Category Archives: The Android’s Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Atom Zombie Smasher: Losing Is Fun!

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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.

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Rise of the Indies

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In contrast to my post earlier this week, I’m now going to talk about the people out there who are making games “as they want to make them”, that is to say, indie developers.

To be clear on the definition, I’m just using Indie to mean a game which is made without the financial support of a publishing house or anything.

And if you don't like my definition, you can take it up with Fluttershy here.

This has created a pretty interesting model. Increasingly, Indie games are implementing a model whereby you can pay a small sum now, in the alpha or beta stage, and get all later updates for free even after the price increases. Minecraft is the foremost example of this, but we can also look at games like Project Zomboid or Overgrowth to see the same model. This has all kinds of benefits; it brings people in and generates an active base of players before the game is officially “out”, the players can fulfill the role of testers, can give feedback and advice (If the dev wants to listen, of course), and most importantly the early sales generate money that mean the game can actually continue to be developed.

The thing is, because these games are made by individuals or small teams, and thus have far lower overheads than triple-A titles like Gears of War or Modern Warfare, they can be far, far more experimental and unique. Sure, you get games like Katamari Damacy from the bigger houses but those are the exception rather than the rule. Indie devs have an easier time in this regard. I doubt you could sell the idea of Dwarf Fortress to EA or Sony and have it still resemble DF once it’s been minced by their focus groups and marketing and what have you. Hell, you can’t even get a decent version of long-running, successful franchises like SimCity anymore.

But indie developers can. They can make extremely complicated games, niche games, experimental games,

games that are banned in Germany,

games that look like spreadsheets, games like Mount and Blade or Kenshi or a zombie game where one bite infects you 100% of the time. Or that are Minecraft, but with a dimension removed.

Which isn’t to say that all indie games are classics and we should bow down and worship their creators. Just that I have an appreciation for them because of the freedom they are afforded, compared to big name publishers.

The Android's an Amateur Developer (Ideas), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Patronage and endowments.

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Something interesting has occurred to me. I was thinking about how other creative/entertainment sectors will very often have people who do things because they want to, rather than because it’s what the market demands. Now this may seem like a senseless statement but I can assure you, even if you’re trying to stick to your guns on every last syllable, when you’re writing a book you still have “Who will this appeal to?” “Will this drive people away from future books?” and the like in the back of your mind. Well, I do at least. Even with something I can completely control like that, there are such concerns. Even so there are always people out there who are happy to use their success to make something they really want to make, be it a movie or a TV show or whatever, even if it’s not going to be a major blockbuster. Similarly, we have all kinds of patrons for the more revered older arts, donations to save a statue or to support a poet or the like. But do we have the same for games?

Well I suppose the short answer is “Yes.” but that wouldn’t make for very satisfactory analysis, tempting as it is to leave it here and abscond to New Antioch where I am trying to craft a brutal urban wasteland from which the poors and minorities have no escape.

Okay, blog's over. Job well done! Time for donuts.

We do have, for instance, the indie game scene, where things like Dwarf Fortress and Aurora are superb examples – the former is funded by donations alone and the latter doesn’t even accept those because Walmsley’s independently wealthy. Toady has pretty explicitly said that while he takes player thoughts into consideration he’s making a game that he and Threetoe want to make, and if other people want to play it and support it that’s great, but if they don’t they’re not going to make radical changes to the game in order to appeal.

Similarly there are people of particular renown who have some leeway even in major companies. I imagine that if, say, Shiggy says “Making a game.”, Nintendo will pretty much let him do that. And we know there are people like Sid Meier, Will Wright, and Peter Molyneux who have had in the past a huge amount of discretion in what they make. But these times seem to be lost now.

In essence I’m just wondering – what if some really rich dude comes along, gathers up a bunch of programmers, and says “We’re making the best space 4X game ever. It’s going to be compared positively to MOO2. We will do what we think is best for the gameplay, not for sales. Profits and sales are secondary to the main objective.” Not indie, but real big-budget, triple-A stuff. I tell you what, when I am mega rich and rule large tracts of the universe, I’m going to make sure some great vidya gets made. But in the meantime I wonder if we might not benefit from a greater spirit of philanthropy towards games in this manner, and help spur new innovations and experimentation.

Edit: Unrelated, but something everyone should read. I think this is one of the most important articles currently on the Internet regarding gaming, it touches a lot of points about a vital game and company.

The Android's Favorites, The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

More about Project Zomboid

I really like this game, so I’m going to write another post about it in case my little tale didn’t hook you.

Basically, PZ is a zombie survival horror game. Now, we’ve had an abundance of zombies lately, but the very great majority of them have been centered around action, killing zombies, gunning them down in hordes, all that stuff. All well and good, everyone loves a good game of Dead Rising, but there seemed to be a huge and obvious gap here. Zombie games are, as it were, zombie games. That is to say, the game part came first. The zombies were almost incidental and could generally be replaced with another one of vidya’s favorite standby enemies. PZ is different. It’s a zombie movie.

Caesar likewise approves.

What I mean by this is that it’s very much about the things you typically see in a zombie film. It’s about hiding, survival, and paranoia. It’s about running out of food, needing to scavenge painkillers, and getting shot by desperate lunatics. Worrying whether that scratch has infected you or not (Bites infect 100% of the time and there is neither a vaccine nor a cure.) It’s not about killing as many zombies as you can – the game doesn’t even keep track of this. The high score is to survive for as long as you can. Admittedly in the pre-alpha demo that’s out now this isn’t hugely challenging once you’ve played it a couple of times and know what you’re doing, but the principle is a vital one – you’re going to die. The opening of the game tells you straight up, there is no hope of survival. This is how you died.

It’s something a lot of us have been wanting for a long time. A zombie game in which you were an average joe rather than an immune superman, in which survival is the main concern rather than an afterthought you can fix with waiting six seconds, in which you’ve got to think about your potential hideouts and assess them for suitability and where preparing them further can attract zombies due to the noise.

They’ve got all sorts of plans for the game in the future. The current update has been very slow to arrive, for a variety of reasons, but if even half of what’s planned goes into the final game it’s sure to be an extraordinary ride. Once again, the relevant links:

Project Zomboid
Wiki
Forums

The Android's Battle Report (Playthroughs), The Android's Favorites, The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Project Zomboid

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This is how I died.

Kate… I had to do it. I just couldn’t protect us both in that house. Her wound was getting infected, who knows if the disease really would get into her? I couldn’t leave her to die, I couldn’t shoot her. I smothered her with a pillow. Gathered what few things I could carry and hoofed it across town.

I don’t know how they knew I was in there. The windows were all boarded up. There was no more power to use the lights. I crept around. But after three days safely ensconced in a small duplex house, where I had managed to secure some decent supplies, I heard them. Hammering. Pounding. I went down to check; the door shook with each rotten fist that smacked against it. It would hold, it would hold for a long time, but they would get in in the end. And there was no other way out.

So I decided to do the only thing I could: I was going to fight. I waited, shotgun in hand, whiskey in belly, for what I was sure would be my end. And I won. I killed them all, there must have been thirty or so of them, and I destroyed them. Quickly, I boarded things up again and retreated upstairs.

Two days passed. Nothing. I didn’t know how they had missed me; that shootout made more than a little noise. I guess all the ones nearby had already been attracted and then killed? I don’t know. But I was running low on food and it was time to start thinking about what next. This place was… safe-ish, and it housed many supplies I had gathered. It would take two, maybe three runs to relocate everything, so I would either have to take a lot of risks, I would have to keep this as a base, or I would have to BAM! BAM! BAM!

How? How did they find me again? And why did it take so long? If any had seen me go in, or heard me shooting, they should have arrived at most a couple of hours after I retreated. I don’t understand it. It doesn’t matter; this place is no longer safe, the doors are falling apart and I’m almost out of wood to barricade them with. Okay. Only one solution. Take what I can carry, fight through the horde, run. Find another place to hole up.

Is this going to be the rest of my life?

I opened the door. Shotgun in hand. They poured in, a lot more than just thirty of them this time. Seventy, maybe eighty. The shotgun tore them apart, but it wasn’t quite enough. They got closer. And closer. I avoided their bites, but a couple of them scratched me, one on my leg, one on my arm. I finished them off, went out of the house, and ran without looking back.

Found a small apartment. Had a zombie in it, took care of him with a baseball bat. Nice and quiet. Very messy. Looked around; enough food for a couple of days here. Saw to bandaging up my wounds, they weren’t major but it was better to try and be safe than sorry. Took some painkillers and a sleeping pill once I had used the last of my wood on barricading things. Slept for about 12 hours.

Sick. Stomach churning, head spinning. Threw up in toilet bowl. Grim. Probably the infection, from a scratch or blood that splattered on me or something. No hastiness though. Don’t be hasty. Took some more pills, ate more than I could really spare, found a book to read and enjoyed it by the evening light with a fair amount of booze. Not a bad day in the circumstances.

Sicker. Dwefinition the virus. Hear pounding, but door is holding. Another surviver they found? Just beating doors for no raisin? Don’t know. Still reading, good book. Atwood. I like Atwood. Virus there too.

Sleep. Wake. can’t see words now too blurry. bread andples not tasty. eat steak. not cook, tastes good, fills belly. Drink. Drink lots and lots. Okay. Get it together. Blaze of gory bob, blaze of glory. Load up. 65 shotgun shells. Bottle of booze. Another steak. Bat with nails.

Open door. quiet, eserted. Stride around town like the duke of new york. hardly any zombies. the fuck? where were they all they were ruining my last stand. FUck it, going to get drunk. Found a bar, raided it, got completely smashed. pills too! might die of od hahahaha hope you all get poisoned by my corpes you fucks

i dont rememberthe alst few days that’s a lot of corpses and fire though what the hell oh god my head

4 itchy tasty

Project Zomboid is an indie survival horror game, one which is seeking to really focus on the survival rather than slaughter side of things, with the intent of it becoming a open-world sandbox which will eventually kill you. It’s glorious. There is currently a free demo, and purchasing is intended to work Minecraft style where you pay less the earlier you buy, and get access to later updates. They’ve had some troubles lately with Paypal and Google and stuff, but they’re top folks and are making an amazing game that I urge everyone to check out.

Wiki
Forums

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Kerbal Space Program

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I could tell you about a very cute, very enjoyable little game I’ve recent come across called Kerbal Space Program.

I could tell you how it has a great physics model, and how you design rockets for the KSP in order to, well, do whatever.

I could tell you how they’re planning to include other solar bodies, so you can have space stations and moon bases and stuff.

I could tell you that it’s highly addictive even absent these because just trying to get a stable orbit (Nevermind leaving a satellite there) is quite challenging.

But I shan’t.

No, what I shall tell you about is Jebediah Kerbal.

There are three at the start of the KSP, three brave Kerbals who seek to slip the surly bounds of Kearth and take flight. Bob, Bill, and Jeb.

Our intrepid heroes

Bob and Bill are, frankly, absolute cowards. Jeb is another story. Jeb does not give anything that remotely resembles a crap. Here they are halfway into orbit.

Loving it

And here they are in orbit. With no way to actually descend.

Oops. At least I remembered the parachute! If only there were atmosphere for it to drag in.

Flung into deep space with no hope of return? Jeb loves it. Trapped in an orbit with no other ships in existence to retrieve you? Jeb loves it. A part of the rocket explodes? Jeb worries for all of five seconds, then goes right back to remembering that he is in freaking space. It’s like someone really took me or Pike and measured how we acted in space, because there is nothing that could damped our spirits. We’d be grinning like maniacs right until we plowed into the moon at 14c.

It’s free to play in it’s alpha-tech-demo-thingy-whatever stage right now, and you can pick it up here! There’s also a wiki (I think my toenail clippings have their own wiki these days) and forums for you to peruse. I recommend you give it a try, it’s a lot of fun to watch your meticulous planning result in something that topples over on the launch pad and fatally explodes!

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

Because There’s Nothing Like a Clean Slate

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Guys, I have a terrible disease.

I can’t keep a Minecraft world or a SimCity city going for more than a couple of days. Or even hours.

I don’t know why! It’s not like I CAN’T keep a city in SC going for a while. Actually, one time I had one going for a really long time. That was in SimCity DS, which only allowed you to save one city at a time, and I played that particular city religiously over the course of about two or three months. I enjoyed the micromanagement and little improvements I could make to an already developed city, and the only reason I finally stopped was because I got to a point where my entire city inexplicably decided to become a fire hazard for no reason, and no amount of fire stations would solve the problem, and I just couldn’t be bothered to fix it. So I quit playing.

Actual blurry phone picture I took of my city when I was in the middle of that marathon a couple years back. It has a weird colorscheme for zoning: yellow is residential and red is industrial, if I recall correclty.

For some reason, that was the last time I’ve really been able to “get” into a single city like that. I’ve been playing a bit of SimCity 4 here and there over the past few months. And you know, I know how to set up a good city. I know where to put the zones, the power plants, the roads, and everything else you need, and perhaps most importantly, I know how to actually make money in the game.

But, every time, I’ll get to a point where I’ve played ten, maaaybe twenty in-game years and then get bored and delete it all and start a new city.

It’s certainly a change from the aforementioned SimCity DS, where I played that one city for something like 150 or 200 game years.

I’m not sure why this happens. It happens in Minecraft, too. I start a new Minecraft world… well, I was going to say every couple of days, but truthfully I really only play Minecraft a few times a week. So I’ll start a new Minecraft world every week or every other week or so. I honestly have no idea why. There’s just something so very enticing about a fresh slate.

(Terraria, on the other hand, has had me hooked in the same world for weeks now, so maybe that’s a sign that my attention span is actually lengthening now!)

Does anyone else have this problem, or is it just me?

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Terraria, aka I’m Bored of Digging, Let’s Go Dig In Another Game

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I think I may have offhandedly mentioned this in a previous post, but in case I didn’t, I’ll relate it again here: I was recently gifted a copy of Terraria, and I have been playing it more than I initially thought I would.

For those who haven’t heard of Terraria, well… saying it’s 2-D Minecraft both is and isn’t fair to the game. Here, let me delve into this a bit:

Minecraft and Terraria have a lot of similarities. A lot of them. They’re both about digging, mining, and building. They both have a day/night cycle. They both involve crafting by way of mixing various ingredients together. They both involve avoiding monsters. Moving from one game to the other is a pretty smooth process.

Behold my derpy little Terraria house. I have since added a basement.

I’ve noticed a couple of differences, though. Aside from the big obvious one (Minecraft is 3-D, and Terraria is 2-D), I think Minecraft puts a lot more emphasis on the building side of things and Terraria on the survival side of things.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of survival in Minecraft or a lot of building in Terraria. But let’s talk about the monsters, for example. Not only are they more abundant in Terraria (and more difficult to sequester yourself from), but you’re actively encouraged from the start not just to avoid them, but to fight them.

Take the torch, a common and necessary item in both games. In Minecraft, you make a torch by putting coal on a wooden stick. Both of these ingredients are farmed from harmless things on the map– trees and mountains. In Terraria, you make a torch by combining sticks and gel. Gel is something you obtain by fighting slimes. You want light? You gotta kill monsters.

This difference in the game’s “mindset” is also seen in their respective methods of health regeneration. Minecraft has auto health regen (on sandbox mode, anyway). Terraria doesn’t. You restore your health by drinking potions that you craft out of materials that you have to find by wandering the big, scary, monster-filled world.

The mining and building is still a big part of the game, of course, but it’s all much quicker to accomplish and the crafting is more streamlined, as if the game is telling you to get on with it so you can get back to killing monsters.

Anyways, those are my first impressions of the game. I’ve really only played three or four hours of it at this point, mostly just poking around, so there are probably a lot of things I haven’t covered. In the end, I wouldn’t call this game either an evolution or clone of Minecraft– rather, it’s the same concept, but taken in a different direction. And it may not be Game of the Year material, but it’s certainly worth a look if you’re fond of this “genre”. And I do have to give props to a sandbox game that I frequently jump into directly after getting bored with a Minecraft session. Bored of digging? Let’s go dig some more!

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

There’s Something About a Sandbox

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Lately I’ve been playing a lot of two different games: Minecraft, and Terraria (aka 2-D Minecraft.)

I know, I know, I’ve talked before about how I don’t quite “get” this sort of game, or how I prefer SimCity or whatnot. But after several months of false starts it seems that something has finally clicked, and lately I’ll merrily spend hours listening to music while… digging. Digging.

I was practically born playing this particular game, so maybe that has something to do with it.

I’m not sure what’s gotten in to me– I’m usually off playing old strategy games, after all!– but I do have to admit: it’s remarkably easy and quite relaxing to just sit down for any length of time– from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours– and mess around in a game where there is really no point. It feeds some sort of deep-seated need in the human psyche to build and create for no other reason than to build and create.

…or maybe I really am a basement-dwelling obsessive-compulsive geek who finds satisfaction in making things perfectly symmetrical. I mean, that’s an acceptable answer too.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Battle for Wesnoth

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Recently I downloaded a free game called Battle for Wesnoth. Now, normally here I’d launch into a lengthy monologue about my reactions to the game, however, my exact reaction can be summed up pretty much completely in image format, so here, have a picture I made:

What I Played: Battle for Wesnoth. What I expected: Final Fantasy Tactics. What I got: X-Com.

For the uninitiated among you, Battle for Wesnoth is a fantasy turn-based tactics game, and it is not easy. Let me rephrase that. I died on the tutorial level while fighting combat dummies. Then I died in the first campaign, on the “easy” difficulty setting. I died a couple of times, in fact, once because my main character got hit in the face a couple of times and promptly bit the dirt, and once because I ran out of turns (they’re limited!) before I could get to the checkpoint I had to get to.

Granted, it’s entirely possible that it’s just that hard because I’m still learning the game, and hence suck at it. But man, when was the last time I failed so spectacularly on a first attempt in a game? X-Com? Hearts of Iron II? Those are not exactly easy games.

Now the best part of this whole thing was probably my reactions to it. I was on voice chat with Mister Adequate as I played, and he was slightly nonplussed (just slightly, though– he knows me very well) and thoroughly amused to hear my squeals of delight as my butt was repeatedly demolished by the AI.* This game is difficult and I love it!

I haven’t had a chance to play as much as I’d like to yet due to less important things like work, but I very much look forward to digging into this game in earnest this weekend.

—

* I have it on good authority that Mister Adequate’s eyes glossed over and he stopped reading and started daydreaming upon seeing the words “butt”, “demolished”, and “AI” in the same sentence.