As dear Pike said a couple of days ago we should be resuming normal service now that our visit has ended. It was supremely enjoyable and I look forward to her reciprocal visit to rainy old England in a few months. Still, let’s get to the videogames, eh?
What have you guys been playing over the past few weeks? Pike and myself mostly played our typical standbys, which is to say Civilization IV and a little bit of Earth Defense Force 2017, but things have come out that warrant attention. Dragon’s Dogma, which I have but haven’t yet played a great deal of, Max Payne 3, and Lollipop Chainsaw to name a few.
Or we could bring up E3 – a few things there looked real nice, I’m thinking Watch_Dogs, Assassin’s Creed 3, and The Last of Us. I may actually need a PS3 for that last one. Did anything at the show catch your eyes, folks?
Despite The Last of Us this situation won't ever change.
And as it’s Friday, why not; What are you playing this weekend? :D Anything you’ve finally managed to make some time for, or just some old favorites that help you relax?
As an aside are there any topics you want to see us talk about? We’ve had some requests before and I don’t think we’ve managed to remember them all; please let us know in the comments!
My dear co-blogger and better half Pike and myself are currently playing a game of Civilization IV. It’s a tech race game, no wars or anything, and she very definitively has the advantage, she has more cities than more, better land, more tech, and more than double my score.
Clearly I need to do something to catch up. So why – in a game with no barbarians – did I build the Great Wall, a wonder whose primary purpose is to stop barbarians getting inside your borders? The secondary purpose, of course! Espionage. See, the Great Wall is one of the few wonders in the game which contributes to the creation of Great Spies, who don’t immediately seem as useful as say a Great Scientist (Who can one-shot a tech) or a Great Engineer (Who can one-shot a wonder), but who really massively boost your espionage. And that’s my plan here. She won’t be able to keep up with my espionage income once I get a GS or two, and then I shall be able to quite merrily run around her obscenely large Russian empire causing all sorts of trouble, like sabotaging buildings, stealing tech, and poisoning her cities.
Rarity only helps put paid to that dreadful Russian fashion, of course.
It shall be glorious. I have no idea whether she remembers that the Great Wall helps with spies, but I sincerely hope not because things are going to get trolly very soon. Also as long as she doesn’t read this post before one gets born. That would be unfortunate. Hubristic, even! But a risk I shall take for our beloved readers, as I leave you with this question;
Do you have any examples of games where you’ve come up with some cunning plan? Perhaps one that does not at first glance seem at all rational? How did they work out for you?
~~
IMPORTANT EDITORS’ NOTE FROM PIKE: Although I didn’t see this post until some time later, I saw what he was up to on the espionage graph and cranked my own espionage up to 80%, effectively foiling his plan. Yeah, it was pretty great.
You know, I think I’ve identified another hook that strategy games tend to have for me. It’s something I’ve noticed I feel in such games for a long time but have never really connected it in a logical sense to a reason of appeal.
That is quite simply potential. Think about when you begin a game, especially a 4X like Civilization. Think about how you see almost nothing of the world, just your immediate surroundings, unblemished by human actions, and beyond that the dark mystery of the unknown. Your first, tiny, puny settlement, protected by a handful of clubmen. You send out a scout and begin gradually cranking out buildings and units, gradually expanding.
I don't have a relevant pic, so have this cat hugging this kitten.
It’s that exact moment right at the beginning, the moment of seeing the potential but not yet being able to achieve it, that I love. Or at least is the first half of what I love. You begin planning, mentally placing future settlements, looking at how to fight a defensive war, scouting out your neighbors, all that sort of thing. The entire game is before you and it is a quantum, Schroedinger-esque value at this moment. It is not yet a game, but the potential of a game. Over at Flash of Steel, a good while ago, Troy Goodfellow wrote an excellent piece that is related to this. As he says it’s not that things are complete unscripted, in fact a lot of things are constrained by various rules and/or in-game costs, but one of the core aspects of a good strategy game is that it is fundamentally a story, or a series or collection of stories. The story of how the Iroquois conquered the world, or when the Cold War went hot, or whatever it might be.
And that pregnant moment in the first few turns of a good 4x where so, so many stories are possible, and you get to wrestle with your rivals to write one – that moment is truly delicious. Much later you will look back across a cultivated, irrigated, networked empire that has left no tile untouched in the quest for dominance and efficiency, and the story of getting from A to B is there to see. Some things will be obvious, like the masses of farms and mines. Some a little more subtle, perhaps, like how all the cities in the southern end of your Persian empire have French names. But all there to be seen and remembered. The potential has been realized, and now you have a completed game, and the memories of playing it.
A core aspect of this is the ability to affect the world itself, which may be why strategy games (and management/sim games) seem to scratch this itch most effectively for me, as opposed to the more typically narrative-led genres. It’s not just the transfer of territory, but also the utilization of that same territory once you own it. Not just the achievement of a prize, but the use of the prize. It’s an inherent strength in strategy games I feel; until you achieve your ultimate victory you’re always looking for more efficiency, how to get more gold or credits or beakers or whatever, using your past conquests to become ever-stronger.
Also, when Troy Goodfellow said “No action game has ever made me want to be a writer. Some strategy games have.”, that could have been me saying it. In fact my book, which I am currently editing, was originally intended to just be an AAR of Space Empires V, but it rapidly blossomed far beyond that.
I’ve had a tremendously poor Internet quality these last couple of weeks and it just kept getting worse – it took me several minutes to check my email for example – but fortunately it is fixed now so we can get back to our regular scheduling! Many thanks also to Rilgon for his excellent post yesterday, giving us a little look into a genre that Pike and myself don’t pay quite enough attention to (Largely because the genre will never equal what Treasure made in my eyes).
I have recently finished a World Conquest in the KR mod for Darkest Hour, playing as an enlightened, democratic Japan. That flung dozens of nukes around and killed tens if not hundreds of millions in her global conquest. Enlightened!
And now Pike and myself have settled down for a wonderful evening of Civilization IV, where we face the famous Confucian Egyptians, among others!
Tell us, dear readers, both what you will be playing this weekend and of your favorite alternate history situations in videogames, either as settings or ones you have yourself created!
Let me tell you a tale. A tale of Mister Adequate getting trolled to an extreme degree. Yesterday my dear co-blogger Pike and I were playing a game of Civ IV. We were on Skype while we did this, as usual. On turn four she began giggling, and on asking what happened, she revealed that a tribal hut had just given her the Bronze Working tech. For those not familiar with the game, Bronze Working is one of the more expensive, and most useful, early techs. It opens several units up, reveals a very potent resource, gives a new civic, AND lets you chop down trees. It’s never a tech you don’t want, the only question is how hard to beeline for it. Oh but we’re not done! Fourteen turns after this, she began laughing with downright insane, maniacal glee. She had just randomly been given Iron Working from another hut.
I was rather perturbed by this. But while later, while she was dominating the leaderboard and teching up merrily in her little remote peninsula, she got a message from Julius Caesar: “Pay 500 gold” was the gist of it. She told him where to go. A few turns after this he declared war on her. Still nothing special there, and she didn’t feel threatened because there were three or four civs between Rome and England – Russia, Carthage, Spain, and someone else I can’t recall. Caesar had to go through at least three of these to reach her.
A few turns later his army showed up and burnt down Nottingham. He had not only trekked like 30 tiles across the world, and brought enough units to do the job whilst leaving his home well defended (I should know, I was his immediate neighbor and eyeing him up for invasion, only to turn my eyes on Sumeria instead because all dose defenders), he secured all the right of passage agreements needed to get there.
Pike was upset. I was amused.
But now the season of schadenfreude is behind us and The Season is now most firmly upon us; Good cheer, terrible music, and attempting to cause the stress-related deaths of retail workers all around the world. Christmas!
Christmas is a wonderful time for gamers, because it’s when we get more videogames to play. And this year there are sure some games to play! Here’s my own list, because I missed some stuff over the parts of the year when I had no money!
This would have been me if the economy wasn't wrecked!
Halo: Anniversary
Batman: Arkham City
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
And I’m also asking for a new mouse and a RAM upgrade! I always ask for a RAM upgrade, and nobody ever gets me any RAM. I guess it’s just a Christmas tradition now!
Pike, like me, is also eager to get videogames for Christmas. I know of one she’s getting for sure because it is my gift to her – but of course this must stay a secret for now. ;)
What are your gaming Christmas wishes, dear readers? Anything in particular you’re looking forward to getting? Some hardware you’re after? Do tell!
Here’s a thing we’ve all experience! Something that shows just how wonderful games can be, as rare with games as a real pageturner with books, and the mark of a classic. One More Turn!
A couple of nights ago my co-host Pike had gone to bed early and I found myself not yet tired enough to do the same. “I know” I thought “I shall play a little Hearts of Iron for half an hour or so.” Two and a half hours later I noticed the same, and also the sunrise, and finally crawled into bed. The thing with a lot of games which have this appeal is that they have some really tangible sense of progression. I think that’s why we generally it call “One more turn” – it came from playing Civ until the wee hours.
Twilight just can't decide. Operation Sealion, or Operation Barbarossa?
With strategy games, good ones at least, you’ve always got something really tangible dangling in front of you. You’re always about to build a wonder, or conquer a city, or research a technology, or otherwise get some sort of reward. (Incidentally I think this is the major area where Civ V falls down; you get punished for many things, compared to Civ IV’s model where at worst you’ve lost due to opportunity cost. You might build unwisely but you still get something from it.) For me on Tuesday it was the conquest of Ethiopia, then of Egypt, then I had to fight Hashemite Arabia and Persia. After that I took on the Ottomans and their allies in Libya, Armenia, and Crete. Then I was ready to grab the remains of National French Africa. Throughout this I was researching new units and building new units and factories to improve my industry. See how it always cascades and there’s always something new to look towards? It’s admittedly a real-time game, but it functions similarly enough to turn-based for this to still work.
Compare to other games with more discrete levels. You do a level, great! Maybe you got a new toy in it. But now the level is over, there’s little that keeps you immediately hooked, the game might be superb but the immediacy matters a great deal in hooking you and keeping you hooked. I was playing some Skyrim and had a great time in this little dungeon, it was fun to explore, lots of fights, all that stuff. But once it was done, it was, well, done. I still want to play Skyrim but there was nothing keeping me there right at that moment.
Which games have the strongest One More Turn effect for you guys? We all know that Pike’s answer is SMAC, but what about our dear readers?
Thanks in no small part to the beneficence of Gaben, I’m currently drowning under a cavalcade of games. I’ve finished Saints Row The Third, and by finished I mean done one ending without getting close to 100% so I’ve not finished it at all (Hypershort review: Exceptional game filled with awesomeness and hilarity but what happened to the great cutscenes you did in SR2 this is a disjointed mess Volition?), there’s Skyrim, which is just stupidly huge, and now I’ve gone and picked up Star Ruler, Space Empires IV, and Portal 2, and I’m hungrily eying the new Legends expansion for Distant Worlds.
And this isn’t even counting the games I’ve not got around to yet, such as twenty years of classics that GoG insist on foisting upon me, or Arkham City for example, NOR does it count the games I have but that I’ve not yet managed to give sufficient time to like Jagged Alliance 2 or Master of Orion 2, or SMAC, though the latter is here mostly because it is literally not possible to give enough time to SMAC. I’ve still not finished Human Revolution.
Plus of course there’s all the regular stuff I play that demands time and attention; Darkest Hour, SMAC, SimCity 4, GalCiv 2, Baldur’s Gate, EU3, Vicky 2, Dorf Fort, Open TTD, Project Zomboid, the list goes on and on! Thank Talos that I’ve shaken the WoW bug for the time being.
Ouch, my wallet
Busy weekend! What about you all, do you ever get overwhelmed by all the games that need to be played? How do you deal with it? What are you playing this Thanksgiving weekend?
Finally I am taking altogether too much enjoyment in watching Notch act like a petulant child. I’m not even a fan of the Yogscast, it’s not my thing, but dang if one side in this debacle isn’t being a lot classier than the other. Which is double amusing because the classy side is a couple of lads who mess around doing silly voices and getting into vidya hi-jinx on YouTube whilst the one being an entitled imbecile has a multi-million Euro business!
I’ve written previously about how strategy games give you a pretty weird angle compared to reality due to how they function, specifically that because they put you in charge of a state and they have a win condition, you become pretty psychopathic with regards to your state. It is only a means to your end.
I’m going to come at this from another angle today. I was thinking about it when I was playing GalCiv, because as I am playing as the Humans I’m sort-of-but-not-quite RPing them as they’re written in the backstory; canny traders, excellent diplomats, with an iron fist in the velvet glove. Now GalCiv has election events that are incredibly trivial. You choose a political party and have regular elections. If your party wins you keep their bonuses (Say, +20% to your influence). If they lose, the bonuses go away until you reclaim control. But if they lose you are still in control. Now from a gameplay perspective this makes perfect sense. Nobody wants to sit back and watch your civ get run into the ground by the AI over the next 30 turns or whatever. That doesn’t make it any more sensible or less jarring; ultimately in strategy games you are your state/country, and anything along the lines of elections, changing dynasties, or anything else is entirely secondary at best.
What’s weird isn’t that they do this, it’s that they try and pretend they don’t. I don’t mind being told “You are the overarching driving force behind the French Empire rather than any particular leader or government therein”. But then a game will turn around and I will be presented as being the particular leader or government, such as EU3 where every notification is addressed to “My Emir” or “My King” or what have you. But how can you address this?
Of course the problem is lessened if you're an immortal Goddess-Queen
The Tropico series has possibly the best approach. You are a tinpot dictator and one of the ways in which your score is evaluated is by how much money you have embezzled from your own country over the years. This is a brilliant little mechanic, because you are actively reducing your abilities in one field in order to bump up your endgame results elsewhere. You’re still just going for the nebulous “score” but it’s something. One idea I had was to essentially provide you with ostentatious monuments to build, of truly obscene scale (Think Bender when he becomes Pharaoh), and the larger you build it the better you are. Civ used to do something vaguely similar where a good performance would make your palace or throne room better, a nice sidebar to the main game, and there’s a mod for Civ IV where you really can lose control of your empire to the AI for a number of turns, an interesting if frustrating feature.
Do you have any examples of this issue being done well? How might a game merge leadership of an in-game actor like a country with being an individual leader? Thoughts and ideas!
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.
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?
