The front of this blog was, until I posted this, a very pleasant post. It was an enthusiastic post by a long-time gamer about one of her very favorite games ever. It heartens me when someone enthuses so about something they love, doubly so when it’s in a medium I cherish.
And that is why it hurts so much to post this, because there are ugly, ugly things afoot and I’m just not able to stand them anymore.
That’s enough by itself really, and I’ll write at length about why it does matter that they’re using the X-Com name for something that is entire not X-Com at another point, but suffice it to say, FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU-
I’m not opposed to online/casual games in principle, but on the other hand, you can pay a full $19.99 USD for a single civilization pack. OR you can pay $99.99 (Yes, one shiny cent shy of a Ben Franklin) for everything. Oh no wait, I’m sorry – everything for now. That’s just the “season 1 pass”. It lasts for the next six months. Ninety nine dollars for six months of a game. And they say MMOs are bad value!
Brian Reynolds now works for Zynga – founded by a man who wanted to be able to buy victory because he sucks at games – and defends the most excruciatingly casual, pay-to-win games imaginable.
Many companies (I’m looking at Namco real close right now because of their SCIV shenanigans) put DLC on the damn disc. Even Paradox is making DLC now, though at least that’s all genuinely optional stuff. How long until their graphical DLC stomps on player-made graphics mods though?
DLC in itself can be okay. Look at what Rockstar make: The Ballad of Gay Tony, The Lost and Damned, and Undead Nightmare are all absolutely superb. But they’re all pretty much expansion packs in their own right. The increasing nickel-and-diming of players for stuff that is either on the disc, should have been in in the first place, or would once have come free in a patch (Remember those? When patches had stuff in them?) is just disgusting. I get going where the money is, but there’s still plenty of money to be made on those of us who actually play videogames; We’re the ones who still buy tons of games in the recession, we’re the ones who still buy Nintendo consoles even after they made the GameCube, and we’re the ones who are going to invest serious time and money into gaming.
In short, Mister Adequate has evolved into The Incredible Hulk
I’ve dropped hints about this game before but never actually dedicated a post to it. I didn’t even do a Classic Video Game Monday about this over at Clockwork Hare because I wanted to wait until the time was right, and then I never got around to it.
Okay then. Here, I’m going to talk about my favorite RPG game of all time, my favorite Mario game of all time, my favorite Super Nintendo game of all time, and my favor– okay, do you see where I’m going with this?
The only game I like more than this is SMAC. And that’s saying a lot.
It’s hard to pin down what, exactly, makes this game special for me. I can give you an idea, though. Think of mid-to-late-90s Squaresoft. This game is the epitome of that. Now either you know what I’m talking about here, or you don’t, so here’s a quick rundown, in case you need a refresher:
Music that can be beautiful, haunting, or fun
Characters with real personalities, stories, and motivations
A long and convoluted storyline that takes you all over the world and has you visiting a variety of cultures
Minigames
Hundreds of random items that you may or may not need during the course of your game
Final bosses that have two or three different “forms”
Magical attacks that look like they should wipe out everything on the screen but actually only do seven hit points of damage to this one guy in the corner
And so on. But, above all, I think, you have that story. THAT STORY. This was the first RPG I ever played. Back then, I had never, ever, seen a story this deep before in a video game. And it left an immense impression on me.
A small sampling of the characters you will meet on your journey.
In other words, it was all that old-school Square quirky charm combined with a solid story and characters that really drew me in.
Okay, now I’m going to tell you about an optional boss in the game, called Culex. Culex is hard. Really hard. He’s like the equivalent of Mewtwo in Pokemon; he has nothing to do with beating the game, but you go after him as an extra challenge.
Culex has this whole mysterious presence going on that really has nothing to do with the rest of the game, and so he’s a bit of an anomaly. He’s a self professed Dark Knight with a a bunch of Elemental Crystal companions; he’s certainly nothing like we’ve seen in a Mario game before.
…that is, of course, the point. Culex gets a special boss battle theme that you don’t hear anywhere else in the game. It goes like this:
…sound familiar? No?
How about now?
Yup.
That’s not all Culex gets. You get a special victory fanfare when you beat him (three guesses as to what that fanfare is), and you get yet another special song after that. It is at that point that Culex breaks the fourth wall and says “Thank you, brave knight. I will treasure this memento of my journey here. Perhaps in another time, another game, we may have been mortal enemies… Let us part as comrades in arms.”
There are a lot of theories as to what Square was trying to say here, ranging from Culex being a reincarnated Final Fantasy enemy to simply being a mere fun homage. Well, I dunno about you guys, but the whole Culex thing and his conversation at the end always just gets to me. There’s something touching about it. It’s Square giving you this whole special enemy and boss fight because they know it’s what you want. It’s their one last huzzah before leaving Nintendo for years to come– this was the last game they produced for Nintendo before hitching up with PlayStation. It’s a genuine thank you from the game developers to the players, a respectful handshake between both– all done through the interface of the game itself.
Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Who knows? It still gets to me, though.
Meanwhile, Pinkie Pie proves that she would be the ultimate Final Boss
Now Super Mario RPG came out to largely rave reviews toward the end of the Super Nintendo’s lifespan and then promptly disappeared and no one heard from it again. There have been no sequels (beyond its spiritual successors in Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi), there have been no rereleases except for one on Virtual Console, and most of the original characters made for the game also have not been seen since. The typical explanation is that Square and Nintendo have some sort of weird copyright drama preventing either of them from really doing anything with it in the future.
Perhaps it’s better that way. Super Mario RPG is a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.
Oh, and Geno is the greatest character of all time.
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:
Anyone who knows me at all will know that I write a lot. Writing at least one novel a year– for NaNoWriMo— is standard for me, and this year I decided to bump it up a notch and write TWO novels, so before November hits this year I am plinking along in Camp NaNoWriMo.
Between odd work schedules, the possibility of moving (again) and the way writers’ block loves to time itself so it hits when I actually have time to write, it’s been slow going. I’m a good five thousand words behind or so– not a thoroughly insurmountable gap, but still a sizable one. Anyways, I was really having a lot of trouble motivating myself to do anything, but then I hit upon a brilliant plan. Basically, I’d force myself to write a good sized paragraph (or the equivalent of it, should I be writing dialogue or something), and then I’d reward myself with ten turns of Civ.
…I was not expecting this plan to work as well as it did.
I think I’ve written more in my current book since implementing this plan than before I did, and I just started doing this a few days ago. I’m knocking out a thousand words an hour– a very high rate for me– and that includes spending a good chunk of time in game.
Playing Civ like it's my job.
The best part is that once I really get going with writing, I don’t have much trouble continuing. This is something I learned back in the day when I used to trick myself into writing by setting a “one sentence a day” goal, knowing full well I’d write more than a sentence. The same thing is happening here; I’m frequently writing two or three paragraphs in between my ten turns of Civ. But the one rule remains steadfast: I must write at least one paragraph before I let myself play more Civ. You wouldn’t believe how fast the writer’s block dissolves when I’ve got Civ an alt+tab away.
I feel really good about this. What’s that you say, world? Video games are a waste of time and are keeping us from being more productive?
Come back and talk to me about it after video games help me motivate myself into writing a novel.
Well, I’m off to do more writing and Civ’ing. I eventually plan to extend this to other turn-based games as well, should I tire of Civ. I’m excited. I can’t wait to SMAC and write.
It’s Friday and I know a lot of people are antsy about the weekend and wanting to get through their day, so today I am here to tell you about a brilliant little flash game called Depict1. It’s an action/puzzle game, and the entire thing sort of gives me Portal vibes (in the form of the game’s “theme” and its quirky narrator), but there is a pretty big twist to the game that takes it from being a run of the mill flash game and makes it very clever: basically, it takes every typical gaming convention you know and turns it on its head.
Hint: You don't actually use the arrows keys to move.
The game requires thinking outside of the box and breaking the gaming-fourth-wall in order to advance, and every puzzle is built in such a way that it requires just a little bit of knowledge from the previous level to succeed. And the best part is, it’s quite short. It took me about, oh, forty minutes to complete it the other day on my first playthrough, including the “secret ending” (which I highly recommend taking the time to find). Just now I did it in about 15 or 20 minutes, now that I’ve got the puzzles down pat.
Go take a look at it if you have a half hour to kill and want to have fun with a quirky and clever little game. It’s definitely one of the better flash games I’ve played in some time.
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.
Sometimes I’ll be driving down the road in town and I’ll see a sign outside an area that’s being developed. It’ll say something on it like “2 acres, zoned commercial.”
And I know exactly what they’re talking about. I mean, why wouldn’t I? I’ve played SimCity.
In fact, 99% of what I know about city development and planning comes directly from SimCity.
Just like everything I know about Europe in the 15th century comes from Europa Universalis 3. They don’t teach you about this sort of thing in school– not here, anyway. You get one year– nine months– of “World History” and they have to cram everything from pre-history to the present era in those nine months. Do you think they have the time to tell you about a bunch of dinky little countries in Europe that have since disappeared or merged into larger ones? They don’t.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is responsible for the rest of my knowledge of pre-19th century European History.
Now, some games, of course, expressly set out to be educational. Some of them succeed, and some of them don’t. The Oregon Trail is one of the ones that succeeded. Thanks to that game I am expert on dozens of landmarks dotting the midwestern US, as well as several other interesting tidbits, such as: how to use 19th century first aid to treat a variety of illnesses, when it is appropriate to ford the river or caulk the wagon when crossing a river, and how to identify a wide variety of poisonous plants. Whether or not any of these skills will come in handy some day remains to be seen, but one can only hope.
Strategy games have taught me a good deal about war through the ages. I can’t claim to be at the same point that Mister Adequate is (the chap actually has a master’s degree in this sort of thing, thanks to an interest in it that was sparked by video games), but where else would I have learned about various types of war doctrines or crazy sounding terms like “amphibious invasions”? The History Channel, maybe.
Next up, on the History Channel!
Actually, I was recently flipping through a coffee table book my mom had lying around; it was called “The 100 Most Important Ideas in Human History” or something. Reading it was like reading an enhanced version of the Civilization tech tree. I mean, you literally could have released this book as an addon to a Civ Special Edition package or something and no one would have questioned it because the game and the book cover the exact same material.
You know, I could go on and on with sort of thing all day. Just like all other media, video games teach us things and mold us into who we are. Sure, we all love to relay that infamous Pac-Man joke:
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!
Yesterday I officially joined the 300 club in Civ IV.
This isn't counting about a dozen hours of vanilla Civ IV before jumping up to BtS, nor is it counting about a dozen hours of a particular mod that Steam wouldn't track properly.
Ahh, it feels good. I love statistics like this. I love them to the point that I have been known to buy games on Steam that I already own just so it can start tracking my playtime. (It’s like Gaben really knows how to reel us obsessive-compulsives geekwads in!)
A few other games I played a lot tracked your time as well. I was really close to 300 hours in FF Tactics Advance. I’m also relatively sure I was close to it in my original Pokemon Red file, before it was inadvertently deleted.
Of course, MMOs deserve to be in a tier all to themselves when it comes to playtime. If I recall correctly, before quitting, I’d clocked up about 220 days played in WoW across all of my characters.
That's well over 5000 hours!
I think over half of it was spent on my main, Tawyn the Night Elf Hunter. As time went on and Blizzard bumped experience rates and made questing and LFG more streamlined, and as I got more experienced at the game myself, I’d spend less time on an individual character. For example, I think my resto druid had a mere 12 days or something similarly miniscule for her /played, despite the fact that I got her to (then) endgame and was raiding with her for a little while.
So yeah, I doubt any other single game I’ve ever played could come close to what I dumped into WoW. Like I said, MMOs deserve their own tier in this “game”.
And I still wish I could see an accurate playtime counter for everything I’ve ever played. That would be fascinating.
Okay, lay it on me. What are your most played games, gentle readers?
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?
