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.
Okay kids, it’s that time again, when I categorically fail to come up with a post topic and so resort to something pretty mundane! What are YOU going to be playing this weekend?
Dead Island
I only use violence as a last resort
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
I'd explain what these do for me, but then the blog would need the new .xxx TLD
DORF FORT You will NEVER kill this many Elves.
Suikoden V
In a game filled with waifus, she still stands out.
ALSO!!!!!
Tomorrow is the premiere of Season 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. So… yeah, if you thought the blog overdid it on Pony pics before now…
... then you may want to bail, because it's only going to get worse.
So what about you, dear readers? What entertainments shall be occupying your precious free time this weekend?
To the chagrin of FFVII fans everywhere, Square-Enix yesterday announced that they are remaking Final Fantasy X for the PS3 and PSV. Me though, I’m overjoyed. I might even get a PS3 one day now that it has a game coming out for it.
I love FFX. I wrestle over whether I like VII or X more, but I really think I have to say the latter is the better game. I love everything about it (Except certain moments of voice acting). The aesthetic, the setting, the architecture, the battle system, the Sphere Grid, the music, the characters, everything. So I’m pretty excited to see what they will do with this.
Though all these FF rereleases and such make it kind of hard to mock Nintendo fans.
It’ll be a delicate balance. FFX isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot easier to mess it up than to improve it. Of course we want more than just graphical updates; FFX has aged fairly well for a 3D game anyway. I must presume the stuff from the European/International edition will be included, but hopefully there will be more besides this, more monsters, more areas, just MORE FFX, without changing the core game.
I also hope they redo Blitzball. I don’t care what anyone says, it was the best FF minigame ever (With the possible exception of Mog House). But there needs to be MORE of it. Two dozen teams, thousands of players (Make every single person IN THE WORLD a potential Blizter), and make it into underwater FIFA in terms of gameplay, where the stats are hidden and things are more dynamic.
Also add a whole bunch of endgame content and more summons and change absolutely NOTHING about Wakka because he is truly a god among men.
What do you hope to see come out of this? And what games do you want to see remade, for that matter?
So as you may recall I’ve written about Dead Island before, but now that it’s out and I’ve had the chance to spend some time with it, I thought I’d give some of my opinions on it.
The very abbreviated version is: Dead Island is one of the best bad games I’ve ever played.
Let me elaborate. It’s a shoddy piece of programming. It slows down at times for no discernible reason; sometimes you’ve got a bunch of zombies and it goes smoothly, sometimes there’s two and it stutters horrifically. There’s noticeable pop up. Textures can vary wildly in quality. The controls were very obviously designed for the console, to a degree that kind of makes me long for Oblivion, because this is far worse and it gets very tedious very quickly.
There are some poor design choices as well. Everything respawns being the main one. Everything – zombies, vehicles, weapons, items, little stacks of cash tucked away inside people’s backpacks and stuff (More on money later). It doesn’t make sense. You end up just learning the game, and once you’ve been through someplace once there are no more surprises. Hardly making the best use of an open world. It also harms the immersion, both in the obvious ways (“Didn’t I kill this guy the last four times I went this way?”) and the slightly less so (People desperate for food/water/booze in a world where everything respawns within minutes).
Remember the previous DI post, where I talked about losing quest hubs and stuff? Yeah, well, there are safe zones in this game. Some infected (Running zombies, just like L4D) managed to get in because there’s a very conveniently placed rock for you to use, and apparently they can do. For a moment I thought “Oh shit here we go!” but they just charged directly at me, got their heads smashed, and elicited no response from the surrounding NPC survivors.
Pretty much my face when that occurred.
In fact, so far at least, it seems that there is no interaction between the living and dead aside from yourself and some scripted encounters. There are other survivors around the island, but unless you get an escort quest or something, they’re not going to be getting themselves bitten or cracking any heads. Worse, if someone isn’t an escortee or the like, you can’t give them a slap/hug/whatever and say “Yeah I know you had to do some bad shit, but we gotta get to safety, come with me.” They just sit there lamenting whatever they had to do to survive over and over.
You also have to pay cash money for stuff. I mean, I can sort of understand why you’d still care about money to some extent – it suggests there will be a normal world tomorrow to spend it in. But yeah, really having a hard time buying that people would hold back on helping you out when their lives are so acutely on the line. Nevermind the workbenches – you pay to repair and upgrade items, but there’s nobody there to pay! Apparently some ethereal miser demands payment in exchange for sticking your weapons back together.
Oh but cracking heads. Forget everything I’ve just said about the game, because really, what it’s about is cracking heads. And this, at least, it does well. Smacking a zombie feels great, visceral. Knocking one aside with a metal pipe is satisfying as hell. Cracking or entirely removing limbs? Yep, you can do that, and they’ll flail the jelly-like appendage at you without much effect. And this is before you start playing silly buggers and modifying the game files.
The game is pretty atmospheric, it does a great job of juxtaposing a tropical paradise with living hell. When you’re walking around and you hear a zombie breathing or roaring or whatever, it’s unsettling, even if you’ve killed a hundred of them already and one more won’t be able sort of problem. The evidence of what’s going on is grim and pretty omnipresent; one minute it’s a picturesque tropical scene, the next you come across someone whose skin appears to have all been eaten.
There are also a nice wide variety of weapons, and what is more, the weapons degrade and break at a pretty believable speed for once! The human skull is one of the toughest structures nature has devised, so you’re not going to be able to break thousands of them before you need to exchange your paddle for something better. Similarly, this is one of the best implementations of stamina I’ve seen in a game. You’ve got a lot of it and it recharges fairly fast so you can sprint a long way, but if you go around swinging madly you’ll run out faster than you expect, and then you’ll be in trouble. It works excellently in doing what it is meant to do: Making you fight with an eye on your tactics.
It should be noted I’ve not played a terrific amount of the game yet, and I’ve also not played multiplayer. I’m confident that messing around with some friends would make the game much better. It’s not a ‘good’ game, so I can’t in good conscience say to everyone “go out and buy it now”, but it is a fun game and once the price comes down a bit, if you see it when there’s a bit of a slow spell of other releases, or if you just want to crack a whole lot of heads and collecting way too many weapons that you then have to sell ONE AT A TIME with a confirmation message for EACH AND EVERY ONE, then yeah, Dead Island is a sound purchasing decision.
The other day Mister Adequate and I were on Sporcle doing quizzes together, which is a fun little pastime that we do on occasion. We had discovered the mother lode of strategy game related quizzes and were having a blast doing things like trying to name all the Civilization IV techs in 14 minutes and whatnot, and then we discovered one particular quiz that was called “Name Every Sim Game” or something.
So we took the quiz. We knew full well that we weren’t going to remember every single Sim game, but we wanted to see how well we would fare anyways, because we both have a huge soft spot for the Sim series. We did pretty well; we probably got about 75% or so, and then at the very end we eagerly went through to see which ones we had missed. It was standard stuff that we should’ve gotten; SimRefinery, Streets of SimCity, Sid Meier’s SimGolf…
…
…
Wait, what?
Sid Meier’s SimGolf.
Sid Meier’s SimGolf.
It’s actually a thing. That neither of us knew existed. Quickly we scoped out the Wikipedia article:
Sid Meier’s Sim Golf is a computer game created by Sid Meier, Firaxis, and Maxis in 2002.
Okay, so, let’s get this straight. Firaxis and Maxis got together. And made a game.
Firaxis and Maxis made a game together.
But instead of taking all the strategic turn-based depth of Civilization and combining it with the sandboxy micromanagement of SimCity to make the ultimate civilization simulator… they made a golf game.
Have a picture of our exact reaction.
And then we were confused for the rest of the day.
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.
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.
None of our readers will be remotely surprised to find out that most of my favorite quotes come from SMAC. I mean, really, were we expecting anything different? No. No we weren’t.
This is my all-time favorite quote:
I haven’t a clue why I love it so much. It tickles me in just the right way, though. I quote it on a near-daily basis (just ask Mister Adequate for confirmation on this.)
On a more serious note, have another quote from that game. I dare you to read it and not get chills:
I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld.
When I die, they will put my body in a box and
dispose of it in the cold ground.
And in all the million ages to come, I will never
breathe or laugh or twitch again.
So won’t you run and play with me here among the
teeming mass of humanity?
The universe has spared us this moment.
Anonymous
Beautiful, no?
Now it’s a little unfair to every other game to have have a blog post called “Favorite Video Game Quotes” and then spend the entire time lovingly quoting SMAC, much in the same way that it would be unfair to blog about the “Hottest Places in the Solar System” and then focus on the sun. So let’s talk about some other games.
For starters, Blizzard games have given us a multitude of memorable quotes, between “Stay a while and listen”, all the unit quotes from Starcraft/Warcraft, and, of course, so much stuff from WoW that I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
More recently, Deus Ex: Human Revolution has given us “I never asked for this”, another quote that I find hilarious for some reason.
This leads us to our obligatory pony image.
Video game writers have truly given us some great stuff, whether humorous or thought-provoking. What are some of your favorites?
Now our initial idea with this post was to semi-jokingly rescind any previous doubts we’ve expressed regarding this game, and leave it at that, but I actually think I can turn this into a more in-depth blog post, so here we go:
I’ve heard some people express dismay at developers who throw too many knowing pop culture references into otherwise immersive games. Blizzard is a good example here; most of us played Cataclysm when it first came out, even if you quit directly after reaching level 85 the way Mister Adequate and I did.
Mister Adequate actually rerolled entirely and leveled to 85 from scratch rather than playing his existing level 80 draenei, presumably because he breaks out in hives when he is not playing a tauren warrior. Picture is related.
Cataclysm, as I’m sure you’re all aware, is chock-full of references, jabs, and full-on homages to pop culture. Uldum is pretty much entirely dedicated to it, between the Indiana Jones storyline, the Katamari Damacy quest, the Hackers references, and anything else I’ve forgotten. Actually, I’m pretty certain that there were more playful pokes at culture than there weren’t.
There were a lot of people who weren’t exactly fond of this, feeling that an MMORPG should be more immersive and that what WoW was doing here was purposefully pulling players out of the world that they had so carefully crafted. Others thought it was all in good fun and point out that, come on, Blizzard has pretty much always had their tongue firmly in cheek.
This isn't Warcraft in Space!
I tend to sit somewhere in the middle; I like my games full of rich lore but it doesn’t always have to be super-serious business. It might say something about me that Uldum was my favorite zone in Cataclysm by far. And ultimately, for me, it comes down to the gameplay. Civilization isn’t exactly the world’s most accurate history simulator– in the game Mister Adequate and I are currently playing, my civ just discovered an ancient manuscript containing the secrets of nuclear fission– but it’s sure as heck fun.
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.
