{"id":51633,"date":"2021-01-26T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2021-01-26T11:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=51633"},"modified":"2021-01-26T08:36:15","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T13:36:15","slug":"denouement-2020-the-good-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=51633","title":{"rendered":"D\u00e9nouement 2020: The Good Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year was not a particularly fun year. For the most part, I did not have a good time. A lot of the games I wanted to play were either disappointments, or delayed to the next year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I can’t claim it was all bad. I did manage to find a few titles that amused me. So here is the list of titles that kept me going…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

7. Graveyard Keeper<\/h3>\n

This game actually came out in 2018, but I didn't play it until 2020. Still, even in 2018 I think Breaking Bad memes were well past their use-by date.<\/div>
This game actually came out in 2018, but I didn't play it until 2020. Still, even in 2018 I think Breaking Bad memes were well past their use-by date.<\/div><\/p>\n

Why did I like this game? I have no idea. I have nothing but gripes about it, but for whatever reason I couldn’t stop playing it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Do we have a name for the genre that Harvest Moon<\/i>, Animal Crossing<\/i> and Stardew Valley<\/i> occupy? I want to say “Farming Sim”, but we already have Farming Simulator<\/a> and it’s nothing like these games. Wikipedia claims<\/a> this genre is called “Simulation Role-Playing”, thus making a compound genre name from two different confusing and overly-broad terms. Both “simulation” and “role-playing” are largely useless descriptors at this point. I mean, both Diablo<\/i> and Cyberpunk<\/i> are considered “role playing” games.<\/p>\n

In any case, we really need a handy name to sum up this genre: “A town improvement game with strong social elements where you improve your own property while also building relationships and helping your neighbors and gameplay involves a lot of time and energy management as you need to keep an eye on the in-game clock.” And no, we can’t just call them “Harvest Moon Clones”. That would be silly<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Graveyard Keeper is a Harvest Moon Clone where you take care of a graveyard instead of growing crops. You embalm corpses, bury them, decorate the graves, improve the grounds, and become the local religious vicar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You have to grow carrots so you can put them in the box to pay the donkey to bring you more dead bodies.<\/div>
You have to grow carrots so you can put them in the box to pay the donkey to bring you more dead bodies.<\/div><\/p>\n

I’m not sure what it was about the game that appealed to me. I did like the moments where I was elbow-deep in a corpse preparation and I suddenly realized it was Sunday morning. I’d stagger upstairs to the chapel, give the weekly message to the faithful, collect the donations, and then dive back into the basement to work on my backlog of cadavers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There’s no wash basin between the morgue and the chapel, so I have to imagine the appearance \/ smell of my character was enough to wake up the faithful on Sunday morning.<\/p>\n

It’s a weird game, but it has a dark sense of humor and some goofy charm.\u00a0<\/p>\n

6. Flight Simulator 2020<\/h3>\n

I like how it looks as if I'm playing the 1982 version of Flight Simulator on my dashboard.<\/div>
I like how it looks as if I'm playing the 1982 version of Flight Simulator on my dashboard.<\/div><\/p>\n

I wondered when Asobo would show up again. You might remember that I was a fan of FUEL back in 2009. I even made that one video<\/a> about the game that got a couple of million views but then YouTube silently made it almost unwatchable by reducing it to 240p qualityThese days I’m keeping the originals, but my approach to content back then was very slapdash.<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Anyway. Like I said in that 11-year-old video: FUEL was an amazing game for the way it took a limited dataset and used procgen<\/a> techniques on it to create a massive world that wouldn’t otherwise fit on a standard DVD.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The game wasn’t particularly successful. I thought the technology would benefit something open-world like Fallout<\/i> or Skyrim<\/i>, but instead it was used to make… a racing game?<\/p>\n

The street layouts are so accurate I can fly by my hometown and tell what street I'm over by looking out the window.<\/div>
The street layouts are so accurate I can fly by my hometown and tell what street I'm over by looking out the window.<\/div><\/p>\n

The AI suffered from flagrant rubber banding<\/a>. The procgen world was an interesting technology, but it ultimately didn’t add anything to the game. You could drive cross-country if you wanted, but there wasn’t really any in-game reason to do so. The endless landscape wound up being treated like a really expensive skybox around the handmade racing circuits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

FUEL used amazing technology to make a mediocre game. The public sort of forgot about it, but I was always curious about what the team might make next.<\/p>\n

It took a decade, but Asobo is finally back. Once again, they’ve made an amazing technological foundation to support something that barely qualifies as a game.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The trick this time is that the game uses real-world satellite imagery to create the environment. This means the topography, roads, and buildings are all based on reality. Consumer-level satellite images don’t have the resolution to make a nice crisp world that can be viewed up close, so Asobo used neural networks to fill in the blanks. The AI will take a big blurry satellite image of farmland, recognize it as farmland, and generate high-resolution texture maps to match. It will see a dark rectangle of pixels on the landscape and recognize it as a building, and then generate a 3D model of the appropriate size and type.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Too bad there aren't any helicopters in the game. Sometimes I'd like to hover around and admire the scenery.<\/div>
Too bad there aren't any helicopters in the game. Sometimes I'd like to hover around and admire the scenery.<\/div><\/p>\n

If you view a familiar location from street level, it winds up feeling like something from a parallel dimension. The buildings are the right size and sitting in the right place, but the buildings themselves are different. It feels familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.<\/p>\n

It does this for most of planet Earth. That much data wouldn’t fit on your poor harddrive. In fact, it wouldn’t fit on a dozen harddrives. The data set for this game is many terabytes in size. So like Google Earth, the data streams to you in realtime as you move around.<\/p>\n

I wouldn’t call it “fun”, but it’s an amazing<\/b> technological achievement.\u00a0<\/p>\n

5. Gorogoa<\/h3>\n