Category: Strategery

Best of the Master series gets a much needed reprint!

Released yesterday, IKUSA is the new name for Milton Bradley’s master system triumph Shogun (later Samurai Swords) produced now by WOTC.  I guess I should have sold my unpunched version of Samurai Swords a  few years back eh!?   While this is a must have, I feel this game has been somewhat eclipsed by Dirk Henn’s  Shogun.  To be sure, these are two very different games.  Herr Henn’s is a Euro take on the conflict and Samurai Swords/IKUSA is at the absolute apex of Ameritrash goodness.   Both are great in their own way, but Ikusa is longer, much more random and it’s objectives are to wipe the other players out as is the way with Ameritrash.  One has a cube tower and one has little plastic swords and the backfiring ninja!  I can’t help but love both.

What to play on the Win2K box?

With my gaming rig down for the count and Bulletstorm, Singularity, BFBC2 and Shogun Total War 2 are a distant dream so I’ve spanned some time on my Windows 2000  box that is going on 11 years old now and still cranking!  Typically I use it for Close Combat almost exclusively as I have most of the series installed (though I have to dig around for the cd’s–how antiquated…).  Yesterday I found a gem installed right on the C: drive:  CHAOS OVERLORDS published by New World Computing back in the elder times — also responsible for HOMM and Hammer of the Gods.  It’s a CCG-like game of area control and gang warfare that allows you to research tech, hire gangs that randomly come up in a queue and extort protection money for the businesses and buildings in your regions.  Like Imperialism from back in the day, Chaos Overlords is notable because I have NEVER won a game.  Even without victory, it’s quite fun to play until you get simultaneously attacked by all the other gangs at once.

Secondly, one of my favorite games from the 90’s– King of Dragon Pass is still hanging out on my win2K’s hard drive awaiting invocation.  While it requires the disk during play, this is a game that I cannot believe hasn’t come out on Steam or GOG, though it looks like it’s being developed for the iPad.  It’s difficult to describe as it’s a little like a Koei strategy title but also a bit of an adventure game with a series of random events obviously very keyed to your current situation in the game.  These random events path, so if your clan adopts a certain red-headed girl when prompted, later random events will be keyed to the fact that she is part of your clan.  If you never accepted her, another set of events are keyed.  Since this happens across a myriad of events, it’s never the same game twice, though you will see the beginnings of event-trees over and over.    My initial games were extremely blood thirsty, choosing to fill my Elder Circle with followers of Humakt (the god of war) and go forth and kick ass on my rival clans.  It turns out the balanced path is the one that wins the game as it’s not about conquest, but forming a tribe of other clans, and then a kingdom through a series of rituals where a member of your Elder circle enters into the lands of the gods.  A brilliantly unique experience.

I can abide 2 weeks or so of this… maybe…

New Dwarf Fortress Release

I have made statments to the effect that while Minecraft owns the limelight at the moment, Dwarf Fortress will eventually be the game you’ll want to be playing long term as Minecraft is really just a timewaster that runs out of steam pretty quickly. Given that Dwarf Fortress is probably a decade away from a release most people would want to play, Minecraft has a long long time to be the darling of procedurally generated mining games–however, if you can brave the incomplete-ness, there is a new Dwarf Fortress release. Clay, Caravans, Bees, Sheep shearing– tons of stuff in this build– but I wonder if you can still build a ton of fishing infrastructure only to find that fishing hasn’t been implemented…

Empire: Total War commentaries on completion

Finally, I was able to press END TURN enough to get the short, generic VICTORY movie at the end of the grand campaign in Empire: Total War (I had completed the victory conditions 30 turns before the end of the game).  It was a long, long slough as Sweden, moving through Russia, south through the Caucases  into Kashmir and then shooting west through Pomerania, Bavaria and onto France.   Empire is a giant game, encompassing the biggest map of the world so far in a Total War game (I actually got to fight a battle near my house in the midwest!).  The idea of conquering all of it by the time alloted is pretty daunting, but once you get on a roll, entirely possible.  I had little trouble with any of the enemy nations with the exception of Spain and England.  England managed to keep my Swedish ships out of the water for decades at a time, and against Spain, I actually lost some major land battles before they finally succumbed to a three prong attack from France, Portugal and up from the Mediterranean.

Overall, Empire: Total War was a big step up from the graphically excellent, but rather mediocre Midieaval Total War 2, with major refinements to the campaign mode, the removal of the management  of families and lineage, reduction of the importance of religion and missions from the pope or some governing body (I’m my own governing body dammit!).  In the Grand Campaign, I felt a lot more free to hack through whatever part of the planet piqued my interest at the time, regardless of race, creed or religion.  I love the fact that each of the nations speak in their own language— a really wonderful touch that I didn’t realize until I couldn’t understand anything my Swedish troops were saying on turn 1.

As for the real time battles, I found the engine to be more fun and more intense than anything in MTW2 as well, handling musket and pistol just as well as arrows and swords.    The typical AI quirks fans of the series have learned to love after all these years are still around, making flanking and harrasment your best tools against an easily flustered AI.   Sieges are still not very fun, and I would have to say they are worse than their Rome/Midieaval TW counterparts because they don’t follow what was going on during the period at all.   Sieges during this time rarely went into initial assault, instead the attackers would build, over time, a massive mine and trench system around fortifications.  Eventually, if left unmolested, the attackers would get bombards close enough to fire over the walls at which time the defenders would either surrender or prepare to receive 3 assaults through breaches, after which they could surrender with their colors.  None of this is represented in TW: Empires and I feel that’s a grevious lack of attention to detail as well as simply not being very fun to play out.

We did finally get sea battles in this version and it’s something I am really looking forward to as Creative Assembly continues to revisit the series (Shogun next!).  The sea battles are slow and tactical, but the first time you see an enemy’s magazine blow up all the build up is worth it.  That said, most of the time I let the auto-fight figure out who won unless it was a major throw down.

As for the special people: Spies, Gentleman and Priests, I really didn’t do much with two of the three.  Priests are necessary if you want the people that you just conquered to be happy by being converted to your religion, but they just sort of stand around.  Gentleman give bonuses to research and production and can duel other Gentleman, but I really didn’t pay much attention to them other than using them as semi-spies here and there.  Spies I used a great deal and were a key to success in most of the campaign, nothing new here from the early days of the series.

To conclude, Rome Total War is still my top dog in the 4X genre.  Sure the graphics are no where near TW: Empires and the campaign game is certainly not as mature, but Rome just something  about it that resonates with me. Possibly that the scale seems more appropriate, or the period is one I find entirely more compelling.  Next on my list is Napoleon Total War, but that will have to wait until I upgrade my tired socket 939.

Top Ten Games I couldn’t finish in 2010.

I must admit, my eyes are far bigger than my stomach sacule when it comes to buying games.  If I dedicated my few moments of free time each day to the games I have instead of buying new ones, I would save a lot of money.  But then, what would money be for?  Would GOG and Steam still exist?

This year was one of abject failure in the realm of completing games.  I’m simply astonished at the pile of games for the PS2, 360 and PC that languish, unfinished on my hard drive or save slots.  Why? Kids, work, freelance, boardgames and, for the first time in quite a while, reading books outside of the Aubrey/Maturin novels.  There I’ve gotten quite stuck, but I digress.   Below is my list of gamefails along with conjectural excuses of note I care to make, as well as an expounding at how good the games are in most cases.

10.  Bayonetta.  This is not a difficult game, and it is quite a fun platformer, item hunter and boss-fighter.  The plot is ridiculous and if I had finished it in the first week or so, I wouldn’t have had time to mull over what I think is going on between plays.  Since I do, I have to say that they could have kept the plot all very simple and still been successful, instead they went for a really wacky ploto-obscuro that is largely irrelevant when you are fighting building size angels who’s pristine armor comes off to reveal demon-like MEAT as the fights get heated.  I aim to finish this one up this winter.

9. Empire Total War. As I am a Total War freak, this is quite embarrassing as they came out with a new version of the game before I was able to finish the grand campaign to Empire.  I blame it on the fact that I had the victory conditions completed 70 turns before the game ends– and yet saw no victory screen asking if I wanted to stop and savor my victory rather than wait until the end.  I can essentially press NEXT TURN over and over to complete this one, but I just can’t stop myself from mucking about with unconquered Spain or Italy, making the turns take over an hour each at best.  This will be finished or I am not a man.

8. Red Dead Redemption.  Any of the two people that regularly read this blog will remember my lingering obsession over the summer with the Old West action brought on by yet another viewing of The Good the Bad and The Ugly and two reads through of Blood Meridian.  This obsession manifested itself in some stints of miniature painting, looking at various Old West skirmish rules, and of course the purchase of probably the best old west game in existence– one I have barely scratched the surface of.  Frankly, this may never be ‘finished’ insofar as the % complete goes but I’ll give it a good college try.

7. Portal. Just didn’t finish.  It’s great and I know it’s short but I got bored and felt like shooting some shit instead of bouncing balls around.

6. Mass Effect. This is really a movie game with some sort of lame fights in between and some extremely tedious side missions that fail to really keep up the impression that you have the freedom to move around the galaxy.  Still, some really fantastic pieces of game here.  Someday I’ll wrap this up.

5.  Dragon Age Origins. This is long.  It’s a long movie game like mass effect.  I found myself waiting for the good parts people talked about while trying to pretend it didn’t suck.  Bottom line: the combat is just plain bad compared to almost every other party-based fantasy game I have played.  I just wish people would look at Temple of Elemental Evil by Troika and realize that, for all it’s faults, that and Jagged Alliance are the way to do party based RPG combat.  This probably won’t be finished as when I play it I start to daydream about other stuff I should be doing instead, like home repair and basic grooming.

4. Painkiller. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get this one completed as I started playing multiplayer (the same thing happened in 1996 with Quake) and sort of forgot about the single player.  I may try to rock through this again, but it’s unlikely.

3.  Gratuitous Space Battles. This one I really can’t blame myself for. I started the campaign twice only to have a patch to the game invalidate my current save.  Though fun, the campaign game did not live up to my hopes though I still think this little indy game is one of the most important 4X space games for the genre that’s been out since MOO3 destroyed it.

2. Left 4 Dead 2.  I got it late, the year ran out.  We are going to finish this and it’s going to be awesome.  As my buddy Graham says: The undead aren’t going to destroy themselves.

1.  GODHAND. This is number 1 for three reasons.  First, because it is the most difficult game on this list both in terms of gaming stamina and technical skill. Second it’s the most embarrasing because one of my buddies completed Demon’s Souls before I was able to finish GOD HAND, and I started GODHAND in early 2009.  Third, this is one of those games like Metroid, Mega Man, Samurai Shodown, Urban Reign,  and Guilty Gear Accent Core that are truly difficult to complete, a game where by necessity you have to learn the system of play inside and out before you have any sort of chance of victory.  It’s a game so difficult that the hapless and fail-ridden reviewer at IGN gave the game one of the lowest scores to date, totally discounting any review IGN does as valid forever. This has to be finished.

Artemis Bridge Simulator and true Space nerdery

I got in on a LAN over the weekend with THIS going on.  It was a ton of fun, and quite challenging.  We had just the right number of people for the roles: captain, engineering, helm, weapons with science and communications combined and the ideal set up: a main screen plus each of the station screens.  We each got better at our individual roles, but most important, we got better as a team.  I dug the engineering the most as you are constantly shifting power around the ship for a myriad of reasons and you’re never sitting around waiting as you can always make some tweaks or prep for upcoming power needs if you are idle. Weapons is my second favorite. While firing the weapons themselves is sort of boring, you have a ton of information on screen you are trying to relay to the team.  You also control the main screen view for the captain.

I really dug the fact that this is a LAN game– at this point it cannot be played over the interweb tubes at all, but I assume that will happen eventually if there is $ in it for the developers.  In the time of extreme anti-LAN (even fake LAN’s over hamachi) from the major publishers, this is really refreshing to see.

Elemental War of Suckage: Was it Scrumfail?

I’m a huge advocate of scrum and agile project management, but there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out there that really don’t know jack shit about Scrum and have had a 2 day training but no real project experience, know less about Agile theory as a basis of why Scrum is what it is and can’t even spout the Agile Manifesto on command (sorry you HAVE to be able to do this if you think you know agile software development) and a lot of companies that try to dip their toes into it and get burned because they do not by any definition understand the fundamentals.   That said, a lot of game companies are moving to the scrum model, some Blizzard folks were at my training in March with Mike Cohn, and I can only assume Torchlight was managed via some form of scrum (I’d be very curious to confirm this if anyone knows).  So game companies have had success with the methods.

With the disasterous failure of the initial release of Elemental War of Magic basically tanking the game for now and the future (who will care about this in 18-24 months when it’s fixed?), I want to know if it was a game company trying to do Scrum for the first time, assuming that the rapid development and approval cycle would lead to a good game?  It’s tough to tell, but with the constant releases of screens and gameplay to the public early on, I’m betting this was a factor.  It’s not THE factor though: granted you had the owner of the company working as a developer, designer and product owner for the game per his admittance (honesty is nice to see in the industry), and that would taint any type of project method, whether waterfail or scrum.  Who on his team would tell him–” boy boss, this game sucks bad and is fundamentally not fun and lame and you tried to copy a game design from 1994 that sucked in the first place?” Only someone who is quitting that moment.  What’s more, because the team may have been doing scrum, team member happiness can be at it’s maximum possible during the development process– adding to the “this game will be great” pollyannishism because team members know what they need to do, what the goals are and have a massive level of autonomy to get their shit done (this makes good developers happy and the bad quit and go somewhere where they can be mediocre together with others via the Waterfail method).  We’ll have to keep watching to see if any clues drop as to their development methods.  Oh and see Keneda’s review here.

Elemental: Where’s The Magic?

Elemental: War of Magic is now about one week old and up to v1.06 and is no where near balanced or complete, but hey it doesn’t really crash anymore. This game is getting glowing reviews from hard core fans because in the future it will have good mods and will be patched by the developer to deliver on the idea that it is the spiritually successor to Master of Magic. What the flying fuck is wrong with people? $50, that is what you just paid for the hope that the game is functional some day. Bullshit.

Put simply, this game plays like a jokeshop of broken concepts. To prove how broken the game is I played several games where I purposely upgraded my military only and won handily over the computer. I ignored the other 4 tech trees completely, save for getting level 1 diplomacy for road building. I only cast summon spells and won. I didn’t use something like 50 or so other spells because they are completely POINTLESS. The only thing you need to win are superior numbers of units, that’s it. A player putting more points into magic is just wasting capital, military trumps magic EVERY FUCKING TIME.

3 years to make this game. The developer spent 3 years to make a shitty CIV clone with useless features.

So here is the feature list from the Elemental website along with my comments to help explain the reality behind this turd:

“A strategy game in an RPG world.”

The most limited RPG world because of the worst balancing problems EVER! You start the game with one “super” unit, your sovereign. This character has 8-10 stats you can lv up over the course of the game as you win battles. BUT only one stat allows you to gain mana and thus cast more spells per turn, breaking your choice of what to lv up. So you just put all your points into the mana stat every time you level. And then magic is really useless except for the summonable units, so what the fuck? BROKEN, zero RPG elements. You can give your character items, in fact you can give them UNLIMITED rings and necklaces that provide bonuses for combat. But who cares because you never really want to use your RPG style characters in combat, its MUCH better to just use the military units. BROKEN.

“Randomly Generated Maps.”

As far as I can tell this is true and works. The game has two modes for viewing the map, a 3d view and 2d view. You’ll quickly stop using the 3d view because of movement issues, you’ll think that you’re telling your units to move to one area, only to find you can’t click there or some other type of interface bullshit failure. So you switch to 2d view, which actually looks cool and works well, with minor “hey is that a spot I can move, click click click click, no, no i can’t move there? what the fuck? okay i guess i can’t move there”.

“10 Unique Factions.”

Doesn’t fucking matter! You can win with military only quickly and effectively every time, no diplomatic enemy will ever out diplomacy you. No AI will use magic to fend off your unit stack EVER. Factions = Fucked.

“In-Depth unit and character design.”

Character design that is unnecessary and clunky in implementation. Seriously you never need to design a custom unit ever.

“Tactical Battles.”

Fail! You only need to do one or two tac battles early on. once you get your unit stack up to 600+ attack you can beat anything without having to waste time in tac battles. There’s nothing of benefit in tac battles, zero.

“Rich, story-driven campaign developed by Random House’s Del Rey.”

AHAHAHAH this is a complete fucking joke. The campaign is boring and initially full of bugs. There is no sense of urgency in the campaign, so you can just sit back and build up your unit stack and once again steamroll through the fights with increasing boredom.

“Incredible replayability.”

No. Magic sucks, diplomacy is a jokeshop, RPG elements are meaningless, only military matters. There is so little to replay for it’s sad.

“Single player or Multiplayer (up to 16 players).”

Pretty sure multiplayer is still disabled/unimplemented I think. And if does work, who the fuck would want to try to play this busted ass unit stack vs. unit stack mess?

“Plays on very low end hardware.”

The maximum number of people can see how unbalanced and devoid of fun the game is.

“Takes advantage of the latest hardware.”

? To do what? What does it do on my new fast computer that is great? I had to turn of 3d map mode just to be able to see the map clearly and move my units around, the game forces you to play “low rez”, how is that taking advantage of the latest hardware?

“Massive modding support.”

Who cares about this now. I paid $50 for a fun, working game now.

“From the people who brought you Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire.”

I should have known Elemental was going to be all concept and zero delivery. I tried to play GC and couldn’t because it felt like shit. SoaSE, I tried to play the tutorial and got so fucking bored I quit. I’ve done that 3 times, what a bunch of fucking ass taco.