Civ V: First Contact

Three screenshosts available at the first official inkling of fifth iteration of the number one all-time great strategy game, Civilization. We’ve had every one and every add-on and only the second was somewhat of a disappointment. Just…one…more…turn…

Retro Review: Carriers at War

Carriers at War: Map Screen

And here’s the Task Group management screen.

Carriers at War: Task Group screen

The Matrix verison has an updated interface that fans of the old game will appreciate – for instance, use a mouse wheel to control the game clock. Mouse wheels didn’t exist in 1991. The graphics are updated as well as are the animated overhead battle scenes. It’s not 3D polygonic but it’s a colorful way of communicating your hits. 

The game is stable under Vista except for one recurring spot. Be sure to save your game before adding US torpedo bombers to a coordinated strike. We had it crash there multiple times.

One flaw in the original that was not updated is the inexplicable lack of randomized start, especially with the Midway scenario. There are however, 38 different mystery variants of the Coral Sea situation. Run through them in order then start again. By the time you get around to the first one you’ll probably forget. That may be random enough.

There’s also multiplayer, which I’m pretty sure was not in the original game.

And  there is no campaign game. You can’t fight the whole war. There was only one carrier game that had that, Carrier Strike, and it didn’t do it too well. But at least it tried. That game had other problems.

But the day of the pure carrier game may be over. Maybe we can get ahold of one of those recent Pacific strategy games. We’ll see.

Back to gaming

Shall we get back to some gaming? Here we are with a front page and no game reviews. Who has time? Actually we’ve been gamed up since X-mas with the add-on to Diablo II: Lord of Destruction. It adds a lot of new items, two new character classes, Druid and Assassin, and an entire new chapter which we haven’t gotten to yet, because we still must get past ol’ Diablo his own self. We will. We’re only a 33rd level druid. Son Leo says a friend of his didn’t get past the big guy until he was at level 80-plus. last two times we encountered him we wore him down to about half his hit points. So maybe by level 50…

I was going to kick off the next post here but this is getting too long so I’ll save it for next.

Diablo II: Lord of Destruction is from Blizzard in 2001 and still in print. Not bad. A nice, calm, oblique overhead, 2D-ish game. Just my speed.

Halo Wedding

Talk about your convergence! A match made in Halo. Good luck with that! I mean…best of luck to them. I must disagree with the commentator, though, that Microsoft was a tad reserved with its gifts. They wouldn’t want to set a precedent. Next thing you know someone sets up a Halo-themed wedding chapel in Reno an they’ll be expected to set up a warehouse next-door.

Hey. That’s an idea.

Matrix Games

Online strategy game publisher Matrix Games has granted us a press account, so you’ll be seeing our usual as-much-review-as-it-deserves treatment of some of their titles. They distribute the efforts of independent developers as well as update and modernize fine vintage strategy titles from the halcyon days of the ’90s(?)

Well they sure don’t make ‘em like they used to and Matrix Games has been burrowing into that niche. The first title we’ll cover is Carriers at War, a game we bought back when it was new. And it seems like that was the last pure strategy Pacific Naval game ever released. Can that be?

Europa Universalis: Rome add-on: Vae Victus

Vae Victus (”woe to the conquered”) is the Paradox Interactive add-on to the Rome-era application of its landmark Europa Universalis strategy engine. Here’s a link to the summary of the enhancements in the upgrade. 

Wouldn’t you know it that the day we’re sure to get this post up Paradox releases the first patch for Vae Victus. It’ll have to wait. We won’t have a chance to play it just yet. But from the readme it appears that the patch will merely refine and enhance the refinements and enhancements outlined below.

First off, as with all the EU  titles, help comes in the form of the highly interactive roll-over information there is no in-game help or online manual. Hover over just about anything in the game interface and it will explain itself. The one drawback to reliance on this with an add-on is that any set of new features can get lost unless you know were to look for them. So read the readme and start with a run through the highly detailed tutorials, which are are more of a familiarization tool than a simulation of play.

There is an obviously smoother, less wildly combative but nonetheless deadly AI. You may find after a long successful inland campaign that a very powerful Carthage awaits you if you don’t knock them out early. It’s hard to ignore tha barbarians, the colonization opportunities and the easy tribal country pickings to the north, but you may want to force yourself.

New to the game is an extensive and engaging Senate system. You’ll spend the first few hundred years as a republic, where the Senate can be more a hindrance than a help, unless handled just right. There are factions to deal with and many of the random events effect their strength, gaining or losing seats depending on your decisions. If your Consul (a single one, not historically accurate but cleaner) is of a particular faction then some abilities will gain modifiers. The two most powerful factions at start are the Military and the Populist. But if you work on it you can arrange for the occasional Mercantile Consul or a Religious one, enhancing diplomatic and omen powers respectively.

Vae Victus: Roman Senate

Personalities, feuds and family are a bit more prominent, and you’ll want to pay a little more attention to this aspect of the game. There’s enough here that you could immerse yourself in it.

A welcome refinement is the addition of Regions. Your micro-management will be reduced, since you now have only to name and track the dux of several regions rather than a governor of each of dozens of individual provinces. Management is streamlined yes, but civil wars can be more dangerous as whole regions may now leave the fold and take the local legions with them.

Bottom line: As much of an improvement as you can expect. It’s been patched. We’ll start a new game as soon as we can.

Link to first post in multi-post Europa Universalis: Rome review.

Review: Mount & Blade

Mount & Blade - the first of the GamersGate titles we’ll review here – is an action/role-playing game independently developed by TaleWorlds and distributed by Paradox Interactive. For what it may lack in spiffy state-of-the-art graphics it more than makes up in interesting gameplay.

You’ll start as a solitary wanderer in a non-fantasy, roughly medieval world, and from this near-naked state you can improve armor, weapons, amass followers and build yourself into a powerful warlord. The same castles through which you had trouble getting past the gates may someday be the ones to which you lay siege, and conquer.

Getting there is the challenge. The tutorials are good, and combat with blade and bow, on foot and on horseback is not difficult to learn, but putting the skills into practice in the game may prove to be an early barrier to some. It’s a little bit beyond that easy-to-learn-hard-to-master threshold, as the application of what you learn will require some hand-eye coordination. And the battles have consequences. If you ‘re defeated you may lose valuable game-time while your character is enslaved or imprisoned.  And there is no option for abstracting battle results as in the Total War series.

Plenty enough of the postings on youtube.com and the trailer below will give a good idea of how fighting in the tactical screens goes…

So except for the above comment and the tip below we’ll say no more. For those who wish to devote the time and who are not debilitated by 3D action-game vertigo, like yours truly, the investment is well worth the effort, since the premise is unlike any other game, and the execution is admirable.

There’s more to the game though than the fighting.

There have been other story-style set-ups in other games but this one works better than any we remember. The handful of questions about your upbringing and misty past create your character’s background and lead right into the skills screen, with point bonuses based on the answers given. After the skill screen you get to decide what the character looks like, with some simple decisions about haircolor/style and facial shapes and sizes, and sliders to draw the features along a range between extremes. Play more than one game and you’ll have to go out of your way to make one character looks the same as another.

After that you’re placed on the strategic map, armed with little more than your wits, some food, a horse, a sword, a bow and just enough scraps of clothing to maintain modesty. This map is in three dimensions and can be zoomed and rotated, but its graphics are flattish; it’s not designed for much more than deciding what your next move will be. On the map you’ll see the castles and villages in the area, the major terrain features that may affect your movements. You will also see – and often, have a chance to avoid – other roving bands – various varieties of thieves and thugs, as well as warbands belonging to the local chieftains.

Mount & Blade Strategic Map. Use the Training Field for in-game practice.

You will also be able to enter a training area In the game where time is taken but your efforts may be rewarded by minor skills increases, and more importantly, after leaving the tutorials behind, you can continue to refine your own real-life skills. handling a sword or bow on foot or horseback.

The controls for weapons-handling are fairly straightforward and simple – for the sword, left-click to start your wind-up and left-click again to swing. On horseback though, everything changes, because you also must control the horse:

Tip: When on horseback in the tactical screens, movement and facing of the horse is controlled by the WASD key combination just like for the character alone on foot. Facing of the rider is controlled by the mouse. When on horseback and wielding a sword, you’ll need to maneuver with fingers of the left hand on the WASD to as close as possible to your target, while at the same time facing the rider and timing the mouse-click swing just right. Avoid some initial frustration around how to best achieve a hit by paying attention to the position of your mouse cursor with relation to the center-line of the horse. Your rider will swing to the opposite side of the side where the mouse cursor rests. So if your target is on the horse’s right side, you must be facing right, yes, but your mouse cursor will have to be to the left of the center of the horse to allow your rider to swing on the right side. And vice versa.

In the villages talk to any villager to get a general idea of the village’s prosperity but you’ll go to the Village Elder for any quests. Hover the mouse over the Elder himself for a handy meter showing his attitude toward you.

Mount & Blade: Entering a village

Through the Village Elder you can take on the offered tasks, or not. If you take them on you don’t have to execute them in order but they will have time limits. You may be asked to get some wheat for the village or perhaps teach the villagers to defend themselves and help them to fight marauders a la the Seven Samurai-Magnificent Seven-Bugs Life movies. The villagers will learn from you if you have mastered the skills yourself. And eventually, when you take this task, you will be faced with the reappearance the bandits, and your trained villagers, with you as their leader, will have to fight. You may also get different types of tasks from a prince of a castle, such as collecting taxes from a nearby village. In this quest you will earn part of the taxes you collect as a commission, which can be quite lucrative. Also the villages and castles will be where you recruit your followers, trade for food and weapons and pick up information about the local conditions.

Though the graphics on the strategic map are merely adequate this is where you’ll receive reports of the regional political situation – who’s at war with whom. On the tactical map the character figures are not as life-like as you’d expect in this day and age but the landscapes are stunning. Athough some of the hilly regions seem a little pointier than normal.

Audio-wise the effects are adequate but effective. Riding a horse can be fun and your mount will be quite responsive, with whinnies and snorts when appropriate; the sounds of walking, then trotting, and then galloping hooves will be feedback on speed.

Conclusion
For those with an interest in 3-D non-fantasy, Middle-Ages role playing action, though the sword fighting and horseback ridng may require some mastery of hand-eye skills to do well, a look at Mount & Blade would be well worth considering.

IB News: a Key to GamersGate

As an early winter sweeps into the Northeast US like an umpire’s flamboyant strike three call, the late October nor’ easter snow storm is easier to handle since InfinityBound has received its press membership to GamersGate. GamersGate is the online computer game delivery portal run by Paradox Interactive. The four games initially set for review are:

• Europa Universalis III: Complete.This is the latest release of the EU franchise, which includes all the latest add-ons. Lance Shears has committed to doing the review. An expert on the Europa engine titles from way back, there’s none better qualified to handle it.
• Mount and Blade. We may work on Chuck to have a look at this one, providing he gets in gear with his school work. If not I’ll be looking at it.
• Penumbra: both Black Plague and Requiem. A horror adventure.
• And Dark Horizon. A spaceship shoot-em-up. 

And tonight the Phillies play the rest of the weird suspended game for the World Series title. Go Phillies!

Spore: 2 of 5….and already played out

For the researchers of this question, whether anticipation enhances enjoyment of a consumer product  the Spore phenomenon might be an interesting topic. Apparently if you’re anticipating something good you’re okay with a delay. And, oh, oddly enough, if you end up with something bad, the delay is fine too. So that works out well.

In this case, waiting almost two years for Spore doesn’t seem to evoke much in the way of disappointment. It’s not great and it’s not horrible , so that may be just in the exact middle of the anticipation scale. We’re not upset at laying out the $50 USD for it because it is obviously a work of high craft and, covering, as we’ve said, a topic of extreme interest to us, a life simulator, we were looking forward to it for two solid years around here. Sorry to say it doesn’t look like it will have the staying power of a Civilization IV, or even X-COM, which has just been revived hereabouts, on, of all things, an old Windows 95 box.

In general, though the graphics and execution are superficially excellent, there is something a little bit off about nearly every aspect of the game, gameplay-wise. It may be a matter of blockbuster-syndrome that you see in $100 million film projects. Will Wright is a pioneer and may be one of the few designers who could pull something like Spore together, but when that much money is involved, no project can possibly be the vision of one person.

This review will concentrate on the gameplay. The creation of creatures, vehicle and buildings is a whole other aspect that is an activity in itself, if that appeals to you. Much of it has nothing at all to do with the playing of the game. Design one factory or spaceship and it will do you forever. This is all tied in with the game company’s effort to create a community around the game. That’s not really why we play games.  

The five games phases are actually distinct game styles that represent five genres in computer gaming.

Cellular Phase
Game genre: Early Arcade. After the opening movie, in which the cosmos is revealed and your plant is bombarded by comet debris, you’re an ostensibly one-celled animal in a tidal pool. this is not the theorized beginning-of-life-on-Earth model we had expected, that is, the Primordial Ooze. You’re in a tide pool, which would be near the shore, and long after the initial beginnings of life on the planet. So in a sense, the title of the entire software is a bit off. So you’re in the pool and you get to choose what sort of mouth you have. This is your first choice, carnivore or vegetarian. No real weight is assigned to that choice, or wasn’t in the one game I played almost-through. There may be nuances to detect upon frequent playing, but if herbivore is supposed to connote vegetarians which is supposed to imply pacifist, it didn’t work out that way in my one game.

Creature phase
Game Genre: Adventure/Roleplaying: One point for this phase. This is the cutest, and all things considered, the most fun phase. It should appeal to the furries out there. In fact any expansion concentrating on this phase might be worth checking out. (Heck, two years from now we may have forgotten our ambivalence about the initial release enough to give it a try.)

Village Phase
Genre: Real Time Strategy. Take over your continent by either defeating or befriending your neighbors. Repetitive, and, like all Real Time Strategy titles, it’s a click-fest. So if you enjoy that sort of thing you might like it. Win the continent by either allying with or defeating every other tribe on it. Quite the forgettable phase.

Civilization
Genre: Civilization: The greatest of computer games, a genre in itself. This phase is a severely hobbled form of it. Win your planet by overwhelming the cities of others, either by force, religion or commerce. Whatever vehicles you make will project that form of force. Doesn’t really matter what you start with, the cities you take over will determine what you end up with. My one pass through I started as religious but left the phase as military. The game almost gets a point for this, but at some point the AI seemed like it stopped playing. At normal difficulty levels, the game shouldn’t let you win.

Space Phase
Genre: 4X Space Strategy. Most disappointed, most anticipated, but still worth a point because it could have been the space conquest and exploration game we’ve been questing for since Master of Orion. But the random events in the short experience seemed heavily weighted toward bio-disaster, of course. And the “culling of the herd” nature of both the bio-disasters we encountered was disturbing. Two aspects killed this phase for us, one philosophical and the other physical: 1) we’re not enamored of flying around a planet killing off diseased individuals of a species, and 2) the 3D and the jumpy navigation around the planet surface and up and down into space and back activated some kind of vertigo reaction yours truly gets whenever playing a First Person Shooter or other action 3D games. Unfortunately playing through nausea and dizzyness is not my idea of fun. This may not bother others but it’s enough to set the game aside for me, and in the most promising phase too. O well. But from what we saw, and allowing for benefit of the doubt, it gets the other point for promise.

On the controversies surrounding the science versus intelligent design aspects, that’s for a longer post, if ever. There is no real science of genetics involved. Nor is it any more godlike than all the other god-games that have come along. It’s a game, not a treatise.

And also as we’ve mention in another post, as with big budget projects on favored film subjects, so much time, effort, money and genius having been spent on a topic, another attempt at is is not likely to happen for a long while, perhaps until a big orders-of-magnitude jump in  technology, like when we’re all comparing the gigabytes of RAM we have implanted in our heads.

So it gets 2 of 5. One for the Creature phase and one for the Space phase, which looked like the most ambitious gameplay, even though we couldn’t play it much. Sigh.

The ultimate evaluation on Spore around here, though? None of the Shears spawn are playing it. Lance has gone back to Europa Universalis II. Chuck bought an eight-year-old swords and sorcery with his own money, Diablo II, which I’ve set aside Civ IV for, and Escella is sharing a game of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened with Mrs. Shears.

So much for two years of anticipation.

Spore – Quick Take

More to come review-wise. And I have one solid commitment from a next-generation Shears, Next Generation, to contribute his impressions of the game.

First though, is this a Spore usergroup, way out in front of the game’s release by, oh, 15 years or so? These visuals could have been taken straight from the game. I wonder if these mooks would survive into the Civilization phase.

As I’m sure you know the game has five phases, Cell, Creature, Tribe, Civilization and Space, each with the animale you create building on the last, so in some respoects it is a strategy campaign game with scenarios that carry your base characteristics over from one section to the next. Right now your poster is working on the second, Creature, stage. Does the combat in this phase remind anyone else of that old Pokemon Stadium?

The creatures you create can have an infinite variety, eventually, but to start you are given the tightest of choices, a very binary herbivore or carnivore. We’re sure this was intentional. The rich game play to follow builds on this simple decision and neither choice appears to be in any way limiting.

Lance is standing here talking to me just now and senses that there may be infinite zoomability in the Space stage. He may be right. We’ll see when we get there but the game definitely qualifies for the title (and inconsistent themes) of this site. Your creature creation in the game is for sure Infinity Bound.

Again, more to come. With a special post commenting on the recent Slate articale just dripping with disdain for the idea that the game might, heaven forfend, point to Intelligent Design. My word.

One other impression is that Sporeis not science or natural history. There is a lot of love in the game. There’s dancing and singing and courtship displays. All-in-all this is not as mushy as you’d think and handled well. Your creatures can get ahead with cooperation and alliances. Although sharp fangs and claws will always help, creature-wise.

First impression in the Shears household is a deep game with lots of replay value. The Space phase may even approach the Master of Orion space conquest/exploration game that we’ve been questing for with no luck for the last 10 or so years. We’ll see.