Hateful, threatening, sinister and not in the least bit thankful; it makes you wonder why humans were stupid enough to give others hyperdrive. The apes should have taken over if this was what we knew we were going to unleash.
After the jump is a galaxy full of jerks Continue reading →
Victoria 2 is Paradox’s massive spreadsheet strategy game about the 19th century, give or take. It’s the game I’ve been playing instead of Pride of Nations, since the “review build” of Pride of Nations is in really bad shape. The developers have their work cut out for them between now and their June 7th release.
So while not playing Pride of Nations, I was greeted by the following message in Victoria 2:
Scientists in our country have discovered Proto-Existentialism.
This was not a philosophical movement but disparate philosophers analyzing and discussing concepts and conceptions which they considered flawed. The general notion about things as Intuition, Time, Intellect, and Being had to be reformulated not do create pesudoproblems.
In terms of gameplay, it means my research had lead to an invention, which is an additional bonus that trickles out after you complete research. Instead of giving you everything at once — BAM! Now you can build granaries! or BAM! Now you’ve unlocked musketeers! or BAM! Now you can research the Apollo Project! — many research results dole out their benefits over time. In this case, Proto-Existentialism gave me a small boost to my prestige rating, which is a nation’s overall metric of success. This will happen some time after a nation finishes researching Idealism under the Philosophy category of the Culture tech tree. Even though it not a major gameplay twist, it’s a nice touch that many of the techs keep on giving with follow-up sub-techs.
But in terms of flavor text, it’s a brilliant combination of eternal wisdom, Paradox Interactive typos, and 19th Century philosophical earnestness. Proto-Existentialism is so hardcore that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry! And don’t get me started on my discovery of Neokantian Idealism shortly thereafter.
The difference between Pride of Nations and Victoria 2 is pretty stark, even though they have identical subject matter and are played at identical scales. Victoria 2 is Paradox’s classic model of gameplay as data surfing, where you just ride the wave of history as it’s presented in a realtime sea of numbers, charts, lists, tooltips, and map displays. And since the game has been out long enough to have three patches and plenty of rough-honed mods, I’m almost dreading the release of Pride of Nations, which will have no such advantage.
The above mishap was entirely my co-driver’s fault. Right five, my ass. That’s a four if ever I’ve seen one. It’s bad enough that she keeps lying about the titans. “Titans, over bridge,” she’ll warn. I have yet to see a single blessed titan. I’m beginning to wonder if they’re even in the game.
I’d just like to point out a few nifty details in the above replay from Dirt 3. Note the little figure dangling from the car’s rear view mirror. That’s my Xbox Live avatar. Mirror and dashboard ornaments were unlockables in Dirt 2, but in Dirt 3, you automatically get your avatar. Nifty touch, sure, but it’s a shame there’s no incentive to drive from that view. Also, you can’t drive from the wider view you see in the replay that shows both the driver and co-driver. Instead, the viewpoints is, as you’d expect, from the driver’s point of view.
This is a rally course in Kenya. That village looks every bit as good as, say, a level in Resident Evil 5 or Far Cry 2, even though you’ll almost never get to see it as anything other than a blur of scenery. Speaking of which, you might notice what looks like a radio tower in the middle of the village. That’s no such thing. It’s the base of a windmill that you can see when the course loads. And if you’ve turned off the music — and good lord, what a relief it is to turn off the music in Dirt 3! — you can actually hear the pastoral creak of the turning windmill. Did you see Meek’s Cutoff? Probably not. But if you had, you’d have an ear for the forlorn creak of a turning wheel.
The camera movement during the replay is automatic, and above you can see some of the more energetic instances of camera movement. It’s a bit gratuitous, but it sure does add a lot of energy. Videogames love to move cameras around, as if they’re lording it over real cameras. It reminds me of the scene in War of the Worlds when Tom Cruise is driving away from New York and the camera is swirling around and into the car while he and his kids freak out. That scene is like the replay from a racing game.
That’s the worst bridge in the world. Someone should tell whomever built it that bridges are supposed to go over the water, not under it.
Of course, I fully intended to hit that little sign with the happy face on it. Although that’s no happy face. It’s a stopwatch icon. Every time you pass those signs, your time is registered and you can see your rank among the other drivers running the course. Now the car behind me won’t know he’s coming up on a checkpoint unless he’s looking on the right side of the road. Ha!
At the very end of the replay, the camera glitches. Did you see it? Don’t blink! I love when that sort of imperfection is coded into a game, like lens flare in the olden days. Most recently, this was used to great effect in Kane and Lynch 2, which was made to look like a cheap digital video, with compression artifacts and smeared lighting. It was one of the boldest aesthetic choices I’ve ever seen in a videogame and I loved it.
I have no idea what kind of car I’m driving. It’s, um, a Monza Sport XL-5 Rally Car 2000. Okay, I made that up. Dirt 3 is really terrible about making me care about the cars.
Well, I signed on to do five of these Nethack diaries, and this is the fifth, which is good, because in order to find new things to complain about I’d have to keep playing the game.
I’m kidding, of course. There are a lot of things I like about Nethack. It’s fun to imagine how thrilling it must have been to college students in 1987, clandestinely passed around on floppy disks or played on a library terminal. The immaturity of the Internet and absence of Google would have made knowledge of the game’s countless spoilers a rare commodity, to be drunkenly shouted by one engineering student to another in crowded small-town bars with lenient carding policies. Gorgeous coeds would get into yowling, hair-pulling catfights over who deserved to fellate the most proficient Nethack player.
I could be romanticizing things a bit. My own first exposure to roguelikes was Nethack’s predecessor, Hack, which I acquired on a Fred Fish disk for my Amiga in high school, long before I discovered beer or coeds. I played it endlessly, dying in more ridiculous ways each time, never really getting the tiniest grasp on how anyone would actually go about winning the game. But then I had an excuse: I knew one other guy who played it, he was as clueless as me, and we had no way to learn about the game other than trial and error. In 2011, all the secrets of Nethack are at my fingertips online, but I still don’t know how to win. I’ve played without spoilers for so long not out of some kind of hyper-morality, but just because Nethack spoilers put me to sleep. I’m certain that interest in playing a game and interest in learning a vast range of counter-intuitive facts that are, for all intents and purposes, separate from the game itself, are two different interests. While some people may have both of those interests, I don’t. And thus, I will never win Nethack.
While that was fine for me in high school, in my old age, I’m less patient with this random, mysterious, goofy game that will kill you on a whim. Maybe I’m distracted by all these coeds and beer.
Rally racing is a terrible idea. Whose idea was it to go fast over, like, gravel? And dirt and mud? You can’t get any traction on that stuff. Your car slides. And sometimes there are rally races in snow. Snow! Can you believe it? That’s the stuff people ski on. It’s the worst place in the world to go fast. When people have footraces and baseball games where it’s snowy, I’m pretty sure they bring out big snow melters to clear the track, or whatever it is you do to get snow out of the way. But not in rally racing. In rally racing, it’s like they intentionally want you to drive on snow. It’s like they go to whole countries full of snow, such as Finland and Aspen.
After my ongoing love affair with Shift 2, I was a bit worried that I’d be tapped out in terms of racing games. But the kind of driving you’re doing in Dirt 3 is really its own beast. It’s loosey-goosey enough for things to go wrong from time to time. The above video illustrates perfectly the difference between actual racing and rally racing, and the difference between Shift and Dirt. If the above had happened while I was playing Shift 2, I’d go straight to “restart race” in the pause menu. But in Dirt 3, it’s just another thing that can sometimes happen on the way to the finish line.
By the way, I blame the elephant grid for what happened in that video. Stupid elephant grid.
Having just started Dirt 3, I can’t race a race to save my life. This is partly because I have too much pride to dial down the realism settings, which means I’m using a handling model that ensures I spend a lot of time getting up close and personal with Finnish trees. Fortunately, unlike the previous Dirt games, I can set the realism separately from the skill level of the other drivers. So for now, I’m my own worst enemy. My kingdom for a patch of asphalt!
And although I haven’t figured out the driving, I’m already in love with the ability to snip a piece of a replay and then upload it directly and without fuss to a YouTube account. So what you can see up there is the single most impressive feat I’ve accomplished. I’m sure the people who live in that house were impressed.
I’ve started a new game as an orcish barbarian. One thing I’ve run into early on is an altar. Your character can gain benefits from his god by sacrificing his kills on these things. This altar-sacrifice “feature” is shared among many roguelikes, including Dungeon Crawl, frequently cited as the most “user-friendly/modern/fun/not stupid/actually playable” example of the genre. And I wonder if anyone actually likes doing it? It just feels like homework to me. You’re an adventurer exploring a dungeon and thwacking baddies, I get the allure of that. But to then pick up your victims and lug them to an altar for brownie points just feels like taking out your recycling, and it’s about as much fun.
Well, I’m dead, jerks. I’m dead in Nethack, and I’m getting the flu in real life. You may not care about the flu detail but this is called a “game diary.” I can write about my damn lunch if I want to. Dear diary: Today I ate a sandwich.
After the jump, how my character bit the big one Continue reading →
So there I was, getting my ships repaired and ready for the next fight my little fleet would face when all of a sudden, THIS asshole pops up. What’s he want? Apparently the little scamp is impatient and wants ME to get back into the fight freaking ASAP while he sits all comfy and cozy back on the mothership. He buddy, I got your system map right here…
This is just one example of all the little things that Space Pirates and Zombies is littered with. Tons of little touches that add flare and zest to the game, wherein you can tell the programmers really put a lot of care and thought into things that might go unnoticed elsewhere. In this, my final entry, I’ll look at some of those tiny, little yet awesome things, as well as wrap up my look at the game as a whole. Join me, won’t you?
After the jump, killing is relaxing… Continue reading →
It has all come down to this. In game time, it has been a mere five months since I arrived in Calradia. Since then, I have made a name for myself in this world. Now a faction is welcoming me in, not through its own choice but rather through the actions of a rogue lord who got a little too bloodthirsty one day. This marriage takes place under the dark cloud of impending war, this time one that promises to take a great many lives more than the last and which will be unmatched in its savagery.
After the jump: today, though, is my wedding day Continue reading →
I’m playing as a gnomish wizard, because that’s what I feel like in real life: a short, weak creature who has a lot of potential that will never pay off because he will be doing pretty well until he eats a rotten rat corpse and dies with only his pet cat to remember him.
After the jump, check out my sweet items Continue reading →
A great man once said, “I’m gonna fight, the only way I know. Ever since I was a boy, all I knew was how to fight. Fight, fight, fight. And when I got tired, I’d fight some more”. Space Pirates and Zombies seems to follow this motto, as it does indeed have a lot of fighting, and it’s this fighting that is basically the glue that holds the rest of the game together. Most of the missions in the game involve lots of pew pew, whether you’re fighting other ships (which is most of the time), trying to destroy containers or even a renegade comet. Combat allows you to collect all three of the game’s main resources (Rez, Goons and Data) in various fun ways. Some call this a grind, but is it really? Let’s discuss the matter further…
After the jump, let me fight so my game won’t grind… Continue reading →
534:366 = Soviet Minor Victory
After the jump, I can explain Continue reading →
I once said that blood and money are the two things that lead to power in Calradia. I’ve earned enough money to support an army as large as those of other lords of the realm. I’ve spilled, directly and indirectly, enough blood to fill all of the ale kegs in Jelkala.
None of that blood is anywhere near as significant as the blood to be spilled today.
After the jump, a little treason before breakfast, then a little war after lunch Continue reading →
