“How do I do the high-five thing again?”
“Use the D-pad,” Aaron says. He is sitting next to me on the couch, staring intently into the screen. He doesn’t look over.
I look for something D shaped on the shiny black controller in my hand. One of the most frustrating things about Xbox games is the fact that you must play them with these little handheld gadgets. They are as user unfriendly as a television remotes. I feel like I need my glasses to really get a sense for what is going on in my hand. How I long for my keyboard, the simplicity of WASD.
I am squinting in the dark of the living room, holding the controller at arm’s length.
“It only goes up to B,” I say.
After the jump, Dad gets all badass and starts quoting Old Testament. Okay, not really. If he asks you to pull his finger, pretend you didn’t hear. . . Continue reading →
Last week, I got to play a couple of missions from the upcoming Heart of the Swarm add-on for Starcraft II. Read the coverage here.
There are three different ways to play a real time strategy game: multiplayer, skirmish, and campaign modes, which I prefer in that order. To Blizzard’s credit, they’re putting more-or-less equal emphasis on all three ways to play. However, the traditional scripted scenarios that go into a campaign mode couldn’t be less interesting to me because they’re more about the mission designer than the gameplay.
Both missions from Heart of the Swarm were typical puzzle scenarios in which you build up an army and then scrape the map clean, but with some sort of twist to supposedly make it interesting. But there’s a fine line between a “twist” and an “annoyance”. In Starcraft II, consider the day/night zombie mission and the lava mission. In the former, you had to decide when to move out against zombie lairs and how many resources to spend on defense vs. offense. The mission progressed with a sense of pulses and a delicious “here they come again!” dread. But in the lava mission, you just had to get your workers out of the way of rising lava every so often. The former offered interesting decisions and a sense of place. The latter was just busywork. I’m not convinced Blizzard has quite figured out the difference yet.
If you liked the campaign in Starcraft II, I’m sure Heart of the Swarm will light your fire as well. And although I can groove on the RPG trappings between missions, the actual missions felt like the usual scripted single-player drill: train units, drag select them, attack move, win. Furthermore, the clot of earnest storytelling is so leaden. At one point, Kerrigan delivers the following line:
Izsha, can they commune with Shakura through the Kala?
That line is so heavy with inscrutable proper nouns that I have no idea what to do with it. The who with the what in the where? A game like The Witcher 2, which I’m on the verge of finishing, can get away with that, because it takes its time laying out the players, and developing the story based on your choices, and putting you into the plot as befits an up-close-and-personal RPG. In The Witcher 2, I care about Saskia and the Pontar Valley and Phillipa’s agenda. But when an RTS tries to get me to care about Izsha and Shakura and Kala, all I can think about is whether I have the number of zerglings the designer wanted me to train to get past this mission.
Tennis Age: Origins anyone?
So that’s some famous tennis guy up there, his sports face immortalized in one of Virtua Tennis 4’s artsy/craftsy splash screens. These screens appear in the gently pastel opening cinematic while some sort of chick rock/folk/pop song plays. Think Edie Brickell. I don’t know why anyone would want to show off his sports face. It’s not a pretty face. Way back when, while playing the original Virtua Tennis with some friends, one of my buddies observed that Pioline looked like he was getting a blow job. Which he didn’t. He looked more like he was being punched in the stomach. This spoke volumes about my friend’s past experiences with oral sex.
Wait, what? Anyway, thumbs up.
Now you’re my bitch. He paid up even though I’m on the opposite end of the galaxy. That’s respect and respecting Canadians grants you a new lease on life, which expires at my whim. But he went and messed it up and thus I owe him. I owe him a beating for having a class 15 planet and for speaking up.
After the jump, it hits me like a brick wall. Continue reading →
Picking up a new game like this, it’s a good idea to shy away from powerhouses like England and France until you’ve dabbled in some smaller power for a while. I prefer Venice or Portugal as an entry point into the Europa Universalis games. A sort of appetizer, if you will, before the main course. So in Victoria, I figured the Netherlands would be a good pick for a learning game. Probably not a lot of battling, but plenty of money, a touch of colonization, some progressive politics, front row seats to whatever’s going to happen in that patchwork territory that’s going to turn into Germany at some point.
I spend the early decades watching my country grow increasingly industrial and liberal, but not in that order. The Dutch are smart, to be sure. Plenty of education, literacy, tech research. But not much manpower. I can build a few factories, but nothing to keep pace with the rate of industrialization in the bigger countries. I spend most of the 19th century hauling coffee and fruit out of Indonesia. Occasionally, some minor nation defaults on its loans and I send a small army. Victorian era muscle, showing up on some single-province monarch’s doorstep to bark, “Where my money, bitch?” That’s what passes for excitement for the Netherlands.
Before long, I’ve been passed up by the other nations and might as well be playing Madagascar. The top eight nations get to be Great Powers, with unique gameplay mechanics for setting up spheres of influence that affect trade and diplomacy. The next eight nations get to play Secondary Powers, who can take part in the race to colonize the bits of Earth that no one has called dibbs on yet. Everyone else is just kind of hanging fire.
But tomorrow, I get my own piece of America, which ends up being a bit more than I bargained for.
