T w e n t y S i d e d

After a full month of 100+ degree temperatures and failing air conditioners (literally; two window units broke during the heat wave), we had a little over a week of cool temperatures. While we’re back into the 90’s off and on now, you can see all around us the signs of impending Autumn. The pets have started begging for more food. The cash crops (I live in an agricultural area) have started what they call “cutting out,” the process of dropping any fruit that isn’t developed sufficiently to mature off the existing nutrients. As part of this process, the leaves start shriveling-up and falling off, as the plant itself no longer needs to grow or synthesize energy from sunlight. It’s not a full die-off yet, that will come most likely naturally with the first night of freezing temperatures or, unfortunately, artificially through chemical applications. With the cooler temperatures now, it’s time to start the repairs beyond the emergencies that have been put off. We have ongoing house improvements, with more planned before we move sometime in the next year to 18 months. I also had to clean and/or replace the cabin air filters in two cars, both of which have been experiencing air conditioner problems as well. Unfortunately, only one of them had a cabin air filter so dirty it probably was affecting performance.

In the computing world, I found something very interesting in Linux, I proceeded further in Star Wars: The Old Republic Galactic Seasons 7, and I have progressed in Tropico scenarios. I have a LOT more to say about the difficulty labels, which continue to be confounding.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Last Gasps of Summer Means More Home Repair and Tropico Funstration”

Paige Francis He/him

I spent a lot of time the last few weeks talking about the intuitive difficulty curve of RollerCoaster Tycoon. With few exceptions, a new player can quickly grasp the basics of the game and even start experimenting with different tactics to win the long list of scenarios. By contrast, 2001’s Tropico features a scenario list of inconsistent difficulty bordering on bugged labels and practically non-existent tutorials. Further, the game shipped and received multiple expansions with incorrect information in the manual and the game’s info text. How in the world did Tropico not only become a beloved classic but manage to generate sequels through 2019, with Tropico 7 still in development (though apparently troubled)? I think mainly aesthetics, tongue-in-cheek humor, and quite simply; despite the obvious failures, brilliant functionality that makes the game *fun* to play…even if you aren’t accomplishing anything.

In fact, especially if you aren’t accomplishing anything: Tropico 1 had a free-play mode where you just built whatever you wanted. It wasn’t an absolute sandbox; you still had to meet various tiered requirements. There was no technology tree, but you had to build (i.e. *complete* the building of) a Logging Camp before you could build a Lumber Mill, and you had to build a Power Plant along with the Lumber Mill before you built a Furniture Manufacturer. Oh, and of course you had to have enough high-school-educated workers available to staff the Lumber Mill and the Furniture Manufacturer, which means you better already have a High School built; those aren’t free. And you have to have student Housing since they aren’t working enough to pay rent. Food from your Farms and Fisheries are always share-and-share-alike for your Tropicans, which automatically makes the United States a bit suspicious of you, so you better have that Furniture Manufacturer shipping out copious rattan chairs and cheap end-tables for the American consumer. That means you will probably have to keep the workers’ pay high, but if the income disparity between the uneducated and the high school and college educated workers grows too much, the Soviet Union may come knocking on your door. I’m sure you don’t want a worker revolution to kick off. Regardless of all that, your Tropican citizens really just want access to food, religion, entertainment, health care, and decent-quality housing that doesn’t cost too much.

Tropico is a wonderfully complex game that fails almost completely at handing you simple, understandable control over this mess. But gosh is it fun.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Beautiful Mess: Why There Shouldn’t Have Been a Tropico 2”

Paige Francis He/him

I completed the RollerCoaster Tycoon base game last week and started working on the first expansion, Corkscrew Follies. Two things were immediately apparent. First, Corkscrew Follies employs the same challenges and difficulties as the base game, but provides different and additional rides and shops to meet a scenario’s demands. In fact, the research tree will tend to focus on the new elements more than the old elements, requiring you to learn to use the new facilities. The second obvious change was the implementation of scenery and ground elements to represent artificial structures like castles and a variety of other buildings, really enhancing the “themed” idea of your amusement park. Honestly, I had previously associated this change with RollerCoaster Tycoon 2. Probably because I played a lot of the RCT2 base game before I obtained the expansion packs for RollerCoaster Tycoon. It was interesting to see where RCT2’s theming came from. It becomes clear, seeing how these ideas were originally implemented, how the building structures in RCT2 are really the same thing…just with “land” that is invisible (and intangible and non-obtrusive in most situations, if I remember correctly. In RCT, there still has to be a physical piece of land which retains it’s inherent properties to apply the “appearance” of walls, ceilings, etc. to.) Unfortunately, while interesting, I never found this part of the game to be as captivating as the core park management gameplay. A big reason why I never spent all that much time in RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.

Upon realizing I was mainly dealing with cosmetic differences, I started getting a bit bored with RollerCoaster Tycoon, and went looking for other games to mix in…all sim games, of course.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “RCT’s Final Challenges, and Other Sim Games”

Paige Francis He/him