T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m probably still a couple of weeks from my XBox acquisition, but I wanted to solicit some advice as I contemplate the purchase. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “XBox Advice”
Master Of Orion 2
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You start off with a single homeworld in a hostile galaxy. You have to build ships, colonize worlds, research technology, grow your empire, construct warships, defend your colonies, and (eventually) subjugate the other other players to become the dominant species. It’s sometimes referred to as “Civilization, but in space”.
Some people celebrate Master of Orion 2 as the pinnacle of this sort of game. And just so you know what you’re getting into here: I am one of those people. The game came out in 1996, the same year the original Quake hit the shelves. MOO2 turns twelve this year, and I still think it’s the best of its kind. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Galactic Civilizations series is outstanding, but it never matched the MOO2 perfection for me. (Sadly, while I celebrate MOO2 as the best of 4X games, the sequel not only failed to live up to the greatness of its predecessor, it failed in a more general sense to be entertaining at all. MOO3 was the worst 4X game, and should only be sampled out of curiosity and masochism.)
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Like my Starcraft review, I want to examine this classic and see if we can figure out what made makes it so great, and why its charm has never been duplicated.
Preamble thus complete, let’s get pedantic:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Master Of Orion 2”
Changing My Tune
Over the past few weeks – when the tone of the site swung from “a little feisty” to “openly antagonizing and feral” a lot of people pointed out I was starting to sound like Yahtzee. It’s nice to know I was entertaining, but was sort of frustrating how far I’d strayed from the intended voice of the site. One of my goals for this place was low-key and thoughtful. (Unless, of course, we’re talking DRM, in which case it’s fire-and-brimstone all the way. This should go without saying.) If I’d wanted to sound like anyone, it would have been James Lileks.
He’s the MacGyver of essayists. Sure, any dolt can bang out 1,000 words on Can You Believe How Crazy It Is Raising Kids These Days? Lemme Tell Ya. But Lileks can start a post armed with nothing more than a coupon for a free 6″ sub and still manage to amuse the reader. Watching him turn the incidental into the insightful is like watching a magic trick. You could lock the guy in a dark empty room for 24 hours, and when he came out he’d tell you stories about the place that would make you wish it’d happened to you.
I do not expect to turn the banalities of my existence into blog posts anytime soon, (aside from the rest of this sentence) but I do hope that things will perk up here now that I’m no longer stuck indoors, sick, wasting away in the dark like Gollum with the One Ring. I don’t need to be Yahtzee, since Benjamin Croshaw has that gig covered.
Later today: A return to form with a review of a twelve-year-old strategy game.
The Witcher:
The Love Thread
I’m still getting chided by Witcher fans for dumping on the game. What’s frustrating isn’t that they like the game when I don’t, it’s that their position seems to be: You’re not a real reviewer. Your opinion doesn’t matter, you’re all wrong, etc. etc. Here you’ve got a chance to sell this game to fellow gamers, and instead you just dismiss my opinion without offering anything of your own.
Here is what I suggest: Rather than creating yet another defensive comment as to why my opinion is invalid or wrong, why don’t you spend those words telling us what you liked about The Witcher? What worked? What was fun? What sets this game apart from other RPGs? How was the plot? The ending? The characters? The combat? The dialog? Who was your favorite character? Did any plot twists catch you by surprise? How does this game compare to the RPG classics? (I’ll leave picking the “classics” as an exercise to the reader.) How many times did you go through the game? What took you by surprise? What about those moral choices in the game – how did those affect your perception of the world? What was fun or amusing about the mini-games? What features or conventions from The Witcher do you hope other games adopt?
I’m serious here. I can understand you want other people to enjoy the game the way you did. This is something with which I fully sympathize. But you gotta give them more motivation than “Shamus is wrong, don’t listen to him.”
So let’s hear it. Give your Witcher Love below.
Games and the Fear of Death
The convention is that survival horror games are very brutal and unforgiving. The combat is finicky and mistakes are devastating. Resources are scarce, and consuming too many now can mean hitting an impossible barrier down the line. Your character tends to die often. Even the ability to save is sometimes rationed. Allow me a moment of presumption and arrogance, but I think survival horror game designers have been undermining the very atmosphere they’re trying so hard to build. They’re doing it wrong.
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- Oh no! The grue is going to eat me! How horrible!
- Oh man. The grue is going to eat me and I haven’t saved in half an hour.
Now, if your goal is to just create a serious challenge for tenacious players to overcome (and some people really do like that sort of thing) then routine player death is a required component of that. But I think in most cases the extreme difficulty is part of a misguided attempt to make the game more frightening. You feel the first kind of fear when you’re immersed in the game. You only feel the second when you are not immersed. The first kind is the thrilling kind. The second is an immersion-breaking killjoy. Which means that – counter-intuitively – if you want to scare a player you should make every effort to avoid killing them.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Games and the Fear of Death”
Talking to Pirates
This link is long overdue. I intended to put it up last week, got distracted, and it slipped off my radar.
Cliff Harris is an indie game developer. A while back he asked on his blog for pirates to let him know why they pirate games. Now, we’ve had that conversation here many times, but this is the first time a game developer has begun such a dialog, and the results were pretty interesting. After being Slashdotted and linked all over the place, he had quite a stack of replies.
Harris then wrote this response. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the subject, as he outlines a lot of the reasoning and then goes on to talk about what he’ll be doing differently in the future based on this feedback.
I agree with Jay Barnson, in that you have to take a lot of the responses with a grain of salt. The most flagrant pirates aren’t going to openly admit, “I pirate software because it’s cheaper and I can.” Those people will either cultivate more nuanced justifications, or they will probably avoid taking part in the discussion.
But even allowing for that, it’s an interesting read. It also gives me hope that no matter how badly EA and 2kGames salt their own fields with DRM, indie developers will be there to provide for our gaming needs.
The Witcher:
Final Thoughts
A lot of people are faulting me for being overly critical of The Witcher and not giving the game a chance, and they’re right. This series has been too divisive, and so I thought we’d wrap it up early, on a conciliatory note.
It turns out I never really took the steps needed to enjoy the game. I’ve been unfair. Luckily, people have provided me with lots of helpful tips on what I’ve been doing wrong. It turns out that to really enjoy the game you just need to:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Witcher:
Final Thoughts”
From The Archives:
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Spec Ops: The Line
A videogame that judges its audience, criticizes its genre, and hates its premise. How did this thing get made?
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Netscape 1997
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.