The Video Game Revue

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.

posted by Parappa @ 4:51 PM