…okay, okay, you can get it whenever you want, but you have seven more days to get it for cheap as part of the Humble Bundle.
What is Frozen Synapse, you may be asking?
Well, let me put it this way:
Do you like tactical turn-based strategy games?
Do you like interesting game premises involving the player being an AI?
Do you like really good music?
If you said yes to the above questions then you should really be looking into getting this game. This is a solid TBS that gives you a considerable amount of control over your troops and provides a rather interesting twist of allowing you to run simulations of your moves before you actually move. You ARE an AI, after all. The actual outcome is always different from even your best looking simulations, though. In other words, the white-knuckle anticipation between turns might just be the death of you.
There is also a multiplayer mode which I’m assuming is intense as all heck but I’ve yet to try it. Mister Adequate and I have plans to butt heads in game at some point, though. As of now we’re both just working our way through the single player campaign between playing a million other things. And yes, Mister Adequate has given this game his Hardcore Strategy/Tactical Game Seal of Approval, which is basically our equivalent of the Good Housekeeping award, except even more elusive.
Anyways, if you think any of this sounds interesting and/or you’re still listening to the music (and you really should be), then go toss Humble Bundle a few bucks and enjoy. There are other games that come in the bundle, of course, and they seem to be adding more every few days, but honestly Frozen Synapse and its soundtrack alone is worth the (user-set) price of the package. Check it out!
For a long, long, long, long, long time we have lamented the absence of X-Com. There have been various attempts at creating spiritual successors to it, most notably the UFO series by ALTAR, and these weren’t terrible games; but nobody has ever really captured the feeling of X-Com, nobody has ever come close in fact.
No ponies today. Only nightmares.
Now someone has. Spurred by the positive impressions of the fine gentlemen at RPS I picked up the preorder (Which unlocks beta access) a couple of days ago and, after spending a little time with the beta build, I can pretty safely say that Mr. Meer’s writeup is spot on. Let me lift a quote wholesale from what he writes;
A playable build of Xenonauts was on show in the RPS-sponsored Indie Arcade at the Eurogamer expo last week, and pretty much everyone I spoke to about it said the same thing: “well, it’s X-COM,” they offered with a wide grin. They didn’t say what worked or what didn’t or what they’d change or anything like that – they just said “it’s like X-COM.”
Xenonauts, ladies and gentlemen, is like X-Com. It’s hard to define what exactly X-Com is, but the end result is very clearly present here. You care about your soldiers even though you know they’re going to die very quickly. You find yourself cursing because in your eagerness to look around the next corner you didn’t spare enough time units for reaction fire. You feel the greatest tension when you take a long-range shot with a rookie. You need it to hit, it HAS to hit, or some other guy right next to the alien with no TUs is going to die next turn. And yes, you’re terrified of Hidden Movement.
It just adds up. Finally, after nearly 20 years, we’re getting a true and proper successor to one of the great, all-time classics of videogaming. I urge everyone to check out the Xenonauts page, take a look around, and to rejoice – for our prayers are being answered.
I think some of these “translated” into ponyfication better than others but I’m proud overall. If I ever get around to redoing it, I think I’ll give Morgan yellow eyes or something (to portray his “faction color”), and I might make Deirdre an Earth Pony– my original thought was that she’s “flying naked through the trees”, but the whole Earth-Pony-bond-with-animals thing might actually fit better. Then, I’ll add faction symbols as cutie marks.
This is a game I’ve had for a while but, for some reason, never actually got around to playing until yesterday: Atom Zombie Smasher. Don’t be fooled by the silly-sounding name or what appears at first glance to be a rather simplistic layout: this is a full-blown real-time strategy game, complete with troops, weapons, and evac helicopters to position and (eventually) tech to research. Unlike many strategy games, though, this particular game isn’t about deciding which of your many available units/buildings to build. Rather, it’s about the tactical execution. It’s about “Here’s your stuff and it’s all you’re gonna get for this mission. Good luck.”
There's a giant artillery cannon in the game so this image is officially relevant.
The game’s premise is simple: There’s a zombie outbreak going on and it’s your job to evacuate as many civilians to safety as possible. Get any ideas of grandeur out of your head right now: there are going to be casualties and collateral damage. A lot of it. In any given scenario if you manage to rescue about a quarter of a town’s population you’re doing quite well.
This is the map where you’re going to be spending most of your time:
Click to enlarge!
The glowing golden dots are your civilians and the purple ones are the zeds. If a zombie touches a civilian, the civilian turns into a zombie. In other words, if one purple dot touches a clump of golden dots, you can say goodbye to that particular clump. The above screenshot was taken about ten seconds after the start of the mission so the zombies haven’t had much of a chance to do anything yet, but believe me– they will.
The meat of the game is juggling the weapons, troops, and other assorted help that you’re given at the start of the mission. You’ve got various types of explosives (artillery, dynamite, landmines, etc.), you’ve got infantry troops and rooftop snipers, you’ve got barricades and zed bait, and most importantly you’ve got your evac helicopter. Watch out, though: not everything is available for every mission, so you go into each one feeling rather crunched for supplies. But that’s part of the beauty and fun of the whole thing.
One of my favorite parts of the game is that it takes “real-time” to its fullest extent. Your helicopter doesn’t just land the second it tells you to. It takes a while to do so, and then it takes its sweet time loading up survivors, and then it has to fly away offscreen somewhere and unload them before it returns. Likewise, your artillery cannon not only has a giant cooldown, but it doesn’t actually fire until several seconds after you tell it to, so you can’t just fire where the zombies are– you have to think and then fire where the zombies will be. Oh, and buildings (and your own weapons/troops) aren’t invincible to your explosives, by the way. Once I piled a bunch of dynamite around my artillery without thinking and before I knew it, my artillery was out of commission. Hmm.
The game also has an experience system so you can upgrade your stuff, and eventually you’re able to research your own upgrades on top of that.
Another thing the game does really well is give you a sense of things spiraling out of control as the zombies multiply exponentially. What begins as one or two available missions on your map turns into this after about four or five successful ones:
Take a guess what the higher numbers mean.
Oh, and did I mention that you’re racing the zombies to a high score and that every single one of those numbers contributes to the zombies’ score? Yeah. Every time you feel good about a successful evacuation mission, you’re taken to the map screen and three or four more infected areas show up and previously infected areas become… well, even more infected.
Losing is fun? Losing is fun.
In short, this is a surprisingly unique and addicting little strategy game that you will easily lose a few hours to. It’s $10 on Steam or $15 elsewhere, which might be a bit high depending on how often you play this sort of game, but I’ve seen it packed in with those pay-what-you-want Humble Bundles a couple of times so it’s well worth the couple of bucks if you ever see it there or otherwise on sale.
Come on, you really can’t go wrong with a game that involves blowing zombies up with dynamite. Right? Right.
According to my mom, who went crazy with genealogy research one year a while back, I’m a direct descendant of both William the Conqueror and Charlemagne. I like to jokingly tell people that this makes me naturally good at strategy games because it means conquering people is in my blood.
If that is actually the case, though, ol’ Willy and Charlie both would be disappointed in me. My usual strategy in something like, say, Civ, is to sit around and tech and then win by space victory. I’m usually not the aggressor unless someone gives me a really good reason to be.
So yesterday I was rather surprised by the sudden urge I felt the urge to play a Civ game specifically to go around and destroy everyone. I did so, and it was glorious. Why build more cities when you can just plunder some for yourself? Why worry about diplomacy when you have a military that could take on three or four other civs at once? Why worry about tech when you’re going to be ahead in tech by the end of the game anyway due to, well, conquering everyone?
The rules of the game.
Anyways, going against my usual grain was a lot of fun and by the end I even found myself juggling things I didn’t think I’d have to, like culture– when you take a lot of cities from other people, culture becomes a big deal in order to avoid losing your new prizes.
I did inevitably end up winning with a Space Race Victory, despite taking about half of everyone’s cities for my own. I just can’t resist the lure of flying to Alpha Centauri. Mister Adequate has issued me a challenge, though: Next time, I have to turn off all victories except for Conquest. Bring it on.
As I’m sure you’re all probably aware, I play a lot of Civ IV. A lot of it. Steam tells me I’ve dumped 366 hours into it in the last six months alone, and I have no regrets about this fact.
Civ V is something I have played considerably less of. In fact, I’ve never actually finished a game. Either my (dated) computer decides that it doesn’t want to handle the game and it crashes, or something in the gameplay annoys me and I quit. So, while I’m technically able to tell people that I prefer IV over V, I feel a little bad anytime I do. Like I didn’t give V a fair shake. Like I have no right to really decide for myself which game is better because I haven’t tried it enough.
So leave it to Mister Adequate to issue me a challenge. Mister Adequate has played a lot more Civ V than I have. He has since decided that he likes IV better, but at least he is able to back this up with his own personal experiences. And, as he knows my desire to be able to come to a similar conclusion, he gave me a challenge, which is as follows:
Play three full games of Civ V from start to finish. Not quit if I run into a game mechanic that I don’t like. Keep trying if my computer starts acting up.
Three full games of Civilization V.
My initial reaction.
Now anyone who knows me knows me even moderately well knows that a.) I don’t back down from a challenge, and b.) If you say “I bet that you can’t [insert thing here], I will do everything in my power to prove you wrong. So obviously Mister Adequate said this knowing full well that I was going to have to take him up on this. And so, you had better believe that I am going to play three complete games of Civ V. I’m going to blog my experiences and conclusions as I go, as well. This may not all be in a timely fashion, since for those who aren’t aware, I’m actually going to be moving a solid six hundred miles east this weekend, so I’ll be busy doing that. But inbetween packing and sorting and being-busy-in-general, I hope to bring you all screenshots and impressions of The Civ Game I Never Gave a Fair Shake To.
Starcraft 2 is a popular game, to make an understatement. I can go to pretty much any video game blog/forum/message board/whatever and people will be talking about it.
I think a lot of this is due to the huge meta-game that surrounds it. The tournaments, the websites, the streams, the wikis, and of course, all of that terminology.
I… don’t follow any of it. I’ve nothing against it, at all– it’s just not something I do.
It’s sort of weird, though. I’ve been playing Starcraft, oftentimes religiously, for over ten years. And yet, I don’t have a clue what people are talking about 75% the time when I wander into the middle of most SC2 discussions these days.
My exact reaction when I wander into an SC2 discussion.
So I tend to stay out of the discussions, and when I do occasionally play SC or SC2, I play the way I always have played Starcraft, or most RTS games, for that matter. Scout around. Expand. Build up a defense. Build up an offense. Troll the other guy a bit. Attack. Profit! That’s my strategy. It seems to work out okay. I don’t often play online, but when I do, I can hold my own.
So when I see people dissecting every move the Korean pros make and then getting nervous about trying to do it themselves, I shrug and go back to making a boatload of dragoons (or whatever they’re called these days, I know they renamed them), dark templars and observers. You’d be surprised how well that works. Sure, it’s not gonna beat any Koreans, but I’m not trying to.
So yeah. I’m Pike, and I’m a strategy game fan and a Starcraft fan, and I have no IDEA what any of you hardcore SC2 guys are talking about. We’re still friends, right?
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?
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.
Okay guys, gather round and I’m going to tell you a story about a Civ IV game that Mister Adequate and I played. It went something like this:
Starting as early as I could I built up this massive, massive army over the course of several in-game centuries. I wish I could tell you exactly how big the stack was, but I can’t remember the details, only that it was huge and contained dozens of catapults and at least a score of swordsmen, axemen, and crossbowmen. It was just ridiculously imposing.
I then spent 80 turns sending the freaking thing across the map to Mister Adequate’s base. 80 turns, because for whatever reason the map we were playing on was completely covered in mountains so it took forever to get anywhere.
Eventually, though, my massive military was parked outside of one of his outer cities. At which point I informed my dear partner over voice chat that if he didn’t give me all of his tech, I would destroy his city.
He was quiet for a while, I think out of utter shock, and then asked to see my army so he could make an accurate assessment of the stakes. I agreed and inched my army a bit closer to him.
This is where I noticed two things. Firstly, he was playing a Protective-trait leader, so he had extra defense built into his cities by default. Secondly, the march across the map had taken SO LONG that he’d just finished researching Feudalism by the time I got there and was upgrading everyone to Longbowmen, which– for those of you who are not familiar with Civ IV– are incredibly effective defensive units well into mid-game.
And I made a big mistake here. A BIG mistake.
Namely, I voiced my dismay at these two facts. In other words, I was betraying a bit of insecurity on my end.
So you know what Mister Adequate did?
He said, and I quote, “Come at me, bro.”
Just like this.
I quailed here. I could hear a bit of panic in his voice, and so the thought crossed my mind that maybe he was bluffing, but then I got scared. He did have longbowmen. He did have a Defensive leader. The city I was standing next to was on a hill. And the guy I was playing against does actually have a master’s degree in this sort of thing. (No, really, he does.) And the game’s built-in combat odds estimation wasn’t telling me a whole lot, either.
And what if he had his own massive army, hidden in wait somewhere? Waiting to strike once my own army was demolished?
So I… said never mind and backed off. Actually, I had a new plan, because I was researching gunpowder at that point and figured that soon I could upgrade my units and try again. But we quit the game for the night not long after and I never got to that point.
That’s when he laughed at me and told me that he had been bluffing and I probably could have taken at least a couple of his cities easily.
Drats. Foiled again. :(
I’m not the only one who has made stupid mistakes like this, right? D:
