The front of this blog was, until I posted this, a very pleasant post. It was an enthusiastic post by a long-time gamer about one of her very favorite games ever. It heartens me when someone enthuses so about something they love, doubly so when it’s in a medium I cherish.
And that is why it hurts so much to post this, because there are ugly, ugly things afoot and I’m just not able to stand them anymore.
That’s enough by itself really, and I’ll write at length about why it does matter that they’re using the X-Com name for something that is entire not X-Com at another point, but suffice it to say, FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-
I’m not opposed to online/casual games in principle, but on the other hand, you can pay a full $19.99 USD for a single civilization pack. OR you can pay $99.99 (Yes, one shiny cent shy of a Ben Franklin) for everything. Oh no wait, I’m sorry – everything for now. That’s just the “season 1 pass”. It lasts for the next six months. Ninety nine dollars for six months of a game. And they say MMOs are bad value!
Brian Reynolds now works for Zynga – founded by a man who wanted to be able to buy victory because he sucks at games – and defends the most excruciatingly casual, pay-to-win games imaginable.
Many companies (I’m looking at Namco real close right now because of their SCIV shenanigans) put DLC on the damn disc. Even Paradox is making DLC now, though at least that’s all genuinely optional stuff. How long until their graphical DLC stomps on player-made graphics mods though?
DLC in itself can be okay. Look at what Rockstar make: The Ballad of Gay Tony, The Lost and Damned, and Undead Nightmare are all absolutely superb. But they’re all pretty much expansion packs in their own right. The increasing nickel-and-diming of players for stuff that is either on the disc, should have been in in the first place, or would once have come free in a patch (Remember those? When patches had stuff in them?) is just disgusting. I get going where the money is, but there’s still plenty of money to be made on those of us who actually play videogames; We’re the ones who still buy tons of games in the recession, we’re the ones who still buy Nintendo consoles even after they made the GameCube, and we’re the ones who are going to invest serious time and money into gaming.
In short, Mister Adequate has evolved into The Incredible Hulk
I really like this game, so I’m going to write another post about it in case my little tale didn’t hook you.
Basically, PZ is a zombie survival horror game. Now, we’ve had an abundance of zombies lately, but the very great majority of them have been centered around action, killing zombies, gunning them down in hordes, all that stuff. All well and good, everyone loves a good game of Dead Rising, but there seemed to be a huge and obvious gap here. Zombie games are, as it were, zombie games. That is to say, the game part came first. The zombies were almost incidental and could generally be replaced with another one of vidya’s favorite standby enemies. PZ is different. It’s a zombie movie. Caesar likewise approves.
What I mean by this is that it’s very much about the things you typically see in a zombie film. It’s about hiding, survival, and paranoia. It’s about running out of food, needing to scavenge painkillers, and getting shot by desperate lunatics. Worrying whether that scratch has infected you or not (Bites infect 100% of the time and there is neither a vaccine nor a cure.) It’s not about killing as many zombies as you can – the game doesn’t even keep track of this. The high score is to survive for as long as you can. Admittedly in the pre-alpha demo that’s out now this isn’t hugely challenging once you’ve played it a couple of times and know what you’re doing, but the principle is a vital one – you’re going to die. The opening of the game tells you straight up, there is no hope of survival. This is how you died.
It’s something a lot of us have been wanting for a long time. A zombie game in which you were an average joe rather than an immune superman, in which survival is the main concern rather than an afterthought you can fix with waiting six seconds, in which you’ve got to think about your potential hideouts and assess them for suitability and where preparing them further can attract zombies due to the noise.
They’ve got all sorts of plans for the game in the future. The current update has been very slow to arrive, for a variety of reasons, but if even half of what’s planned goes into the final game it’s sure to be an extraordinary ride. Once again, the relevant links:
Kate… I had to do it. I just couldn’t protect us both in that house. Her wound was getting infected, who knows if the disease really would get into her? I couldn’t leave her to die, I couldn’t shoot her. I smothered her with a pillow. Gathered what few things I could carry and hoofed it across town.
I don’t know how they knew I was in there. The windows were all boarded up. There was no more power to use the lights. I crept around. But after three days safely ensconced in a small duplex house, where I had managed to secure some decent supplies, I heard them. Hammering. Pounding. I went down to check; the door shook with each rotten fist that smacked against it. It would hold, it would hold for a long time, but they would get in in the end. And there was no other way out.
So I decided to do the only thing I could: I was going to fight. I waited, shotgun in hand, whiskey in belly, for what I was sure would be my end. And I won. I killed them all, there must have been thirty or so of them, and I destroyed them. Quickly, I boarded things up again and retreated upstairs.
Two days passed. Nothing. I didn’t know how they had missed me; that shootout made more than a little noise. I guess all the ones nearby had already been attracted and then killed? I don’t know. But I was running low on food and it was time to start thinking about what next. This place was… safe-ish, and it housed many supplies I had gathered. It would take two, maybe three runs to relocate everything, so I would either have to take a lot of risks, I would have to keep this as a base, or I would have to BAM! BAM! BAM!
How? How did they find me again? And why did it take so long? If any had seen me go in, or heard me shooting, they should have arrived at most a couple of hours after I retreated. I don’t understand it. It doesn’t matter; this place is no longer safe, the doors are falling apart and I’m almost out of wood to barricade them with. Okay. Only one solution. Take what I can carry, fight through the horde, run. Find another place to hole up.
Is this going to be the rest of my life?
I opened the door. Shotgun in hand. They poured in, a lot more than just thirty of them this time. Seventy, maybe eighty. The shotgun tore them apart, but it wasn’t quite enough. They got closer. And closer. I avoided their bites, but a couple of them scratched me, one on my leg, one on my arm. I finished them off, went out of the house, and ran without looking back.
Found a small apartment. Had a zombie in it, took care of him with a baseball bat. Nice and quiet. Very messy. Looked around; enough food for a couple of days here. Saw to bandaging up my wounds, they weren’t major but it was better to try and be safe than sorry. Took some painkillers and a sleeping pill once I had used the last of my wood on barricading things. Slept for about 12 hours.
Sick. Stomach churning, head spinning. Threw up in toilet bowl. Grim. Probably the infection, from a scratch or blood that splattered on me or something. No hastiness though. Don’t be hasty. Took some more pills, ate more than I could really spare, found a book to read and enjoyed it by the evening light with a fair amount of booze. Not a bad day in the circumstances.
Sicker. Dwefinition the virus. Hear pounding, but door is holding. Another surviver they found? Just beating doors for no raisin? Don’t know. Still reading, good book. Atwood. I like Atwood. Virus there too.
Sleep. Wake. can’t see words now too blurry. bread andples not tasty. eat steak. not cook, tastes good, fills belly. Drink. Drink lots and lots. Okay. Get it together. Blaze of gory bob, blaze of glory. Load up. 65 shotgun shells. Bottle of booze. Another steak. Bat with nails.
Open door. quiet, eserted. Stride around town like the duke of new york. hardly any zombies. the fuck? where were they all they were ruining my last stand. FUck it, going to get drunk. Found a bar, raided it, got completely smashed. pills too! might die of od hahahaha hope you all get poisoned by my corpes you fucks
i dont rememberthe alst few days that’s a lot of corpses and fire though what the hell oh god my head
4 itchy tasty
Project Zomboid is an indie survival horror game, one which is seeking to really focus on the survival rather than slaughter side of things, with the intent of it becoming a open-world sandbox which will eventually kill you. It’s glorious. There is currently a free demo, and purchasing is intended to work Minecraft style where you pay less the earlier you buy, and get access to later updates. They’ve had some troubles lately with Paypal and Google and stuff, but they’re top folks and are making an amazing game that I urge everyone to check out.
I could tell you about a very cute, very enjoyable little game I’ve recent come across called Kerbal Space Program.
I could tell you how it has a great physics model, and how you design rockets for the KSP in order to, well, do whatever.
I could tell you how they’re planning to include other solar bodies, so you can have space stations and moon bases and stuff.
I could tell you that it’s highly addictive even absent these because just trying to get a stable orbit (Nevermind leaving a satellite there) is quite challenging.
But I shan’t.
No, what I shall tell you about is Jebediah Kerbal.
There are three at the start of the KSP, three brave Kerbals who seek to slip the surly bounds of Kearth and take flight. Bob, Bill, and Jeb.
Our intrepid heroes
Bob and Bill are, frankly, absolute cowards. Jeb is another story. Jeb does not give anything that remotely resembles a crap. Here they are halfway into orbit. Loving it
And here they are in orbit. With no way to actually descend. Oops. At least I remembered the parachute! If only there were atmosphere for it to drag in.
Flung into deep space with no hope of return? Jeb loves it. Trapped in an orbit with no other ships in existence to retrieve you? Jeb loves it. A part of the rocket explodes? Jeb worries for all of five seconds, then goes right back to remembering that he is in freaking space. It’s like someone really took me or Pike and measured how we acted in space, because there is nothing that could damped our spirits. We’d be grinning like maniacs right until we plowed into the moon at 14c.
It’s free to play in it’s alpha-tech-demo-thingy-whatever stage right now, and you can pick it up here! There’s also a wiki (I think my toenail clippings have their own wiki these days) and forums for you to peruse. I recommend you give it a try, it’s a lot of fun to watch your meticulous planning result in something that topples over on the launch pad and fatally explodes!
Yesterday, having nuked Charlemagne and his hordes of knights and musketmen, Pike and I began a new game of Civilization IV. We thought we’d take it easy with this one, so we only had ourselves and two AIs, and one continent for each one of us.
Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Rule Britannia
This is… unusual. I had actually been under the impression that unless you really screwed around with the mapscripts, a start like this was essentially impossible. Pike’s start was a bit better, but still on a small island. Nonetheless we decided it would be fun to forge ahead rather than restarting with a new world. We were both within sight of the continents we were supposed to start on but, although she has spread like a plague, I have elected to remain in this single city. Now that I’ve got Moai Statues (Which provide production from water tiles) and some Great People, London has become a terrifically productive city.
The less said about the unpleasantness with Byzantium and Ethiopia, the better. I’ll just let Pike fight them while I hide in my walled, hilltop island city with my protective, charismatic leader.
Have you ever had a game present you with an unorthodox situation? Did you roll with it, or just find it annoying? If you carried on, how much impact did it have on what you did?
In the old days, before your time, there was a company called Blizzard. Yes yes, I know, they’re still around today, but they’re not the same Blizzard. Back then, when they made a game, you sat up and took notice. Back then when they made an expansion, it added a great deal of content.
I remember it clearly. I had just awoken, the sleep barely rubbed from my eyes, when Pike came with grim news. Blizzard. Diablo III. I thought perhaps that they had bowed to the silliness about “too much color”, and made it all brown’n’bloom. But no. Diablo III, I learned to my endless horror, would be subject to the following;
1) There would be no offline play. You must be connected to b.net to play the game.
I saw this and I was mad. It is monumentally stupid. It encourages piracy rather than reducing it. It has consistently proven to be a poor idea when previously implemented.
2) There will be an auction house where you can use real money to purchase in-game characters and items from other players.
I saw this and I was leery. I can understand Blizz’s desire to undermine gold farming and so forth, and legitimizing something we all know already happens anyway is not such a huge deal. Still, it seems dreadfully crass and overwhelmingly all-encompassing in this instance. I just don’t want to log into a game, play for awhile, decide to look for an item, and be presented with real-world prices. I’ve enough money woes as is without my escape being filled with constant reminders of it too. Still, I play single player for the most part, and this doesn’t provide anything that some grinding and luck won’t get you anyway – it’s optional, and I can tolerate it despite the bad taste it leaves.
(Though given that Diablo is essentially Grinding for Gear: The Game, my solution would have simply been to make players unable to trade anything except to people in their group at the time the item dropped. I imagine this would have caused plenty of rage too though.)
3) No mods allowed. You read that correctly.
Now let me be quite clear about this. This doesn’t mean Blizzard won’t be supportive of modders or include any tools that make life easier for them. What they mean, in fact, is that the EULA will specifically forbid them. They are not merely not officially supported, they are avowedly not permitted. And because you have to be online to play, even if someone makes a mod, you’re likely going to have to do something like download a crack in order to actually use it. Suffice it to say, this is a truly mindboggling step to take from the company’s whose modded games have spawned such things as DOTA and Median XL. I have waxed lyrical about the virtues of mods previously, and I really cannot quite wrap my head around who at Blizzard thought this was a good idea, why anyone agreed with them, and why the nice gentlemen with the wood-paneled station wagons have not yet carted the whole shower of them off to get the help they so patently require.
In short, I cancelled any notions I had to ever purchase D3. Which is a damned shame, because I loved the first two, and I love most of Blizz’s games, and I actually anticipate that if I did play it, I’d enjoy it immensely. But I simply cannot sanction this sort of nonsense with my patronage.
Here’s a thing that bugs me about videogames that take place over a long period of time; They run on the assumption that what held true in our world will hold true in that way. Absolute monarchy and aristocracy begin, and these are gradually or violently reduced in favor of either constitutional monarchy or republicanism. Divine Right gives way to consent of the governed. Religion begins as a dominant force for the entire planet, and gradually declines in importance. It’s true that most games allow you through some means or other to maintain your previous status quo, but the assumptions are always the same – later technologies unlock new governments and these are superior to previous ones. You can run a theocratic state in Civ but if your rivals are a police state or democracy, they’re likely to outproduce you by some measure due to the bonuses they get compared to yours.
Now, in the first instance, I understand that even making these value judgments can be a pretty tricky task if you’re making a game which offers a number of governmental forms, and every single thing you add to that can complicate it considerably. Let’s take Communism as a working example. Superficially it’s easy to see why a Communist state would get a bonus to industry – Stalin forced the USSR from peasant serfdom to industrial superpower within a couple of decades, and Mao attempted the same in China (Though it was Deng Xiaoping’s free-market oriented reforms which have unleashed the Middle Kingdom’s current surge in wealth). Hoxha’s Albania and the DPRK regime both put military production before any other consideration. Our real-world historical examples of it are industry-centered, militaristic, and vary from merely autocratic to incomparably vicious.
If it was like this, we'd all be Red.
The question is, does this demonstrate what Communism has to be? Or is this how it is perceived because that’s how it worked out in our world? I would argue no, that much as I am opposed to it as a system, it wasn’t a fait accompli that it would turn out as it did. Had it taken hold in a heavily industrialized country such as the UK, France, Germany, or the USA, had the Mensheviks taken power in 1917, had the CNT-FAI won in Spain and resisted Stalinist control, we might well have a very different image of what Communism is.
My point isn’t to defend Communism. I’m merely using it because it’s an excellent example for what I am talking about, which is that game makers rely overly on preconceptions rooted in our reality’s experience to inform them of how things work in their games. More interesting, I feel, would be a more gradual, evolving system, where you didn’t choose your form of government so much as evolve it over the course of the game by reacting to events and conditions. The closest example to this I am aware of is Victoria II, where different political groups have various objectives, and different ones are allowed to do different things (So the reds can build factories all over the place, whilst radical liberals can’t fund any, for example) but even so, it feels somewhat thin, perhaps because it takes place over a relatively short time period.
I would, in any event, love to see a game on the timescale of Civ or even Spore where the development of not only your country, but its ideologies and most of all, what those ideologies actually entail, changes over the course of the game. For another example, consider that during the Renaissance and Enlightenment it was argued by many (very pious) people that to understand the universe in a scientific manner was not only in accordance with being a good Christian, but indeed a form of worship in itself. The argument (Grossly oversimplified; I’m no theologian) was that as God had created everything, everything was holy, and thus understanding anything had to be an act of worship in itself. What if such a perspective had taken hold even more strongly and become as universal an attitude towards Christianity as the doctrine that Christ died on the Cross? I doubt the current perspective that religion is dogmatic and myopic whilst secularism is the route to a more accurate understanding of the world would be as deeply entrenched by any means. So yes, what I'm saying is that no current game is spergy enough for me.
The problem is, of course, that this is an immensely complicated field. Even working on the experiences of our actual history, we have a huge amount of different experiences to draw on. When you implement “Democracy” in Civilization, is it the democracy of Athens? Is it a democracy where only the landed elite can vote? Is it constrained by constitutional checks and balances? How do you model a unicameral vs. a bicameral system? Is the President the Head of State only (As in the Irish Republic) or the Head of State and Head of Government, as in the USA? And what influence does this have on how the respective countries are run? These are all just individual factors of a single potential form of government. How they all interact, how they might all evolve over the course of centuries, is certainly a daunting thing to tackle in even the densest academic text, nevermind a videogame.
But ultimately, isn’t that what more ponderous strategy games are about? You’re not just drawing your lines on the map, you’re creating a country, wrestling with competing concerns, trying to do five things with the resources to do three of them properly, listening to the concerns of different groups in your society and deciding how to react? I admit it might be something of a niche game, but I think there would be room for something that really went into the evolution of political systems, religions, and social ideas in videogames.
It refers to FFVII, and specifically to a challenge of playing the game with the following conditions:
Initial Equipment – You can never change a character’s armor or weapons from the stuff they come with.
No Accessories – You can never use accessories. If a character comes with one equipped, it has to be unequipped at the first opportunity.
No Escaping – Obvious.
No Physical Attacks – does not just refer to “attack”, but also to anything that is a ‘physical’ type attack, including items such as Grenades or command materia such as 4-Cut.
No Limit Breaks – take a guess.
Command Materia Only – You can only use command materia. And obviously quite a few are ruled out by other rules.
You can’t actually do this challenge from the start of the game, because you have no way to hurt enemies until you can start learning Enemy Skills. In essence, it’s an “Enemy Skills Only” play. Anyway, it’s an extreme example – my point is to highlight how a self-imposed challenge can add life to a game, or possibly change it entirely. I’m good – very good – at FFVII, but I sincerely doubt I could do this challenge without tearing my hair out until I’m as bald as Dr. Robotnik.
Who is, incidentally, the greatest villain ever.
I have done other challenges in other games though. Sometimes games encourage something in particular, but don’t necessarily require it. You can usually shoot or slice your way through what is ostensibly a ‘stealth’ game such as Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu, or Hitman. Playing through stealthily is usually better rewarded is all. Imposing the challenge on yourself can make things a lot more exciting though. Sometimes this is a fairly loose arrangement for me – such as only ever going to war in Europa Universalis when I have a realistic casus belli and suchlike. Sometimes it’s a bit more extreme, like the time I played Civ IV and was not allowed to have more than one military unit per city (Funnily, happiness problems were larger than military ones for the most part). I can be especially enjoyable in more freeform games such as Dwarf Fortress, where there aren’t any real tangible objectives in-game, and making your own
In RPGs, because I grew up on some truly spergy, grinding-centric games, it’s really hard for me to limit my levels or anything. But I did a Pokemon play where I only used my starter Pokemon, that was interesting when I came up against stuff he was weak against.
Are any of you fans of particular challenges? Have you played through anything with challenges? Do you have any particular ones you’d recommend to others to enhance their enjoyment of an otherwise-completed game?
Hello, my name is Mr. Adequate, and I’ve got a problem.
In any game where you can make characters who are quite varied in nature, well, I’m going to do so. Over and over and over again, and I’m going to abandon existing ones and start anew with a new character, no matter what I have achieved with a previous one or how far through the main plot I am. It’s especially bad in games like Morrowind and Fallout New Vegas; if I combined the time I’ve spent playing the former, I’d probably have a level 9001 living god. But every time I play, I think “Oh hey what if I made an Argonian who wants to join the Legion?” Then I do that, and then I think “Oh wait I totally want to make a Breton monk who uses unarmed, unarmored, alchemy, and restoration to get things done.” and off I go to do that, until I take a notion for something else.
So in actual fact I’ve seen the first half of Morrowind more times than I can remember, and the second half like twice. Oblivion is the same story. So was Fallout 3. New Vegas is somewhat better, perhaps because the writing is so strong and immersion so great that it’s hard even for me to abandon a character. MMOs are the same way; I start, play for awhile, then I want to be a Mage/Priest/Hunter/Whatever and off I go to do that instead of carrying on with my Warrior.
I know I’m not alone in suffering this affliction. Regale us with your tales of altoholism!
So, here’s a game I’ve not played for a couple of years, but my friend came over to my place today and we spent a couple of hours with it. Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI. We’ve played all of them from VII onwards, and the series is commendably varied in its approach. In some you control a single general and can give orders based on your position; in others you may have different levels of control. In XI you don’t control any one individual, but the entire faction you have chosen.
My benevolent kingdom of killing Wei Yan!
And it struck me today that it really is a remarkably deep, genuinely strategic affair, in a way that few other games I can call to mind are. Every city is an individual unit, with its own production, farming, income, etc., and this all gets influenced by how you develop them and stuff. But the interesting part is how everything is quite discrete and the interactions have to be done consciously, by you. If one city is starving and another has plenty, you need to set up a supply transport to move grain. If you build a ton of spears in a secure province, you need to have them shipped to the front in order to use them. Your units themselves need to set out with food in order to stay in the field. It’s not a civ or city building game by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, but it is a game about war and not just fighting. It is a game about logistics. You have to worry about supplies, recruiting troops, keeping your cities in good order, developing your cities, keeping your generals loyal, locating and recruiting generals, diplomatic dealing with other factions, providing weapons, research, and money. On top of the fighting.
It really is categorically commendable, because it’s one of far too few wargames that seems to really care about this sort of thing. In Han China, you most certainly would have supply problems unless you planned very well. And as many are fond of saying, logistics is the difference between victory and defeat.
