The Geryk Rebuttal
Reach for the Stars

By Tom Chick

As for myself, I haven't played Reach for the Stars, but that won't stop me from having an opinion. Which is this: a bad backstory doesn't matter a whit. You can just as easily ignore it and pretend there is no backstory. There are far more important factors to consider. In fact, in a list of the most important elements in a computer game, I'd rank backstory right under Aureal 3D support.

One of my favorite strategy games this year is Starships Unlimited, a 4X sci-fi strategy game in the same category as MOO and Reach for the Stars. But unlike those titles, Starships Unlimited was born naked of backstory and hasn't bothered to don one. It's running around, naked as a jaybird, with its lack of backstory blithely flapping in the breeze. There's no intro cutscene. There's no flavor text with the tech advances. Each race is just a little head in the diplomacy window. The robot dude is no different from the bug dude or the long-snouted dude.

The closest thing to a backstory in Starships Unlimited is the competing ideologies, which are more of a game mechanics than anything else. Each race subscribes to either the Big Endian or Little Endian school of thought. In diplomacy, a race is more kindly disposed to other races with the same philosophy. Otherwise, they don't mean a damn thing.

I suppose Andrew Ewanchyna, Starship Unlimited's developer, could have hired someone like James Wagner Au or Martin Cirulis to write up some stuff about how the Big Endians blew up the Little Endians' home planet or killed their prophet or something. I probably wouldn't have bothered to read it and Mr. Geryk would have just made fun of it. Other reviewers could have written about it to pad their word counts. That's probably the most useful function of a backstory: it's a convenient way for bad reviewers to avoid making any sort of useful comments about a game.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: me and Alan Emrich doing a tag team rebuttal to Mr. Geryk, WWF style. Mr. Emrich hit him with the folding chair and I did the elbow drop to the groin. To recap:

1. Bruce's opinion is entirely too long and complicated to recap.

2. My opinion is that bad backstories are inconsequential.

3. Mr. Emrich's opinion is that MOO3 will have a fifth X.

4. What's your opinion? The message board wants to know.

Join us for the next Geryk Analysis when Mr. Geryk takes the controversial stand that bugs in games are a bad thing. We're in talks with Jonah Falcon to write the rebuttal.

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