All posts by Pike

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

In Which a Strategy Game Tugs at my Heartstrings

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I never thought that a Paradox game, of all things, would touch my heart so much, but, well, it did.

See, in Crusader Kings 2, you play as a dynasty. If your character dies, you become the next character in your line, and so on and so forth. In my current game as the Holy Roman Empire, I started out as the Kaiser, and then became my firstborn son when the Kaiser died. At that point everything went down the tubes over the matter of a few in-game years as my jealous younger brother declared war on me, took most of the empire from me, defeated me soundly, and finally instilled me as a minor Duke of a couple of provinces. Then I died (rather mysteriously, I might add) and suddenly I found myself playing as my next heir– a four-year-old boy.

I was still sort of reeling from this whole development when a lone character approached me– my uncle, then in his late teens. His name was Prince Heinrich the V. He asked for a title and some land, so I gave him some so I wouldn’t have to micromanage all of mine. And at this point he became the one character in the game who was kind to me. He tutored me. He was on my court as my spymaster. I could always count on him for a favor. I imagined that my little boy character looked up to him as a sort of hero figure to latch on to, and even out-of-character I appreciated that this guy was one of the sons of the original Kaiser that I’d started out with and because of that I was attached to him.

Time went on and the boy grew up. Once he hit about 15 years old, I got this event:

Now one thing about Crusader Kings 2 for those of you who don’t play it: Every character gets several “traits”, both physical and personality-wise, and these effect different stats on your character. A gay character gets a hit to their fertility rate and it affects diplomacy a little, but mostly it’s just there for flavor.

And so I clicked the okay button, figuring it was just a random event of sorts, and then, a few in-game days later, I got another event:

So it wasn’t just random. My character had developed feelings for the one person in the game who was kind to him.

Put that last image on the right side of this one and you have basically my exact reaction.

Rather nervously I clicked the button. I wasn’t sure what would happen next in the game or if it would have an effect. As it turned out– it didn’t really. There were no more events about this particular storyline, although– tellingly– Prince Heinrich V remained kind to me.

My character grew up, married a woman (you can only marry the opposite gender in game), and had a couple of kids, some of whom I put into Prince Heinrich’s tutelage. At some point around here I was mysteriously killed and I found myself playing one of my daughters, who grew into an upstanding Duchess in part due to the fact that Prince Heinrich tutored me and whacked all of the negative traits out of me. In the little story in my mind, I could imagine him raising me like his own child as a favor to my dad.

Most of this stuff is long-past in my game, but that little storyline, spawned by a couple of events, has stuck with me. I never thought I’d get this many “feels” out of a Paradox grand strategy game, but I’m glad I was proven wrong.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

Crusader Kings 2: A Paradox Game for People Who Don’t Play Paradox Games

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Games by Paradox Interactive tend to attract a specific sort of person and you either are or aren’t that person. The games involve staring at maps and charts for hours at end and doing a bunch of micromanagement, and let’s face it, that either appeals to you or it doesn’t.

Well, yesterday, after spending about thirty minutes getting Crusader Kings 2 to run on my computer (You know your computer is bad when…) I spent a good several hours with the game, and while it’s probably too early for me to make some sort of definitive statement on the matter, I’m already getting the sense that this is, as I said in the title: A Paradox game for people who otherwise don’t play Paradox games.

Let me explain where I’m coming from here. Let’s take the other Paradox games. Victoria is about micromanaging pie charts, economy and government. Hearts of Iron is about micromanaging military forces and supplies. Europa Universalis goes for a more nuanced “just take over the world” approach and throws you right into this with no real explanation of what’s going on.

Crusader Kings, on the other hand, is about your family. The core mechanic of the game mostly revolves around who’s marrying who and who’s tutoring who and so on. For the average person, this is far more intuitive to pick up on than whether or not you need more supply convoys, or something.

Paradox continues to make the game accessible to newbies with the inclusion of comprehensive “hints” which explain every bit of the UI, a tech tree that mostly runs itself if you want it to, and military at the push of a button.

If you are the Holy Roman Empire, this is what happens when you press that button.

There is, of course, more to do for veterans or people who warm up to the game quickly. It’s a Paradox game, so there’s warfare, and you can also do fun and exciting things like assassinating people or throwing people into dungeons. But none of this stuff is exactly necessary if you’re just warming up to the game, and you can spend hours pouring over your family tree and selecting potential brides for your sons.

The result is that Crusader Kings 2 is a game that does a very good job of easing newbies into the Paradox family and introducing them to typical grand strategy concepts and UI features, while still maintaining a decent amount of complexity for those who want it. It used to be that I’d recommend a newcomer to the genre try Europa Universalis 3 as their first game, but I think I’m going to have to change that recommendation to Crusader Kings 2. This really is a solid, enjoyable game so far, and if any of you guys have been wanting to make the jump to grand strategy for a while but have been iffy on it, well, now is a great time to do it.

The Android's Aural Receptors (Music/Sound), The Android's Jetpack Augment (Platform)

SteamQuest 3: Bit.Trip Runner

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SteamQuest is a series based around Pike’s quest to play all the games she has on Steam. Which is a lot. Her definition of “play”, here, is at least one hour for smaller games and at least three hours for more substantial ones. Feel free to follow along!

BIT.TRIP RUNNER
Developer: Gaijin Games
Genres: Platform, Rhythm, Arcade
Website: http://www.bittripgame.com/bittrip-runner.html – and the Steam Link
Time Spent by Pike: 71 minutes – unfinished

Bit.Trip Runner sort of reminds me of Robot Unicorn Attack. Both are about controlling a running character and having lightning-quick reflexes. Both have catchy music that entices you to keep playing. Both look like a technicolor rainbow barfed all over your screen.

Yep, something like this.

There are a couple of major differences between the two, though. One is that the music plays a much more active role in Bit.Trip Runner, because your actions determine the music and vice versa. Another big difference is that, where Robot Unicorn Attack has two actions (Jump and Dash), Bit.Trip Runner has a whole bunch of them. Oh, and lastly, there are something like fifty different levels in Bit.Trip. Yep.

Now that you sort of have an idea of what this game entails, I’ll launch into more specifics.

Bit.Trip Runner has a sort of retro, pixel look to it. Inception-like, we go deeper and the retro gets even MORE retro when you unlock a bonus stage which is basically a parody of Pitfall (not gonna lie, the way the game even emulated the old-timey Activision logo at the bottom of the stage here made me smile). Appropriately, the music is chiptune-inspired electronica, and it’s very, very catchy chiptune-inspired electronica. You are rewarded with better versions of the music as you go along a level, because not only do your successful actions add little riffs to the song but powerups add more complexity and make the catchy music even catchier. This turns out to be a brilliant and unique hook because you want to beat the level not just to beat the level, but because it lets you listen to more and more great music.

The happy bouncy music and colorful aesthetics are in pretty hard contrast to how unforgiving the game actually gets. One mistake gets you ported to the beginning of the level. Yes, even if the goalpost is in sight and the actual level is as long as the Missouri River. There are no checkpoints. Checkpoints are for pussies. If you mess up, you get to redo the whole thing. It would be frustrating if the whole game wasn’t as completely addicting and entrancing as it is. See, once you sort of know how a level turns out, it becomes rather zen, and any mistakes just encourage you to try again, because, deep inside, you sort of don’t mind the repetition.

In fact, if I wasn’t trying to pump out this blog post before work, I’d still be playing right now, trying to beat this freaking level. (Watching this now and seeing how close the goalpost is to where I made it last time is absolutely maddening.)

So, in short, this is a solid, upgraded version of Robot Unicorn Attack, and fans of that famed flash game could do much worse than to check Bit.Trip Runner out. It’s on Wii and Nintendo 3DS aside from PC/Mac/Linux, and I do recommend using a controller instead of a keyboard if you’ll be playing it on a computer. The controls are more intuitive that way.

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

Hiding Your Power Level

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This is a term that is bandied about in various (usually rather geeky) fandoms: “Hiding Your Power Level”. Hiding one’s Power Level involves not letting anyone know about your chosen hobby, or at least not letting on that you’re so, well… fluent in it. It means not wearing that anime/My Little Pony/furry/whatever shirt out in public. It means downplaying your involvement in said hobby when people ask.

People seem to have different motivations for this. For some, it goes back to feeling a sense of shame. For many others, it’s because they don’t want to be associated with “the fandom”, either because it’s gotten a bad rap or because their taste for the fandom has soured (or both). And still others just like the idea of having a “personal” hobby which is their own personal space which they don’t share with other people.

For me, it’s social anxiety.

You don’t see this on the internet. On the internet, I’m very out and proud about my love of games and the fact that I spend a lot of time playing them, as anyone who follows me on Twitter can attest. There is no closet because I smashed my way out of that a heck of a long time ago.

Real life is different. Nobody at my current job knows about my love of games. Partially it’s because I never talk to begin with, but mostly it’s because my anxiety likes to kick in at full speed when someone brings it up. I always beat myself up for it. When someone asks “So Pike, what are you going to do on your day off?” I want to say “I’m going to play a minor country in Europa Universailis 3 and take over the entire continent.” But I don’t.

Instead I say, "Oh, I'll uh... just, you know. Hang out. And do some errands. Yeah. Those."

It’s not always this way. At one of my last jobs about 75% of the employees played World of Warcraft so everyone talked about it all the time, and I very eagerly joined in. This was back when I still played and two of my coworkers, including my department supervisor, rerolled on my server and joined my raiding guild. I was literally raiding with my boss. That was fun.

But now I’m at a new job and nobody seems to play anything and certainly nobody knows that I do. It’s not that I’m not fiercely proud of my hobby– I am– but my mind certainly likes to trip me up when it comes time to actually bring it up. It’s something I’d like to get over at some point, but until then, it’s a struggle.

I do, however, wear my Steampunk My Little Pony shirt all the time. There are some things you’re just not gonna take from me.

Do you guys hide your power level?

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

Why “Growing Out of Games” is a Foreign Concept to Me

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I hear this a lot, both on the internet and elsewhere. People who say that they can no longer enjoy games and rationalize it as “getting too old” or “growing up”. Note that I’m not talking about a lack of time here– I fully understand that games are time consuming and that, the older we get, the less time we tend to have.

But there seems to be this sort of prevailing idea that games are a toy or mere plaything more than a valid entertainment form.

You don’t grow out of books.

You don’t grow out of movies.

You don’t grow out of watching TV.

You don’t grow out of listening to music.

So why would you grow out of video games? The thought baffles me.

Playtime is for everyone. Even ponies.

Games suck me in just as much these days as they did when I was younger. SMAC, EU3, and Civ IV are a very small sample of games that have all pulled me in and enthralled me just in the last few years alone. And it’s not just “older” games that are doing it– recently, Skyrim has really made me feel like I did back when I was exploring the worlds of, say, Ocarina of Time or early World of Warcraft. The excitement of the games I play lingers well after I turn it off, too, which why this blog exists. I want to talk about games and share my experiences with them. I always have, and even nearing thirty years old now I still do.

Or maybe I’m just unusual. Maybe it is possible to “grow out” of games. Maybe the really interactive nature of games equates them more to something like dance or sports or competitive chess– because you do have to put some amount of work and effort into it, it becomes more relaxing to just not bother. So people for whom it isn’t a priority fade away.

I hope not, though. I don’t ever want to lose what I have with games.

What do you guys think?

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

The Soul in the Spreadsheet 2: Being the Bad Guy

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A blog called Critical Distance provides writing prompts for game bloggers, and I’ve decided to give this one a go (although I can’t promise how successful I’ll be). Here’s the prompt:

Being Other:

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

I imagine that a lot of responses are talking about gender or race. Which are very valid things to talk about as we approach games critically. However, I’m going to touch on something a little different. I’m going to provide a sequel to my earlier post “A Spreadsheet With a Soul” and talk about what it’s like to be the bad guy in a game. I’m not talking about picking the dark side path in a Bioware RPG. I’m not talking about roleplaying a jerk character in an MMO. Here, let me show you what I’m talking about.

I’ve been on a big Europa Universalis 3 kick lately. Currently I’m playing Portugal and taking over the Americas, just for giggles. Let me tell you how that went down: I sailed over to the new world and found some unclaimed land (denoted as gray on the ingame map.) Some of this land was inhabited by “natives”, which was no big deal, because my infantry could destroy them in a matter of seconds if they chose to fight. I slaughtered several thousands of these natives that way as I slowly began to turn the map from gray to green.

Then I encountered something else. Aside from the nameless “natives”, there were actual native nations on North America. Huron, Iroquois, Cherokee, Shawnee, and others all had little patches of color on the map denoting their territory. If I clicked on their territory I could see the names of their leaders. I could also see that they were eying me rather warily.

At first I decided to be nice. They weren’t bothering me and I was taking land that was rather far from theirs, so I gave them gifts of gold in order to befriend them and then I let them be.

For about, oh, fifty or sixty years or so.

Because that was when my lust for territory had taken me all the way down to them and their little blobs of color on the map were interfering with my lovely solid green. I checked the technology chart– they had nothing compared to me. I clicked on their territory to see what they thought of me. We weren’t friends, by any means, but they “trusted me implicitly”, probably due to decades of peace and the gifts I’d given them.

No matter. I declared war, stormed in, easily killed off their little armies and occupied all their territory. (The “casus belli”– cause for war– that I gave here in order to not take such a hit in various game attributes was that they “owned territory that was rightfully mine”.) They sent me peace treaty after peace treaty– first just begging me to stop and then offering to give up some of their land– and I turned them all down. I wanted nothing but full annexation. I wanted them gone from the map.

See that brown? It was bugging me.

It didn’t take long. First the Iroquois were gone. Then the Huron a few years later. I let Cherokee and Shawnee live for another decade or so (they were more out of my way), at which point they banded together and declared war on me and I retaliated by annexing them. Just as I’d wanted, these cultures were now gone from the map and it was all mine.

Now I know what some of you are probably thinking. That this is an absolutely awful and atrocious game and how could I play it in good conscience and how could anyone find this fun?

Well here, let me tell you something. By the time I quit WoW I had over ten thousand PvP kills on my main character alone, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of NPCs that I’d killed, and I never batted an eye or thought about the implications of it.

I’ve killed hundreds of people in Skyrim and not blinked.

I’ve Planet Bustered away portions of entire continents in SMAC and giggled.

These were all clearly fiction. The enemies were not real. It was all abstract and didn’t matter.

EU3 is different. EU3 is making you recreate events that actually happened (or would have happened, in some crazy world where Portugal took over North America). EU3 has made me stop and think about myself. Sure, I can rationalize every day that I wouldn’t ever do something like this in real life. But you know what? I bet the monarchs back in Europe in the 17th century were seeing it exactly as I was. These other cultures were offending patches of the wrong color on their maps.

Maybe we weren’t so different after all. What a thing to chew on.

It’s just a game, sure. But it’s a game that lets you step into the shoes of history, for good or for ill, and because of that, it’s a very valuable experience.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – George Santayana

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Repair Shop (Meta-blog)

Nintendinitis

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Well, I guess it was bound to happen. Not only have I literally grown up playing video games (and/or using the computer), but carpal tunnel syndrome runs in my family, and it looks like my own luck with staving it off may have run out: this past week or so I’ve had growing discomfort and numbness in my right wrist/thumb, particularly when using the computer. It’s probably something I’ll have to get looked at– in the meantime I’ve given myself a wrist brace, which seems to be helping some, even if it makes typing and such slightly awkward.

I’m still adjusting to the brace (I just got it about a half hour ago), but I figure I should probably do the right thing and give my poor wrist a break and minimize my computer usage for a little while. Well, crap. I was in the middle of colonizing Canada as Portugal in my latest EU3 game, too.

My face, upon realizing the implications of all of this.

Oh, who are we kidding? I’ll probably keep playing anyway, albeit a little less. And on the plus side I still seem to be able to comfortably hold a 360 controller with no issues, which means maybe I can actually finish Skyrim (and poke around with Mirror’s Edge which I’ve recently acquired.)

Has anyone else had this problem? What are your tips for dealing with it– especially as a gamer?

The Android Collects Random Objects (Adventure), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

SteamQuest 2: Ben There, Dan That!

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SteamQuest is a series based around Pike’s quest to play all the games she has on Steam. Which is a lot. Her definition of “play”, here, is at least one hour for smaller games and at least three hours for more substantial ones. Feel free to follow along!

Ben There, Dan That!
Developer: Size Five Games
Genres: Indie, Point-And-Click Adventure
Website: http://www.sizefivegames.com/games/ben-there-dan-that/ – and the Steam Link
Time Spent by Pike: 62 minutes – unfinished

Today’s SteamQuest entry was actually going to be about Alpha Protocol, but as it turns out my computer doesn’t want to run it. So for the time being I’m stuck running games that take much lower system requirements. Hopefully I can patch up my computer eventually and then I can go back and play the newer, fancier stuff, but until then I’m plucking random indie and/or older games off of my list. Ben There, Dan That! is one of them.

I’ll come right out and admit it: I’m not a big Point & Click Adventure game player. This isn’t because I have something against them, but I just have very, very little experience with them. It’s one of those genres that I don’t know very much about just because I’m so inexperienced with the games in said genre.

This is a quintessential adventure game, though. You click stuff. You pick stuff up. You solve puzzles by combining stuff. That’s basically how the game works. It’s not a difficult mechanic, but in this game it’s well-executed. Once you get the hang of how things work it’s very intuitive, and some of the puzzles will leave you feeling very clever indeed.

The devs are clearly fond of Sam & Max and Monkey Island (in-jokes and homages abound) and so this is an adventure in a bizarre world and off-the-wall humor abounds. Should you choose to examine a light switch in the bathroom, one of the characters goes into a very detailed monologue about said light switch, for example. The characters also poke unabashed fun at themselves (they’re based off of the devs) and at prior games they’ve made. Not gonna lie, the humor had me laughing to myself on more than one occasion. The game is also super-British, so one of my early quests was to rig up an “aerial for a knackered telly”. Yeah, it took almost as long for me to figure out what they wanted me to do as it did to solve the puzzle itself. Fortunately I can always use Mister Adequate as a translator if things get dire.

Pic related.

There’s not really much else to say about this game except that it was considerably more interesting than I initially thought it would be and it’s probably worth a look for point-and-click fans, especially since you can get both this game and its sequel in a package for $5. I think I’ll be diving back into this at some point in the future when I’m not in a rush to get a blog post out before work. Supposedly the storyline involves Nazi dinosaurs or something, and that’s clearly worth a closer look.

Moments later I was abducted by the aliens outside the window and taken aboard their spaceship. ...no, really. That's in the game.
The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG)

Final Fantasy 2 – Beaten!

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Yesterday I beat Final Fantasy 2, which means I’ve got two down in my quest to play all the major Final Fantasy games (barring the MMOs) in order. This is one of the games I haven’t played before, so it was all completely new to me. It was also a game that a lot of people gave me advance warning on because it’s so polarizing. Apparently FF2 is the game that will make or break a planned Final Fantasy marathon.

Well, I’m pleased to report that I actually quite enjoyed this game. It did have a couple of unconventional ideas and mechanics, which made the first hour or two probably the most difficult to get through, but once I got past that it was smooth sailing. I found this to be an immensely enjoyable RPG with a lot to offer in terms of being able to customize your party to fit your playstyle.

Did someone say "party"?

The last couple of dungeons– the Jade Portal and Pandemonium Castle– were deliciously difficult and had me worried that I was going to run out of the 99 ethers I’d brought along with me (not to mention all of the potions.) Every random encounter felt like a mini-boss. Running into a group of Abyss Worms was always utterly terrifying and yet so thoroughly delicious to struggle against. It was wonderful. And due to the unique way in which you “level” your characters in this game, I really felt like the final boss fight was the moment that I’d been training for this whole time. I loved it.

All in all I had an awful lot of fun with this game and I really do recommend pushing yourself through the first couple of hours and warming up to the playstyle if you’re looking for a solid and challenging oldschool RPG.

Now then: on to Final Fantasy 3! This is another game I haven’t played, so I’m excited to dig into this one!

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

The Gaming Gods Love Us After All – XCom: Enemy Unknown

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Firaxis – that of Civilization fame – has just announced that they are remaking X-Com and that it’s going to be a turn-based strategy, like the original. Excuse me while I post my face:

And now, Mister Adequate and myself shall post our thoughts on this:

Pike’s Thoughts:

There’s a lot that could go wrong here but there’s also a lot that could go right. The easy way out would be to say to just make X-Com but give it a graphical and UI facelift, but we could even improve upon that. RPS discusses this at length in this article. Mostly what I think is vital to me is that they don’t lose any of that feeling of being terrified between turns as you hear noises and “hidden movement.” Like old Hitchcock movies, X-Com largely works not because what it shows you, but because of what it doesn’t show you. I hope that, in the whirlwind of fancy graphics and whatnot, Firaxis doesn’t lose sight of this.

This is definitely going to be an interesting one to watch– since we don’t have any major details yet, it’s definitely too early to say whether or not this is all going to work, but as it stands now I’m rather cautiously optimistic. Firaxis isn’t perfect by any means, but if we’re going to put X-Com in the hands of a major studio I’m glad they’re the ones getting it.

Mister Adequate’s Thoughts:

Given that we know very little about the thing at this point, Pike has already covered most of the major points that could be made right now, and I echo everything she said. What I will add is that I am also cautiously optimistic if for no other reason than the fact that XCOM – the shooter that is – is already on the way. There’s nothing to be gained by trying to capitalize on the action market, 2K would be competing against themselves, and a studio like Firaxis is never going to have an easy time going up against 2K Marin in the shooter domain, but the strategy side of things is, Xenonauts aside, wide open.

There is an enormous wealth of ideas about what a new XCOM ought to be floating around out there, and I hope Firaxis have been carefully and continue to carefully read and think about them, and take them on board where it seems appropriate. We’re a rabidly obsessed, hard to please fanbase, but give us what we want and we will reward you with kingly sums.

Another, and absolutely vital, aspect here is modding capability. People have done some impressive things with the original X-Com despite the thing not being remotely modder-friendly, but look at the mod scene for Civ IV and imagine that transposed into XCOM.

—

And there you have it. Who else is excited?