Tag Archives: sim

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Second Ledger (Management), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

Bored Receptionists and Smelling Faintly Of Cabbage

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It bears mentioning that Theme Hospital has very recently become available on Gog.com and I urge you all to purchase it at your earliest convenience. I did and have barely been able to put it down since, it is if anything even better than I remembered it being.

Theme Hospital is the sequel – after a fashion – to Theme Park, two of the games Bullfrog put out in the 1990s during their golden era, a short but incredible catalog that I’m not convinced any other developer has ever matched; Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper; it’s a truly illustrious list of games that are not only classics, but that in some cases defined and defied genre. In Theme Park your job was, as the title suggests, to construct a profitable Theme Park. Theme Hospital is obviously a preposterous notion, but that gives a good indicator of the humor at the game’s core. Your job as manager-god is to design, staff, and run a profitable hospital, dealing with such absurd conditions as Bloaty Head and Uncommon Cold, keeping your staff and patients happy (And alive), and coping with the sometimes rather restrictive layouts you are given.

The gentleman dressed as Elvis will die ON THE SPOT if his shrink gets it wrong.

It’s a management game of the kind that became so widespread in the years after Theme Park/Hospital and Railroad Tycoon were successful, but make no mistake, this is the genuine article. We are not talking about Waste Management Facility Tycoon here (though you do need to build toilets), we are talking about an exceedingly clever, enjoyable game that gets challenging fast, all with a strong streak of humor running through it, from the perfectly bored tannoy announcements to the amusing descriptions of staff.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Hockey Riot (Sports/Canada), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

Unexpected games

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We’ve been going for about a year now (Huzzah!) and in that time I’m sure you’ve become familiar with the content of this blog, because said content is eminently predictable (it is a blog about spergy strategy videogames). Still we’ve all got surprises up our sleeves, I am sure. For example, the game I have been playing a lot of this past week?

Football Manager.

Picture: Pike's face when I told her this.

Now I suppose I should clarify that I’m not a Sports Guy. I’ve never been a big fan of sports, and that’s largely because no matter what I try I’ve never been very good at sports. Partly because I’m blind in my left eye, which messes my depth perception right up and means anything like baseball and tennis is right out, and partly because I’m just crap at them anyway, so they never held much interest and I developed my interests in other directions. Yet I got a little bit of an itch, the idea of management like FM provides is… appealing.

I should further clarify that Football Manager is still a game about sperging over spreadsheets, and you could probably say it’s “strategy” inasmuch as you have a bunch of goals (Ha!) and you must concoct and execute long-term plans in order to meet them, all whilst opponents are trying to stop you. Nonetheless there is no arguing that tone and content matter greatly, and this game definitely doesn’t contain the slaying of monsters, nuking of foreigners, or militarily-enforced agglomeration of foreigners into the Glorious Worker’s Republic of Transcascadia. No, this is a game of spherekick (As opposed to handegg). But damned if it’s not compelling! I’ve just come away from a string of defeats and finally yelled at my team, locked them in the locker room after the last game, and then drew up a new formation, new first XI squad, and new training regimen for them. The first game since these changes is just underway and it’s gripping me. More than most games do, even in genres I very publicly adore.

Of course, sports games of the more typical kind have one great strength, which is multiplayer. Great as many games are in that regard few things compare for small-scale, couch competitive gaming, as a game of Virtua Tennis, Tiger Woods PGA Tour, or John Madden. In any event this really detailed side of things is hugely fun, much more than I would have guessed when I caved into a strange hunch and gave it a shot.

Readers, tell us in the comments about any games you’re a fan of that people around you might not expect!

The Android's Hardware (Tech), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

SimCity

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So, though there’s not a huge amount of information yet, the new SimCity looks like it has potential! Here is the good stuff we know so far:

Curved roads.
PC-only.*
Modding supported.

Launch Arcologies

And the GlassBox engine seems to have a great deal of potential for detail. Here is a link to a GamaSutra interview regarding it, and I’ll quote one of the most interesting parts. It may look a little intimidating if you’ve never seen code before but if you take a minute to read through it you’ll see it’s really rather simple and intuitive.

Here is an example of a unit rule, showing a chaining effect: as a sim consumes mustard, they create an empty bottle, which then adds to a city’s pollution. If mustard is unavailable, they then go buy more mustard.

unitRule mustardFactory
rate 10

global Simoleans in 1

local YellowMustard in 6
local EmptyBottle in 1
local BottleOfMustard out 1

map Pollution out 5

successEvent effect smokePuff
successEvent audio chugAndSlurp

onFail buyMoreMustard
end

Map rules are simpler than that. In this example, grass will grow only where there’s soil, water and nutrients, which are all depletable resources

Putting aside the amusing image of your Sims eating an entire bottle of mustard and nothing else for a meal, I don’t know if that is the actual way GlassBox stuff can be written, or if modders will have access to this side of the thing, but if it is it will be simple for modders to wrap their heads around but have a great deal of potential for changing how the game operates. It does sound like, hopefully, they are aiming to have a level of detail and fidelity that even SC4 fell far short of, and that in turn should help the development of natural looking cities.

If that still doesn’t make sense, take a look at these videos from the GDC giving some examples of how the engine works:

One
Two
Three
Four

Pretty impressive, right?

Of course these are early days. There’s a great many ways this game could go wrong, and there are already things I’m wary of, such as the DLC elements already announced, and how multiplayer is involved. Nonetheless, although rather cautiously, I do have a smidged of confidence that this game will be a worthy update to the series – and if it isn’t, that modders will be able to fix it! What do you all think of what we know so far?

*I have nothing against console games, it’s just that a game as complex as a good SimCity is something that no right-minded company should consider porting to a console.