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 Closet has been open for a little over four months now and I think we’ve been doing well; we’ve had a lot of great comments and discussions and Mister Adequate and I continue to be flattered that people actually like to show up and read what we cough all over the screen. We are both aiming to be People Who Write for a Living at some point in the future, and so this is great practice for both of us.
Now this is sort of a cop-out post, but… oh who am I kidding? This is a cop-out post. Anyways! Basically I want to know if there’s anything in particular you’d like to hear about. I know that this blog tends to orbit around a pretty steady rotation of a handful of specific games, but when you combine both of our respective gaming experiences we’ve played a LOT of games through the years so if you want to hear about something in particular, lay it on us in the comments. There’s a good chance at least one of us has messed around with it.
I’m also curious if there are any specific types of posts you’d like to see more of. More Let’s Plays, like my Civ one? Reviews? Videos? Some sort of *gasp* podcast? We’re all ears!
At some point soon I’ll be looking into getting a dedicated email for the blog so you can email us these sorts of requests anytime you wish. I’m also considering getting a dedicated Twitter account for the blog. Currently, my own personal Twitter auto-tweets everything from the blog, but I think that causes some confusion because a lot of people assume that Mister Adequate’s posts are my own and, while flattering, I want to be sure he gets due credit.
To make up for the lack of video game content in this post, have Fluttershy playing FFVI.
In the old days, before your time, there was a company called Blizzard. Yes yes, I know, they’re still around today, but they’re not the same Blizzard. Back then, when they made a game, you sat up and took notice. Back then when they made an expansion, it added a great deal of content.
I remember it clearly. I had just awoken, the sleep barely rubbed from my eyes, when Pike came with grim news. Blizzard. Diablo III. I thought perhaps that they had bowed to the silliness about “too much color”, and made it all brown’n’bloom. But no. Diablo III, I learned to my endless horror, would be subject to the following;
1) There would be no offline play. You must be connected to b.net to play the game.
I saw this and I was mad. It is monumentally stupid. It encourages piracy rather than reducing it. It has consistently proven to be a poor idea when previously implemented.
2) There will be an auction house where you can use real money to purchase in-game characters and items from other players.
I saw this and I was leery. I can understand Blizz’s desire to undermine gold farming and so forth, and legitimizing something we all know already happens anyway is not such a huge deal. Still, it seems dreadfully crass and overwhelmingly all-encompassing in this instance. I just don’t want to log into a game, play for awhile, decide to look for an item, and be presented with real-world prices. I’ve enough money woes as is without my escape being filled with constant reminders of it too. Still, I play single player for the most part, and this doesn’t provide anything that some grinding and luck won’t get you anyway – it’s optional, and I can tolerate it despite the bad taste it leaves.
(Though given that Diablo is essentially Grinding for Gear: The Game, my solution would have simply been to make players unable to trade anything except to people in their group at the time the item dropped. I imagine this would have caused plenty of rage too though.)
3) No mods allowed. You read that correctly.
Now let me be quite clear about this. This doesn’t mean Blizzard won’t be supportive of modders or include any tools that make life easier for them. What they mean, in fact, is that the EULA will specifically forbid them. They are not merely not officially supported, they are avowedly not permitted. And because you have to be online to play, even if someone makes a mod, you’re likely going to have to do something like download a crack in order to actually use it. Suffice it to say, this is a truly mindboggling step to take from the company’s whose modded games have spawned such things as DOTA and Median XL. I have waxed lyrical about the virtues of mods previously, and I really cannot quite wrap my head around who at Blizzard thought this was a good idea, why anyone agreed with them, and why the nice gentlemen with the wood-paneled station wagons have not yet carted the whole shower of them off to get the help they so patently require.
In short, I cancelled any notions I had to ever purchase D3. Which is a damned shame, because I loved the first two, and I love most of Blizz’s games, and I actually anticipate that if I did play it, I’d enjoy it immensely. But I simply cannot sanction this sort of nonsense with my patronage.
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:
It refers to FFVII, and specifically to a challenge of playing the game with the following conditions:
Initial Equipment – You can never change a character’s armor or weapons from the stuff they come with.
No Accessories – You can never use accessories. If a character comes with one equipped, it has to be unequipped at the first opportunity.
No Escaping – Obvious.
No Physical Attacks – does not just refer to “attack”, but also to anything that is a ‘physical’ type attack, including items such as Grenades or command materia such as 4-Cut.
No Limit Breaks – take a guess.
Command Materia Only – You can only use command materia. And obviously quite a few are ruled out by other rules.
You can’t actually do this challenge from the start of the game, because you have no way to hurt enemies until you can start learning Enemy Skills. In essence, it’s an “Enemy Skills Only” play. Anyway, it’s an extreme example – my point is to highlight how a self-imposed challenge can add life to a game, or possibly change it entirely. I’m good – very good – at FFVII, but I sincerely doubt I could do this challenge without tearing my hair out until I’m as bald as Dr. Robotnik.
Who is, incidentally, the greatest villain ever.
I have done other challenges in other games though. Sometimes games encourage something in particular, but don’t necessarily require it. You can usually shoot or slice your way through what is ostensibly a ‘stealth’ game such as Metal Gear Solid, Tenchu, or Hitman. Playing through stealthily is usually better rewarded is all. Imposing the challenge on yourself can make things a lot more exciting though. Sometimes this is a fairly loose arrangement for me – such as only ever going to war in Europa Universalis when I have a realistic casus belli and suchlike. Sometimes it’s a bit more extreme, like the time I played Civ IV and was not allowed to have more than one military unit per city (Funnily, happiness problems were larger than military ones for the most part). I can be especially enjoyable in more freeform games such as Dwarf Fortress, where there aren’t any real tangible objectives in-game, and making your own
In RPGs, because I grew up on some truly spergy, grinding-centric games, it’s really hard for me to limit my levels or anything. But I did a Pokemon play where I only used my starter Pokemon, that was interesting when I came up against stuff he was weak against.
Are any of you fans of particular challenges? Have you played through anything with challenges? Do you have any particular ones you’d recommend to others to enhance their enjoyment of an otherwise-completed game?
Like everybody else, I played Pokemon as a kid. (Well, as a 13 or 14-year-old, because that’s about how old I was when it came out.)
I played Pokemon Red, the first in the series, religiously, and then when the second generation came out I played Pokemon Gold just as religiously. I loved those freaking games, and I imagine that I don’t have to go into much detail here because I’m sure most of you loved them just as much.
Something happened then, though. When the third generation of Pokemon came out, I had just started attending university. And it’s not that I grew out of Pokemon, because I certainly didn’t. And it’s not that that I didn’t have time for video games, because if I recall correctly that was the year I was pretty dang addicted to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. As in, I took my GBA to school and played it between classes and then doodled moogles on my notes.
Anyways, I think that maybe I just had too much on my plate. Eventually, I did buy Pokemon Emerald, and I messed around with it, but it never quite “clicked”. I’m not sure why. I quit playing after the first badge or something.
And so I didn’t play anymore Pokemon after that– with the exception of FireRed, which doesn’t really count because it’s basically just a graphical update of the original.
That changed last summer, though, when I went road-tripping for a family reunion. I’d be spending hours and hours on the road, and I wouldn’t be driving, so I’d need to do something to make the time pass.
So what did I do? I pulled out Pokemon Emerald, which I hadn’t touched in years. I didn’t even glance at my old save file, I simply started a new one.
As a matter of fact, I DO like them! Thanks for asking!
What happened next was magical. I merrily spent hours running through tall grass, catching Pokemon, training them, and battling trainers and gym leaders. I stopped keeping track of Pokemon after the second gen, you see, so I had no idea what the new species were, what they evolved into, or what they learned. Every time one of my Pokemon evolved, it was a surprise. Every time I ran into a new gym leader, it was a challenge. I didn’t have access to any sort of help websites or guides while on the road, so it was just me and my Pokemon. I was 26 years old and it honestly felt like I was 14 and playing through the original game for the first time again. It was sheer magic.
All things come to an end, sadly, and soon the road trip was over and I was thrust back into the adult world of working and paying bills. I kept playing Pokemon for a bit even after, but for some reason it wasn’t quite the same. Obligations kept pulling me away. So I never did finish that magical new Pokemon file. My Pokemon are all sitting pretty at level 38 or 39 or whatever I left them at. Waiting.
Hello, my name is Mr. Adequate, and I’ve got a problem.
In any game where you can make characters who are quite varied in nature, well, I’m going to do so. Over and over and over again, and I’m going to abandon existing ones and start anew with a new character, no matter what I have achieved with a previous one or how far through the main plot I am. It’s especially bad in games like Morrowind and Fallout New Vegas; if I combined the time I’ve spent playing the former, I’d probably have a level 9001 living god. But every time I play, I think “Oh hey what if I made an Argonian who wants to join the Legion?” Then I do that, and then I think “Oh wait I totally want to make a Breton monk who uses unarmed, unarmored, alchemy, and restoration to get things done.” and off I go to do that, until I take a notion for something else.
So in actual fact I’ve seen the first half of Morrowind more times than I can remember, and the second half like twice. Oblivion is the same story. So was Fallout 3. New Vegas is somewhat better, perhaps because the writing is so strong and immersion so great that it’s hard even for me to abandon a character. MMOs are the same way; I start, play for awhile, then I want to be a Mage/Priest/Hunter/Whatever and off I go to do that instead of carrying on with my Warrior.
I know I’m not alone in suffering this affliction. Regale us with your tales of altoholism!
So, here’s a game I’ve not played for a couple of years, but my friend came over to my place today and we spent a couple of hours with it. Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI. We’ve played all of them from VII onwards, and the series is commendably varied in its approach. In some you control a single general and can give orders based on your position; in others you may have different levels of control. In XI you don’t control any one individual, but the entire faction you have chosen.
My benevolent kingdom of killing Wei Yan!
And it struck me today that it really is a remarkably deep, genuinely strategic affair, in a way that few other games I can call to mind are. Every city is an individual unit, with its own production, farming, income, etc., and this all gets influenced by how you develop them and stuff. But the interesting part is how everything is quite discrete and the interactions have to be done consciously, by you. If one city is starving and another has plenty, you need to set up a supply transport to move grain. If you build a ton of spears in a secure province, you need to have them shipped to the front in order to use them. Your units themselves need to set out with food in order to stay in the field. It’s not a civ or city building game by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, but it is a game about war and not just fighting. It is a game about logistics. You have to worry about supplies, recruiting troops, keeping your cities in good order, developing your cities, keeping your generals loyal, locating and recruiting generals, diplomatic dealing with other factions, providing weapons, research, and money. On top of the fighting.
It really is categorically commendable, because it’s one of far too few wargames that seems to really care about this sort of thing. In Han China, you most certainly would have supply problems unless you planned very well. And as many are fond of saying, logistics is the difference between victory and defeat.
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!
