To begin, let it be known throughout the lands that I’m extremely skeptical of any Space Strategy games these days.*
Matrix Games has recently put out two space strategy games, Distant Worlds by Code Force and Armada 2526. Distant Worlds is another go at the RTS/4X genre muddle and has most piqued my interest since it’s release in March. Yet, not enough to actually buy it. It has ship design, a MASSIVE galactic map and pretty sweet graphics for it’s suite of earth animal-influenced alien races. Here are a couple videos that may pique your interest as well– and if it’s enough to actually buy it… please let us know.
Exploration (with a shot of the massive galactic map)
*After Master of Orion 3’s cascade of space piss into my open mouth a few years back, I lost hope in the genre as, almost by design, the games kept getting worse and worse from the high point of Master of Orion in 1993, Ascendancy in 1995 and Emperor of the Fading Suns in 1996. Since the heyday, we’ve had the mediocrity of Sword of the Stars, a mess of what are really RTS games that, while OK for RTS games, fail to really hit the mark with the 4X turnbased crowd (Homeworld, Hegemony and Sins of Solar Empire) as well as the excellent but multiplayer-only Ultracorps.
What’s more, the game series that is considered the current king of Turn Based 4x Space strategy games: Galactic Civilization is such an incredible rip-off of Civilization 3/4 that I consider it simply a graphics swap rather than a new game. The galaxy in Galactic Civilizations, like Civ 4, is just a big flat map with planets (cities) that you move your units on. Sometimes in Galactic Civilization there are asteroid fields (forests) that slow down your movement. What’s worse it’s not a ‘globe’ like Civ so managing a big empire, multiple fronts on a big flat map is even more tedious than Civ. That said, please note that it is with a mountainous level of distrust that I even mention any current 4X space games on this blog in light of the simple question: are they better than the original Master of Orion? If not– why would anyone bother? Better graphics? who cares. Better interface? Really? Is that even possible? Seriously: you can have the best 4X game, plus it’s almost good sequel, for 6$. Keep that in mind with this and any subsequent posts on this subject.
I was late for work Thursday after a 6 hour download of the beta and patches and a SINGLE game with the Protoss that went late into the night. Having played it before almost 3 years ago at Gencon, playing the beta is nothing altogether new– which is going to be a theme as I go forward in the next month or so babbling about the kings of RTS’s new title that is so very improved and so very much the same.
I’ve gotten in a single 1 on 1 game against a total n00b. One thing to mention straight off if you are on the fence about liking it considering that it feels at first blush very much like an upgrade is the fact that it looks incredible. The level of detail to the maps is just ridiculous, and the units look great. As much as the multiplayer is the real draw of the game, I’m really looking forward to the single player.
I had no idea this video of Peter Cushing painting and playing with miniatures existed, and while we, as a culture, have moved far beyond H.G. Wells Little Wars, it’s probably still A fascinating test of ingenuity and marksmanship. This is worth watching for Cushing pulling out a cig as he looks over his play area (on the FLOOR of all places).
That’s the story of my first campaign run through Mount and Blade : Warbands. Being a seasoned veteran of the old version of the game I feel I was slightly overconfident and went into some siege battles that decimated my miniscule warband– then I wandered into three armies of Swadians who had their way with the rest– what’s more, while running away (all alone) I ran into another full army who attacked and had their way with my lonesome self. I took down 15 or so before, yet again, being captured, probably raped and pillaged. Though you don’t lose all your good/goods/weapons, there is a random roll and I lost my elite tempered sabre, about 2K worth of flax, and, of course, all of my followers are locked up in some castle jail somewhere. A desolate place to be in the game– but who can stop playing even after constant and massive set backs? That’s the beauty of the game: you and your fellow ‘lords’ are effectively immortal– you just keep going. Raise another army, train them, go on some trading runs and then you’re back in the field after an hour or so destroying the Swadian masses.
For those that don’t have it yet, if you have the old game and just want to play the single player campaign: wait until you can get Warbands for cheap. It’s really just an incremental update rather than a new version of the game for single player, which I am fine with as it’s a fantastic indy game. Sure you can get married and learn some poems (!?) but that’s really not enough to warrant a purchase unless you are dying to get some multi player in. However, if you have been waiting for multiplayer all these years– immediately go out and spend the cash as that’s where this version shines.
Saturday was spent sitting at various tables in a giant room with a giant stone fireplace placing pieces of plastic, wood and cardboard on top of other, usually larger, pieces of cardboard. This was Gaming Hoopla. As a pure gaming convention, I would rate it a definite 1 on the binary scale. No mucking around with lines to see celebrities, no big announcements, no wasting time at vendors digging through boxes of old mouldy stuff looking for deals (there was only one selling about 50 games at most): it was all about sitting down and playing games. People were exceedingly friendly and would either just ask you to play a game or, as you were sitting down to play something, would ask to get in on the action. My only complaint was that the room (though big) smelled of MEAT the entire time and giant wafts of MEAT-AIR would blast into the gaming area from the kitchen.
Games I got in on:
Agricola
Rush N Crush
Dungeon Quest
Arcanum
El Grande
My favorite was probably Rush N Crush. It just really captured the feel and intensity of a race with guns (and I won by wrecking my buddy’s car right at the finish line). Though it may not be a play all the time game, I think I may pick it up. All in all, a great little CON in the town where it all started and a good time.
Yeah? Oh yeah! Fantasy Flight must be hitting their numbers re-releasing the holy grails from Games Workshop’s golden age because we have yet another awesome edition to the roster: DungeonQuest. This and Mummy’s Tomb I never got my grubby teenage hands on so I am fired fired fired up about the re-release (and was wondering why the original version’s price kept dropping on ebay the last few months). Great news and more info.
Let’s talk about Schlitz. The butt of jokes, the ass-crack beer you’d have to choke down on camping trips: Pabst, Blatz, Hamm’s all beers with a certain flavor that is maybe almost good if the weather and batch were just right. Throwing Schlitz in with those beers was easy back in the day, but with the new bottled version using the original formula it’s become one of the go to beers like High Life (of course) and your obligatory stable of New Glarus wizardry.
However, Schlitz’s billboards featuring Cynthia Myers and 2/3rds of her BREAST on the freeway with the heaviest traffic in the state has made me an ardent supporter of their so far glowing comeback and a soon to be more frequent kisser of their hops.
Small World was one of the big board games of the last year and I picked it up like many based on reviews of it and it’s predecessor Vinci. I found it OK, but it didn’t totally grab me the first few plays. After about 6 plays however, it really started to grow on me. The game works well in that Euro/Ameritrash hybrid genre that we keep seeing in recent days, but what I like about Small World best is that is an asymmetric strategy game and like the granddaddy of all asymmetric board games, Cosmic Encounter, has a lot of room to grow. While Small World oozes with theme and comedy, the board is totally insane on the eyes and in all honesty I think I would prefer the theme of the original version (Romans, Greeks, Carthaginians, etc.) to the wacky fantasy theme– but the fact is, the game sold a lot and it’s quite fun to play once you get the hang of it–and now we have the first launch title of interest for the iPad making some history last week.
The only reason I’m exposed to the iPads is due to work– no one I know personally has plans to pick one up in the short term. As frivolous as it is, I must admit the iPad is an awesome piece of consumer electronics: far better than what I expected both in size, readability and responsiveness despite a terrible name that somehow passed muster with everyone at Apple with a dirty mind. That said, I’ve really only used it to read some comic books, watch an ASL video and, of course, play some Small World.
So what is Small World? In short, 2-5 players try to conquer a piece of cardboard with a map on it, scoring points for the number of regions on this piece of cardboard they control at the end of their turn. To do this, players choose a combination of a Race, like elves, dwarves, orcs, wizards and a Skill like berserk, commando, Ethereal, etc. This gives players an adjective, noun combo i.e.: Commando Amazons (a favorite for many reasons), Berserk Trolls, and so on. Each combination gives a player a number of Race tokens and two means to break the rules of the game: one with his Race power and one with his Skill power. The player then attacks parts of the piece of cardboard to score as many points as possible. Each player turn is scored, and whoever has the most at the end of 10 turns is VICTOLY. The key funny business in the game is that players can choose another race after sending their original race into decline. Knowing when to decline your race and what race/skill combinations to select based on the board conditions are the painful and fun choices for players.
With the iPad version, you can play with another person sitting in front of you (there is no online play and no computer player) in the same way you would the board game, but without the box, pieces of cut up cardboard and cardboard map.
First, I want to make note a few flaws in the iPad version of Small World in terms of gameplay. The game crashes sometimes after a race is selected. You can tell when this happens as the player’s name and score disappear from the map screen and though you can mess around with the active buttons on the screen– the game will not continue. This is exacerbated by the fact that the game does not save it’s state on exit, so if you exit the application for any reason, you have to start over. This is a bit odd as just about every application on the iPod touch had the save state feature, even the real time ones like Field Runners.
Second, the iPad version is only two player. This may put some people off who are used to the wonderful backstabbing and mystery score of the 4 and 5 player games, but after playing quite a two player games, I’m slowly becoming convinced that it may be the better way to play. With two, the game plays extremely fast and you can predict fairly well what powers your opponent will choose, when they will decline and where they will enter the board. This is very tough in a 3-5 player game as so much is going on you basically hang on for the ride and hope for players not to notice how well you are doing (Merchant Wizards seem great for this).
The final issue I had with the game is that when selecting my stack to drag to a space to attack, it didn’t pick up that I was trying to select it as well as I would have expected– you have to have your finger/appendage directly on the stack to move it. This may seem a ridiculous complaint, but when someone hands it to you in a morning scrum and you have to take your turn before anyone notices, you want to go fast fast fast.
That said, let’s get into what’s awesome about the iPad version of Small World: It plays fast, fast fast! No digging through stacks of counters, or searching for the 3 and 5 gold coins in your game box, nor counting your gold in secret means that 2-player games can be over in done in 10 minutes at which time you can be on to another game or doing something else, like finishing your morning scrum. What’s more, the multi-touch means you can check out your gold total while the other player is taking his or her turns.
Pondering the race selection as Spider looks on at something else entirely.
The graphics look extremely crisp, and it’s very easy to pick out what is what, especially if you are used to the insanity of color that the boardgame tends to become during a game. Small World, good gameplay aside, is all about the funny illustrations and the iPad does them all justice here–though the screen does get awful greasy…
All the touching makes for a real greasy iPad in mere moments of play.
Except where noted far above, the UI and interface is spot on. If you are a veteran Small World player you will know exactly what to do as soon as you start playing, it’s that intuitive. The only confusion came when one was selecting a race and want to go back to the map, then back to the race selection screen. There is no button or link– you just touch the screen (this was a d’oh moment).
If you have an iPad and have any reason to try to have fun on it, you should pick up Small World. It’s dirt cheap and if you even play it 2-3 times you will have well spent the cash; chances are you will play 10 to 20 times that number in a single week. I’m very impressed with the hardware and am very much looking forward to many more board games on the device. Books? Movies? Tax Software? BLEH. Board games are what the iPad was built for.
