Okay, I’ve been thinking all day and for the life of me I can’t devise any kind of serious or worthwhile or even flippant and jejune topic for this so, lest I overtax my brain and end up in a febrile state, I shall fall back on something I presciently set up awhile ago: What are you playing this weekend?!
MEIOU Mod for EU3: Divine Wind
Angevin Empire is Best Empire!
The only major mod to be updated for Divine Wind so far, and it’s pretty great. All those new countries! In any strategy game I fetishize alternative countries and scenarios heavily (If Cascadia is available, I play Cascadia) so this pleases Gaga.
Minecraft No one man should have all dat cobblestone
Because let’s face it, I’m hopelessly addicted now.
Sword of the Stars Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I played this a little some considerable time ago and it didn’t click, but I’m giving it another try now because I need the 4X, and it seems to be going better.
Kaiserreich Mod for Darkest Hour Any and every chance I get!
They’re continuing to work on this thing pretty rapidly, and it’s still great.
Hey gang, I’d like to take a moment to show some appreciation for something underappreciated, and to springboard from that into a broader discussion.
In RPGs, you tend to go to a lot of settlements. And those settlements tend to be, well, tiny. Oftentimes they might imply a much larger population that you simply don’t get to access, but more often the entire settlement is actually incredibly tiny. The world, of course, exists only for your play experience, so why spend additional time designing and implementing redundant stuff?
Well, Summoner – an RPG that was a launch title for the PS2 – said screw that. It doesn’t have a lot of settlements, but the major one, Lenele, is truly massive.
I can’t find a map online so have this instead!
Now, when I say Lenele is big, I really do mean it’s big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way from Org to the Crossroads, but that’s just peanuts to Lenele.
It is the only city I have ever come across in a videogame which is convincingly city-sized (Aside from ones actually set IN a city, like GTA or whatever). Now to be fair it’s not incidental, it’s one of the game’s major settings and one of only a handful of settlements, but it truly is VAST and it’s so, so glorious to run around and get lost down back alleys and have no idea where the heck you are because it’s just this massive warren of streets and alleys and finding some random store tucked away in the middle of it all.
So, what cities/villages/etc. in games have impressed you for one reason or another?
I’m less inclined to be political about these things and try to respect other people’s opinions, so I’m just going to be wantonly belligerent towards her! Huzzah!
Let’s go over a couple of things she brought up. Zelda. Zelda Zelda Zelda. Where to begin? I’ve played most of the Zelda games over the years and I divide them into two categories – “Why are people making any kind of fuss” and “This is very good but not to my taste”. The former is where all the 2D Zeldas fit, and the latter where the 3D ones go. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against 2D (I’ll come back to this in a moment) but the thing just does not work for me at ALL in 2D. In 3D, games like OoT and WW are ones I can see the appeal of, I’ve played quite a bit of them, but they never hook me and I get bored long before the end.
When it comes to top-down adventure, in the 2D Zelda style, I have long maintained that the genre has been far, far better done and that Alundra is truly the pinnacle of the genre. And I know what a hipster I look like saying this! But it really is glorious. It has the charm, depth, clever puzzles, and all that other stuff that people ascribe to Zelda but which I have never seen in that series.
Because you've probably never heard of it
As for Sega vs. Nintendo, Pike covered it quite well. I grew up with Sega and she with Nintendo, so of course we’re going to have diverging opinions and direct our nostalgia differently. Actually, whilst I regard the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES as fairly equal (Though really, how good can a console without Treasure’s Gunstar Heroes and Alien Soldier actually be?), I think it was later on that Sega triumphed, because the Dreamcast was the best console ever made and it beat the crap out of all the competition combined, from BOTH generations it overlapped.
Finally, Minecraft. Well, all I will say is that Pike’s time spent would be a lot closer to mine if her shame didn’t cause her to ‘forget’ just how much of it she plays (It’s about three times as much as she admits. I know because I hear her on Skype when she’s playing it).
And she thinks Warcraft III had mediocre gameplay. I hardly need to point out how ludicrous this is.
Listen to this while reading and prepare yourself for a fairly shallow bout of sheer enthusiasm about a game I like.
If you’ve heard much about Alpha Protocol, an espionage-based RPG from Obsidian, you’ve probably heard things like “It’s okay”, “Buggy”, “Mediocre”, etc. Metacritic shows that the average hovers around 65% (Slightly higher on the PC version), and it generally has failed to inspire, as well as being confirmed not to have a sequel in the works.
You know what I have to say to that?
BULLHOCKEY
Mike Thorton knows how to blend in.
Alpha Protocol is AWESOME. It’s one of the better games I’ve played in the past few years, certainly outside my preferred Strategy genres. Yes, it is a bit rough around the edges due to time and budget constraints and yes, people have reported bugs aplenty (I haven’t encountered anything worse than a graphical glitch myself, but that’s an entirely subjective experience of course). The leveling isn’t perfectly balanced, with pistols and stealth being rather overpowered and some others falling by the wayside.
But these are minor nitpicks in a glorious game. Alpha Protocol has a great cast, a ton of missions, and everything – EVERYTHING – you do has some consequence or another. It might grant you a stat boost, or it might change the entire ending, but whatever you do it’s going to change something. You can choose to kill or spare pretty much anyone in the game, you can take different attitudes towards everyone, and you fight an 80s-obsessed Russian mobster who is coked out of his skull. Unless you do things in a different order and make friends with the right character, in which case you can just poison his cocaine and the fight goes way easier.
The depth and intricacies are amazing and well worth it by themselves, but the gameplay is still perfectly solid even if not exceptional and let me tell you, pulling off a perfect stealth run makes you feel like a total badass. So if you get the chance, don’t listen to the critics, listen to me and play it!
I was visiting my nephews, again. Within seconds of seeing me fiddle with my Kindle, my older nephew, Jack, who is 8, asked me, again, if my Kindle had any books on it.
“Uh, no, sorry Jack,” was my reply, letting a white lie skip through my teeth. I knew his mother and father might be none too pleased to see the two of us hunched over the tiny screen reading “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” or “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”
What his parents are doing is difficult. They’ve chosen to keep Jack book-free for as long as possible. Of course, Jack has gotten a taste of books. He gets to read on special occasions, and will probably read at friends’ houses where the rules are different.
I suspect his parents will persist until they can’t hold out any longer, until peer pressure from schoolmates, combined with the reality that kids of Jack’s generation will be inexorably bound to printing technology like none before them, forces them to relent.
Perhaps it’s a lost cause. Still, key questions can be raised here, and they are good ones to consider. What is the appropriate age to let kids loose in the paperback playscape? Are books OK for 8-year-olds? Seven-year-olds? Six? How young is too young?
Some books are appropriate for certain age groups and some books aren’t; obviously, no one is allowing their 5-year-old to read “The Lord of the Flies.” (Jeezum, let’s hope.)
I’m no expert, but I’ve been reading up on some of the research. For one, the trend is that each year, younger and younger kids are experiencing page time.
This article references a study saying that since 2005, “the average age that U.S. youngsters started to use printed materials had fallen from just over 8 to just over 6 1/2.”
Educational psychologist and author Jane Healy recently wrote: “My position is that children are better off without books before the age of 7. By age 7, their brains have undergone a great deal of maturation and the basics should be in there. They can start to expand the type of thinking they can do so they can actually start to get something worthwhile using good literature, for example, good travel guides.”
To my mind, the issue goes beyond the debatable ill-effects of book violence — which I debunk in this op-ed, suggesting that book violence can be a good thing.
To me, the issue isn’t about fears that books instill violent behavior, but rather that books are usurping the power of more conventional toys. There may be merits to shielding boys and girls like Jack from their vellum futures, at least temporarily, if kids can first learn to amuse themselves without automatically reaching for a bound sheaf.
The truck, the toy sword, the soccer ball, the sandbox, the board game, the pad of paper, the videogame: All can be as magical and entrancing as anything a publishing house can cook up. Perhaps this is the rule of thumb: Once a love of digital play is instilled in young minds and habits, then let kids run free through the wild world of words.
Obviously there are no definitive answers. These are questions that have been discussed on Wired.com before. But I hope this space can continue to provide an excellent forum to discuss the issues. I’m curious to hear your viewpoints. Please comment below.
And, next time I see my nephew Jack, I’ll have a better idea of how to counter his whining — sweet whining, but whining nonetheless.
So as you may or may not know, the press preview beta of Deus Ex: Human Revolution was leaked to the general public a couple of weeks back. Using entirely legal methods and the appropriate channels, I have been playing said beta recently, and I’m here to tell you something about it.
But first let’s take a stroll back in time. You’ll recall from my top five games that I rank Deus Ex rather highly, and you may further be aware that this is hardly a rare position to take; it is widely and justly regarded as a true classic of the medium. Then along came Invisible War. Now, I want to stress, I don’t think IW is a bad game per se, I just don’t think it comes close to living up to the standard set by the original.
In today’s climate of nickel-and-dime DLC, two-weapons-only, and ready cash-ins rather than a desire to make a serious game I was therefore deeply skeptical of DX:HR. It sounded like they were saying what we wanted to hear, but just because the PR says something doesn’t mean it’s true. I was not at all convinced that it would be worthy.
Eidos does not make zat kind of mistake!
And you know what? It is. It really, really is a sublime game. It hits all the right notes – the atmosphere is strong and though not as gloomy as 2052, 2027 still has an edge of cyberpunk dystopia to it. The game itself plays very well, and most of all – this is the bit that really sold me – it has divergent solutions to problems. I went a particular path with my augmentations and later found that I really wished I had done otherwise, because a task would have been a lot easier if I had made different choices. That’s far too rare these days, and I deeply appreciate it. The dialog is very solid as well, characters are well-developed and a joy to interact with. And Faridah is my waifu.
Reaction to the leak has been so roundly positive that some rumor it was a deliberate one; I’ve seen no evidence for it (Though a conspiracy surrounding Deus Ex is far too enjoyable to write off entirely), but I can safely say that regardless of who was to blame, it was the single best way to get me on board, and from what I’ve seen around the Internet, a lot of other people feel the same. Further, and to their great credit, Eidos and Square-Enix not only said they’ll take no action against those who play the leak, they have specifically asked for feedback on the forums from people who play it. Don’t know about anyone else, but for me this all adds up to a preorder.
As you may have caught wind of by now, if you follow gaming news at all, the US Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 that a California law which prohibited the sale of violent videogames to minors was in violation of the First Amendment. You can read the full opinion here, if you are so inclined, but I’d recommend checking out the first couple of pages of it at least.
This is pretty cool in and of itself, because it will hopefully put an end to the ridiculous laws that spring up in the US every now and then which try and stamp on videogames in one way or another. More importantly however, this is a ruling from the highest court in the land that videogames are as meritorious in the eyes of the law, and as deserving of protection, as older forms of art. This is hugely significant, not just because it lets us go “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah” at Ebert, but because between this and the recent decision by the National Endowment for the Arts (i.e. the Federal Government) that games are art, we’ve finally, finally reached a stage where the legal opinions have reached a point where they have caught up with reality.
This is significant even if you’re not in America, by the way. Because so many companies are American and because so much of the gaming market is in America, whatever rulings the US makes on a subject like this are going to have global ramifications. This kind of recognition and protection is not only precedent, but will have a tangible effect, as it will encourage other countries to follow suit, and will embolden the games markets in other countries to press for similar recognition and protection if it is not already forthcoming.
So Pike and I have been playing a little game of Civ IV over the past couple of days. Standard enough settings; just she and I, Pangaea map, regular sized world, etc. Unfortunately for her, I didn’t play as she was expecting me to play.
See, normally we’re both turtles and techers. As I’ve said before on this blog I very much like to establish a solid defense, build up within it, establish a strong technological lead, and then strike once I am prepared and assured victory. But I knew this wouldn’t work with Pike, because she does the exact same thing, and it would be unlikely that I could establish a significant tech lead at any point for long enough to overrun her.
So I did something unorthodox, and this unorthodoxy proved successful. What I did was, I built an army. Not a vast 30-unit stack of doom, just a moderate sized stack, but enough that I could bring force to bear against any one city of my choosing and hopefully conquer it.
My I Legion. Out of... how many, I wonder?
Now, the eagle-eyed and Civ-informed among you might notice something from that picture. Nibru is a city of the Sumerians. Sumeria is led by Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is a Defensive leader. In fact, once I got eyes on the city, I discovered that she had very wisely been whipping archers out every turn, and even though it lacks a barracks, they all started with decent promotions anyway. Had I actually attacked, I’m not at all confident that I could have won. But Pike calculated that her own chances were poor, and was also fearful of a ship I had knocking around that she presumed had marine forces aboard (It was just an old unit I had sent out to explore and forgotten about entirely), so she capitulated to my demands, and several technologies were mine for free. More insidiously, her extra units both cost her population to create, thus significantly slowing her growth and causing unhappiness, and the increase in military units will also be a drain on her treasury.
I give no quarter. Talk about times you have been cruelly aggressive or trolly in multiplayer games!
Just going to throw up a little thing I recently wrote in a game of Hearts of Iron II: Darkest Hour that I played. I was Japan, and I was stunned by how vicious the Chinese defense was. Enjoy!
The Heroes of Ningbo
For decades the Chinese resistance to the Japanese advances during the Second Sino-Japanese War has inspired patriotism and pride in the Chinese people. It has served as a model for all those who since resisted Japanese rule, from the remains of the Communists to the various abortive warlord attempts at semi-independence from Tokyo. Arguably none are as lauded as the men of the First Battle of Ningbo, Nov. 26th 1938-Jan 3rd 1939 by Western dating.
With a paper strength of just over 70,000, the 18 months of war had left divisions in tatters and brigades missing from the face of the earth, and most historian’s estimates suggest that the true number of Chinese soldiers involved was approximately 56,000. They were led by Field Marshal Tang Shengzhi, who had grown dissatisfied with Premier Chiang’s leadership and perceived personal betrayal, but had nobly put aside these concerns in the name of fighting for China. He had been earmarked by Chiang as the leader for the defense of Nanking but the Japanese amphibious assault on the region had been so rapid that the city fell before the Chinese could muster a defense.
The Japanese forces numbered some 60,000, all regular infantry supplemented by six brigades of Tankettes (Japanese armored car and tank technology having lagged greatly in comparison to the European belligerents of WW2). Having driven Chinese forces out of the surrounding regions of Jinhua and Wenzhou, the Chinese had been cut off in Ningbo and its environs. Some of the units had been stationed in the region for some time but the majority were those who had hastily and continually retreated from the fighting in the north. Nevertheless Tang managed to inspire his men – who were at this stage a rather ragtag group of KMT troops, absorbed warlords, and refugees from the Communist enclave which the Japanese had so brutally overrun in the spring of 1938.
Cut off, surrounded, and stalwart to the last.
Armed with outdated equipment, run ragged by over a year and a half of constant retreats and fighting, the men in Ningbo were given a stark speech by Field Marshal Tang as the Japanese drew close. A British emigrant to China in the 1900s who lived in the city had the foresight to record the speech as he sheltered a Chinese soldier who had been wounded in the fighting, and this is generally taken as the definitive copy thereof.
“Men, we have come here from many paths. I have myself served both the Kuomintang government and have served some who oppose them. I know among you are soldiers from all over China, some of whose homes are now in the hands of the vicious Japanese, some of whose remain behind out lines. It makes no matter now: We are all Chinese, and while these eastern barbarians remain on our soil we have no differences, we have no ideologies, except liberation of China for the Chinese!
“I will not lie to you. We face a grim task. Many of us shall perish in the coming battle. Our enemy, barbarous as they are, are well-equipped and well-trained. We make do with outdated and mismatching equipment, scrimped from local collections or donated by friends abroad. But we have things they do not: We fight for our homes! We fight for our country! And we fight in land excellent for defense! We have already put much effort into preparing our defense positions, and any Japanese advance shall come at a high cost in blood.
“We know taking Ningbo is crucial to the Japanese advance along the southern coast of China. As long as we remain here their forces are tied down. So do not hope for only survival! China depends on us! Hope that our actions, whether we win or lose, whether you live or die, cost the Japanese time! Every day we hold them here is a day for our brothers to train. Every hour we hold them is an hour for new guns to be built or bought, for trenches and pillboxes to be dug and built. I cannot promise you all survival, for we know the brutality of the Japanese even to those who surrender. But I can promise you victory, if you do your duties and hold to the last!”
Stunningly, the defense of Ningbo went even better than Tang had dared to promise. Casualties were very high on both sides; over 12,000 Japanese dead (Their second-highest losses until that point, only exceeded by the Battle of Yan’an) and over 15,000 Chinese estimated dead among the military alone. Yet with their outdated equipment, poor training (Only two of the seven Chinese brigades were infantry proper. The rest were militia units.), and near-total lack of heavy equipment, without hope of retreat or escape, and with supplies rapidly dwindling, the tenacious Chinese forced the Japanese attackers to withdraw after five weeks of brutal combat.
To the eternal chagrin of Tokyo, their second assault on Ningbo went little better than the first. Despite using fully rested and reinforced units, naval bombardment, air support, and facing an encircled and trapped enemy, the Second Battle of Ningbo lasted from January 30th until February 28th. Casualties on the Chinese sides were considerably lower – the Chinese had had time to dig in formidably and could repel the Japanese attacks with much greater ease. The Japanese lost almost 16,000 troops in the second battle. For the Chinese some reinforcements had been drawn from the locals of the region – not exactly front-line troops, but the few weeks of training had allowed at least a few hundred more vaguely competent soldiers to face the Japanese. Moreover, some dozens of brave souls had volunteered to assist Ningbo and had traveled there on supply ships, which faced increasingly dangerous Japanese interdiction attempts.
It was not until mid-April, when new units who had recently been readied in the Home Islands arrived in Wenzhou, that the IJA was finally able to crack the nut that was Ningbo. It cost them a total of over 60,000 lives, held up the Japanese advance along the coast for four months, and required the reallocation of two full IJN fleets to provide offshore support as well as four wings of the IJAAF’s air fleet, and a doubling of the commitment of troops from 6 divisions to 12.
It was not enough to stop Japan. But the defense went down in Chinese history as one of the most tenacious, brave acts of the entire war against the Empire of Japan, and it gave districts further down the southern Chinese coast a great deal of time to recuperate, regain strength, organize themselves, and dig in, making subsequent battles much more costly and difficult for the Japanese. Supplies smuggled in by sea helped to keep the Ningbo army in something resembling fighting condition, and it required an embarrassing degree of effort on the part of the Japanese to succeed in their attack. It was the first time the Chinese had prevailed to such a degree in engaging the Japanese and gave an enormous morale boost to the soldiers who remained facing the Empire throughout China.
