Archive for September 9th, 2011

Witness the power of this fully repaired and operational purple sickle!

By the way, that guy can still attack. I can tell you from first-hand experience that zombie headbutts hurt.

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You might guess from this screenshot of an iPhone game that you’re looking at some actioney shooter thing in which a little dude shoots monsters. Not quite. That’s no monster. That’s a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath. And while there’s certainly shooting involved, check out those stats on the right side of the screen. SAN? As in “sanity”? But of course. What sort of Cthulhu game doesn’t have sanity?

What’s more, look a little closer and you’ll see the AP and hit% figures at the bottom of the screen. Action points and die rolls? Like you’d find in a turn-based game? Yep.

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based RPG, and it’s set in the early 20th century, like any Cthulhu game should be. Your dudes — you’ll control up to six of them — might lose sanity when encountering monsters, but you’ll also spend sanity to cast spells.

The Wasted Land is based on the Chaosium pen-and-paper RPG, so in addition to the usual combat skills (it’s still basically a combat game), you’ll also have a Cthulhu mythos skill that determines how well you can use spells, and a psychoanalysis skill that lets you restore lost sanity. There’s no announced release date yet, but find out more here.

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Victoria 2 is one of Paradox’s greatest games partly because it’s great, but partly because it has such a unique sense of identity. No game models the interplay of population and politics quite so cannily as Victoria 2.

However, the last time I played, it had a couple of frustrating issues that killed my interest. The first is that I was able to max my spending on bureaucrats just long enough to optimize their effect, at which point I could lower the spending to zero with no apparent detrimental effect. My society would run smoothly with an unpaid bureaucracy. Wisconsin would be so proud.

The other problem I found was a global shortage of liquor, which made a lot of production difficult. You need liquor for artillery, for instance. It may not seem like a good idea to mix liquor and heavy firepower, but them’s the rules. If you want artillery, you gotta get your men liquored up.

So during a recent trawl through the Paradox forums to see what’s up with patches, I was pleased to discover the following in the notes for the latest beta patch.

– Beuruecrats will demote quicker to farmer and labourers if no current spending.
– Increased liquour output a little bit further.

I’ll refrain from putting [sic] in there, since I’m American and therefore have trouble distinguishing between the Queen’s English and a typo.

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