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.

Spore Week

Spore is spreading. We’ve preordered but only a day before release so our copy will have to wait its turn and is due to ship tomorrow. Look for a multi-Shears ongoing review to start up in the very near term. Papa Shears and the gang of Shears teens are drooling over the game. Heck we may even get Mrs. Shears to take a stab at it.

Check out the horrific reviews on that Amazon page. We have it on good authority from son Chuck, though, that this is an organized campaign because of the draconian Digital Rights Management (DRM, copy protection.) When we heard of that ourselves some time back, yes, we were none too pleased. You only get to activate the game on three computers, meaning after you upgrade hardware a couple of times you’ll need to repurchase (theoretically.) That’s if you only have one computer in your house. Our three activations will be eaten up the first day.

Organized or not, some of the reviews are quite detailed. We ourselves have had a mildly negative predisposition since seeing the preview videos. The creatures have been made a bit on the cartoonish side for us. But Chuck assures us that the skins will be moddable, so adding realistic textures should be possible. 

We disapprove of the overbearing DRM well, but with all the piracy you can see why a company would take such steps to protect their $millions$ in investment. However, it does not help in the long run. We have bought our copy in part because of extreme anticipation and a high interest level in the topic. We’ve always been interested in life simulatiors. We were too far along in our commitment to the purchase to back off. If we had known about the plans for the DRM we’d have thought twice so we, like many other, we’re sure,  are feeling a bit ambushed by it and it doesn’t sit well.

The ill will generated will carry over to other purchase decisions involving the same publisher. Case in point, we bought Silent Hunter III, a World War II submarine game, which had a frighteningly invasive copy protection scheme that pretty much required you to install the game company’s own DVD-ROM driver on your hardware. It would then make a scary clunking noise whenever you ran any disk. Turned out to be a chore to deinstall the game and the driver. I removed it the first time, and then reinstalled the game two years later after having forgotten all about that nasty copy protection. Played a few times but couldn’t enjoy it, and then uninstalled again. This time I put a note in the box. “Do not install because of invasive copy protection!”

We would never even entertain the remote possibility of buying a game from that company again.

$50 for three installs? I don’t see Spore lasting much beyond that as a resident on Shear computers. We’ll see. It had better be good.

Europa Universalis: Rome – 5. Action Report

Click here to read Part 1 of this review
Click here to read Part 2 of this review
Click here to read Part 3 of this review
Click here to read Part 4 of this review

Review of Vae Victus add-on

It’s 534 AVC and our first swipe at the earliest scenario playing as Rome has come to an end. We’ve resigned it and have started again, to try it from another angle. The long and the short of it is the game, Europa Universalis: Rome, like Chef Paul Prudhomme says of good Cajun food, makes you want to keep eating. 

For the first game we chose the earliest scenario, as is our habit, and chose to play the Big Dog of the time period, Rome, as many would. Your challenges are myriad. In the Pyrrhic War scenario, as Rome, you start at war withe Epirus and Magna Graecia, one-province and a two-province countries, respectively. You also have Carthage acting up out in the Mediterranean, Macedonia in the wings causing trouble, barbarians everywhere, and your own provinces ready to rebel at the slightest opportunity.

The  major mistake we made here was trying to hold the overseas province of Epirus at all costs. This cost turned out to be allowing the barbarians to hit us from the north, to decivilize one of our recently acquired provinces, thereby reducing our chance of colonizing other adjacent unattached provinces. This reflects our play-style tendency/fault of not giving up hard-earned conquered territory. This amounts to classic short-term gain that proves unprofitable in the long run. Next time we’ll go about it differently.

We made short work of Epirus, across the Mare Hadriaticum on the Greek mainland, and of two other remaining fragments of Greek former glory, Ager Bruttius and Tarentum, in the toe and heel of the boot, respectively. Then we sat back and  thought to bide our time and let the two provinces north of Bononia be drawn in as colonies. To do this your adjoining provinces must have 10 points in population and at least a 50 percent civilization rating. Just as we were about to score on this count the Macedonians begin to assassinate my aristocrats. This should have been taken for a sure sign of an attack, but we hoped for the best. And we were disappointed. Still, if we didn’t feel like we had to defend a cross channel province, and build the strong navy because it it we might have gotten away with it. As it was, the need to strip Bononia of strong defenders allowed the barbarians to trash it, and our allies in Massillia began to colonize in the north. A peace with the Macedonians didn’t last, and soon we were at war with them, other Greek leagues  and with Rhodes and Crete. And our manpower was completely drained. Time to resign.

A tip: pay attention to the supply limits. Having a big legion in a province that drains it ten percent a month will also plunder your manpower. And lengthy wars with lots of attrition will do the same. If you look up and suddenly see your manpower numbers almost to zero, these factors would be the reason. Hover over your Manpower number and you’ll see your replacement and usage rates. If the latter is bigger than the former, you’re in for steady manpower drain.

A positive: even in full screen (non-windowed) mode, the game ALT-TABs pretty quickly, so during those slow times, if you have the message settings set just the way you like them, you can flip over to do other more useful tasks, like write blog posts, and then check in to the game to see if there are any developments.

A word on the art: We had mentioned that the in-game graphics were strictly serviceable, and this is true, but the art in the loading screens and the opening start-up menu are quite good. it’s a shame that’s the only time you see them and a little more variety would have been nice.

Multiplayer was not tested, a visit to the Paradox-provided MetaServer saw no traffic in the visits we made, but that’s sure to pick up. The manual is a bit short on information about getting onto the server. What you need to do is log on as a member of the Paradox Plaza Forums web site. Then look for the “My Games/Registrations” link at the upper left. Click there and you’ll see where to input the registration code from the game package. That code is in an obscure spot, on the card that advertises the strategy guide book for the game. So be sure not to throw that away as packaging spam.

This will be the last formal post of this review series, but we’ll post more as the play continues, and, of course, when we achieve some milestone of success. But for now I would think that fans of the Rome genre in strictly strategy game mode would consider this getting a copy.

It is an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master in the Paradox Interactive style. it’s not action-packed so first-person shooter or even RTS fans may not go for it, but it’s full of historical nuance and though none of us were ever a Roman Consul or Emperor, you sense that some faint echo of the same decision-making may be getting as simulated as it will ever get. Who shall I appoint? Who are my friends? Where do I march my legions? Or after a defeat, like Augustus after Teutoborg….

“Give me back my legions!”

Space Invaders and Asteroids: Two Classics in your browser

Two fairly authentic renditions of these games for the browser:

Space Invaders: Play it from a page that tells its yen-shortage creating history. First played by yours truly at the M Street Saloon in Georgetown. The bar’s gone but the game remains.

Asteroids: Many an hour wasted with this one at ol’ Dirty Frank’s in Philly. Those were the days.

Europa Universalis: Rome – 4. Diving in

Click here to read Part 1 of this review
Click here to read Part 2 of this review
Click here to read Part 3 of this review

*** 

It would be impossible to review this game without touching on the ultimate Rome game, Rome: Total War. You will not avoid noticing some similarities in approach to the strategic game. Europa Universalis: Rome completely foregoes a tactical map. Your armies are pitted against the enemy and you have no control over their disposition or movement on the battlefield once they get there. All you get are the results. If it’s a tactical ancients game you’re looking for then Rome: Total War is still your best bet.  

The most striking similarity between the two will be the 3D game map, and in Europa you have nearly 100 percent zoom and full 360 degree turning abilities. Use the CTRL key to achieve this, then let it go and the map will stay in the viewpoint you set. And if you’re expecting state-of-the-art, realistic graphics you’ll have to look elsewhere. The art here is strictly serviceable, although clear and colorful. With these games the play is the thing, and the accuracy of the research. It may not be so difficult to find symbols of the Carthaginians for use in your game, but we wouldn’t know where to even begin to look for data on the Phangorians or some of the other more obscure ancient cultures that are present.

As for game play, this title strikes a middle complexity, somewhere well below the denseness of Victoria and above the relatively simple-minded Crown  of the North. Tooltips abound. Just about everything you hover your mouse pointer over will give you detailed information about the object under it. Hesitate and most often you’ll get even more details.

Alerts, the History log and Pop-ups are vital to tracking events in a far-flung empire. The Alerts will appear in the top middle of the screen to remind the player of the most important chores needing attention to optimize your empire, such as province governorships without an appointee and trade routes unfilled.

Other game news appears as messages and can either show in the History log that constantly scrolls at the bottom middle of the screen, as a Pop-up window or dialog or as a Pop-up that pauses the game. You have complete control over this for the many different types of messages. Tip: Check the Message Setting list in the Main menu and make sure that all types of messages are set to appear in the History Log. Then keep a close eye on the log and when a message comes up that you think deserves a Pop-up, right-click and set it.

Characters are deceptively important, their traits and rivalries can have a critical effect on many game developments and on research in particular. Research is a direct function of your population levels but it can be maximized (or stunted) depending on who you’ve appointed as magistrates in the various research categories. When you click to appoint a character, whether as a magistrate, governor of a province or to a generalship of a legion, you’ll see the list of available unassigned characters. but clicking one actually executes the appointment. Because of this you can’t really see the into the next scteen which details their fired, family and rivals at that spot. There is a way to see the entire roster of characters, in the Ledger’s Country Overview.  You’ll have to check the details a character there ahead of the time you make an appointment, if the facts on the second screen are important to the decision, which they can be.

Characters also have a profound and flavorful effect on your control over the military units that fight your wars and put down the inevitable rebellions, barbarian eruptions and civil wars. A legion or a fleet can become so loyal to a character leading it that, though the unit may obey movement commands, you cannot split it or replace its leader. And be careful not to reassign the character who’s the object  of such unit loyalty, or you will not be able to assign anyone else to lead the unit either, leaving it at a disadvantage. Disbanding the unit will also be a costly affair. You may, however attempt to assassinate the character, with all the penalties that may entail, successful or not.

A little bugginess was detected in the family tree.  A daughter was announced born to a our consul but looking at his family tree immediately all it showed was 16-year-old son. And a random event once showed that another consul’s child was a little bossy on the playground. Checking the family tree we saw that the consul still had no children.

All in all though, the game play at first swipe has the potential for an addictiveness, and we’re still drawn to it. 

Click here to read Part 5 of this review

Europa Universalis: Other Reviews

Different reviews from different folks. we haven’t read any of them. We will after own fades to see how close the OTHERS are to us. What a boring world it would be is we all agreed:

1UP
Crisper Gamers
GameSpy
GamesRadar
GameTap
GamesSpot
IGN
MetaCritic
N4G
StrategyInfomer

And here are the links to our humble review:
Click here to read Part 1 of InfinityBound’s review
Click here to read Part 2 of InfinityBound’s review
Click here to read Part 3 of InfinityBound’s review
Click here to read Part 4 of InfinityBound’s review
Click here to read Part 5 of InfinityBound’s review

Europa Universalis: Rome – 3. On the March

Click here to read Part 1 of this review
Click here to read Part 2 of this review

***

Getting started with the game, as a single player for now, takes you to the main start-up screen. (Veteran Paradox Interactive players bear with us. Much of this will be familiar from other titles. And that’s the last time we’ll say that in this series so have patience, you veteran Europas.)  

Here, instead of the usual choice of scenarios, you’ll see a series of Bookmark buttons aligned vertically on the left. These represent significant milestones (a Roman invention, btw) in the Roman historical timeline. For even though you can play any of the highlighted available countries, the theme of the game is Rome, so for that reason this Bookmark metaphor fits nicely.

Below that on the left is a Calendar widget, you can choose any date between the earliest and latest that are covered by the game. The earliest date has been pegged as signifying the real ascendancy of Rome as a regional Mediterranean power, the era of the wars with a fading Greece. The entire span goes from, earliest to latest, 278 BC to 25 BC. In the game, though, these and all other dates are represented by the Latin equivalents, 474 AUC to 727 AUC. These years are marked from the mythical founding of Rome as known to the Romans of the time. AUC stands for Ab Urbe Condita.

The earliest start time/bookmark, is the above-mentioned Pyrrhic War (474 AUC), in which the remnants of ancient Greece under the leadership of Pyrrhus, managed a series of costly victories over Rome which sealed its doom – and giving us the term Pyrrhic victory. (”Another such victory over Rome and we are undone.” - Pyrrhus.)

Other Bookmarks include: The First Punic War (490 AUC); The Second Punic War (536 AUC); The Syrian War (562 AUC); Mare Nostrum (604); Gaius Marius ( 647); Caesar’s Gallic Wars (696 AUC); Alea lacta est (705 AUC) and First Emperor (723 AUC).

Pick a Bookmark or select any date in the Calendar, then click on any of the colored-in countries in the main window and the right side of the screen will show details of the chosen country’s leader, the leader’s rating in three areas, the type of government, the main diplomatic situation for that country (enemies and allies) and the difficulty rating of playing that country in that specific situation. If you’ve clicked a Bookmark you’ll get a paragraph describing the historic background of the scenario. Changing the date on the calendar makes that text disappear. But if you don’t wander too far in time the situation will be roughly the same. This feature alone shows the incredible amount of research that goes into the making of this and other games in the series.

Click the PLAY button and your legions are on the march.

Click here to read Part 4 of this review
Click here to read Part 5 of this review

Apolyton Spore Forum

Spore. Possibly the most highly anticipated game in decades, (preorder at Amazon.com) is still almost a half-a-year from release, but fans are tooling up. Apolyon now has a Spore forum. And any day now we might hear that someone has released a Spore mod for Civ4 Beyond the Sword.

Here’s an interesting post from the forum with a detailed video of a demo of the game given by lead designer Will Wright at the TED conference in March 2007. Be ready to duck, though. Watch out for the unscientific and self-defeating silliness on global warming. No amount of greenhouse gases will melt a planet. Venue is still there, with a surface temperature of 900 degrees, sure, but it hasn’t melted. And what happens when water evaporates? Why it falls back as rain. So, the climate change model in this simulation may be even more simple-minded than usual. The admitted propaganda channel the game will afford has Montessori Will positively giddy. He hopes to “recalibrate our instincts.” We’d say for such a smart guy he’d fallen hard for the hoax, but since he’s tipping his hand that he has designs on our instincts he pretty much gives away the game, so to speak.

Post 3 of the EU: Rome review coming up tomorrow. Got distracted a bit.
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