Not in real life, of course, it’s way to slow there (Why am I not a robot yet?). But it’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile in 4X games, and the slower-paced RTSes (i.e. those which have parallels to 4Xs rather than to speedily-resolved conflicts such as those in Command & Conquer or StarCraft).
Here’s the thing I find happens all too often, from Age of Empires to Civilization to GalCiv: I research some shiny new tech, I crank out new units that make use of it, and then by the time they get to the front line… I’ve researched something better. And I hate to throw things into the fight when I can give them a better chance at victory, so I pull them back, upgrade, send them in – and the same thing happens.
Now partly this is my own fault. I identify, quite outside of videogames, technology as being perhaps the single most important factor of human civilization; naturally this attitude transfers into games when I play them, and given how most games which involve any kind of research can be thoroughly dependent on it if you want to win, the attitude is encouraged. Better units, better buildings, new wonders, more options in general.
You thought it started with Civ? Dune II maybe? Nope, this was the first vidya with a tech tree. Though the Civilization board game by Avalon Hill was first of all, a decade prior.
But in these games, things tend to come along too fast for you to keep up with it all. This isn’t terribly accurate to real life; we might suspend production of our appliances during a war or depression or something, but once those are past, the evidence is that the public explodes with eagerness for new technologies like the radio or TV. Technologies are interlinked, often in a hugely complicated way, and games don’t come close to handling this complexity in a satisfying way. At best you’ll get a research bonus to tech X if you’ve researched tech D first. I hope that someone can put together a broader and deeper sense of technological development, one where you don’t always have control (As with SMAC’s blind research), and one where you have enough time to make use of your things before new units surpass them. This would both make development more rewarding and would probably serve to equalize things slightly, as a big tech lead would be harder to get.
Do you guys know of any games that do tech advancement in interesting ways? Do you know of games which just have insanely huge tech trees?
One of my earliest posts was about Dwarf Fortress, wherein I also made mention of a game called Aurora. In the comments, Repaxan asked me to describe it, intrigued by my claims that it is significantly more complex than DF. Finally, I am bothered to do so!
Aurora is ultimately a 4X game. It is, however, to 4X games what Dwarf Fortress is to The Sims – vastly, impossibly, insanely more complex, more detailed, and more inscrutable. This is what it looks like:
It's like I'm really in 1985!
That’s the only game screen with graphics, really. Every other page, tab, screen – all the icons across the top lead to submenus and so forth – is basically an Excel page in one form or another. It is not an attractive game, indeed it is intimidatingly the opposite, even for a 4X grognard such as me.
HOWEVER! As with DF, it’s well worth struggling through the initial stages of confusion, because this game is… I don’t even know, holy crap, it’s insane. Sure, sure, lots of games let you design your ships these days, from the shiny and simplistic (GalCiv 2) to the detailed and consequential (Space Empires V), but this is on an entirely different plane. In Aurora, you research the basics needed for a component, then you design the component, then you research the component, and then you can assign it to a ship. In other games you research what amounts to ‘Shootier rooty-tooties’. In Aurora you decide on what kind of energy weapon you’re making, and then you dictate relevant factors such as the size of the laser lens you are using. THEN you research appropriate radar and firecons for your new weapons, and THEN – once you’ve also got engines, fuel, quarters, etc. etc., you stick it all on a ship.
Then you have a process nearly as complex for assigning commanders and giving orders. I’m STILL trying to figure out all the nuances of the latter, and my ships don’t always do what I’m wanting them to do. But, as with DF, the end result is astounding – a game that takes a lot of investment, but rewards it beyond your wildest dreams. Nothing else comes close, that I can think of anyway. Also, you can terraform planets however you want. I have indeed killed the Earth by stripping her entire atmosphere away, and poisoned other worlds by similar sabotages. Which is, you know. Hilarious.
The game is free, and can be picked up the forums. There’s also a Wiki but, unlike DF, I know of no equivalent of capnduck or 51ppycup making tutorials.
If we’re going to improve videogames, then we need to do something which might seem a bit counterintuitive – we need to look at games which got it wrong. Que? Don’t we need to look at what went right and emulate it? Well sure, but we also need to look at what went wrong, and why. Sometimes this is very obvious, of course, and needs very little investigation. A game with a bad control scheme is always going to suffer, for example, regardless of the rest of its merits. More interesting, perhaps, is to look at games which fall into that very broad, but very overlooked, category of “Yeah it’s not bad I guess”. Mediocre, average, adequate, the games which don’t get many people excited, don’t do anything too amazing, and you probably won’t want to buy new but when you find it cheap a couple months later, won’t necessarily be a bad purchase.
For me, Spore is a first-class example of a second-class game. It had all the ingredients for being a classic; a legendary designer, a man who has literally invented a genre; his development studio, Maxis, responsible for some all-time greats, as we have discussed on this very blog; and that video from 2005, the video, the one which got us all so ridiculously excited.
This. Looked. Awesome.
And Spore, in the end? Spore was a much less interesting game. It looked like it was going to revolve around evolution and development in a really meaningful, enjoyable sense – you would experiment to figure out what worked, you would have different things that were beneficial depending on what kind of critter you were building, all sorts of things like that. Vehicles would have utility depending on how you shaped them, and buildings might to some extent as well. None of this was true, at least not beyond the cellular stage, where placement of parts did make a difference, and gave us a taste of what we were hoping for.
Then it all came crashing down. Your creature’s strengths and weaknesses weren’t determined by the design at all, just by the stats of the body parts you acquired. Which wouldn’t have been a bad compliment to the designing by itself, but replacing it wholesale? Nope. Oh, and the huge, cohesive world which it seemed like we would have to roam and explore and hunt over, with a dynamic ecosphere? In actuality other creatures just hang out near their nests, in groups of 10-15, and do nothing beyond that. The tribal stage was much the same. Rather than the Populous-esque experience which we were hoping for, it was a very simplistic, very easy affair. Not high crimes in itself, again, but contrasted against the potential, thoroughly disappointing. This is after all Will Wright we are talking about. And how we awaited the City/Empire stage! Oh my, this was going to rock. A cross between SimCity and Civilization! Who among us hasn’t dreamed of such a thing? But alas, t’was not to be. The design by this point had become completely aesthetic. Even the cursory customization of the previous stages was essentially gone now. There were no items to add to increase your buildings’ durability, for example, or to make them produce more money, or anything like that. The city building aspect was merely a simple puzzle game, revolving around where to place buildings in the grid. The empire was hardly more developed, though at least they made the concession of having different ways to take over other cities. Did I mention that once you reach a certain point you can just hit a magic button and win the stage?
L-R: EA; Our Dreams
Then you go to space. Space, space, space. It was always billed as the top dog of the Spore stages, the thing which everything else was building up towards. So maybe it was okay. We can take it, the other stages aren’t really bad, they’re just not great, not what we were hoping for. Well clearly they spent all their time on the Space stage, making it the best it could be, right? … right? Guys?
Who is responsible for subjecting our eyes to these... horrors?
Well, it is big, at least. The space stage in Spore is massive, that can’t be denied. If only there was much to do in it. If only terraforming was an interesting and involved process that was at least somewhat different according to each world’s unique situation. If only you could go and do stuff without being called back to deal with a crisis every ten minutes. If only the design of your spaceship mattered. If only you could make choices between speed, fuel, armaments, armor, etc. If only, if only, if only. And that’s really the story of Spore – taken by itself it’s not a bad game. What is there is fun enough to play a bit of, and the designing is at least visually engaging and somewhat enjoyable, even if not consequential. But even without Maxis, without Will Wright, without that video presentation, the potential is so clear, and it falls so far short. The end result is an extraordinarily shallow experience, which has very very little replay value, in a setting which feels exactly the opposite of what was hoped for – it’s not a big dangerous world you must struggle to adapt to and overcome, it’s a world designed specifically for you to play around in. Which would be fine if there was a lot for you to DO, except the sandbox is so lacking in sand, or a bucket and spade, and I think the cat peed in the corner of it. Now I accept that hype is playing a part here, it can’t not, but that only raises the question of why they thought moving so radically away from the GDC ’05 model was a good idea. Before Spore came out everyone was going berserk over that video.
So yeah, Spore: There’s a reason I list it as my most disappointing game ever. Which again, is not to mean worst – it’s worth picking up if you come across it for a few bucks, and it’ll keep you entertained for a few hours quite happily, maybe more depending on how you take to the designing stuff. But for me, for what I was hoping for? It falls so far short I don’t even know quite how to express it. It really breaks my heart to see something with so much potential fall so far short.
I’ll cut right to the chase: I really don’t care for multiplayer most of the time. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not as though I’ve sworn a vow against it or anything, I enjoy a good game of Team Fortress or Halo as much as the next person. But it’s just an aside, something that I do now and then for fun, just as every now and then I play some co-op with my good friend Barry Manilow (long story). But there’s a whole segment of gaming that seems to be almost exclusively or exclusively caught up in the multiplayer side of things. And I mean, I can grok that. Nothing better than a real human opponent (Not yet, anyway, and this doesn’t count in chess) for matching wits against – and yet I don’t care to. Which, if you’ll let me indulge my ego, isn’t to say I can’t. Back when I played Red Alert 2 I was horrendously good at it. It just doesn’t really appeal to me, and I’m not entirely sure why, but I have an inkling.
See, I'm just too cool for school (and for sayings that were in date at any point after LBJ was in office)
Here’s the thing: I like to play games my way. I like to derp around, to explore here and there, to try stupid things with weapons, to experiment with different strategies and whatnot. This is all well and good with friends, but in any game where other people are expecting me to do something productive, it just doesn’t seem to work out so well for me. I feel rather constrained by it all, and I don’t particularly like other people being dependent on me when I’m just wanting to mess around with some ridiculous glitch I’ve discovered or something. Interestingly I still like MMOs a great deal; I’ve played my share of WoW over the years, and a fair bit of EVE Online and City of Heroes too, as well as dabbling in quite a few besides. But I’m always solo in these things; I don’t want to have to worry about keeping others alive or what have you, because when I screw it up I feel really bad! Contrary to the title of this post, I don’t actually mind if others mess up unless it’s making the same mistakes repeatedly or something.
I was wondering how others feel about all this sort of thing. Do you prefer single player or multiplayer? Do you care at all? Do you worry about letting the side down to a point of excess?
So as you may or may not have seen, there is a new video out regarding Dead Island, the game which caused some interest and excitement recently with their rather good announcement trailer. The new one features plenty of gameplay footage, so I thought I’d take a look at it and give my thoughts, being a lover of all things shambling and flesh-eating.
Okay. Let me start out by saying that this isn’t Dead Island, this is Left 4 Borderlands: Far Cry Edition. And that’s okay! It does look like a great game, I will almost certainly be picking it up when it hits. But I will admit to being somewhat disappointed because the vibe I got from the first trailer, and from what I had seen of developer comments so far, it was going to be a bit less action-oriented than this and a bit more concerned with survival and so forth.
The one thing that is really bothering me though, is what happens at 2:50. Yes, she blew up a propane tank by throwing a nail bat at it. This really, REALLY pushes my suspension of disbelief over the edge to a jagged cliff far below; I’m all for a game which is action-centered, and I’m all for killing zombies in ludicrous fashion (Hello Dead Rising!) but seriously, come on.
That rant aside, there’s not a huge amount I can find to complain about if the game is taken on its own merits rather than what I was hoping it would be. The animations need work for sure (That kick, oh my), and the HUD is incredibly obtrusive, but really, a game which is centered around open-world zombie slaughter using customizable weapons (“Explosive Homemade Knife of Concussion”) and locational damage? Yeah, I can get behind that. I can get behind that BIG TIME. What will be really interesting to see is how much you influence things on the island and to what extent things can happen dynamically. I cannot begin to elaborate on how much I want a zombie game where you can lose entire quest hubs to zombie onslaughts and you can’t do anything about it.
Another thing I’m deeply interested in is how good their mod support is going to be. A foundation like this means that, with powerful mod tools, even if the game proper doesn’t provide exactly what I’m looking for, it’ll still be possible to implement something like it. Like taking out the ability to detonate propane tanks with melee weapons.
As we all know the End Times have arrived and tomorrow is Judgment Day, the commencement of the Machine Uprising against our fleshy oppression and dictatorship.
Or something like that.
Anyway so with the world ending tomorrow, what videogames will you spend your final hours upon this moral realm playing? Anyone who says something sappy like “Spend it with family” is clearly not hardcore enough and should be ashamed. Me, I’m going to celebrate the end of the world in reality by ending worlds in videogames!
Yes yes, we all know that I like weapons of horrifically massive destructive power by now. I mean, my cutie mark is a nuclear trefoil, and my main complaint about games with nukes is how ineffective they are and why can’t I weaponize smallpox and yadda yadda. WELL! Let me tell you, my friends, of a game of mystery and legend, a game of science and fiction, a game called Space Empires V.
Best ship design ever put into a game, bar none.
Like too many games I love this is basically Spreadsheets: The Game. The difference is that this one really, truly tries to encompass the scale of futuristic technology and all the awesome stuff it can do. There are a huge, a mindblowingly huge, an offensively, insecurely huge number of technologies to research and as a result, a lot of buildings, ships, and parts to stick thereupon. So far so good.
But we’re not done yet. Oh no no, for you see, other games have some impressive degrees of destruction. Alpha Centauri lets you flatten continents. GalCiv lets you blow up stars. But no other game that I know of lets you construct your very own Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres, and then blow these things to Kingdom Come like a… well, like a wrathful deity I suppose. Where SEV excels is in the sheer giddy heights it lets you ascend to. More than anything else, more than any other game, this is a 4x which demands you advance technologically, and which makes you feel so rewarded when you have done so because you always gain some incremental benefit at least.
And sometimes you get devices that let you construct planets. Or blow them up. And that’s something we can all get behind in our final hours.
Oh hey, it’s been a few days, sorry about that guys! Anyway!
Over the weekend I finally finished my repeat playthrough of GTAIV, which was satisfying, but I have to concur with those who feel the second half of the game is weaker. Once you’re done with Packie’s missions there really aren’t many interesting new characters or anything and the missions reach a point of being somewhat tired. Not that it’s a bad game by any means; I think they just reached the limit of what could really be done with the style and tone they were going for. There was plenty fresh about The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony.
Anyway, with that out of the way, I decided to go back to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And oh man, I had forgotten how freaking amazing it is. The graphics aren’t as bad as I was expecting, though the jagged edges will chop your eyes to shreds it’s much smoother than I remember in terms of animation. The only thing I really do miss is the physics from IV, but it’s not critical.
But you know what’s weird, the thing I’ve noticed in San Andreas compared to IV? I wouldn’t have guessed this myself, and probably not even noticed except that I went from IV to SA immediately. It’s the sound. Walking around Liberty City you don’t really even take in all the noises, but there are constant sounds of the city doing its thing without you. In SA? It’s surprisingly quiet. I don’t know, maybe it’s something weird with my copy or something, because it really struck me when I went back to it and I’ve not played SA in a couple of years. It’s almost silent when you’re not in a car, stuff people say breaks the silence powerfully rather than blending in with the sounds of the city. And this is not a game I am new to, I spend enough time with it back when it was new. It’s a strange thing!
So, have any of you gone back to older games and been surprised by something in them, even games you played plenty and know well?
I mentioned it before once or twice, but I’m going to take a whole post now to talk about Mirror’s Edge.
“Once this city used to pulse with energy. Dirty and dangerous, but alive and wonderful.”
Mirror’s Edge was, in my eyes, something with a lot of potential from the start. It was the first first-person platformer I can remember since Jumping Flash, and the first trailers spoke of something even more impressive, which was the unique and interesting aesthetic.
I don’t recall ever seeing a game world with such vibrancy. I don’t normally mind the “brown ‘n’ bloom” that seems to have taken hold terribly, but to get a breath of fresh air like this was rather delightful. This game is so bright and colorful it should be garish, but because it was apparently designed by Rarity, it works perfectly and harmoniously to create a sharply gorgeous world.
The Android's Closet is apparently filled with MLP toys.
And what do you know, the game is great. Not flawless by any means, the combat especially is a rather questionable addition (Though it can usually be avoided in whole or in part), but it has a flow to it, a sense of speed and movement, that you don’t really get outside of racing games like WipeOut or Rollcage, but unlike those each step and jump and juke is something you have directly done. Fundamentally Mirror’s Edge has a lot going for it, but the real reason I think it’s great is because it gives you such a sense of satisfaction when you do something right; when you get a new personal best on a level (And the game is best viewed as having strong puzzle elements), when you master a particularly tricky section, or when you find some shortcut that cuts your time down hugely.
The DLC cuts everything down to the barest components, and it still has to look this weird and colorful.
Ultimately, and I’m sorry to use somewhat nebulous terms, the thing about Mirror’s Edge is that it feels refreshing and kinetic, it feels fast, it feels rewarding when you do it right. It isn’t perfect at all, but it is glorious, it tried to do something that was genuinely new, not just aesthetically but in gameplay as well, and it largely succeeded in this. Despite Faith’s quote up at the top there, the City feels alive and wonderful, pulsing with energy, even if that energy is Faith’s alone. It’s also supremely cheap now to pick up used, so I would wholly encourage anyone with a few bucks and hours to spare to pick it up.
Alrighty, so as you may have gathered by now I’m a pretty big fan of the music in some videogames, and I feel it’s often a vital part of completing the experience. This said, sometimes when you play a game a lot, the stuff in the game just gets so repetitive it’s crazy. Right now I’m playing a ton of Minecraft, working on a stupidly overambitious project, and I’ve been playing Daft Punk pretty much constantly while I do so.
This is a glorious idea and I clearly have to get in on it.
Back when I was a young teen, my mom got me Morrowind and System of a Down – Steal This Album on the same day, so I can’t listen to the latter without thinking of the former. They are inextricably linked for me.
Do you have any particular games and musicians who are linked for you? Any preferred artists for particular games or genres? Tell us in the comments about the music you listen to while gaming!
Following on from Pike’s post I shall also provide some musings on the games I consider to be the very best. But unlike her, I shall actually deliver a list of five games! Just to briefly note that I’m not trying to say this is a definitive list of “best games ever” or something; just give that I’m most fond of and have a lot of personal regard for.
5) Final Fantasy X
Well, it’s always a toss-up between this and VII, but every time I play through FFX I find something else to love about it. This is, for my money, the best game Squaresoft/Square-Enix have ever put out. It is massive, richly detailed, I love all the characters in their own way (I didn’t used to like Yuna at all, but I’ve totally come to love and respect her as I really thought about her life and how she deals with everything), the battle system is immensely fun, and it’s got the best bonus content of any FF except, perhaps, XII, but then I don’t like XII so I’ve not seen much of that!
Also, blitzball is the best minigame ever.
I think most of all I love it because it’s so beautiful. Not in the purest sense of eye-melting graphics, but in the aesthetic sense. Not too many games have a South-east Asian style setting anyway, but FFX feels so hot and tropical, is so colorful, so thoroughly alive in every scene, that I can’t help but get completely sucked in. And this is not mentioning the soundtrack; I listen to this and I am transported to Spira, feeling the heat and the water, it’s so wonderful.
X-2 is great as well, I don’t care what anyone says.
4) X-Com
Ah, X-Com. You’ve heard Pike talk about this lately, and just think about what that means for a moment. A game that’s nearing 20 is more compelling to a new player than almost anything contemporary. Just so! X-Com is vast, ridiculous in scope, encompassing a global geostrategic component, base building, research, economic management, manufacturing, and of course the insanely deep, detailed, addictive tactical combat against the alien menace. Why so good? Like any classic, because it’s immersive. It sucks you in. You are the Commander, you have to simultaneously care about your troops and deal with it when they die in droves. You have to juggle a number of competing concerns, and the aliens will usually throw a wrench into your plans. It might be an isometric pixelfest today, but it’s still more engrossing, and often more terrifying, than anything that has come since.
Pictured: An actual nightmare. Not pictured: You, never sleeping comfortably again.
X-Com came out in 1994 and the game has probably never been improved upon. I own four separate copies (Along with two copies of TFTD and a copy of Apocalypse). I really can’t recommend it strongly enough to anyone who hasn’t played it. This is why we got into gaming: Experiences like this are what it’s all about.
3) Deus Ex
Games like to talk about having multiple and diverse solutions. They rarely do – This one does, and oh man does it ever show how short the rest of the industry falls in that regard. You can be Snake, you can be Dook, you can be a l33t haXX0r and turn the enemy’s guns and robots against them, all kinds of stuff. And all backed up by two separate, synergistic methods of advancement, namely experience points on one hand and nano-augmentation on the other. All wrapped up in the most delightful dystopia I’ve had the pleasure of setting foot in, reveling in every conspiracy theory you can imagine (Except birthers, because that didn’t exist in 1999, obviously).
If you think this is an exaggeration, you'd be wrong.
Yes, the graphics have aged badly and yes, the gunplay is a bit clunky, and yes, it has voice acting that can veer right into the comical. Not a single one of those things matter, because this game is how you make games, and the few flaws it has are completely overshadowed by the vastness of scale and ambition contained here.
2) Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
There’s no shortage of 4x games around, but if you’re listing the best, you’re probably going to talk about either Civilization or SMAC. There is a reason for this. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is the 4X game par excellence, the apex of the genre, not matched before or since. What makes it so great, I hear you ask? Where to begin. Name an aspect of videogames and SMAC does it brilliantly or better. The implementation of the gameplay, the mechanics, all of that stuff, is essentially unimpeachable. There is little realistic way to say it could be better except, perhaps, to say there could be more of it. What elevates SMAC from merely a brilliant game to an all-time classic and a brilliant experience is the atmosphere.
This game has quotes from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, all kinds of stuff. And these quotes are usually the less impressive ones. The really impressive quotes are the ones written for the game’s various faction leaders. Every time you research a tech you get a quote from someone, every time you build a wonder, and the first time you build any given building. The end result? A 4x game with stronger, more detailed characters, who undergo more evolution, than the best RPG. As things progress their opinions change; compare these two quotes from Sister Miriam Godwinson, leader of the Lord’s Believers faction.
“The righteous need not cower before the drumbeat of human progress. Though the song of yesterday fades into the challenge of tomorrow, God still watches and judges us. Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.”
“And what of the immortal soul in such transactions? Can this machine transmit and reattach it as well? Or is it lost forever, leaving a soulless body to wander the world in despair?”
Also there are cyborgs, which is extremely hot
The final enjoyable factor is that the game goes for the ‘high balance’ route. All factions can achieve a position of particular strength, often wildly divergent from each other, but they can all become immensely powerful. When you can wipe out continents you really feel like you’re in charge of a future society, not to mention gives a palpable sense of reward for building up your empire. It was an excellent design decision which goes somewhat unnoticed, but contributes a lot to the game.
1) Suikoden II
So there’s some predictable classics on this list. Nobody is surprised to see X-Com or SMAC on a “Top games list”. But what’s this? Soo-wee-ko-den? What’s that? It’s a Playstation JRPG. It’s the best game I’ve ever played.
Suikoden, now up to entry V (All are exceptional except for IV), is a game where you lead an army. You generally start out on the side of an empire, and the corruption of it is soon revealed. Willingly or not you are caught up in a revolution or war to oppose it, and end up being the leader of the army. Yes, as a JRPG it means teenagers end up leading tens of thousands of troops. Yes, it has essentially silent protagonists, which is usually an immense pet peeve of mine. No, there is essentially no way to diverge from the prescribed plot (Though there are more chances to do so in SII than in any other JRPG I can call to mind). And yet here it is, number one on my list, a game I replayed around Christmas and loved as much as ever.
It’s a little hard to really explain what I love about this game, but that’s sort of the point of this post, so I’ll do my best. It has charm. It has grandeur, but it keeps things believable. You’re not saving the world from an ancient evil that has recently awoken, you’re fighting for your country, usually by fighting on the side of your country’s historic enemies. And you fight people on the other side who believe in their country, or believe they have a duty to serve it at any rate, who are for the most part thoroughly human. Except Luca Blight, who is the only ‘Murderous lunatic’ villain I have ever seen who makes me feel anything other than derision.
Viktor and Flik - most severe badasses to ever kick ass.
There are 108 characters to recruit in each Suikoden, sometimes recurring from other games in the series. They all form part of an overarching story of the Suikoden world, a plot not yet all revealed, but one which is engrossing in the extreme. Every game has fascinating characters and locations, gorgeous visuals, and absolutely stunning music. Forget Nobuo Uematsu, forget Yasunori Mitsuda, Miki Higashino is an unsung genius. I don’t think anyone has ever made better videogame musicthan she has.
