Category: Master of Orion

Perusing, I found this on reddit as a response to a user asking “why should I hate Master of Orion 3” and it made me… well, read it yourself:

<

it pretty much breaks down like this:
imagine that you love bacon. bear with me and suppose that you also love cheeseburgers. perhaps they are even your two favorite foods. now, imagine that you open a menu at a restaurant one day and are for the first time ever presented with the prospect of a bacon cheeseburger. in a highly elated state, you place an order for one and steel yourself against your barely manageable level of anticipation. you are quite possibly looking forward to this bacon cheeseburger more than any other meal of your life up to this point.
(i have to pick up the pace here, because the stunning accuracy of this analogy is forcing me to revisit feelings that, i swear this is true, i do not want to consider even so far as to continue describing them).
your bacon cheeseburger… takes four years to arrive. your server, however, pays you frequent visits to assure you that the burger is not only succulent and delicious, but that the chef has already finished preparing it and the only reason that it is not already in your hands being devoured is that it has been detained by the outpouring of praise and admiration being showered upon it by the kitchen and wait staff in the back of the restaurant, slowing the plate’s progress to your table.
but it’s (seemingly) ok: your bacon cheeseburger finally arrives. the wait has been nearly unbearable. in a haze of anticipation, joy and relief that threaten to impair basic cognition, you whisk the bacon cheeseburger off of your plate and take a ferocious bite-
-into an actual, physical piece of shit, -fecal matter-, sandwiched between two hamburger buns. there is no bacon. there is no cheese. it is disputable as to whether this can even legally be described as a “burger.”
a piece. of. shit.
it doesn’t matter who the fuck you are, or whatsoever, at this point, your experiences with or opinion of bacon or cheeseburgers are. there is no reason whatsoever to think that anybody, under any circumstances, would ever, EVER want this piece of shit sandwich.
THERE IS NO REASON.
in fact, the global repercussions are so disastrous that every single article of bacon or cheeseburger, in any format, cease to be prepared or sold anywhere in the world ever again. nobody will ever even approach the shame and awesome disgust associated with the bacon cheeseburger ever again.
try as you might, no matter what you eat or drink or pray to, you can never remove the shit taste from your mouth. or your soul. ever.
THAT, good sir, is what is wrong with Master of Orion 3.
it is literally Hitler.

>

Endless Space.   Community Driven 4x space game by some French peoples.  When you play, in the distance you can hear the cowes lowing out MOO.  Shot out onto the internets via Steam in alpha format if you pre-order the game, and while it is definitely an ALPHA, the game and interface shows a great deal of promise for those of use that feel we have been urinated upon from a great height by games like Sword of the Stars and Galactic Civ.

High points:

Combat is tight as Seven of Nine’s uniform and will work for both single player AND multiplayer

The interface is Jeisa Chiminazzo.  Extremely impressive both functionally and visually.

Ship design is easy.

BauriceMastard did a video of some play where he and I were babbling about it and of course it’s worth a listen– all fourty three minutes and twenty six seconds of it.

Quicksilver’s Master of Orion 3 was personally my biggest disappointment in gaming–and singlehandedly dug the 4X turn-based space game’s grave after a decade or so of good stuff (MOO2, Ascendancy, Reach for the Stars, etc.).  We’ve had some independent efforts since, and some semi-big name games that were incredibly lackluster, either didn’t do multiplayer well (forgivable), were just effectively mods of CIV 4 (Gal Civ I’m looking at you) or just plain huffed a pan-galactic cockle (Sword of the Stars).  With the’ release’ of Elemental War of Magic we’ve seen that while Stardock may have the passion for attempting to recreate some of the older games we love with new graphics, and even the financial clout and true grit to get them published (that’s the hard part), that does not mean that they are able to make good games.

What I’d like to see is Stardock to focus on their Gal Civ games, and now that CIV 5 is out for them to copy all the gameplay from, a new release is inevitable in the next few years.  While I have no interest in the Gal Civ games (I can just go play CIV 4 or 5 and pretend it’s a space field), they have a following that may help to keep the genre alive while someone else– almost anyone else– picks up the Master of Orion Licence from Atari where it sits, languishing after Quicksilver Games cascade of space piss debacle.

I have not tried this badboy out, but soon.  Link