Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 30, 2008

 Rise Of Nations:
Neverending SortiePrevious Post

Next PostStarcraft:
The Secret Formula 

I picked up Sins of a Solar Empire on Sunday. I’d been holding off until I had more time to play it, but then my friend Bogan showed up with it this weekend and taunted me. A purchase ensued.

Not having the time to invest in the game properly until the weekend, I decided to just run through the tutorials. The most important thing that I learned was that under no circumstances should I ever be allowed to run a galactic empire. It’s harder than it sounds, and the consequences for failure are rather dire. During the tutorial I was taught a few short lessons about some buttons. Apparently there are buttons, and they need to be pressed sometimes. There were some other details in there about economies and spaceships, but they eluded me once the tutorial had run its course. I’m still pretty sure about the button thing, though.

Thus graduated from the Sins education system as a functional illiterate, I assumed absolute power over a fledgling empire and began my first game.

I built a small collection of spaceships, which were sent to an adjacent planet where they were murdered by space pirates. I built a trade center which sat idle, since I didn’t have anyone with which to trade. I built a series of scout ships and sent them to auto-explore, after which I never heard from them again. I built a capital ship and subsequently misplaced it. I pushed some other buttons related to the running of my main planet, none of which seemed to have any real effect except to deplete my coffers. Then I found some ships I didn’t remember building, flying around my world. They didn’t respond to my commands, and it wasn’t until just before they began bombing the place that I realized why.

A half hour into the game I was running an inept empire whose only accomplishments were staggering financial and military losses. I felt like I was playing Soviets in Space. My empire wasn’t so much mismanaged as sabotaged by my bumbling button-pushing. I quit the game before some sort of space-Khrushchev showed up with my resignation pistol.

I will say that Sins of a Solar Empire provided an absolutely gorgeous environment in which to lead my people into ruin and anguish. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Sins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Rise Of Nations:
Neverending SortiePrevious Post

Next PostStarcraft:
The Secret Formula 

53 comments

Batman Vs. Batman

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 30, 2008

Filed under: Movies 45 comments

 Old MemesPrevious Post

Next PostRC Car + Bottles = Mario? 

Compare the 1989 Batman trailer, and the one from this year. Everyone is unconsciously aware of the rhythm of these things, but I never would have guessed they were this formulaic:

I wasn’t a very big fan of the 1989 Batman, a position that is viewed as heretical by most. I expect to get flamed for this one. I know it’s coming. I know it broke box-office records and was hailed and embraced even by die-hard Batman fans, but the 1989 movie earned little more than a polite shrug from me.

I was glad it was made, and happy that Hollywood threw us a bone, but I couldn’t help but wish they had landed closer to the mark. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Batman Vs. Batman”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Old MemesPrevious Post

Next PostRC Car + Bottles = Mario? 

45 comments

A Different Kind of Review

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 29, 2008

Filed under: Video Games 31 comments

 Four-Five-OnePrevious Post

Next PostBioWare and EA: Dumbass Effect 

Sometimes I feel guilty about putting up these long-winded reviews and over-analysis on ten year old games. I enjoy doing it so much that I just assume I’m being horribly self-indulgent. I’m lucky in that many people seem to find this sort of thing entertaining, and so together we form a nice symbiosis – I get to scratch my itch for esoteric blather, and you get to read stuff that (I’m assuming) you can’t find elsewhere.

But whatever faults and excesses I might engage in here, at least I know I’ll never do anything as goofy as writing a nine-page print preview for a still-buggy pre-release game and giving it a 10 out of 10. That article has scans of the review of GTA IV from XBox 360 magazine, where the reviewer dings the game for various bugs and shortcomings and then gives it a perfect score anyway.

I’m glad it’s not my job to review GTA IV and try to assign a numerical value to it, because it’s essentially an impossible task. It’s greatness is directly related to what aspects of the game you cherish. I don’t like the stories. (Ugly and meandering.) I don’t like the main characters. (Wearisome thugs.) I don’t like the core gameplay. (DIAS.) But I derive fantastic satisfaction from inhabiting and exploring a sprawling simulated world of lavish detail, and no other series can hold a candle to what GTA has in that department. Since you have to slog through the parts I loathe to get to the parts I crave, I’m at a loss as to how I might rate the experience. How do you rate a restaurant that serves mouth-watering steaks for $5 and a punch in the face before the meal?

Other people have other value systems and a completely different perception of the game. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “A Different Kind of Review”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Four-Five-OnePrevious Post

Next PostBioWare and EA: Dumbass Effect 

31 comments

Rise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie

By Shamus Posted Monday Apr 28, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 49 comments

 Serious Sam:
The Mayhem ShooterPrevious Post

Next PostSins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander 

Rise of Nations is an RTS game from 2003. Perhaps I should say the RTS of 2003. It secured many awards that year, and its appeal remains undiminished today. It’s featured heavily in our Saturday night LAN games and is the only game capable of displacing Starcraft for any length of time. It would probably have seized the long-held crown from Starcraft if not for the interminable endgame.

Playing a game of Rise of Nations is a delightful and rewarding endeavor. Finishing a game of Rise of Nations is a wearisome test of endurance and patience, a task worthy of Sisyphus. Once you reach the tipping point and the winner is inevitable, you’re about two-thirds of the way through the process and you still have a long fight in front of you before that outcome can be realized. Far too often I’ll find myself in the final stages of a game, ruling a vast empire that blankets the map. I’ll wield the most spectacular technologies and I’ll be awash in resources, yet beating down the last holdouts on the map will still take forever. (Nukes would solve this, but introduce new problems I won’t get into.)

Part of the problem – which is endemic to most Age-spanning “civilization” games – is that the technology levels are designed so that a solid technological lead is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. At the same time the various technological tiers just don’t offer that much of an advantage on the battlefield. Yes, when tanks supplant knights they are more effective in general, but they are still screwed when they come up against a bunch of pikemen. Aside from the frustration of seeing your computerized steel juggernauts fall prey to guys with sharp sticks, there is the problem that you’re left without a way to quickly crush a supposedly weaker foe.

This is only the beginning of the problem. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Serious Sam:
The Mayhem ShooterPrevious Post

Next PostSins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander 

49 comments

Wavatars: New Faces

By Shamus Posted Sunday Apr 27, 2008

Filed under: Projects 33 comments

 About the mini-comicsPrevious Post

Next PostChainmail Bikini, RIP 

Rather than trying to watch the last five or six posts for new comments, I usually just follow the WordPress moderation queue. This lets me see all new comments, even when they appear on months-old posts. The only downside to this was that I couldn’t see the avatars for everyone. It’s much easier to remember people and what they’ve said previously if you have a “face” to go with the name, so this was a major drawback for me.

The good news is that now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5, this moderation queue shows Gravatar icons for each user. The bad news is that I can now confirm that the Wavatars generated by Gravatar.com are different from the Wavatars generated by my original plugin. Which means the faces I see don’t match the faces you see. Sigh.

One of my goals for that project was for people to get a wavatar in a deterministic way, so that your Wavatar at Chatty DM will match your Wavatar here at Twenty Sided, which will match the Wavatars at any of the other 1,000+ sites that have downloaded the plugin.

Now everyone will have two Wavatars associated with their email, and which one you get will depend on where it was generated.

I’m not sure why this change was made. It doesn’t look like they added more parts to allow for more permutations, it’s just… different. I can’t imagine what the benefit would be of going in and changing this. I don’t have access to the Wavatars source being used at Gravatars.com, so I can’t even tell what the difference is.

I realize this is probably trivial to most people. It’s certainly not hurting anyone. This is just one of those displeasing situations that drive engineers nuts. I’m sure I’m being pedantic in worrying about it, but obsessing over details like this and wanting disparate systems to inter-operate gracefully is in the blood of anyone who writes software for a living.

To this end, I might alter my site to use the Gravatar.com versions. This will mean the faces will match again, although it also means the faces you’ve come to know here will all be “re-rolled”.

Phooey.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 About the mini-comicsPrevious Post

Next PostChainmail Bikini, RIP 

33 comments

WordPress 2.5

By Shamus Posted Saturday Apr 26, 2008

Filed under: Random 25 comments

 Turning GreenPrevious Post

Next PostCRT vs. LCD for Retro Gaming 

If my writing seems unusually witty or incisive, it’s probably because I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and it’s got all these cool features which will undoubtedly make me a better blogger. </sarcasm>

This was a big upgrade. I’ve skipped the past couple of updates, mostly because I hate doing it so much. I don’t really feel the need for any new features, so going through the upgrade rigamarole seems sort of pointless. Most new features focus on making the process easier for non-technical people. (In this version, there’s a whole system for uploading, embedding, and managing catalogs of images, movies, etc.) That’s nice for the people who need it, but I’ve already got a system I’m using and I’m fairly set in my ways.

Response to WP 2.5 has been overwhelmingly positive, but for me it was just a pointless shuffle of all the administration controls, so now I can’t find anything. Still, sooner or later I’ll grow attached to this. Probably just in time for the next upgrade. I know I’ll get it when it comes, for the same reason I got this one.

This must be what it feels like to be a Mac user.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Turning GreenPrevious Post

Next PostCRT vs. LCD for Retro Gaming 

25 comments

Serious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 25, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 29 comments

 Doom 3: MuhahahaPrevious Post

Next PostRise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie 

It has been observed that in terms of gameplay, the true descendant of Doom was not Doom 3, but Serious Sam. In Doom you played a man who could run at something approaching the speed of an automobile. You carried a cache of weapons, ammunition, and armor that would, in a more plausible reality, require a U-Haul truck to transport. You were a bullet sponge of epic proportions and capable of falling any distance without being harmed. Most importantly, you fought multitudes of foes in huge, chaotic, open-air battles. In all of these ways, Serious Sam is like Doom, only moreso.

After Doom, the entire genre of FPS games moved away from this sort of thing. The games slowed down as they fragmented into numerous sub-genres. The Stealth Shooter. Survival Horror Shooter. Tactical Shooter. Roleplaying Shooter. Puzzle Shooter. But Serious Sam embraced its roots. It exhumed the abandoned gameplay of the Mayhem Shooter, dusted it off, polished it, and made it fun again.

It’s all played for laughs, which is fitting. This isn’t a game where you engage in soul-searching and probe the mysteries of what it is to be human. This ain’t Shakespeare. This is a game where you kill an unbelievable number of foes with massive guns and overwhelming bravado. It’s good, mindless fun.

It actually took me a while to get through the game. I can only take it in limited doses. After twenty minutes of holding the fire button down and watching things go boom, I need to sit quietly and let my nervous system recover.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Serious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Doom 3: MuhahahaPrevious Post

Next PostRise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie 

29 comments

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