Civilization IV, Gary's Mod
We are definitely in a game release slump at the moment. Aside from that massive bomb of The Burning Crusade, there's so little going on in the way of new releases that even that Hotel Dusk - Room 215 title for Nintendo DS looks exciting (honestly, I watched the review on GameTrailers.com, and it does look appealing.) Overall, I'm thankful for the lull because it's affording me the continued opportunity to keep playing games like Guitar Hero, Company of Heroes, Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Final Fantasy XII. I'd hate to see my interest in those games (among others) killed by pesky new releases that I don't have the willpower to stay away from. ("To Do:" need more willpower.)However, the lull has also given me a chance to check out titles that I passed over earlier due to being too busy, and among those are Civilization IV and Gary's Mod, both of which have just joined the roster as "games that I play." Functionally, this makes them much like new releases, except that they're really only new to me. Perhaps you're in a hurry (or merely bored) and won't really read the rest of this article, in which case I'll simply say this: Civ IV and Gary's Mod are awesome. Now that I've gotten that out, I'm going to make the rest of this post super-duper long-winded (but entertaining nonetheless, I hope.)
My first experience playing Civilization was with a "modded" copy that Fritzkrieg got from his cousin back in the day. This was the original, original Civ, and the "mod" consisted of simply the fact that some of the dialogue had been modified, which you could do by loading certain game resource files in a text editor. I taught myself to play Civ mostly through trial and error with a copy of Civ that told me "way to go captain nemo" every time I sunk a tireme by straying too far from shore. That was back around 1995, and I would have been 15 at the time.
A while later (1996) I acquired CivNet, which is a Civ title that most people seem to have forgotten about these days. CivNet was the original Civilization game system updated for the Win32 platform (back when most people were still using Windows 3.1 and you needed to install a Win32 service pack to run Win32 apps, although obviously Windows 95 existed and was very popular) with multiplayer added. It was an ambitious product and very buggy, but I loved it. I loved the multiplayer aspect, and I loved the updated graphics. I played tons of CivNet. I even played some FreeCiv for Linux and OpenBSD when I started University in 1998 (back then, FreeCiv looked much like the original Civ.)
Then I basically ignored Civ for years. In 2000, when I was half-way through my undergraduate degree, my room-mate Phf reintroduced me to Civ through Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition, which is one of the finest releases in the Civ series. At first I didn't like the changes that Civ II made to the game, but eventually I came to prefer Civ II to the original, and it sucked away hours and hours of my life. On more than one summer afternoon, Phf and I started a multiplayer game at 4 pm, took a break for supper at 5:30 pm, resumed play at 6:00 pm, and finally stopped playing to go to sleep at 4 am. Even now when I merely think about Civ II, I feel a small urge to start a new game of it.
So you might think that I was on pins and needles when Civ III came out, but it was not so. As much as I resisted Civ II at first (and was quickly won over by it), I all but hated Civ III even well after its release. The game felt way too different--I didn't like the UI, I didn't like the new "worker" units, I especially didn't like the fact that enemy units could not move through tiles adjacent to my own units, and I didn't like the whole idea of borders and cultural influence. It's not so much that I felt that Civ had gone horribly wrong, but I just couldn't get into the "new Civ." Besides, I was still in University and too busy for new games. I didn't even get a PlayStation 2 until the summer of 2002.
Years passed. Eventually I bought a copy of Civ III (without any of the expansion packs) for $10, but I still couldn't get into it. Looking back now, I realise that that was only the second legal Civ product that I had purchased since CivNet, since I merely copied Civ II Multiplayer from my room-mate. It's a strange thing that I've always invested so much, yet so little of myself into the Civ series. Once in a while I thought about buying Civilization III Complete, but it always seemed so expensive.
Civ IV came out last year and I barely even noticed. Subcontiously, I was thinking that it was going to be "just another Civ," and somehow not special at all. But then the Civilization Chronicles package came out, and I was tempted. It's $90, but then, I was in a position where the only legal Civ products I owned were CivNet and the bare bones Civ III game, yet I considered myself a Civ fan. Being the "boxed set" sort of deal that it was, Civilization Chronicles presented an opportunity for me to make up for years--a decade, even--of Civ neglect all at once. Besides, Civ IV was $50 anyway, and Civ III Complete was worth another $30, so what's another $10 to get a fresh port of the original Civ, the complete Civ II, and a bunch of extras including Civilization: The Card Game and a DVD about Civ?
I didn't crack right away, but I did crack. And here's the amazing thing: I ended up loving Civ IV immediately. The visuals are refreshing, although I lament that the game runs so poorly on lower-end systems (I started off playing it on my Radeon 9600 system and quickly realised that even that computer was a bit too light to get the full experience.) The UI is fantastic--easily the best of any Civ game that I've played (which is to say, all of them), and a huge upgrade from Civ III. The Leonard Nemoy voice-overs for the tech tree are terrific and add a lot to the game. But above all else, the game system itself is intuitive to me as a long-time Civ fan, and the process of updating my Civ knowledge to become familiar with this latest incarnation was pleasant and fun rather than jarring.
I cannot emphasize enough how impressed I am that I have ended up initially disliking every single new Civ game ever since I learned how to play the original, and yet I loved Civ IV right away. Maybe it's simply that I was "ready" for a new Civ, or perhaps more likely I've simply grown and matured to the point of not resenting the "newness" of Civ IV as much as I resented other Civ sequels, but I think that the situation runs deeper than that--which is to say that I feel Civ IV does things right that other Civ games got wrong. Civ IV makes so much sense to me that I even now appreciate the direction that Civ III was taking and can see myself playing Civ III for fun (especially since Civ IV won't run well on my laptop), which is something that I'd been unable to do before. (In fact, I did start a game of Civ III after playing Civ IV for a few days, and actually started enjoying it.) In short, Civ IV is the most fun that I've ever had playing a Civ sequel for the first time.
I'm also really happy that Civ IV includes all of the multiplayer functionality of network play, PBEM, and different play modes such as a "free-for-all" play where everyone simply takes their turns as fast as they can (which, from what I understand, is a first for the Civ series.) I was extremely annoyed that Civ III didn't immediately provide multiplayer right from the first version, since multiplayer has always been one of my favourite Civ features, ever since CivNet. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, Civ is essentially a multiplayer-centric experience, and always should be. Yes, the single-player play is important, and the AI needs to be good enough to facilitate that, but I'm not a believer in the idea that good AI comes before multiplayer play. Civ IV is the first iteration in the Civ series to provide multiplayer play right at the time of its release, since Civ didn't turn multiplayer until CivNet, Civ II didn't turn multiplayer until Civ II Gold, and Civ III didn't turn multiplayer until Civ III: Play the World. Given my experience with the series as a whole, right there that's strong evidence that Civ IV speaks more directly to the kind of Civ fan that I am right out of the starting gate.
I still have a long way to go with Civ IV: I've only played it for, maybe, ten hours total, and my final impression of the game is still forming. I still need to play the scenerioes and get a feel for that aspect of the game, and then there's the new expansion pack (Warlords) that I haven't even looked into yet. But for now, I'm very happy with Civ IV, and I can best sum that up by saying that it has really brought out my inner Civ fan.
Then there's Gary's Mod. For a long time I resisted Gary's Mod as a frivilous purchase, and I've been cutting back on new games lately, so I was doubtful about getting it. But then I started reading a little more about it and watching videos... you probably know the drill. :)
For those of you not already familiar with it, Gary's Mod simply lets one play around with the Half-Life 2 "Source" engine as a physics sandbox. One can load any map (if you have Counter-Strike: Source and/or Day of Defeat: Source, you can use the resources from those games, including maps), spawn models into the environment, and move things around using the new "Physics Gun" (in addition to the more traditional, but far less accurate "Gravity Gun" from Half-Life 2.) One can tie objects together with ropes or bungee cords, add rocket thrusters or wheels, light things on fire, and even shoot stuff. There are lots of different options available, and the end result lets users intuitively build ad-hoc structures ranging from soap box racers, to massive catapults, to flying gun platforms, and all manner of devious traps.
One thing that I was initially very worred about with Gary's Mod was the UI. My concern was that I would shell out the $10 only to find it too laborious to be fun. And, I have to admit, the UI was a little initimidating at first--but the main hangup that I had was that the number of options was overwhelming, and it wasn't immediately clear as to how anything worked. Once I started to figure out how to use the Q and C keys and what some of the simpler constructs did, I made quick progress. A big revelation was realising that the game cleverly allows you to assign mechanisms like motors and thrusters to numpad keys, so you can actually build a device such that you can control it in real-time (eg. a car that you can drive, or a rocket that you can launch.) Having gotten the hang of the basics, I'm quite satisfied with how simple the UI for Gary's Mod is; it's certainly does not resemble the complicated sort of 3D modelling application that I was worried about (ever try putting together a scene in Blender?)
There are a couple of killer features for Gary's Mod that I find especially exciting. First off, there's the multiplayer play, which means that you can join an environment along with your friends and actually collaborate on building stuff, or just show off each other's inventions, or even have mad scientist duels. Playing with strangers isn't as exciting because getting people to play along is so difficult, however, although it is possible to have a good experience on a well-moderated server. The other killer feature is the Lua scripting engine, which makes Gary's Mod highly flexible. You're not likely to be using it for much other than installing other people's mods if you're not a programmer, but there seems to be a lot of potential for people to expand Gary's Mod with cool features or even make entire independant game projects with it.
As exciting as the sum of Gary's Mod's parts is, the whole is much more than that, however. Back in the early 90's, Fritzkrieg had a PC game called Stunt Island published by Disney Interactive. It was a flight-simulator/virtual reality type game where you could create your own 3D scenes, set conditions, and watch the whole thing play out from different camera angles. You could even jump in and control vehicles yourself, since the premise of the game was that you can be the director, the stunt coordinator, and the stuntman himself. For what this game was at the time, it absolutely blew my mind. It presented a level of open-endedness in a game that pushed the boundary of anything I'd ever seen before, and I still think of that game as revolutionizing my idea of a "sim" genre game.
Needless to say, Fritzkreig and I spent most of our time with Stunt Island screwing around. We would spawn an outhouse (although we certainly didn't call it "spawning" then, since this experience predates the popularization of that terminology) with The Statue of Liberty in the air a thousand feet over top of it and watch as the rectangular shadow cast by the statue grew until the outhouse was flattened in an instant. We'd set up The Parthenon as a flyable model and control it like an F-15 fighter jet to make strafing runs (you could even shoot as though the thing had a forward-mounted machine gun and rockets.) Once we had The Sphinx explode, just to make a big explosion. The stunt pilot theme of Stunt Island wasn't important because it was open-ended enough for us to create our own theme, and that's a kind of experience that Fritzkrieg and I have been yearning for ever since even though the graphics and controls of Stunt Island were unimpressive by today's standards. We also still talk fondly about games that don't try to hard to steer you into doing what you're "supposed" to do, which is one of the reasons that Shadow of the Colossus was such a big hit with us, for example.
Gary's Mod reminds me a great deal of Stunt Island, particularly in terms of its sandbox-like experience. It isn't so open-ended that you have no idea what to do, but it certainly is open-ended enough to give you that rush of being able to do whatever you want. And really, what I want is to do absolutely stupid, over-the-top stuff with it like Fritzkreig and I used to do with Stunt Island. I'm the kind of person who really enjoys the show Jackass in spite of its unbearably gross side because crude, slightly dark humor is very funny to me. Gary's Mod has much of that kind of bent to it, since a lot of what's possible with it involves horrific, cartoonish violence, such as floating exploding barrels through the air with balloons, or accidentally(?) crushing yourself with a monstrous spinning machine. Gary's Mod is an educational game experience (you get to learn about physics), but it's one with a very naughty attitude--where gore and fart jokes collide.
Think of Gary's Mod as being like Jackass meets Half-Life 2 crossed with Stunt Island (or perhaps The Incredible Machine, which is another game that I played as a kid) and you're starting to get a pretty good picture of what the experience is really like. I strongly recommend it, but only for creative people.
posted by Parappa @ 10:58 PM
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