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.
Cable has Shark Week. Qt3 has Dead Island Week. Until science discovers a way to combine them, we devote a fair amount of this week’s podcast to the latter.
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Iced Wind is a cute adventure level where you scoot around in ice caves collecting bubbles. It certainly doesn’t have the personality of last week’s Toy Story level, but it’s a good little platformer I played last week. I actually meant to go back to a level I found too difficult to finish and try to figure out why it had given me such problems, but my PS3 pulled this updating scam on me where it insisted I had to download a 568MB update for LBP2 before I could play it. I freaking hate that forced-update scheme, but what’re they gonna do? They know that left to my own devices I’d put that off forever. Oh well. I’ve only got to wait 267 more minutes until it’s updated.
I wish there were a way I could be warned about those things. A little bell that would cause me to salivate and automatically know I had a wait ahead of me. Or a warning sent to my iPhone so I could schedule the update for when I’m cooking dinner and getting my kid to bed. Something. Instead I it takes me by surprise in that tiny window of time I have for gaming and annoys the hell out of me. I suppose there’s no way to train someone to expect this.
Because I don’t mind training. If it’s good. In point of fact, I love it.
After the jump: good for you, good for me, mmm good Continue reading →
There’s a particular genre of book, military history book specifically, called the “unit history”. It may have a desultory title like “The History of the 1st Infantry Division in World War II” or a slightly jazzier name like “The Big Red One: Crusade in Europe”. It’s usually a catalog of where a unit was on each day of a campaign, what it did, and a lot of name-checking and shout-outs to people who served in that unit, along with photos and other memorabilia. It’s both a historical and personal record, meant to preserve the unit’s memory and standing, and take due (or undue) credit along the way.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this, except that as an outsider I don’t have any attachment to any particular military organization or unit, so there’s nothing to grab my attention. I’m not a “fan” of any tank division in the same way that I am a fan of — for example — the Detroit Red Wings. I generally find this kind of stuff boring, despite my interest in military history. Someone once gave me, as a gift, a copy of Comrades to the End: The 4th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment “Der Fuhrer” 1938-1945. I’m not sure what kind of comment that is on him or me, and I probably shouldn’t think about it too much. It’s on my bookshelf somewhere, but I don’t particularly care what a bunch of Nazis did on, say, 14 October 1943, or any day before or after that, unless they died, in which case I’m good with the outcome.
So it’s weird that I just spent thirty bucks plus shipping on a copy of Messerschmitt Bf-110 Bombsights Over England: Erprobungsgruppe 210 in the Battle of Britain.
After the jump, eat your heart out, Detroit Red Wings Continue reading →
Also, Svetlana, can you please move a little to your left before I accept the quest?
I think at some point in this series I promised you some role-playing. Strategy role-playing, to be exact. Not by me, of course, because I don’t do that kind of stuff. But from a game design perspective, you can’t help but appreciate the possibilities. Because the best games tell the best stories, the chance to tell a good one shouldn’t be missed. From a strategy role-playing perspective, what could be a better story than what I’m about to show you?
Find out after the jump Continue reading →
I don’t envy Atari having to promote their upcoming game for the Wii and DS. Thanks to Dutch filmmaker Tom Six, I mentally put the word “human” in front of the word “centipede” whenever I see it. It’s his fault the last feature in this paragraph is so unintentionally creepy.
Centipede returns as an updated version of beloved gaming classic. Explore an expansive new world with seven different environments and 40 stages. Defend Maisies [sic] garden from waves of nasty creepy crawlers with an arsenal of over 20 weapons. Test your power and skill against five devious bosses. Team up with a friend for maximum fire power for nail biting two player co-op action.
The Debt is one of those movies where characters deal with a Deep Dark Secret from Many Years Ago ™. And, to be fair, these are interesting characters. Tom Wilksinson, Helen Mirren, and Ciarin Hinds are former Mossad agents credited with taking out a prominent Nazi many years ago during a mission in East Berlin. Cue Samuel Jackson making a gun-to-the-head gesture and asking “taking out”? Yes, taking out. Mossad, dontchaknow? The Debt is about something that happens thirty years later.
Well, at least that’s what The Debt is about before it spends far too much time with the less interesting younger versions of the characters, particularly Jessica Chastain. She’s certainly lovely, and we know from Tree of Life that she’s capable of gravity. But here she’s just lovely and not much else. The most interesting thing about her is that she’s going to grow up into Helen Mirren. She does demonstrates one hell of a way to take out a gynecologist who you might suspect is a former Nazi, but that’s still not as interesting as growing up into Helen Mirren.
I saw in the credits that Sam Worthington was supposed to be in this movie, but I don’t recall seeing him. Maybe he was in the Sam Worthington-shaped hole that was moving around on screen a lot. And I’m always up for watching Marton Csokas, who you probably know as Mr. Galadriel in Lord of the Rings, or the agent who Matt Damon kills with a toaster and a magazine in Bourne Supremacy. But it wasn’t enough to keep me from wondering when we were going to get back to Helen Mirren. And when that finally happens, the movie is nearly over, leaving just enough time to literally stumble to a silly and hurried finale in which Mirren demonstrates that she is the worst secret agent ever.
Hey, Hollywood, can I tell you a secret? People over 40 are inherently more interesting than people under 40*. I say this having been on both sides of the equation. Now if your goal is to get people under 40 to see your crappy movie, good job focusing on Jessica Chastain. But if your goal is to tell an interesting story, The Debt is doing it wrong.
* if I knew how to do footnotes, here I would cite episode 12 of season two of Louie
During the Civil War — bear with me — battles often happened by accident. That’s just how it worked back then. Two armies would maneuver around, chasing each other, or feeling their way around the land, trying to find advantageous ground. Eventually, they’d tangle up a flank, or stumble onto arriving enemy reinforcements, or get caught flat footed crossing a river. Skirmishes blossomed into full-blown encounters that gave birth to unplanned Civil War battlegrounds. We don’t often think of battles as surprises, but that’s often what they were.
After the jump, why I thought of this as I plunged to my death in Dead Island Continue reading →
New content goes live for DC Universe Online today, including a new set of superpowers and some more instances.
Introducing DC Comics legend The Green Lantern and the game’s seventh power set (Light), the “Fight for the Light” pack allows players to join the Green Lantern Corps or Sinestro Corps as reservist members while helping to restore balance to the universe.
Along with interactions with Green Lantern based favorites and foes, players will be launched into multiple action-packed scenarios, including an epic battle for control in S.T.A.R. Labs, a light-to-light showdown with the Red Lantern Corps in Coast City, and chaotic prison break at Sciencells Prison.
I really enjoyed DC Universe Online, and if I had time to jump into an MMO, it’s on the very short list of MMOs I’d like to get back to playing. But I wish the developers at Sony Online would find a way to get players out into the cities of Gotham and Metropolis. When the game launched, these cities were full of players zipping to and fro, getting into skirmishes with each other, and generally bringing the places to life while they did quests on the short trip to the level limit. At which point they all retreated into instances to grind for raid gear. Last time I checked, Gotham and Metropolis were ghost towns.
And Sony Online seems content to keep them ghost towns by continuing to shunt players into places like S.T.A.R. Labs, Coast City, and the Sciencells Prison. What about Metropolis and Gotham City, which are already in the game and in dire need of things to do and players doing them? And when is Sony Online going to unbottle some of those buildings and let us fight over them?
I couldn’t tell you the first thing about the storyline in Bodycount, which is all about the gunplay like a shooter should be. However, throughout the game, an obligatory female voice is talking you through the missions. She’s your handler or narrator or Cortana or whatever. This is how you’re supposed to figure out the story, but I was only half listening. Near the end of the game, she gets attacked and you have to mumblemumble data cores mumblemuble nexus mumblemumble cyber program mumblemumble to save her. And that’s when I realized the voice actress is a dead ringer for the host of NPR’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross. Who I’d much rather rescue than Neal Conan or Robert Siegel.
I’ll have a full review of Bodycount posted later this week. Until then, suffice to say Bodycount doesn’t close nearly as strong as it opens.
Everyone knows that strategic games with tactical battle engines are better than strategic games without them. Any game which tries to abstract out combat in the name of tighter, more thematic game design is eventually going to get crushed by complaints from gamers who want to fight out the battles turn by turn, or for truly advanced players, in real time. You know it, I know it, and the American people know it. So why do developers keep missing the boat? It’s so cute that you think I am about to give you the answer. I would never be that straightforward. Maybe I just don’t know.
After the jump, there are known unknowns, where we know what we don’t know Continue reading →
So far the most powerful weapon I’ve discovered in Dead Island is Xian’s high-heeled shoe. Once I’ve knocked a zombie to the ground, I can aim at its head and tap the E key to apply my shoe (pictured). It is the equivalent of going nuclear. Let’s look at the numbers.
The early trash weapons do about 30 or 40 points of damage. More durable weapons do two or three times that amount. As you upgrade weapons and specialize with your skills, you can get that into the 300 or 400 range. At level 20, with most of her points in combat skills, my Xian has a rare bolo machete given to her by a nun. After investing considerable lucre, the machete does 700 points of damage. A molotov cocktail will apply about 150 points of burning damage every second or so, pretty much until a zombie is dead. The first homemade bomb you discover will do 5000 points of damage.
Xian’s stomp routinely does over 20,000 points of damage.
As much as I’d love to consider Dead Island a subversive commentary on women’s footwear, it’s not just the high-heeled shoe. All four characters have a stomp attack once they get about half way into the combat branch of their skill trees. Stomps are actually — get this — a part of the game’s economy. Every point of damage you do without spending some of your weapon’s durability rating is money you’ll save on repairs. Timothy Geithner has nothing on me.
Shark Night, which features a scene in which a one-armed man wades out into waist-deep water and wins a hand-to-hand fight against a shark, introduces its cast with a pair of Tulane students playing Halo 3 in their dorm room. Microsoft’s shooter gets quite a bit of screen time, some map-specific discussion, and a generic Xbox shout-out. The word “pwned” is used unironically. And considering that the cast of this forgettable tripe is so uniformly unlikable — I was even rooting for the dog to die — I’m not the least bit surprised they’re the sort of people who play Halo online.
