Tomi Undergallows
Sunny and I got some Neverwinter Nights time in last week, but I haven't had much of a chance to sit down and blog about it until today. We didn't get very far into the adventure; we're playing the original, official campaign, her with a hack n' slash fighter, and me with a cleric. Together we set out to find the waterdhavian creatures, and we quickly found that not being able to pick locks was kind of a downer--we're both accustomed to playing rogues, in some capacity. I suggested that we hire on that slippery little twerp, Tomi Undergallows, which is where things started to get interesting.
For starters, I guess my character had a better charisma score or something, because Sunny's fighter couldn't talk Tomi down lower than 225 gold to sign on, but my character managed to hire him for only 175. So we set off with Tomi under my command. Well, I'm playing NWN on my laptop which, unfortunately, isn't the most stable thing for 3D games. Most games don't give me much trouble, but once in a while something will crash (yeah, yeah... I'll look into getting some graphics driver updates.) Anyway, so we're in the middle of the overrun prison area, and some badass prison gang leader starts beating the shit out of us. Tomi dies, Sunny runs in the other direction, and I start running with the gang leader in hot persuit. The damned guy is really persistent and doesn't let up even as I pass through several areas.
Just then, my computer crashes. Sunny uses her stone of recall to get back to the temple, and after I manage to get back into the game, I do the same. Tomi is there, but he doesn't recognize me--he just keeps saying "sorry, but I'm here with somebody else" even though I have his scuzzy little contract in my inventory. Oh well, no use arguing with an NPC who is only scripted to repeat himself over and over, but we really need a rogue to open chests and stuff. Since we were barely 15 minutes into the adventure, we'll probably start that chapter over with the same characters. This time I'll let Sunny hire Tomi, since the PC that she's using is more stable than my cruddy laptop. Personally, though, I just think that Tomi is trying to milk more money out of us.
Metroid Pinball
Sunny got me Metroid Pinball for Christmas. I'm having a blast with it, and it's easily one of the most infectious DS games I've tried yet. You have to enjoy pinball game adaptations to get a kick out of it, though; if you either don't like pinball or are a hardcore pinball purist, then I imagine you could well have strong objections to Metroid Pinball that would be relatively foreign to me.
I'm not much of a pinball wizard, but I have had some experience with it in the past. Only a slim margin of this experience was with actual pinball machines, unfortunately. I had the old DOS version of Tristan, and I spent some time with Kirby's Pinball Land for GameBoy, which is one of the best GameBoy games ever made. I also have the Sonic Mega Collection for GameCube, which includes Sonic Spinball, although I haven't played much of that as I found it relatively frustrating. With this somewhat meager, yet adequate experience with pinball adaptations behind me, I've found it easy to dig right into Metroid Pinball. My current hi-score is over the 3 mil mark, although I'm consistently scoring near 2 mil and if I continue to find the time to play it, I expect to steadily improve.
Mind you, I'll be back to work on Tuesday and I have tons of other games demanding attention (Ico, Dragon Quest VIII, Mario Kart DS, etc.), so time will continue to be scarce. Fortunately, Metroid Pinball doesn't demand a whole lot of time--just a half-hour window here or there is plenty. The same could be said of Mario Kart DS though, or even Final Fantasy IV Advance, which I'm nearly 5 hours into now.
Oh yeah, one last note about Metroid Pinball: the "rumble pack" is pretty weak, which is to say that it's more like a "jiggle pack" or a "vibe pack" than a proper rumble pack. Somehow I remember hearing the same criticism of the original rumble pack for N64... was it Star Fox 64 that introduced that tech, or am I just making that up? Anyway, it's not a big deal, really. Metroid Pinball isn't made or broken on the strength of the rumble pack, and I'd rather conserve battery time by not using it anyway.
What does matter about Metroid Pinball is the vivid theme and interestingly varied levels. Metroid Pinball kick ass where it counts.
Console Gaming Buddies, Part 2
Merry Christmas to all! I won't be online for several days so I'd better get that message out while I'm still able. :)
As promised, Fritzkrieg was over to play games yesterday. The actual gaming must have went on for between six and eight hours--it's hard to say exactly. When it was all over, neither of us could fully remember all of the games that we'd played.
There was Street Fighter III: The Third Strike, Resident Evil 4, We Love Katamari, Burnout: Revenge, Gradius V, Parappa the Rapper 2, Amplitude, 1943 Kai, Gun.Smoke, Ghosts and Goblins, Ico, Zelda II: The Adventures of Link, and, oddly enough, over a full hour of Zelda: Majora's Mask to round out the evening (we stopped after the game crashed.) I may have missed one or two titles. There was no Soul Calibur III or NBA Street Vol. 2 this time, and we didn't crack into the Dreamcast titles, although that was suggested at one point.
As you can see, we were just all over the map--playing whatever, whenever, however. It didn't matter the genre, era, or platform; we just let our whims run wild, and the results were spectacular. It's really a shame that the two of us couldn't make a full-time living out of playing video games for 40 hours every week. It's also a shame that I won't be seeing Fritzkrieg again for a long while.
Mt. Ordeals
Fair warning:
hefty Final Fantasy IV spoilers ahead.
One of the things that I really admire about the console RPG convention of locking the player into a particular story path is that the extra executive control that the game has over developing the plot can make for a stronger thematic message. Final Fantasy IV is an excellent example of this, which I'll contrast it with Neverwinter Nights.
In Final Fantasy IV you follow the story of the Dark Knight Cecil. Yes, you can change his name, choose his equipment, decide where he goes and who he talks to, but as a player, ultimately you cannot stray far from the primary story path. Cecil feels conflicted over executing his King's orders, he is horrified when Mist gets levelled by the Bomb Ring that he is ordered to deliver, and he chooses to care for Rydia largely as an act of repentance. These are not choices that the player can make; they are scripted elements in the game.
Such a story would have to be told very differently using a Neverwinter Nights module, because the module creator has to account for the fact that the user can choose to create any type of character, and the player expects to have greater control over the game's storyline. Sure, you could script your NWN module to force the player to be a certain class, have a certain name, and carefully engineer everything so that the player cannot do anything that they are not supposed to, but to do so is to fight against the natural order of a Neverwinter Nights module. The player is supposed to be able to choose whether to be selfish or helpful, mean or nice, ultimately even good or evil. Much of the story is statically scripted, yes, but the tendancy is to attempt to limit the number of assumptions about what kind of character that player has chosen to play. I'm not saying that the story of Final Fantasy IV could not be told through a Neverwinter Nights module, but rather that the creator of such a NWN module would have to be conscious of certain limitations and perhaps make certain concessions to choices that are best left up to the player, whereas FF IV limits the player in obvious ways. This results in the story being told in a different style.
Many hardcore RPG gamers are big fans of the more open-ended style of RPG that one typically finds in PC games. One could argue that FF IV would be a more interesting game if the player could decide whether Cecil chooses to leave Baron or to embrace his career as a Dark Knight. FF IV could be re-written with massive scope such that the player is able to explore all kinds of "what-if" scenerioes, thereby making the world of FF IV a much larger and more fascinating place. The appeal of that is obvious. However, I largely prefer the hard-coded style of storytelling that Final Fantasy IV employs. FF IV takes control out of the player's hands because the game is not simply about a fantasy world for the player to explore--it is about specific characters in that fantasy world that are not of the player's divising. By limiting the player's choices, FF IV is able to present a unified, canonical story about particular characters in a particular storyline, and thereby develop specific themes. FF IV is not the kind of game where the story unfolds differently every time you play it, so every time a player notices some new aspect of the plot of Final Fantasy IV, he can be certain that it truly part of the FF IV saga and not the result of some decision that the player made on that particular play-through.
One of my favourite examples of how far FF IV takes this philosophy is in how Cecil's character class is used as a thematic device. Character classes in FF IV are scripted, and these choices of character class help to cement each character's role in the game. Yang is from a kingdom of warrior monks, so he has to be a warrior monk. Kain talks about how he might have advanced further in his career if he had chosen to be a Dark Knight instead of a Dragoon. Rosa's compassionate nature is emphasized by her role as a White Mage. Bits of story development such as these would be difficult to pull off if the player had the option to choose each character's class. As for Cecil, the roundness of his character is made more explicit by the dramatic transformation that he undergoes at Mt. Ordeals. His transition from a Dark Knight to a Paladin is a thematic device that underscores the consequences of his decision to leave Baron and fight against Golbez.
Such a scripted method of story telling harnesses the full power that playwrights have known about for centuries. Some game developers would argue that the full power of video games is harnessed by giving the player as much control as possible over the game world, but as exciting as that mode of expression is, it loses the dramatic ability that a scripted play has to tell a specific story about specific characters undergoing a specific ordeal. The true power of video games is not simply that they can provide the player with choice and control over the in-game world; it is also that they can effectively incorporate the same static storytelling methods used by movies and literature. Sometimes taking control away from the player in order to strengthen the message of the game results in a more profound work of art.
Resident Evil
I just spent the better part of ten minutes salivating over the
awesome Resident Evil DS gameplay video that I found via 4 Color Rebellion. Nintendo DS certainly has had a steady flow of worthwhile games coming out, and I'm falling more and more in love with the DS platform every month in spite of the facts that a) I never really bought into the value added by the touch screen and I still don't really see it as that big of a deal, and b) Lunar: Dragon Song was one of the games that I originally bought a DS for, and it turned out to suck. All that really matters, in the end, is that steady flow of worthwhile games.
I have a funny long-standing history with Resident Evil. I wasn't much of a PlayStation fan in the early days, and when Resident Evil was new it wasn't on my radar at all (I may have still been reading primarily Nintendo Power at the time, I think.) I got my PlayStation in the summer before Final Fantasy VII dropped (no coincidence, mind you), when Soul Blade (the first PSX game that I bought) was a relatively recent release. I ended up getting Resident Evil for Christmas that year, if memory serves me correctly, and it was the "Director's Cut" with a demo for Resident Evil 2.
At that point I got very deeply into Resident Evil. It is, after all, a completely brilliant adaptation of Alone in the Dark with heavy manga sensibilities and a touch of the X-Files. Overall, that was a dynamite formula for me at the time, and largely still is: Resident Evil 4 dominated my life for a month last January. Having thoroughly enjoyed Resident Evil Director's Cut, I expected to dive right into Resident Evil 2, but alas, the price of a PlayStation game was much more significant for me at the time than it is now, and University has this way of sucking one into it's vast and wonderous realm while blotting out the outside world. I slipped under the spell of my studies and didn't emerge again until about 2002. Even then, it took me a full year to get back up to speed on what was going where console gaming is concerned.
By that time I'd missed out on the Resident Evil remake for GameCube, Resident Evil: Code Veronica for Dreamcast, and even Resident Evil Zero. I was vaguely aware of these games and yet didn't really clue-in that I should be trying them out. For some reason, I'd assumed that everything since Resident Evil 2 had been lack-luster, that Penny Arcade were just being goofs about it, and that Resident Evil wasn't my thing anymore.
Actually, now I kind of remember--it was all of that crazy Dino Crisis crap that first got me thinking "oh, well now Resident Evil is going to suck forever." Also I was somehow convinced that although Onimusha and Devil May Cry were cool games, they also constituted evidence that Resident Evil was no longer the "pure" franchise that I'd enjoyed initially, because the game engine was being recycled. And I distinctly remember thinking that Resident Evil 3 was bad, for some reason, although I've never actually played it. Finally, there was the fact that although I finally got myself a PS2 in 2002, it wasn't until a year later that I finally got a GameCube, so I was mostly only concerned with PS2 and PC titles.
It was Resident Evil 4 that snapped me out of my lack of caring for Resident Evil. Not surprisingly, in the wake of that game, I ended up picking up copies of most of the other Resident Evil games. Resident Evil 2 eludes my grasp, although I did see an original copy for $60 at a hobby shop the other day. I've still never seen a copy of Resident 3 anywhere. I'm sure that one day there will be remakes available, though.
Anyway, that's the drama of my off-again, on-again relationship with the Resident Evil series. Fun times. I can't wait to try that Nintendo DS version.
Console Gaming Buddies
I got to hang out with my old friend Fritzkrieg last night. Him and I go waaay back, but he's going to school out of town these days, so I haven't seen him in roughly half a year. We dug into some deep console action, just like old times.
Soul Calibur III took up quite a bit of the evening, and deservedly so. Actually, fighting games frequently make up the bulk of our gaming action; from Soul Calibur III we dove into King of Fighters 2002, and later on some Final Fight (courtesy of Capcom Classics Collection.) There wasn't any Street Fighter action this time, but we're supposed to be hanging out again on Friday, and I hope to rectify that. Maybe I'll even spring some Capcom vs. SNK action--Ryu and Athena are unstoppable together, bwa ha ha!
Fighting games aside, we played Burnout: Revenge, NBA Street Vol. 2, and a particularly demented bout of Parappa the Rapper 2. Looking back, I should have dug out Amplitude, SSX 3, and perhaps some Metal Slug 4, but there are only so many hours in the evening, I suppose, and I did have to drag my ass into work this morning. :(
Before Fritzkrieg went back to school, we were somewhat in the habit of doing some console questing together. There was Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles (Sunny, Fritzkrieg, and myself), Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (a couple of times we actually managed to get four of us together), and just last summer, Fritzkrieg and myself did a complete play-through of the orignal Secret of Mana on my original, and still functional, SNES. It's amazing that my Secret of Mana cartridge still manages to hold save data after all these years, but what's more amazing, perhaps, is that Secret of Mana is still as much fun as any other game I've played this year. (Well... except maybe Resident Evil 4 or Metal Gear Solid 3. Maybe.)
I've thought about trying to set up some remote Neverwinter Nights action. In fact, I just purchased a cheap copy of NWN Diamond this week so Sunny and I can play together over LAN. Fritzkrieg's out-of-town status is not the biggest barrier here, though; school is keeping him remarkably busy. We'll have to do the NWN thing another time. I'll post about the adventures that Sunny and I have questing together in the meantime. Sunny has actually played through NWN, Undrentide, and Underdark, whilest I've only played through the first three or four chapters of NWN. I'd like to get a bit more use out of NWN than that.
You know what I should really do is dig out the old GameBoy units (Sunny and I each have one from when we were kids), link em up, and play head-to-head Tetris. I know where the link cable is, too. heh heh heh
Soul Calibur III - Arena Missions Bug
I've found a bug in Soul Calibur III! At least, I'm pretty sure I have. Whever I play one of the "Missions" from the Arena battle mode, whatever money I collect from beating the mission replaces my current gold total rather than adding to it. For instance, let's say I have 2,200 gold to spend at the item shop, etc. And let's say I beat the Coin Collector mission on easy (although I find that this bug happens with any mission) and earn 11,407 gold. When I go to the shop, my total gold will not be the expected 13,607, but rather 11,407. I'm glad I didn't find this bug in the game much later, after saving up 500,000 gold or something like that.
Now that I think about it, does the gold that you earn from completing a stage ever stack? I was quite certain that it did--that if I played, say, three story mode games in a row, I'd have earned in the ballpark of 150,000 gold added to my total, rather than just the gold that I got in the most recent playthrough. Am I mistaken, or did some programmer accidentally do a "gold_total = gold" where "gold_total += gold" was intended?
In either case, I find it unfortunate because Arena Missions strike me as a fun and convenient way to rack up lots of gold for unlocking items, but since the gold that you earn clobbers your existing total, you can't, say, play three missions in a row winning 20k gold each time to get a 60k gold item. If you try, you'll end up at the item shop with only 20k gold in your pocket. What a bummer.
In other news, I've started playing through Final Fantasy IV Advance which is completely awesome. I can't tell you how happy I am that they chose to do the "silent" intro version of Cecil's Red Wings raiding Mysidia rather than the childish American SNES adaptation version with the unnecessary "no! you can't do this! aaah!" dialogue added. The former is true to the Japanese original, and more dramatic, I think. Even if they manage to mess up the rest of the game, I'll still be happy about that one bit.
In any case, I look forward to pouring dozens of hours into FF IV Advance, but hopefully not in such a way that it keeps me from finishing Digital Devil Saga and Disgaea. It's the Christmas season, and I already have my family to keep me from that. :)
Working Designs
I am not happy at all to hear about
the disbanding of Working Designs. They have done a great job over the years of injecting some additional magic into the gaming industry for me, and I'm crestfallen to hear that they've close up shop.
I have the orignal Lunar games for Sega CD--both The Silver Star, and Eternal Blue, as developed by GameArts and brought to America by Working Designs. Those are among the very finest of the 16-bit era RPGs, and at the time I considered them second only to the games made available by Squaresoft. The Lunar magic was rekindled by the 32-bit remake versions that were intially released only in Japan for Sega Saturn (I remember reading about them in GameFan and being outraged that there were no plans for an American release), but later brought to the PlayStation by Working Designs. That was a very important event to me.
I also remember rushing out to buy Alundra when it was a new release. I was in University at the time, and too bogged down with work to properly play it, but I've toyed with it repeatedly in the years since; I've even played through the first half of it again as recently as earlier this year (and I really should spend a few more hours to try and finish the darned thing.) I highly recommend Alundra for action RPG and Zelda fans.
Finally, I was very happy with Growlanser Generations this year. It's such an incredible treat to get to play a popular Japanese RPG that never really had much hope of seeing an English language version, and the distinctive (and very high quality) voice acting provided by Working Designs is just as I remember it from playing Lunar on the Sega CD more than ten years ago. Times have changed, but Working Designs has remained a steadfast purveyor of games that really mean something to me.
So here's to you guys, Working Designs. You fought the good fight, and I won't ever forget it.
Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space
Weird Worlds, as gushed about by Tycho, has been my primary time-killer this past week, with Mario Kart DS running a close second. I don't mean to sound like a broken record here, but things are ramping up work-wise and family-wise, so I really haven't had time for much gaming at all. The break will probably be helpful in the long run.
Speaking of Weird Worlds, though, I really have to hand it to the developers of that game--they did an awesome job building a solid little game engine that I've found to be free from obvious faults, and they did it using open tools like SDL and OpenAL. There's a small
tutorial site up for building mods with the Weird Worlds engine, which I've found to be interesting so far; I hope that it continues to expand.
Before rushing off to buy Weird Worlds, you should know what you'll be getting. In many ways, the game is quite limited in scope: a typical playthrough lasts no more than 30 minutes (often far less time than that, in fact), and it's not the sort of game where you get to keep items or experience points acquired in one mission to use in the next one, which is something that I found to be a let down. Weird Worlds is, to a certain extent, the kind of game where you keep high scores and continually try to best yourself (or your friends), but it depends so much on the luck of the draw in terms of what the level layout you're thrust into is, that I don't find the scores to be all that meaningful as a short-term measure of the skill with which the game is played. In the long term, your scores will improve steadily as you play the game many times, and that is certainly satisfying.
Weird Worlds is also fairly addictive. There was one evening when I played it for three hours straight, and even then I wasn't tired of it. That having been said, Weird Worlds does have very simplistic gameplay and can be extremely repetitive when you play it that much; it's designed more to be played for short periods regularly than in frenzied marathon sessions. I've heard Weird Worlds called a replacement for Solitaire, because it's only meant to keep you entertained when you need to kill a short stretch of time. Of course, there's also the fact that even though Solitaire is only meant to be entertaining for 10 minutes or so, people still end up playing it for much longer than that, and Weird Worlds is no different.
People talk about Weird Worlds in the context of 4X games, which I think is misleading, because a 4X games are generally associated with massive scope and empire-building, whereas Weird Worlds has a small scope and does not offer much of a persistent "building" experience at all. On the surface, Weird Worlds could be said to resemble Master of Orion 2 because you're moving a space-ship from planet to planet on a 2-D map, but MOO2 is practically the opposite sort of game in that it has a huge scope, takes a long time to finish a single game, and is all about empire-building. Weird Worlds is mostly about exploration and treasure grubbing, with a fun real-time combat engine thrown in for good measure.
If you've ever played Rogue, the text-based Unix dungeon-crawler (if you Google for it, you should be able to find a DOS version playable under Windows), you can think of Weird Worlds as being like that, but less time consuming and more user-friendly. The setup of the two games is similar in that you're thrown into a risky environment with the simple goal of hoarding as much treasure as you can while still making it back home in one piece. Both games are similarly elegant in that they are simple but still manage to be very challenging and continually throwing new twists and turns at the player. Both games also rely entirely upon randomly-generated levels, so it's unlikely that any two play-throughs will ever be exactly alike. You will see more than half of everything that there is to see in Weird Worlds within ten minutes of starting it for the first time, and yet even after playing for weeks, you still will not have seen absolutely everything that the game has to offer.
In short, Weird Worlds is a convenient little time-killer that's very professionally put together, and it's worth checking out. There's a free demo that gives a flavour of the game but doesn't include as much content as the full version. I'd go further than that to say that the creators deserve your support, and that we all need to pitch in to support independent developers, but really that depends on whether or not you find Weird Worlds to be appealing or not. Personally, I would love to see more games like Weird Worlds being made.
Mirage
I've been procrastinating on finishing Digital Devil Saga. In fact, the simple reality is that I just haven't been doing as much gaming in general over the last couple of weeks, and it's not a sure thing that that will turn around for me anytime soon. I have been getting back into Disgaea, though, which is great, and I continue to be very interested in continuing to play Mario Kart DS, Soul Calibur III, and We Love Katamari, among other recent acquisitions. Finding the energy to keep up has been difficult, mostly due to work and the Christmas season bearing down on me.
After a brief hiatus from Magic the Gathering, though, I've been keen for some action lately. It just so happens that Mirage was released for Magic Online today, which is particularly exciting for me since the set was originally released way, way before I ever got into Magic. I've only been into Magic since roughly around the start of the Mirrodin block, which is to say that I was practically born yesterday where Magic is concerned.
So if you happen to be playing in some Mirage draft queues on Thursday, don't be surprised if you bump into me. And consider yourself lucky, because I'm an easy target. :)
WoW Gnomes
Sunny has been taking screenshots of gnomes in World of WarCraft:
Heh heh.
Master of Orion 2
Yesterday I was chatting with Matt (you know, that guy who leaves the comments... actually, he's probably the only guy reading this, so you know who you are) and I realised that while I'd heard the term "4X" before in reference to a genre of games, I didn't actually know what it meant. He was kind enough point me in the right direction; Matt is good about that sort of thing.
4X stands for "Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate," and it refers to Empire-builder sims that incorporate those four elements--particularly the space-based variety such as Master of Orion and Galactic Civilizations, but Civilization also manages to be recognized under this category.
As a young teen, I loved those kinds of games. I used to play lots of text-based empire-builder door games on BBSes, such as BRE/SRE and smaller ones that had occasionally been written by a sysop himself. I wasn't especially good at those games, but they were extremely enjoyable. They're great from a sci-fi geek perspective (ever wanted to play out your own Babylon 5 epic in computer game form?), but they also have aspects that appeal heavily to those who like "building stuff" games (SimCity) and, of course, strategy wargames.
The reason I bring all of this up is that after chatting with Matt, I went and played Master of Orion 2 for roughly six hours last night, which kept me up until 3 am. What a way to spend a Friday night. We've all heard of the Master of Orion series, or "MOO" as it is affectionately known, and MOO2 is largely recognized as the best of the series. I played a fair amount of the original MOO back in the day (not as much as Civ, SimCity, or X-Com, though), and I tried to get into MOO3 a few months after its release (was it the year before last already? time flies), when the retail price on it had sunk quite a bit. I'm not going to comment much on the various factors behind MOO3's terrible failure (it's a topic with a wide range of different takes), but I would like to say a few things about what makes MOO2 so great.
Perhaps MOO2's greatest triumph was that it isn't actually all that complex. The original MOO had adjustable number bars signifying the adjustable focus on agriculture, industry, and scientific development for each planet, whereas MOO2 borrows the more user friendly system of moveable citizen icons from Civilization. Another major component of MOO2 is the build queue, which allows you to set long-term policies for planetary development without there being a whole lot of details to crunch. The thing that really floors me about MOO2 is that compared with a lot of other 4X games (Civ in particular), there really isn't a huge range of things that any given planet can develop. You have to climb pretty high on the tech tree to get to the point of having a dozen different colony improvements to construct, and you generally only end up building about four different kinds of military units (although there are three different varieties of colonization units: outposts, colony bases, and colony ships.) I've also found that there aren't very many menu screens; the ones that are there are relatively simple and effective. The end result of all of these things, I find, is that MOO2 keeps the developmental details simple enough to allow the player to maintain a sense of the larger picture, and does so without trying to build "larger picture" features into the game.
In the classic style of old-school 4X games, though, MOO2 does not shelter the player very much from micro-management. It's easy to get to the point in MOO2 where there are many small developments happening every turn and there's a lot of busy-work involved in sorting them all out. Still, compared with Civilization or most modern RTS games like Age of Empires III, the amount of micro-management in MOO2 is hardly out of control. That isn't to say that the length of a turn won't tend to grow massively over the course of the game.
Anyway, you're probably thinking that all of this talk about MOO2 is all well and good, but that you lost your copy a long time ago or have never seen it on store shelves. Keep your eyes peeled--I was also one who had missed out on MOO2 back when it was first released, but I did manage to pick up a "classics series" copy for cheap at EB Games not more than a year or so ago. This is one game that any and every respectable gamer should have spent some time with.
Nanaca Crash!!
Here's some exciting news: I set a new personal best of 679.88m in
Nanaca Crash!...
Yeah, slow day. Really,
really slow.
Sites of Note
Yup, the ol' blog has been pretty slow this week. I haven't really been doing that much gaming either, although there was one glorious evening (Monday, I think) in which I played an hour of Digital Devil Saga, an hour of Disgaea, and
two hours of Dragon Quest VIII. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The rest of the week, I've been completely swamped with work and unable to do much of anything else, really.
So given the complete lack of new developments or left-over energy to come up with anything substatial to post about, I've decided that the easy way out is just to do up a quick post about what other sites out there on the net I use to keep up on gaming. Everyone knows about the usual Penny Arcade, IGN, GameSpot, and other biggies out there--so I'll stick to the more fringe ones. Mind you, this is kind of pointless: anybody who was able to find this blog could easily find these other sites. Bah.
The Escapist is an attempt at publishing a hardcore gaming mag in PDF form. It reminds me a little bit of the old Next Generation magazine, but more home-grown. (Nothing compares with the classic Next Gen, though; those guys broke stories about stuff like Net Yarouze and how the N64 was a sinking ship.)
RPGFan is a great site for news about RPG gaming, particularly for console RPGs. If The Escapist is like a loose web equivalent of the old Next Generation, then RPGFan is like a loose web equivalent of the old Diehard GameFan. Except that RPGFan only covers RPGs.
Joystiq is one of the larger newsfeed style gaming sites out there. They are notorious for lacking journalistic integrity (ie. posting lots of rumours and stuff from unreliable sources), but it's a fun site. Who doesn't like rumour mills?
Videogamey is another good place to pick up on misc gaming news bites.
Greg Costikyan's blog has legendary rants about the games industry and game design.
Lost Garden is an interesting collection of rants about game design.
Gaming Steve has a bit more of a personal soap box feel to it.
NetJak has a touch of the 32-bit old school.
Kid Fenris is an old school gamer/anime fan who only posts occasionally, unfortunately.
Games are Art! pretty much speaks for itself.
Anyway, that's just a handful. If you could get all of the writers from those sites together to collaborate on one super-duper game mag with all of the best content from each, then you'd have one awesome game mag, in my opinion. It depends on who wound up with editorial control over the whole enterprise, though.
