Godfucking damnit but that game is fucking brutal. Like... So fucking brutal.
My first mission goes alright, a downed scout ship with four or five sectoids inside of it. I lose four rookies, which is pretty good considering the difficulty I'm playing at. I get back to base, hire more guys to fill out my loses, and keep going.
Second UFO, same thing. Only lose two guys this time, things are going good.
Third mission is a Floater terror mission in Beijing. I grit my teeth, the replacements haven't come in yet so I'm going into combat with only eight guys, not the ten I like to bring.
I start moving my guys out of the skyranger, and crossfire from both sides of the ramp take out four of my soldiers before I can even set up and spot one of the aliens. My remaining four set up a loose defensive line and I hope for the best.
Alien turn, they take out two more of my guys, one of my rookies panic, and I'm left staring down a floater and a reaver in close range, one more accross the ways about ten hexes distant, a three reapers and two floaters a few dozen hexes south of me.
Full team wipe.
I think I'm going to go back in a lower my difficulty a few notches.
Showing posts with label Gaming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaming. Show all posts
Friday, September 6, 2013
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
On another note
Stop going to PAX and giving these assholes money.
I was a fan of Penny-Arcade back in the day, and I thought they were awesome and did "Gamers Right" for various reasons. Then... Then Dickwolves happened, and more and more sexist bullshit came out of the owners and runners of it.
Don't support it.
Don't give them money.
Just... Stop enabling and encouraging it, even indirectly. It hurts people, it hurts gamers, and sends horrible messages that this kind of behaviour is acceptable and encouraged.
I was a fan of Penny-Arcade back in the day, and I thought they were awesome and did "Gamers Right" for various reasons. Then... Then Dickwolves happened, and more and more sexist bullshit came out of the owners and runners of it.
Don't support it.
Don't give them money.
Just... Stop enabling and encouraging it, even indirectly. It hurts people, it hurts gamers, and sends horrible messages that this kind of behaviour is acceptable and encouraged.
Remakes and Re-imaginings
I always imagined (heh) that the term "re-imagining" came into existed because "remake" stopped testing well with focus groups.
"Goddamnit," said the tired 18-35 white male who decides what we are sold, "not another fucking remake."
"No no no! This is different, this is a re-imagining!" the panicked marketing director pleads.
"I find myself turgid with anticipation," the ideal consumer replies.
But enough of that. I want to talk about what makes it work, and I have an amazing example.
In 1994, a game was released where you took the control of an international organisation given the task of defending the Earth from alien invasion. It was called X-COM: UFO Defence (Or X-COM: Enemy Unknown, or UFO: Enemy Unknown, varyingly depending on your locale). It feature a very light, almost non-existant plot and story (even for the time) that was revealed almost exlusively through text-info dumps from your science researches.
There were, in effect, two games being played at the same time! One half was on a global stategy level, where you built your bases, managed your funds, researched technologies and built new equipment. The other half was a turn-based tactical combat interface, where you sent out a bunch of your soldiers to fight the alien threat face to face.
The game begins with little to no fanfare or story. You begin, you chose your difficulty, and then you are faced with a globe map of the Earth. You place your first base. Eventually, a UFO shows up on radar and you shoot it down, then send your troops in to mop-up and grab whatever alien technology you can. Get back to base, queue up some research on the new artifacts and repeat as required. When you finish the research, you get little info-dumps giving you insight into the alien physiology, psychology, purpose and goals.
Then something magical happens.
Since all you have in the game is a world-building framework, you begin to create your *own* story. Your soldiers (all of whom have names and unique stats, and fairly wide-ranging portraits and sprites) begin to take on personality traits that were never coded into the game. You have Willis, your heavy-weapons specialist who only ever misses his shots if he sees one of his comrades die. Franklin, that asshole who panics at the fight sight of actual battle and routinely frags X-COM members. Victoria, the cool sharpshooter that not only never misses, but survived six missions where she got shot without armour and lived to payback that sectoid fucker.
No two X-COM games are the same, and no two players play the same. You begin to grow attached to this story of a desperate fight for human survival against overwhelming odds, not because of careful scripting or dialogue or multi-million dollars cinematics... But because of the simple interaction with this open world, and the effects your choices have.
There are few moments I can recall, in gaming, that are as brutally tense as a UFO recovery mission gone horribly wrong. You pile your troops out of the Skyranger, and begin to explore the area. The sun is down, visibility is shit, the only light source you have are the dying fires from the crash sight. Move one of your mans a little too far, and a burning bolt of plasma screams out of the darkness and destroys him. You re-deploy your troops, trying to find the source, but more of your soliders are quickly felled by the invisible sniper. You desperately send rockets and heavy cannon shots exploding into the distance, and are rewarded with the dying scream of a single alien.
You've lost half your troops and expended a third of your ammo. And you know that there are five or six more of the x-rays out there, somewhere... Waiting for you.
The experience intensifies ten-fold on the first actual terror mission, where you don't have a focal point of your search. Just a city, filled with civilians being murdered by alien invaders.
The experience is something most modern games have no idea how to reproduce. They are so bent on holding your hand through their carefully crafted and linear plot that you don't grow attached to your experience. It becomes something you watch, not something you've created. And when 2K studios announced a reboot of the X-COM Franchise (which hasn't seen a new game in years), fans were excited.
Until it was announced it would be a shooter.
The backlash was something to behold. The more information was released about the new X-COM game, the angrier the fanbase began. It had nothing to do with the franchise, except it had to do with aliens invading earth. There was no strategic depth, no open-world, no option to rename your hordes of poor defenceless goons after your friends and gleefully march them into a burning plasma barrage.
It would be a linear, scripted plot bringing you from fight to fight, giving little to no true interaction and feedback. It was an obvious marketing ploy to slap the X-COM name on this new game, to give a mediocre shooter some legs from brand-loyal purchasers (and one of a parade of remakes of classic, varried games as first person shooters). It was, to be blunt, insulting.
Then a miracle happened. Firaxis, the makers of the Civilisation series (and, ironically, also publishing their games under the 2K banner) announced that they were working on an X-COM game as well. A game featuring a strategic layer, where you built and maintained a base, did research on advanced technology, built new equipment, and managed a squad of soliders. A game where you sent out your troops to a crash site or a terror site and launch into a turn-based squad tactical combat mission.
When it was finally released (Before the shooter version of the game, despite being announced almost a year after), it met fan expectations. It was not the perfect remake fans may have wanted, but it captured everything that made X-COM one of the best games every created. The plot was given in cinematic cutscenes, but it gave the same kind of information that the text-briefings did in the original. The rest was open world, sandboxy. Your soldiers (with some amazing customization options) took on a life and personality of their own independant of their stats and script.
The shooter was released a week or so ago, rebranded as The Bureau: X-COM Declassified, and will probably be forgotten within a year. The proper remake is still being played, updated, and has a sizable expantion pack being released by the end of the year.
The lesson to be learned here is not that remakes or reimaginings shouldn't be attempted. X-COM showed that it is possible to do it, and properly. The lesson is that when you remake something, you should look at what made the original popular, or (if it's a cult or niche property), what gave it the identity it holds. There is no requirement to hew exactly to the original; the requirement should be to hew to the originals mood, theme, and ideas. Do that, craft your new product with a love and respect for the original, and you will find yourself basking in the glow and adoration of a fanbase, thankful that you obviously understand why they enjoyed the original and willing to forgive differences.
Don't, and you'll end up making another third-person cover shooter with aliens in it.
"Goddamnit," said the tired 18-35 white male who decides what we are sold, "not another fucking remake."
"No no no! This is different, this is a re-imagining!" the panicked marketing director pleads.
"I find myself turgid with anticipation," the ideal consumer replies.
But enough of that. I want to talk about what makes it work, and I have an amazing example.
In 1994, a game was released where you took the control of an international organisation given the task of defending the Earth from alien invasion. It was called X-COM: UFO Defence (Or X-COM: Enemy Unknown, or UFO: Enemy Unknown, varyingly depending on your locale). It feature a very light, almost non-existant plot and story (even for the time) that was revealed almost exlusively through text-info dumps from your science researches.
There were, in effect, two games being played at the same time! One half was on a global stategy level, where you built your bases, managed your funds, researched technologies and built new equipment. The other half was a turn-based tactical combat interface, where you sent out a bunch of your soldiers to fight the alien threat face to face.
The game begins with little to no fanfare or story. You begin, you chose your difficulty, and then you are faced with a globe map of the Earth. You place your first base. Eventually, a UFO shows up on radar and you shoot it down, then send your troops in to mop-up and grab whatever alien technology you can. Get back to base, queue up some research on the new artifacts and repeat as required. When you finish the research, you get little info-dumps giving you insight into the alien physiology, psychology, purpose and goals.
Then something magical happens.
Since all you have in the game is a world-building framework, you begin to create your *own* story. Your soldiers (all of whom have names and unique stats, and fairly wide-ranging portraits and sprites) begin to take on personality traits that were never coded into the game. You have Willis, your heavy-weapons specialist who only ever misses his shots if he sees one of his comrades die. Franklin, that asshole who panics at the fight sight of actual battle and routinely frags X-COM members. Victoria, the cool sharpshooter that not only never misses, but survived six missions where she got shot without armour and lived to payback that sectoid fucker.
No two X-COM games are the same, and no two players play the same. You begin to grow attached to this story of a desperate fight for human survival against overwhelming odds, not because of careful scripting or dialogue or multi-million dollars cinematics... But because of the simple interaction with this open world, and the effects your choices have.
There are few moments I can recall, in gaming, that are as brutally tense as a UFO recovery mission gone horribly wrong. You pile your troops out of the Skyranger, and begin to explore the area. The sun is down, visibility is shit, the only light source you have are the dying fires from the crash sight. Move one of your mans a little too far, and a burning bolt of plasma screams out of the darkness and destroys him. You re-deploy your troops, trying to find the source, but more of your soliders are quickly felled by the invisible sniper. You desperately send rockets and heavy cannon shots exploding into the distance, and are rewarded with the dying scream of a single alien.
You've lost half your troops and expended a third of your ammo. And you know that there are five or six more of the x-rays out there, somewhere... Waiting for you.
The experience intensifies ten-fold on the first actual terror mission, where you don't have a focal point of your search. Just a city, filled with civilians being murdered by alien invaders.
The experience is something most modern games have no idea how to reproduce. They are so bent on holding your hand through their carefully crafted and linear plot that you don't grow attached to your experience. It becomes something you watch, not something you've created. And when 2K studios announced a reboot of the X-COM Franchise (which hasn't seen a new game in years), fans were excited.
Until it was announced it would be a shooter.
The backlash was something to behold. The more information was released about the new X-COM game, the angrier the fanbase began. It had nothing to do with the franchise, except it had to do with aliens invading earth. There was no strategic depth, no open-world, no option to rename your hordes of poor defenceless goons after your friends and gleefully march them into a burning plasma barrage.
It would be a linear, scripted plot bringing you from fight to fight, giving little to no true interaction and feedback. It was an obvious marketing ploy to slap the X-COM name on this new game, to give a mediocre shooter some legs from brand-loyal purchasers (and one of a parade of remakes of classic, varried games as first person shooters). It was, to be blunt, insulting.
Then a miracle happened. Firaxis, the makers of the Civilisation series (and, ironically, also publishing their games under the 2K banner) announced that they were working on an X-COM game as well. A game featuring a strategic layer, where you built and maintained a base, did research on advanced technology, built new equipment, and managed a squad of soliders. A game where you sent out your troops to a crash site or a terror site and launch into a turn-based squad tactical combat mission.
When it was finally released (Before the shooter version of the game, despite being announced almost a year after), it met fan expectations. It was not the perfect remake fans may have wanted, but it captured everything that made X-COM one of the best games every created. The plot was given in cinematic cutscenes, but it gave the same kind of information that the text-briefings did in the original. The rest was open world, sandboxy. Your soldiers (with some amazing customization options) took on a life and personality of their own independant of their stats and script.
The shooter was released a week or so ago, rebranded as The Bureau: X-COM Declassified, and will probably be forgotten within a year. The proper remake is still being played, updated, and has a sizable expantion pack being released by the end of the year.
The lesson to be learned here is not that remakes or reimaginings shouldn't be attempted. X-COM showed that it is possible to do it, and properly. The lesson is that when you remake something, you should look at what made the original popular, or (if it's a cult or niche property), what gave it the identity it holds. There is no requirement to hew exactly to the original; the requirement should be to hew to the originals mood, theme, and ideas. Do that, craft your new product with a love and respect for the original, and you will find yourself basking in the glow and adoration of a fanbase, thankful that you obviously understand why they enjoyed the original and willing to forgive differences.
Don't, and you'll end up making another third-person cover shooter with aliens in it.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Five Guys and Minecraft
Burgin' so hard
Five Guys opened a few stores in the Montreal region recently. I was walking down St-Catherines street on Friday, burging and wondering if I felt like McDonalds or Burger King. Then what would happen to cross my sight but the big red "FIVE GUYS" sign.
Fuck it, said I, I'm gonna see if all the Americans I talked to are right about this place.
The burgers themselves are nothing super magical; the meat is good, the buns are fresh and nicely toasted on the grill. The toppings are numerous and free, and more varied than even what you can get at Harvey's. If you want grilled onions or mushrooms at any other burger place, it generally needs to be on a special (and generally limited time) burger. Here, it's always avaible and always free. That, in of itself, secures Five Guys a place in my stomach. The wait is longer than at most fast-food places, but seeing as how you seem them slap the patty down fresh for your burger, and come off sizzling from the hot plate, I'm willing to forgive.
The burger texture and taste (and slop) is not something I'm used to from our local (and province wide) burger joints. I can't quite describe it, but it's different and surprising. At my first bite my eyes widened and I mumbled (around a mouthful of beef, bacon, cheese, onions and mushrooms) that this is what all those damn American TV shows mean by "juicy burger". It was pretty damn good.
The friest, however. Ye gods, the fries.
I don't know what sorcery they use, but they are the best damn friest I've had. Maybe it's the peanut oil (higher frying temp, bigger crisp, less oil-soakage? that sounds good, lets go with that), maybe it's the skin they leave on... But they are crispy, delicious and taste not a whit of grease or oil. I didn't even have to use any of my extra salt packets that McDonalds or Burger King has trained me to pour on top of my flaccid, flavourless potatoe mush.
I am for sure going back, and I hope they spread around some. This is the kind of fast food place this city needs more of.
Minecraft
Minecraft is keeping it's on again, off again love affair with my spare time. I've sometimes found myself delving in the dark depths for hours at a time, just carving out a series of mining tunnels and collecting ore before I stumble into an unexplored cavern complex. I'd go off, adventure for a bit, then die. All my precious equipment, ore and valuables falling into a pit, or surrounded by a writhing mass of enemies. I'd swear and just quit to desktop, too pissed off to return to the game for weeks or months at a time.
Last time this happened, I had a dozen diamonds in my pack when I was unceremoniously dumped into a lava flow by an archer. I flipped off the screen, shut it down, and started playing Icewind Dale again.
When I did finally decide to go back, I started a new world to go through. I'm petty like that.
This current one isn't so bad. I have a small (poorly mad saddly) keep surrounded by torches. I have a good set of pumpkin farms going, and just recently started on my underground wheat and sugar cane farms. I started those late, because I was busy hunting pigs (to near extinction in my close-area) and getting enough iron to make a golem.
I got my golem, but my iron reserves are so low. As are my woodstocks.
I need to go out for a while and just clear-cut the forest surrounding my keep. It'll help clear some land so I can expand my castle, and make it easier to spot enemies. As it is, I can barely see through the dense foliage from my (admitedly tiny) watch tower.
Being in a winter Biome is nifty for some things, but makes setting up outdoor farms a pain in the ass. I should make a greenhouse, and I have a huge desert close enough that it shouldn't be trouble grinding up some sand for it, but... Effort. Time. Annoyances. I want to get at least a small sustainable growing farm happening in my mine before I start anything bigger.
Plus I need some fucking wood.
----
I find it kind of amazing how deep and complex Minecraft is, for such a simple game. There's no real plot, no real in game hand-holding... And yet it grabbed my interest from the moment I started playing. That it doesn't keep it for huge lengths of time at once is more of how I game than a problem with the game itself. I tend to get frustrated if something goes awry, and I've been known to just drop a game entirely if it annoys me too much.
It's one of the reasons Dragon Age remains unfinished, three years after I purchased it. I got pissed off at a mage-filled battle and just sword a blue streak, and nuked it from my hard-drive. Fuck those mages.
Same thing with the Witcher. Though, in that case, it's the second chapter which is just long, meandering and in an irritating and difficult zone. I should really just power through it to get to the better parts afterwards.
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