets and everything together. This game seems to be designed to travel back in time and kick Emmeline Pankhurst and Susan B. Anthony in the ovaries so hard their great-grandkids feel it.

Now for a palate cleanser. Something that has strong female characters with realistic flaws, motivations, and personalities, which is neither patronizing nor insulting. Something like…

Girls, you've got an important mission. You must save our fillies from this horrid thing!
The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Incoherent ramblings

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I don’t really have a proper topic today, because insomnia is a lot of fun and has left my brain quite mushy and useless today! So I’m just going keep moving from topic to topic though it won’t be one long incredibly unbroken sentence and hopefully something will stick!

Let’s see then.

I finished Dead Island yesterday. My verdict remains much the same: It’s a buggy game from a developer who clearly has no idea what they are doing (The most recent patch broke the game entirely and they had to roll it back before fixing it; I don’t really know how you miss the “Nobody can play your game because it doesn’t even start” bug but there you go.) and it is a ridiculous amount of fun. You go to three major places in the game; the Resort, the City of Moresby, and the Jungle. Weirdly it’s Morseby which is the most hectic, tense, and meaty part; the Jungle was a quick and pleasant jaunt in comparison. Also as someone on SA said, the presence of an honest-to-god sewer level in a game in 2011 is personally offensive to me.

Mowen? More like BRO-en!

My efforts to give HoI3 another shot have failed because I keep playing Victoria 2 and EU3 all day. It’s not my fault, PDM keeps getting updated and I must also bring the Light of Islam to the world as a unified Arabia! I’ll try and play some HoI3 soon though.

I picked up MoO2 on GoG.com recently (I know, it’s shocking that it took me this long) and I can already tell it’s very much worthy of the praise it receives. That said I’ve more been messing around with GalCiv 2 lately, largely because MoO2 doesn’t seem to play nice in a window.

Oh, and if you’re playing any Gears 3 lately, make sure you give the mutators a try in Horde mode. Super Reload is amazingly fun.

Finally, I’ve come across a freeware RPG called Exit Fate, which apparently hews to the Suikoden school of game design. Will give it a try and report back on how true this is and so on.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

Hearts of WHYron 3

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So, as you’ve no doubt gathered if you’ve been reading this blog for a length of time, I’m a fairly big fan of Paradox’s grand strategy games such as Europa Universalis. My favorite however is probably Hearts of Iron II: something about it just really, really appeals to me, and I’ve had weeks where I play nothing but that game or one of its innumerate mods.

All kinds of hilarity

So you’d have thought Hearts of Iron III would be a pretty big thing for me, right? So did I. Then I played it.

I really can’t put my finger on what it is. It’s not a bad game, though it had the usual panoply of Paradox bugs on release. It does a lot of interesting things and objectively looks like an improvement over its predecessor. I don’t want to be some kind of old stick-in-the-mud but at the base of it, it’s not enough like II for my tastes. It took a long time to get into II, and now that I’ve got it all figured out I’m somewhat reluctant to move on.

But I can see the appeal of III. So I’m giving it another try! This time I’ve said screw the base game though, I’m going to dive straight into a mod that does stuff I like, so I’m rolling with the Historical Plausibility Project, which seeks to allow plausible in-game outcomes based on what happens without being either too sandboxy or hewing too closely to reality. Exactly how I like my Paradox.

What I REALLY want is Silent Hunter with Admiral Rarity, though there is an Equestria mod for Vicky 2

So let’s see how this goes! Have you guys ever had a game which you know you should like, but don’t? Have there been games which you’ve had to try several times before you get into them? Are there some you’ve just given up on, and retreated to a preferred predecessor?

(Ponies are here)

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Xenonauts

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For a long, long, long, long, long time we have lamented the absence of X-Com. There have been various attempts at creating spiritual successors to it, most notably the UFO series by ALTAR, and these weren’t terrible games; but nobody has ever really captured the feeling of X-Com, nobody has ever come close in fact.

No ponies today. Only nightmares.

Now someone has. Spurred by the positive impressions of the fine gentlemen at RPS I picked up the preorder (Which unlocks beta access) a couple of days ago and, after spending a little time with the beta build, I can pretty safely say that Mr. Meer’s writeup is spot on. Let me lift a quote wholesale from what he writes;

A playable build of Xenonauts was on show in the RPS-sponsored Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer expo last week, and pretty much everyone I spoke to about it said the same thing: “well, it’s X-COM,” they offered with a wide grin. They didn’t say what worked or what didn’t or what they’d change or anything like that – they just said “it’s like X-COM.”

Xenonauts, ladies and gentlemen, is like X-Com. It’s hard to define what exactly X-Com is, but the end result is very clearly present here. You care about your soldiers even though you know they’re going to die very quickly. You find yourself cursing because in your eagerness to look around the next corner you didn’t spare enough time units for reaction fire. You feel the greatest tension when you take a long-range shot with a rookie. You need it to hit, it HAS to hit, or some other guy right next to the alien with no TUs is going to die next turn. And yes, you’re terrified of Hidden Movement.

It just adds up. Finally, after nearly 20 years, we’re getting a true and proper successor to one of the great, all-time classics of videogaming. I urge everyone to check out the Xenonauts page, take a look around, and to rejoice – for our prayers are being answered.

The Android's an Amateur Developer (Ideas), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Why GTA V should be set in the future.

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Speculation about a new GTA game is always going to be widespread and wide ranging, and until I get news that it’s going to be something I really don’t want, like GTA Stockholm or something, I’m going to talk about and dream about GTA being set in the future.

1. Scope for all kinds of neat toys.
What is the coolest thing about the future? All the crazy gadgets we hope to have. Rayguns, flying cars, moonbases, robots, etc. etc. San Andreas already went a little in this direction towards the end, with those crazy jetpack missions and suchlike, but the scope for including all kinds of completely crazy vehicles, weapons, and other gadgetry is never going to be higher than in a game set in the future. Given that the point of the GTA series is fun, and that R* seem to have realized this in making Gay Tony much more flamboyant and contain much crazier missions than IV, a setting where pretty much anything you can imagine can legitimately be said to exist opens the door for that.

We could even imagine a future where there is a Dreamcast 2...

2. Scope for social commentary.
“But Mister Adequate!” I hear you cry “GTA relies so heavily on making commentary on the period in question! How could a future GTA do this?” Well, okay, it can’t actually comment on the future proper for obvious reasons, but it CAN comment on our imaginings of the future. And it’s not like we have a shortage of that. R* can quite easily poke fun at futurist utopians like me, as well as cynics or those who feared despotism and destruction, or anyone else. Moreover, it’s not hard to imagine issues in the future which will parallel existing or historical ones; clone rights, human-robot marriage, and so forth and which would be ripe for making fun of, as well as letting R* comment on current events with references to ‘history’, e.g. “Remember back in 2013 when we legalized gay marriage and within a month, the military collapsed because of all the gay sex?” or whatever.

3. Variation in setting.
Of course, there are a multitude of visions of the future, both in terms of individual ideas and broad movements. This doesn’t constrain, it does the opposite. R* has so much to choose from that they could use a great deal of it to create a varied and engaging environment. The high-end part of town could be all 1920s modernism in appearance and style; the middle-class suburbs 1950s all streamline moderne and raygun gothic; the business district could remind us of Mirror’s Edge with businessmen in their mile-high gleaming towers overlooking a city rife with crime, poverty, and misery; the densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Blade Runner and Judge Dredd, with blocks of intolerably densely packed buildings overlooking perpetually gloomy and rainy streets, all while, off in the distance, the Space Elevator that carries hopeful immigrants to Mars is always visible and is the dream of millions. This ties in again with #2; what if America’s population was falling because people were so desperate to leave?

4. Music.
As with #2 there seems on the surface to be a problem here, but #2 itself actually solves the problem. Assuming the setting is fairly unpleasant (And it’s GTA, so it will be), it’s pretty easy to say “Well everyone’s on a massive nostalgia kick because things suck” and then voila, you can pick any music from any period. For contemporary stuff you can just get people like Brian Eno to create it – he knows how to make it sound like the future. If done right the setting could be sublime precisely because it isn’t so constrained by a specific era.

The future sounds like the 80s and looks like ponies.

5. “Five” and “Future” alliterate.

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Just when I thought I was out…

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… they pull me back in.

Yes, I’m talking about that old standby that nobody ever truly escapes from, the game that both codified MMOs and redefined what they could commercially and culturally achieve – World of Warcraft. Now, our dear Pike has as most of you will know been a very long-time player of WoW, and played solidly for years, which is of course where her delightful Aspect of the Hare arose from. In fact I first played the game considerably before she ever touched it (I got it just as Patch 1.6 came out.), but unlike her I come and go in waves. I play for a few months, then put it aside for a few months, repeat. Apparently ad nauseum. I had thought I had escaped for good; I last played in early Spring if I recall correctly.

But here I am, and I know the signs by now. I’ve started reading the WoW forums. I keep an eye on the patch notes. I’ve updated to the latest version. I’m looking for the best current plugins to use. Sooner or later, no matter how long and hard I resist it, I’m going to give Blizzard yet more of my altogether too scarce money and I am going to spend an extraordinary amount of time playing World of Warcraft.

Again. And I’m sure I’ll drag Pike along with me, because she’s susceptible to that sort of thing and hearing me ooh-ing and ah-ing over some mediocre Green I just found will make her itch to play it.

Goldshire, my body is ready!

Are there any games, MMO or otherwise, which just seem to always manage to call you back to them, an irresistible siren song that must inexorably conquer you despite your best efforts?

Also how is WoW these days, to those who still play?

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites

Giant Manly Men Being Manly

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I spent the great majority of yesterday playing Gears of War 3. Now, Gears is not the highest-minded game series ever made, it’s true, but it also highlights why not every game has to aspire to being meaningful and special in that sense. Because this is gaming at its absolute finest, it is sheer, unadulterated fun.

Gears of War is a game where people are made of muscles the size of oak trees. Pretty much everyone can take a stupid amount of punishment before dying, they’re as strong as oxen, and the whole game is basically Violence Is Fun Part 3: Electric Boogal…ee? Whatever. The point is you shoot a lot of stuff. And it’s great. Now I’m doing Gears a bit of a disservice because it does actually have some rather good characters and does some heavy stuff story-wise (Both far better in this than either predecessor), but really, the main point of the game is killing lots of Locust.

Everything here has been polished to an impressive degree. Absolutely everything about the game shows attention to detail and refinement, everything works brilliantly, the whole system just feels like it’s put together properly out of a lot of solid and well-tested parts.

As a tribute to my good friend Paul, here is a picture of Carmine.

I’m being a very poor blog person here because I’m not really conveying what it is that is good about Gears 3. It just… it just works, really really well, and is stupidly fun to play. I’ve not even touched the improved Horde mode yet, though I messed around in Beast mode (Where you play the Locust side in a Horde game, basically) a bit and it was just glorious. Epic Games seem to have held nothing back here. You fight the most ridiculous, over the top enemies, all sorts of insane things happen, and the game includes one of the best siege defenses I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing through in any action game.

In short, if you like FUN, get GoW 3. I guess it won’t convert you if you’re not a fan, but if you’re on the fence I would wholly endorse joining in now and getting into some multiplayer with friends, because few games do multiplayer as well as this one does.

The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

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I like Deus Ex. And I liked Invisible War okay as well, as a game it wasn’t at all bad, it just looked bad next to Deus Ex. Because it’s one of the best games ever made.

So when there was news of another DX game on the way I was predictably skeptical. Might be an okay game, but it’s really not going to match the original. And I was pretty wrong about that. But the reason HR works is not because it has good, solid controls, not because it has developed characters and a good story, nor even because it offers several ways to pursue objectives. The reason it comes close to matching the original is something intangible, often overlooked, and always of great importance: Atmosphere.

The setting is amazing, now that I’ve been further than Detroit. In fact it took me about two minutes of walking around Heng Sha before I declared it one of my favorite game settings ever. Heng Sha is by far the magnum opus of HR in fact; a cyberpunk dystopia that hits all the right buttons. As RPS said, it’s not just night, it feels like it hasn’t been day in years (And in the Lower City that’s pretty much exactly true). It’s dirty and cramped, and hugely wealthy buildings sit beside apartments barely above corrugated-iron shanties. Above, monorails buzz around on the underside of the Pangu (The plate upon which the Upper City sits). You get a vista of the Lower City at one point and it is a scene straight from Blade Runner; clearly so full of hardship and suffering and matchlessly beautiful despite it.

Also known as the floof

Then you see the Upper City, and it is not just a nicer place, it is a completely different sci-fi aesthetic. It is clean, green, sleek, and searingly bright. It is definitively Utopian in style. Juxtapositions are generally nice and a pretty commonly used too but I’ve rarely seen one so well handled, even though your contact with the Upper City is limited. The buildings are pale and quintessentially futuristic, compared to the cyberpunk skyscrapers of the Lower City. There are parks and plazas everywhere; the biggest open space in the Lower City is a dirty rooftop.

Crystal Spires and Togas

This is what the original DX did so very well, and where IW was weak. This is where HR succeeds as well. It has been a long, long time since I’ve felt that palpable knot of excitement in my stomach that comes from just exploring somewhere awesome, but I felt it in Heng Sha. HR is a game that succeeds, and it’s because of the amount of attention paid to the details and the setting that elevates it from “good” to “memorable”.

Are you enjoying HR? Do you agree? Which game settings have really stuck with you thanks to being well executed?

The Android can't be arsed with a real topic (Weekend)

This weekend!

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Okay kids, it’s that time again, when I categorically fail to come up with a post topic and so resort to something pretty mundane! What are YOU going to be playing this weekend?

Dead Island

I only use violence as a last resort

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I'd explain what these do for me, but then the blog would need the new .xxx TLD

DORF FORT

You will NEVER kill this many Elves.

Suikoden V

In a game filled with waifus, she still stands out.

ALSO!!!!!

Tomorrow is the premiere of Season 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. So… yeah, if you thought the blog overdid it on Pony pics before now…

... then you may want to bail, because it's only going to get worse.

So what about you, dear readers? What entertainments shall be occupying your precious free time this weekend?