Things You Don't Care About

My Grandfather

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:29:44 -0600

Grandpa Hilberg was always "old" to me -- he must have been in his mid to late fifties in my earliest memories of him, going to see Cubs games with him and my dad. I remember his apartment on Ashland Avenue; its smell, and how it was filled with his model trains. I remember the creaky wooden stairs in his building and their red stained wood. I can't remember much else though, almost thirty years later.

He moved to Montana when I wasn't much older; I won't pretend to know why exactly, but after that I saw him less, when he would come to visit or on the rare occasion of a family gathering. I would talk to him on the phone, I always intended to go visit him sometime once I started working but somehow it never worked out; the idea of going to see him without my dad always seemed awkward, and how many people in their 20s want to go hang out with their grandparents? I always thought there would be time later anyway -- the mortality of Grandpa Hilberg never really set in for me.

When my mom's dad died on Christmas 2003, I seemed to make it through almost unfazed. Maybe it was because I had just changed my name and his funeral would be the first time I would meet my mom's family as I am now, and selfishly I was more worried about their reactions to that than grieving over his death. I hadn't spent as much time with Grandpa Schroedter either, since he lived further away. For some reason, I feel like he had reach his time -- he had done what he set out to do and now he was done, and maybe felt a bit at a loss with what he was supposed to do now.

Grandpa Hilberg was different; there was always something childlike about him to me. He seemed to have few regrets about his life and despite the fact that I don't think he ever really had a comfortable or successful career, he never seemed bitter or upset by that. It seemed like every time I talked to him, whether in person or on the phone, he had some story to tell about his friends or his family, and nearly every single one ended with his laugh. I don't think I ever heard him to tell a story with a sad ending.

For someone like me, who has felt world-weary and cynical since I was in my teens, there's something fascinating about a person like Grandpa Hilberg who could maintain that kind of point of view and outlook on the world for so long. I never really thought about his mortality, I guess, because it felt like he would never really go -- how can someone like that die? I figured when you see death coming that has to be the ultimate downer -- when the end is near how can you maintain that kind of outlook?

Yesterday, my dad called me as I was leaving lunch and told me that Grandpa Hilberg had died that morning. He'd been in the hospital, and I knew he was sick, but still, I never thought he would actually die -- it just didn't even strike me a possibility. I don't think it really settled in until last night, but for the first time, I think, I'm actually feeling a strong sense of grief over someone's passing in a way I've never felt it before. Maybe it's the fact that I'm getting older, and my parents are getting older too; for the first time I am really thinking about what it will be like when they die and realizing what that will mean.

I'm filled with regrets now, about my grandfather. I always told him I'd come visit, but I never did. He wrote me after the first time I went to Iceland, including an article he'd read on the place, and I don't think I ever wrote back. I talked to him on the phone, sure, but now...I was his oldest grandchild, and I think he was trying to reach out to me, and I wasn't there. I was always going to see or talk to him later, and now there's never going to be a later.

That is always going to haunt me I think, especially when I look at how his kids turned out -- seven boys and girls who managed to turn out to be pretty great people, one of whom I'm happy to call my dad. Whatever he and my grandmother did to raise them, they seem to have done it pretty well, and they managed to pass those lessons on to their kids, because I don't think I could have asked for a better dad than I am lucky enough to have. After all he's been through -- with me and my brothers, with my mom and everything else life has thrown at him, he's always been there for me. And when I think of that, I wonder if that's how my dad feels about his dad, and I wish I understood that more. I can't help but feel a bit of guilt that I am never going to have kids of my own so that I can pass those lessons on too -- and part of me wonders if I could have, even if it weren't no physically impossible. I can't imagine it was easy for him or for my parents to raise their kids as well as they did.

So, this weekend, I guess, I say goodbye to Grandpa Hilberg, and sorry for putting off what is now never going to happen. I hope that he passed peacefully and as without regret as he seemed, and I hope he knew how much he meant to those of us he leaves behind.

Iron Man 2

Tue, 11 May 2010 20:09:56 -0600

Last weekend kicked off the big summer movie season I guess, with Iron Man 2 premiering; after how much I enjoyed the last one, I was pretty excited to see what they did with the sequel. I took the afternoon off on Friday and went to see it at a matinee, which was mostly empty (a situation I'm told changed quickly by Saturday).

The movie picks up six months after the last movie, with the US government trying to get a handle on the Iron Man issue. Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), a competing arms manufacturer, is doing his part to try and bring Stark down (and develop something to compare with Iron Man), and Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) is plotting his revenge, as Stark's father destroyed Vanko's father during the cold war. Meanwhile, SHIELD is still trying to deal with Stark and the emerging Avenger Initiative as well; Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury has a bigger part, as well as Clark Gregg's Agent Coulson.

The big difference between this movie and the original is that while the first Iron Man was more of a character piece, with Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark going through an introspective journey for the first two (or maybe three, depending on how to divide it) acts, Iron Man 2 is, by and large, a more conventional action movie, which is somewhat of a disappointment after three much more interesting superhero movies of the last two years (the original Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen). While there's definitely some good character moments for Robert Downey Jr. in the movie, there's not nearly as much development, and that makes the resolution at the end seem a bit empty to me. While the dialogue is, for the most part, very good, I think the script is just missing the character scenes that made the first one so good -- Downey's strength is that kind of acting, and if you don't give him that, you're wasting him to some extent. I think the improv style of the first one probably made it a lot stronger.

I certainly can't fault the acting; all of the principals are top notch, and even with as many characters are crammed into the movie, it did not feel like they'd been wedged in for no reason. They have a natural presence in the movie, but they also don't get a lot of time to shine. Aside from Downey, Sam Rockwell does an amazing job portraying Hammer; you can tell that Hammer desperately wants to be Tony Stark, but can't quite pull it off. Rockwell gets just the right amount of empty swagger to his step.

Rourke also manages to pull of "bruiser Russian physicist," which I'm surprised as anyone actually works. His opening scenes are very reminiscent of Stark in the cave in the first movie (which I'm sure was intentional) and his opening confrontation with Stark (and the monologue he gives) drips with menace. Later, however, he managed to portray just the right kind of "focused gearhead" kind of personality coming through his gruff exterior.

The other supporting characters work very well (including director Favreau, whose Happy Hogan gets a bigger part in this movie, but not annoyingly so), but none of them quite measure up to the level of the three principals. Considering that they may be three of the best actors working today though, that's hardly a slight. Don Cheadle does an excellent job filling in for Terrence Howard as Rhodey/War Machine, although I think Howard may have had slightly better chemistry with Downey in the first movie. This could just be a symptom of the movie's action focus rather than character focus though -- there's no good scenes where we get to see the two of them just kicking back together like the scene in the first Iron Man on the plane. Scarlett Johansson does a fine job as Black Widow, but only really gets two scenes to show her stuff. She's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm not sure that any other reasonably competent actress couldn't have pulled off the role.

The action scenes were pretty good, though I don't think any of them really knocked my socks off; I think part of the problem was that there was just less investment in them than there was in the first movie, where there was a much stronger personal stake in each of them. The first confrontation between Vanko and Stark was probably the best, and the finale, while showy and pretty cool to watch, just didn't have the same weight to it.

On a minor note, the soundtrack for Iron Man seems to basically be AC/DC's greatest hits, and I was kind of disappointed that the score, which I actually liked in the first one, seemed to be missing. I was waiting for the Iron Man theme to start up a few times and I never really heard it (maybe I just missed it though).

Overall, Iron Man 2 is definitely worth seeing; however, be prepared to be at least a little disappointed if you're expecting the same kind of character-focused piece that we had the first time around. It's not a bad movie to be sure, however, and you'll probably enjoy it just for Downey, Rockwell, and Rourke's performances. Hopefully, though, Iron Man 3 will be a return to the first movie's strengths.

Getting more Eves in Eve Online

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:24:54 -0600

CrazyKinux's latest Eve Blog Banter is on a topic of some interest to me, as one of the relatively small percentage of Eve players that happens to be female. Admittedly, I'm not necessarily the typical female player of Eve (or the typical female in general, as anyone who knows me well or reads this blog regularly is already aware of), but I would like to think I'm not completely bizarre in my Eve tastes -- I seem to get along well with the other ladies of Eve I meet at FanFest, anyway. So, as an armchair game designer and someone that would like to see Eve broaden its appeal to women, I've decided to take a crack at that this week.

This topic is a difficult one for me. I've thought about it in regard to gaming in general, and generally I'm of the opinion that far too many people at least in the game-playing community, if not the game-making community, think that women will only be attracted to games which are stereotypically "girly." Things like the Sims, Barbie games, or Bella Sera. It's not a very helpful angle from which to come at the question of "how can an existing game increase its appeal to female gamers?" Maybe Eve Online would get more female players if it was focused around who can dress their avatar up prettier, but that wouldn't really be anything like the current game.

Mostly, though, I think that's a load of crap. Yes, there's some things that women like more than guys and vice versa, but I think a large part of why women don't like certain games has little to do with the gameplay or the number of pink horses in them -- it has to do with how these games are made and marketed, and I think that's partly because of the fact that game development is still such a male-dominated field.

In my experience, one of the ways games can expand their appeal among women gamers is by focusing on "soft" game design issues -- specifically, increasing the strength of story and social elements in gaming, two things that Eve has a good head start on, but still has problems with.

Making the Emotional Connection

Why is storyline important? Because it adds emotional depth to your reasons for playing the game. This is something that I think all gamers appreciate on some level, but with women I think it can be a major draw to the game. I have a friend who does not really enjoy playing a lot of "hardcore" games for the most part, but who loves to watch her husband play pretty much every kind of game out there and go through the narrative of the game. The games outside the casual model that she enjoys playing tend to be those with interesting stories (especially adventure games) and those she can play cooperatively with her husband (like Civilization, for instance).

Eve already has a story which, when it comes to games, is fairly decent (and I think getting better most of the time). However, currently the storyline is rather detached from what the players actually do -- characters can't really interact with the storyline in very many ways, and generally just have to sit back and watch things unfold. Then the question becomes, what do I get from playing the game as opposed to watching the game? If CCP wants to attract people (including women) into playing the game with the story, they need to make that story part of your experience as a player.

The old AURORA events were one way this sort of connection could be made, but I don't think something like that is necessarily needed. The recent appearance of Ishukone and Mordu's Legion ships in Intaki, for instance, is one way to show this, although optimally, you want it to allow active participation, not just passive. Making the economy fluctuate in regions based on storyline activity, incorporating current events into missions...making the world feel more alive and increasing the verisimilitude, basically. I think this is a good thing for games in general (as I'm sure anyone who's read my articles on storyline and metaplot before is aware), but I think it's definitely something that women tend to find more interesting than the visceral thrill of blowing someone up. They want the emotional context that the story can provide, in order to pull them through the gameplay they might not enjoy at first glance.

The Booby Trap

However, Eve's specific storyline does have its weaknesses when it comes to women. Those of you who have read my review of The Empyrean Age can already guess where I'm going -- and to be fair, this is hardly a problem that Eve alone falls victim to. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of strong female characters in the Eve storyline. Newsflash, gentlemen. Most women do not want to play tarted-up sexpots that need a big, strong man to save them all the time. What does Eve have?

Jamyl Sarum, gets half a page devoted to her in the novel talking about how sexy she is and then at the end her suppressed "real" self begs for help from Falek Grange, a man she is hinted at having a sexual relationship with in the past. Her "strong" self is evidently an alternate personality or some sort of possession.
Haatakan Oiritsuu, CEO of the largest Caldari megacorporation, gives up her position to Tibus Heth without a fight and can't seem to find bodyguards who are loyal enough to protect her. Since then, she's been co-opted by the same man that forced her out of her position (which, to be fair, could be an improvement).
Karin Midular throws a tantrum in a government meeting and nearly gets raped by (yet another) poorly-chosen bodyguard, only to be saved by Shakor.
Mila Gariushi (aka Kinachi Hepimeki) runs off after her brother is killed and lets the man that stands for everything her brother hated push Ishukone (and the State) around with nary a peep, despite being his heir apparent.

Add to that a Gallente pilot who evidently will sleep with a subordinate at the drop of a hat and another woman who sticks with the captain of her ship despite the fact that he's an abusive asshole that blows all their money on ale and whores, and there's not a lot of female characters who come off very appealing in that novel. Unfortunately, since then, there haven't been a lot of well-developed female characters who've emerged either, which is somewhat disappointing (though Catiz Tash-Murkon has potential). I don't write this to beat up on Tony Gonzales again -- however, women want to play games where they can feel empowered too, and making the Eve universe seem like one that is hostile to women is not helpful.

I am not saying that you can't have strippers or prostitutes or sex or whatever in Eve -- for the most part, we're all adults here and we can handle adult subjects. But for once, I would like to see a female character get the upper hand in a big way and behave like a strong woman. Recently, I finished watching the Rome TV series. That's a show that takes place in a time where women were legally subordinate to men in almost every way, which was rife with nudity and sex, and yet I still thought that nearly all the main female characters were strong, well-developed people who did not exist simply as things for the men to have sex with or collapse into tears whenever things didn't go their way. They had as much of a role in the events that unfolded as the male characters, even if they did it in different ways. That's the sort of thing that will open up the appeal to women.

Expanding the Social Sphere

This is something that Eve already does well, I think, but maybe doesn't promote as much as it could. I think women gamers tend to be more attracted to "social games," where the game is as much about interacting with other people, often in a cooperative way, as anything else. A lot of the marketing for Eve in the past has focused on the shiny ships, big fleet battles, and its wide-open, often cutthroat nature; for sure, these are things that are definitely strengths of the game, but not necessarily the most appealing to women. However, one of Eve's other big strengths can be the extent to which it encourages cooperative effort; CCP has highlighted this somewhat with their "Butterfly Effect" ad, and it's part of this Goonswarm recruitment poster too, but I'm still not sure it really gets played up as much as it could be.

Incarna may help with this, but it's not going to be the secret key to opening the floodgates to women. Adding some dress-up minigames and social spaces is not going to keep female players, although it may be a good way to get them to dip their toes in the water. In order to retain those gamers they are going to need something more than what they can get from free games or games geared towards that kind of thing more specifically (like Second Life, for instance). Retaining those players will require making those social spaces meaningful within the context of the rest of the game -- something I'm not sure is possible with any sort of game mechanic, but which will only happen if Incarna is seen by the majority of the player base as a valued addition to the game rather than something tacked on or seen a separate game in and of itself.

I also think that Eve's marketing needs to promote stories of cooperative, constructive social play in Eve over the kinds of stories that seem to make Eve's big press -- the GHSC heist, the EIB scandal, and the collapse of BoB and GoonSwarm, for instance. While there's no doubt that those are possibilities that are unique to Eve's single-server universe and they are extremely impressive (and interesting) in their own right, women seem to be much more drawn to constructive, rather than destructive, social events. Things like the ongoing mission of Eve University or the Providence effort (prior to its recent collapse) might be good examples of that. Certainly, to some extent, CCP can't do anything about what outside news organizations choose to cover, but they can at least try to counterbalance it.

The Learning Cliff and Fumbling in the Dark

I think by now everyone has probably seen the Eve "learning cliff" graph. Certainly, Eve has suffered in the past by perhaps not being the most accessible game out there, but they've recently made big strides in revamping the tutorials -- if you haven't seen CCP Eris' presentation from FanFest 2009 about that, it's worth seeing. However, I think Eve is still very intimidating for new players to just be dropped into -- and CCP knows this, which is why when I see them at various gaming conventions they are always trying to get people to start playing with a friend. This is an impediment for getting new players of all stripes, but especially women.

A lot of the material I've read on game design indicates that men and women tend to want different ways to learn new tasks -- men tend to like fumbling around in the dark, so to speak, until they figure them out by doing. Women (including me) tend to like reading the manual, getting coached through things, and then doing them. Eve has come a long way from where it was, but it is still, to some extent, a game where you learn by fumbling around in the dark. The new tutorials and the Evelopedia have done a great job providing documentation for new characters, but the high-level game of Eve is far different from the high-level game of other MMOs. I have never seen the kind of basically scientific research used to determine the boundaries of game mechanics and out-of-the-box thinking for other games that I have seen with Eve; the example that sticks in my mind is the Goonswarm grid manipulation guide.

To some extent, this is never going to really be presented in an easy to learn form (at least, until it is already in wide use). That's something I don't think is likely to change with Eve, especially as CCP often goes back and revises game mechanics fairly often. Personally, I actually see that as a good thing, but this is going to be an impediment as long as things like that exist. Promoting corporations like Eve University is probably the best antidote to this sort of problem, but then CCP gets in the trap of showing favoritism to one alliance. That's a trap they are understandably wary of falling into.

Note that I'm not saying women can't figure this stuff out too -- but I think they tend to be a little more intimidated than the guys, especially when you take into account the culture of the player base, which brings me to my next point....

This Place Smells Like A Locker Room

Possibly, at the highest level, the biggest obstacle to getting more women to play Eve is simply that there aren't that many women playing Eve right now, and the culture is a bit on the intimidating side. When you join a Ventrilo server and three guys tell you "pics or stfu," you kinda just want to reach through the internet and punch them in the face, not hop through seventy jumps to blow up the opposing alliance with them. To be fair, a lot of the women I've known in Eve can give as good as they get, but I think that's because we're a self-selected group. I work with a bunch of guys at work and am used to the same sort of attitude (though to be fair, the folks in CAIN have never treated me -- or any of the other women in the corp -- with any less respect than the guys, for which I'm thankful).

It can get tiresome to deal with that kind of crap if you have to put up with it on a regular basis though, and after dealing with guys making dick jokes and remarking on co-eds' boobs all day, I have to say I think I'd rather not deal with it when I'm in my off hours. That sort of attitude can be hard to avoid sometimes, especially if you deal with the bigger alliances. One of the reasons I was happy in a smaller corporation or alliance was because there was a much friendlier (and less anonymous) atmosphere. Guys seem less likely to let out their inner dumbass when they are more familiar with the person whose tits they are demanding to see. :)

However, this is something that's not really anything CCP can control -- aside from doing what they can to encourage women to play in other ways, so that we aren't such a curiosity. That's something the players are going to have to do if they want to see more women in the game -- which, honestly, I'm not sure a lot of them do. I think that by and large, most of them would be happier if more women played, but they don't really have any interest in doing anything to actively promote more women players in Eve.

Does It Really Matter?

In the end though, so what? So Eve's player base is 95% male. Is that actually a problem? In the grand scheme of things, I have to admit it's probably not. Until CCP has 50 million subscribers, there's probably going to be plenty more guys out there to pull into the game that are more likely to enjoy it and stick with it. It's not like "men 18-34" is a small demographic. They can probably survive just fine appealing to that market.

On the other hand, for a woman who does like Eve, it matters a great deal to me. It does get a little lonely out there being the one woman in 20 players. I'm not going to quit Eve because of it, or throw myself a pity party, but it'd sure be nice to go to FanFest and not have it be a total sausage fest. :)

Edit: In the interest of full disclosure, after reading some of the other blogs on this topic, I have to admit that I originally picked Caldari for Svetlana because Civire appeared to have the best hair. However, that is not what kept me in the game for 5 years, nor what inspired me to write so much on Caldari society and history. Cheap tricks to appeal to girls might get them in the door, but it won't keep them here.

Highlights of the Banter so far (according to me):

The Girls Who Fly Spaceships
Space Boobies Are Bad, Mmmkay?
New Eden Doesn't Need To Change For Eve -- Adam Needs To Get Over Himself
Eve Online and Women (sorta)
Think Outside the Spaceship
Don't Change Eve For Me
Where Are The Laydeez of Eve?
Where Are All The Wenches?
Evequality: The Rise of the Female Gamer
Women? IN MY SPACESHIP? Is She From Mars As Well?
The Female of the Species
Eve and the X by X Genetic Succession Unit
Sociability V
What Women Want In Eve
Getting In Touch With Our Feminine Side
It's a Woman's World (They Just Don't Know It Yet)
Women In Eve -- Can It Be Done?
You'd Rather Be Playing The Sims, Right?
Women In Eve
EVE: WTB Girls?
All About Eve
Hell Hath No Fury
The Ladies of New Eden: An Analysis Of How Men Are Not From Mars, and Women Are Not From Venus
The Ladies of New Eden
Eve vs Women
Gender Inclusiveness in CCP's Eve Online

Scarlet Letters, 27 March YC 112

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 12:07:26 -0600

Personal Log, Svetlana Scarlet
Captain, Buzzard-Class Frigate Lonely Hunter
Rapid Assembly Plant, Hatakani System

I have finally emerged from the wormhole I have spent much of the last week in, where the system's magnetar secondary was playing havoc with my onboard systems. The magnetic interference and constant high-energy radiation bombardment prevented much in the way of extensive exploration, but it present a spectacular sight I'm not likely to see in any of the inhabited systems of the cluster.

The Lonely Hunter drifts in the light of a magnetar.

There was little sign of Sleeper presence, but I did find one outpost in the system. Again, the Sleeper drones prevented a close inspection, but from what I could tell, this was some sort of scientific outpost, quite likely to study the unique phenomenon that the nearby neutron star presented. I find it somewhat heartening that the Sleepers -- and perhaps all the old races -- were not nearly as all-knowing as some would have us believe. The universe is a mysterious and complicated place, and it seems like hubris to think anyone could unlock all its secrets. I do not doubt that the Sleepers were more advanced than us for now, but I do not think they were so far ahead that we will not see similar technology emerging from laboratories in the State and elsewhere before the middle of this century, especially now that we have their relics to reverse-engineer.

A Sleeper scientific outpost, still studying the magnetar perhaps.

After two weeks of this journey, however, I still feel lost. When the only wormhole leading out of the magnetar system led to Hatakani, it was as if I was opening the windows of a country home on the first warm day of the year. The constant buzz of radio chatter, the clusters of ships at the gates -- wormhole space may be good for introspection, but you are constantly aware of just how alone you are. Here, along the main route between the State and the Federation, you are always aware of how widespread humanity has become over the last millennium.

The Lonely Hunter emerges from a wormhole into the Hatakani system.

Hatakani also brings back memories. The memories I have of the Reserve, and when I fought in wars where I truly believed we were in the right. When we fought to prevent the escalation of regional conflicts and to keep the Federation from supplying violent malcontents here at home. When we fought Phoenix Wing and the Acheron Federation, I had no doubt that what we were doing benefited not only the State, but the entire cluster as a whole. Now, our nation fights for the exact wrong reasons -- out of malice, for territorial conquest, destabilizing the status quo because of one man's mad obsession. It is easy for me to understand why my friends in the Reserve have become disillusioned with this war and with our leaders. No wonder they left to fight in nullsec, where they at least have control over what they fight for.

Hatakani's Rapid Assembly plant, once headquarters to the Reserve.

And yet, I still can't bring myself to leave the State behind. It is my home; it is the land I have fought and died for, and I still believe its values are my values, and the only ones worth fighting for in the cluster. This current war is not about those values, however, and being here in Hatakani only reinforces that. What has happened to those fights? The ones I felt proud to win? Today, even a victory against the Gallente seems hollow; the Distinguished Blade on my uniform feels more like a mark of shame rather than a decoration.

A pair of Charon-class freighters approach the Kassigainen gate in Hatakani.

The Provists are foolish to think that we can win a long-term victory against the Federation; our "victory" over the disputed territories last year only drove them to fight harder, and coalesce into a stronger fighting force. Our own forces have become largely discouraged, and do not see the point in defending territory that isn't ours, aside from a few holdouts. As the FDU pushes closer to our systems in Black Rise and elsewhere, I wonder what will happen if the situation is reversed. I feel the need to defend my homeland, but to do it on behalf of a man who has made himself king...

Scarlet Letters, 18 March YC 112

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 19:48:01 -0600

Personal Log, Svetlana Scarlet
Captain, Buzzard-Class Frigate Lonely Hunter
Location Unknown, Locus J110108

I have spent the last four days surveying the system I entered through the last wormhole, which has proven to be extremely intriguing, at least from an astronomical point of view. The eighth planet is unusual in that its orbit is wildly out of alignment with the rest of the system, but despite being more than 18 AU from the system's primary, it appears to have liquid water and at least primitive life.

The Lonely Hunter over the anomalous garden world.

It seems likely that this is not an entirely natural course of events, but if this is the work of the Sleepers, they were far more advanced that anyone has even tried to suggest. It's possible the planet is a captured body; that would account for its orbit, at least, but how the planet's surface can be warm enough to have liquid water this far out -- or why anyone would terraform a planet so far from the primary star -- is a puzzle that I don't think I have the astronomical knowledge to figure out.

The orbit of planet 8 (click to enlarge).

Unfortunately, the rest of the system does not offer a great many clues. From repeated intensive scans of the system, the Sleeper presence appears to be limited, what one would expect in a system at the edge of their sphere of influence. Resources are in abundant supply, especially of the more common ores and fullerene gases, but I have only found a few outposts and what might have once been some sort of resource harvesting operation. The Sleeper drones still patrolling these ruins made a closer inspection rather impossible for my ship, unfortunately. I toyed with the thought of attempting to make some sort of contact, but every attempt to do so I have heard about has ended in violence. While I have fought Sleeper drones before with great success, doing so in an unarmed and lightly shielded frigate will probably bring a swift end to my explorations.

A Sleeper drone prowls asteroids and gas of a long-dead mining operation.

I thought that perhaps a survey of the other planets in the system might turn up some information, but aside from an extremely geologically active "lava world," none of them offered anything particularly unusual. The lava world did not appear to be the result of a massive kinetic impact; if it had, it's possible that it could have been related to the eighth planet's orbit. Nor does the proto-garden world appear to have any sort of artificial structures; I detected no energy signatures or other signs of civilization, at least in the recent past.

The "lava world" of J110108, third from the primary star.

Is it possible that this planet was terraformed by a race who lived here before the Sleepers? I still don't understand why this world, and not one of the ones closer to the system's primary, where solar energy would be in a far more abundant supply. Unfortunately, my knowledge of astronomy and planetology is somewhat limited, so I suspect I will not be able to unravel this mystery. I've recorded my findings and will forward them on to Dr. Ikkola in Uchoshi the next time I can link with a comm buoy.

Speaking of that, I've been unable to find a suitable new wormhole to move on to yet; so far, the only wormholes I can find have led into high-security Federation space, which, to be sure, is not a place I think I would be particularly welcome. Until I can find a more suitable way out, I appear to be stuck here. I actually made contact with another pilot who maintains a space platform in the system today, and spoke to him for a bit. While he was suspicious at me at first -- he seemed to think I had attacked his platform for some reason, which I assured him was quite impossible -- I think I managed to convince him I'm not a threat. Still, his worry seems justified; it looks like a pilot from the Cry Havoc. alliance, who are rather notorious for their capital ship-busting exploits, has also taken up residence here. Hopefully I'll be able to move on soon.

A Sleeper outpost remains here, a relic of their forgotten empire.

As for where I will head, I don't know. It seems like wormhole space may be a bit limiting; I'm somewhat constrained in what I can actually do here, as Sleeper activity seems to be much higher and wormhole availability much lower than what I had originally anticipated. Part of me longs to return to combat fleets, but my heart is not with what the Reserve is doing these days, and joining the State Protectorate -- I don't know. I regret supporting the war effort of an incompetent madman like Heth as much as I did before, and cannot bring myself to do so again, even as the Federation draws ever closer to our borders.

I have considered going to Intaki to assist with Ishukone's efforts there; returning to the fold of my parent corporation alongside Mordu's Legion, who I spent so much time in 5ZXX-K with years ago, is a tempting thought, and I have long felt that the Intaki deserved better than what the Federation had given them after our secession. Unfortunately, I fear that my presence would not help the pro-Intaki forces there; no doubt the FDU would take a decorated Caldari combat pilot assisting as a sign that they were nothing more than Caldari puppets. It is unfortunate that the Federals have such a black and white view, but I cannot say I would feel differently in their place. I do not want to damage the strides Ishukone is making in the system, nor do I want to encourage the kind of brutality the Federation showed our people during the last war. Already I see them slipping towards that kind of unreserved malice, and I admit I am frightened -- not for myself, but for the people caught in the middle; I have no doubt Heth would retaliate in kind, and we would end up with barren and burned-out worlds the length of the border zone.

I am also considering joining Eve University; I've always had great respect for their work, and I think my experience might be of some service. It is too soon to make a decision however, and if I do join another capsuleer organization, I want it to be for at least a respectable length of time, several months at the least. We shall see. For now, I need to find a safe path out of this wormhole to continue my explorations.

Scarlet Letters, 14 March YC 112

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:04:15 -0600

Personal Log, Svetlana Scarlet
Captain, Buzzard-Class Frigate Lonely Hunter
Location Unknown, Locus J131842

Yesterday, I threw my life away -- four years and nearly four months in the Reserve, and today I am without a corporation for the first time in my life. It had to be done, though. The past two years I have found myself making excuses for what I do and I have come to have a hard time believing them myself. No longer; today, I left for parts unknown to find a sense of purpose again. Like the State, I have lost my way. If I can find it again, maybe I can help the Caldari to return to our true purpose as well.

I released my crews from their contracts today; I do not know when I will return and it seems cruel to leave them waiting around when I could be dead and gone forever. I'm told that cloning technology works even from within the depths of wormhole space, but having never tested...well, I am ready to meet my Maker if it does not. If I don't return, I've made provisions for them to receive the balance of my assets. They have served me well, and that is to be rewarded.

My ships, save this one, have been put in mothballs. I've managed to get the automation aboard the Lonely Hunter working well enough that I should be able to handle everything myself, barring a firefight. Considering I have no weapons, that seems for the best anyway; any fight I get into will be short, one way or another. The cloaking device should manage to keep me away from trouble for the most part anyway. I've loaded three months of supplies, which should be enough for now. I suspect I will be able to find my way back to known space within that window anyway.

The Lonely Hunter departs Ishukone headquarters in Malkalen.

And so, here I go, into the unknown. I thought to begin my journey in Malkalen; if nothing else, it would serve as a reminder of all the Caldari have lost these last two years. I do not know whether to curse Otro Gariushi or praise him; he was a kindly father to his employees, but sometimes I think he spared the rod a bit too much. Perhaps if we had known of the dire straits we were in before our nation was wrested into the hands of a fanatic, before the treachery by the Gallente that doomed us to this ridiculous war...perhaps it might have shaken us from our slumber. Now, I fear, we have traded one lie for another, prosperity for hollow patriotism. I see it on GalNet every day, Caldari who think extolling our superiority and slandering the Federation will propel us to greatness. It takes more than words to make great men, a lesson I have learned all too many times.

The Lonely Hunter over New Caldari Prime.

I tried to find a wormhole within Malkalen, but to no avail. I don't know if it's my own inexperience with the probes and sensor systems on this vessel or that there were none; I'm certainly not the equal of Derrys or Beann with such things, I'm afraid. I decided New Caldari was as good a place as any to have another look, and so I set course for New Caldari Prime. As tempting as it was to visit home again, I restrained myself, and merely looked down from orbit. I did not want to take the chance of being distracted; I have heard things are...not as I remember, these days. I will return when I can make a difference.

On approach to a wormhole in New Caldari.

I had better luck in New Caldari; it took me a while, but I managed to narrow down a wormhole some 5 AU from New Caldari Prime. On the other side, I emerged in an uncharted system -- a small, G2 class star with a spectacular nebula in the background.

Emerging from the wormhole in unknown space.

As quiet as it seems to be here, it is not as deserted as I thought; perhaps unsurprising, considering that it is accessible, at least for now, from one of the most populated systems in known space. I found a space platform being operated in orbit around the moon of a ringed gas giant, and while I was there, cloaked, I watched a Hoarder arrive with what was presumably fuel for the platform. The pilot was unaware of my presence, thanks to my cloaking device; for more than half an hour I watched, simply to see the time go by.

A space platform in orbit around the moon of a gas giant.

Unfortunately, aside from some Sleeper ruins I am wary of approaching, especially with others in the system, I have been unable to find much else of note. As I write this, I am on approach to another wormhole; sensors indicate that beyond it is another system unlinked to the main gate network. Onward to new discoveries...

Finding a New Path in the Eve Cluster

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 21:45:05 -0600

Well, today, after nearly 52 months in the Reserve, I resigned my commission. Probably the hardest thing I've done in a long time; despite the fact that I've never met most of these guys in person, I still consider them to be good friends. Unfortunately, I'd sort of fallen out of love with Eve the last few months, and I think part of that was CAIN going off into nullsec to join the 0.0 wars and the my disappointment with the way things have gone in the way of roleplaying for me the last year or so. Rather than be an absentee member, which isn't fair to CAIN, I thought it best to cut the cord and move on.

What I plan to do now is a little exploration on my own to try and get me back to the right headspace where I can enjoy the game and Svetlana can find her destiny again. A bit of a walkabout, if you will. I've purchased a ship for the purpose, one that should see me through the darkest parts of the cluster (hopefully) and I'm gathering the last things I need to head out. As part of this, I think I'm going to be doing some stories or diary entries for Svetlana as she goes out, accompanied by screenshots from my travels. I know I've talked about a lot of writing projects and never really followed up on them before, but this time...well, I hope it is different. Svetlana has come to mean a lot to me over the last four years, and I don't want to see her end her career by just fading away into nothing.

I'm not sure how soon these will start up -- I'm thinking of starting this weekend, but I have some other stuff I need to take care of tomorrow (and I just started Arkham Asylum too) so I'm not sure if that will happen. I'd like to get it started this week for sure though, and it will go on as long as it has to. It's only fair to a character who has become a big part of me.

Mass Effect 2: Big Damn Heroics

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:24:36 -0600

I came to Mass Effect late, only playing it for the first time last year, but I was pretty impressed with it and really enjoyed the storyline and setting that Bioware created. My attitude towards its sequel, prior to last month, was positive, but not overwhelmingly so. I wasn't keeping up on the press and everything too much, though I was considering preordering for the bonus items.

Dragon Age changed everything for me, I think. That game completely blew me away when I was just sort of lukewarm on it, mostly because Bioware had spent so much time creating the setting and the story, and made me realize how much I really craved that kind of story-driven gameplay, and just how good Bioware had gotten at it. In retrospect, that has really been in evidence since KotOR and the first Mass Effect, but I think Dragon Age solidified it as a trend in my mind. I started paying a lot more attention to the coverage of Mass Effect at places like Giant Bomb and threads on RPGnet, and from the teasers that were trickling out, I really started getting excited about the game; I did end up preordering Mass Effect right before the release date, just to get the bonus content.

But does it stand up to the hype? Let's face it, Mass Effect 2 has been promoted to hell and back, probably to a nearly-unprecedented level. It would have to be pretty friggin' awesome to live up to that.

And yet, I think Mass Effect 2 does, by and large, live up to the hype. Nearly everything I didn't like about the first game has been fixed. The storyline is excellent, despite a few small failings, and for the most part I think your companions are more interesting and more developed than in the first game. A lot of the accounting-style RPG trappings that were in Mass Effect (and in Dragon Age), like the ginormous (and often painful) inventory management, the complicated power management, and the annoying collection quests, have been ripped out and replaced with much more streamlined systems, giving Mass Effect a much smoother storyline -- you don't feel like the game is dragging you down with boring stuff for the most part, you're always moving from one cinematic moment to the next. Here's my breakdown (spoilers after the break):

The Good

Again, the writing in Mass Effect 2 is superb, and it's accompanied by some excellent voice acting. While there's not really any Dragon Age-style banter between your companions, sadly, characters do have different stuff to say on missions, and the dialogue system from the first game is back and works very well. The incidental dialogue you run into throughout the game is excellent, and often completely hilarious -- especially on the Citadel. The commercials and stuff really undersell the writing of the game, very similar to the crazy Marilyn Manson trailer for Dragon Age; characters are far deeper than they seem, and this is revealed through "loyalty missions" that each character has that focuses on their backstory.
Importing your character from the original game does not give you a ton of tangible bonuses, but the game does an excellent job of calling back to your choices in the first game. Choices you made and quests you finished into the first game, even if they may have seemed relatively minor, crop up in various ways throughout the second game, some more significant than others. Your companions from the first game show up in various places (assuming they survived), and all seem to have been profoundly affected in one way or another by their time with you. Surprisingly, the one major exception from this was the romance subplot from the first game -- my Shepard had romanced Liara in the first game, and by and large that was forgotten in the second game, aside from her picture on my desk in my cabin and a more-than-just-friends kiss when we met up again.
Mass Effect 2 introduces conversation interrupts (at least, I don't remember these from the first game), which really add to the game's cinematic feel. During conversations, you will sometimes get the option for a Paragon or Renegade interrupt, which lets you make a move rather than just sitting there passively. The bad guys have you in a Mexican stand-off while they monologue to your face? A Renegade interrupt might be to just shoot him in the head. One of your companions about to kill someone because they're flying into a rage? A Paragon interrupt might be to grab their arm and knock them aside. Most conversations with interrupts will probably only have a Renegade or a Paragon option, but rarely both. They really keep you involved and on your toes in a conversation, rather than making it seem like a more passive experience, which definitely helps with the immersion.
Combat is much more kinetic and seemed a lot more exciting to me in ME2 than in the original game; there are some issues I have with it (see below), but in general I had a lot of fun with the fights and didn't seem to run into as many really annoying "die a lot" combats, at least on Normal difficulty, unlike with the original game, where the two climactic fights on the first planet your pointed to, Therum, killed my ass 5-6 times before I figured out what I needed to be doing. The addition of clips in the game, instead of using heat like the first game, doesn't really make much sense from a story point of view, but it does force you to change your weapons up and move forward to get clips from fallen enemies, rather than sitting back and gunning them all down.
The horrific inventory system from the first game is gone, gone, gone. No longer are you juggling 900 different kinds of guns and armor to figure out what is best for everyone. Instead, there's really only 2-3 guns of each type (aside from the 5-6 heavy weapons), and you find or buy upgrades to research as you go through the game. Most of these upgrades cover everyone in your squad, not just you. While some people have mourned the loss of the customizable upgrade system, I actually like the new one. It makes the focus of the game the fun parts for me -- the story and the actual missions themselves, not arcane record keeping. If Bioware stuck with this trend for future games, even for old-school RPGs like Dragon Age, I would not mourn the loss of fiddly bits much.
The Mako is also gone, and Bioware has done pretty much what I asked for in my Mass Effect review -- I think there are fewer side missions, but they are definitely not all "go to this generic-looking pirate base and shoot a bunch of guys." Missions, in general, are much more varied, many don't involve combat at all, instead focused on dialogue and story, or a minigame of some sort that relies more on a keen eye and your wits than simply the ability to kill people real dead. Even the sidequests have their own environments that are not reused (at least, not to the ludicrous extent the ones in the first game were). I've heard that there will be some DLC coming with missions involving some sort of hovertank, but Bioware seemed to have given up on the annoying Mako-style exploration and instead focused on putting you into the action right away, and thank god for that.
Your new ship feels both very familiar and also bigger and better than the Normandy did, and your NPC crew is given a lot more flavor than they had in the first game, where you really only had Joker and Pressley with anything to say (other than your companions). The same goes for most of the other locations you visit in the game. In the first game, one of my big complaints was that aside from the Citadel, the major planets of the first game seemed a little lacking -- very bland and empty for places that were supposed to be bustling metropolises or well-developed colonies. ME2 remedies that in a big way. The major planets all feel very different, much "busier" and jam-packed with life. Yes, for the most part they are all pretty small for what they are supposed to be, but I didn't expect Bioware to make the sci-fi version of Liberty City for every planet you land on -- the feel and atmosphere is excellently done (with a lot of help from the superb incidental dialogue you hear as you go through the game), and there's lots to do on every single one.
Again, music and the actual cinematics in the game are superb and fit the game perfectly. I do feel like they may have slightly overdone the cinematics -- so much of the game already feels like an awesome action movie that I wish they had replaced some of the cinematics with something more like what Valve does in Half-Life -- scripted sequences that you still take part in. However, they are so well done that seems like a fairly minor quibble, and it really is only a problem at the very end of the game. The one problem with the soundtrack I do have is that the version that comes with the Digital Deluxe version of the game is only half the actual soundtrack -- the version available on Amazon's MP3 store (which I ended up buying) has twice as many tracks. This was the case with Dragon Age too, and I don't know why they can't just give you the whole thing when you're shelling out the 10-15 bucks extra.
The romance plots are well done and less salacious than in ME1, thanks to the strength of the characters, and there are more options (three male and four female, I believe). While it's not up to the quality of the ones in Dragon Age, nor is it as tied into the game, but they are a bit of a step up over the original. Bioware appears to have done without the even the tame "explicitness" of the sex scene in the first game and just fades to black at an appropriate moment (which didn't bother me at all). Unlike in Dragon Age, though, there's not really any same-sex romance options (aside from one, less-developed one for a female Shepard), which has caused some ire among people on RPGnet; it didn't bother me too much, even though I think I preferred the female love interests to the male love interests for the most part. If it really bugs you, you can just avoid it entirely -- "no time for love, Commander Shepard!"

The Bad

From what I hear, if you start a new character and don't import one from the first Mass Effect, you kind of get the shaft in regard to "your" choices in the first one. You don't get to choose your origins, you didn't save the Council, Wrex died, and Udina is the human representative on the Citadel. Most people I know who played the first game went for the extra opposite choices in most cases, so that really sucks. If you haven't played the first game, and you want to play ME2, get the first game (it's not that expensive anymore, and Steam puts it on sale regularly for as little as five bucks) and play it so you can import your character. You won't regret it.
Character abilities have been very reduced both in size and effectiveness in the second game, which is kind of annoying. Ammo types are now a power your character will get depending on his class; my Infiltrator got Cyro Ammo and Disruptor Ammo as powers, for instance. Each biotic or tech character really only gets two powers (plus an additional one if you win their loyalty) and most don't work on shielded or armored enemies. Since unshielded and unarmored enemies usually aren't that troublesome, this really diminishes their utility -- on the higher difficulty levels, nearly every enemy but the weakest of mooks has shields and/or armor, which makes these abilities almost useless.
It is still very much a console port, and that has some annoying limitations. Run, grab cover, vault over cover, and use all use the same button -- which sometimes caused problems for me; I still don't quite have the whole vaulting over cover thing down perfectly. I can't really zoom out much from being right over my character's right shoulder, and it seems like I have a much more limited view than I had in the first game even, which can sometimes lead to problems with situational awareness, especially against melee enemy swarms, such as husks. All in all, I think I preferred Demiurge's port of the first one, which seemed to fit a lot better with the PC platform, to Bioware's very direct port of ME2. It isn't bad or especially distracting, but it does feel a little lazy to me, especially considering the rather significant differences between the PC and console versions of Dragon Age.
The prospecting minigame got to be a little tiresome. In ME2, to build your upgrades, you need to get quantities of four different minerals, which requires you to visit a planet and scan it by dragging a sensor circle over the surface to find the minerals, then launch probes at it. Unfortunately, partly due to my OCD tendencies in RPGs, I became obsessed with getting the minerals off every planet (because it marks it as explored after you visit it, and it's hard to tell without going there if you mined it or not), even after it became clear I was probably not going to need the half million units of palladium I was carrying around. I think my playthrough took about 45 hours, and probably ten of that was just flying around getting minerals. The fact that you have to buy fuel to travel between systems and you can only carry 30 probes with the option to expand to 60 later and it takes 10-20 probes to deplete a planet makes this a bit frustrating, especially since both items are only available in one system per cluster. My suggestion -- don't overdo it. Visit every planet to find the anomalies that represent a mission on that planet, but once you have 50-100k of an ore, don't feel like you need to do any prospecting unless you have a bunch of upgrades waiting, and don't bother mining gas giants unless you really need the more common minerals -- they usually have less of everything than rocky worlds and rarely if ever have Element Zero. There is way more than enough minerals in the game for every upgrade you could want -- the limiting resource in ME2 is definitely credits, which are in short supply by the end of the game, largely due to the fact that you can't fund your mission by selling secondhand weapons and armor (the extra 100k credits you get from getting the Rich achievement in ME1 really come in handy, as it provides you probably 1-2 more upgrades at the very least).
The missions in ME2 are much more discrete and end in a way that is more obviously game-y. There's some good things about this -- you get experience for completing missions now, not killing things, so that means missions aren't as focused on combat necessarily (though it's still very much action/combat-centric) -- but at the end of every mission, instead of just heading back to your ship afterward, you get a summary screen where it tells you all the stuff you got and what you found out. While this isn't done in a completely broken way (the mission summary is written as personal notes of your mysterious backer), it does yank you back into "oh yeah, this is just a game, not an awesome action movie" mode briefly.
As much as I prefer the new way weapons and armor work, there are a couple issues I have. There's really only 2-3 versions of each weapon, and they seem to have a progression of normal-better-best (though the difference between them is not nearly as pronounced as you might think) -- but it's not really clear if that is the case. Heavy weapons are slightly different, since there are 6-7 different options, but there is one that you get fairly early on that is very good in nearly every situation, while the others are more specialized -- a flamethrower is really good against lots of swarming enemies, but won't really help you against a heavy mech or gunship, whereas a rocket launcher is the opposite. Because you never really know exactly what you're going to run into, the all-purpose weapon tended to be what I used most of the time. Armor had a different issue, the biggest one being that ME2 does not have a "remove helmets" option in its settings, and the DLC armors (which are much better than your default at first) all have helmets, means that you can't see your character's face at all. When one of Mass Effect's big attractions to me is that characters have excellent "facial acting," that really sucks. By the middle of the game, I'd found enough armor upgrades that the default N7 armor was comparable, and I switched to a headpiece that didn't obscure my face simply to avoid this problem. The DLC armors are also not customizable like the N7 set, and that's another reason I didn't really like them.
Probably the biggest problem I had with the game is that there is time limit with the game that may not be particularly easy for people to pick up on if they haven't read discussions online -- one with real consequences to the game as opposed to the immersion-breaking, you-need-to-go-to-Ilos-right-away-but-really-you-can-do-side-missions-for-a-while endgame start that Virmire is in ME1. At one point during ME2, you're given a mission to go recover a certain Reaper artifact; when you're given the mission, you can choose to do it right away or keep building your team. At that point, I highly recommend saying you will keep building your team -- once you go on the mission to recover the artifact, you will only have a limited amount of time (usually not more than enough for one or two missions) before an event happens which pushes you towards the endgame. Waiting to do the endgame mission at that point will slowly push the game towards a bad ending, or at least a more bloody one. I suggest doing what I did -- get all the companions you can, do all their loyalty missions, and do as much exploring as you want to do before you go get the Reaper artifact, because after you do that, it opens up another mission you will probably want to do before you go to the endgame, and if you have lots of missions to do after that, you won't get a chance. I wish Bioware had made this more clear, but it can just sneak up on you and I have seen many people get pretty miffed about running into this time limit. Yes, I understand why Bioware did it -- story-wise, it makes good sense. Unfortunately, for people who are completionists in RPGs, it can really piss them off, like the time limits in the original Fallout.
The lead villain in ME2 is not nearly as good as Saren or Sovereign were in ME1, perhaps the one place where a character from ME2 falls short of his predecessors. From the ending, it seems likely that he will return in the future of the franchise, but you don't really become personally engaged with him like you did with the villains of the first piece. Unlike Saren or Sovereign, you never really confront him personally, nor does he have a personal hand in striking against you. I understand letting him be in the background for now as setup for ME3, but I wish they would have added a Saren-analogue you could confront and deal with to get some personal satisfaction as opposed to making the threat largely impersonal. As it is, I had a more satisfyingly antagonistic relationship with the man backing my secret mission than I did with the "real" villain.
The Digital Deluxe version (from Steam, as well as other online places) does not really give you that much stuff over the normal version. For ten extra bucks, you get some weapons that are good, but not really that much better than what you can get in the game, some armor that (as I said above) I wasn't really fond of anyway, an art book PDF (which fell far short of the hardcopy art book for ME1), soundtrack MP3s that make up about half the tracks on the MP3 "album" available on Amazon (which goes for 12 bucks and has everything you get here and more), the 30 minute documentary I believe was broadcast on SyFy (which doesn't really give you anything you probably didn't already know), and the first issue of the ME comic series that shows what happened between the games (which if you really want, you'll probably just wait and get the TPB of anyway). Honestly, while I don't feel screwed for getting the Digital Deluxe version, I don't think it is really worth the money. Unlike with Dragon Age, you don't get any DLC adventures/locations you'd have to pay for otherwise. For the vast majority of people, even hardcore fans, I'd say you'll be perfectly happy with the normal version of ME2.

For all those problems, though, Mass Effect 2 is still probably one of the best games I'm likely to see this year -- it far exceeds the bar set by the original game and is filled with awesome gameplay, story, and detail that draws you in quickly and does not let go. If you are looking for a good RPG, Mass Effect 2 is definitely worth picking up, especially if you prefer sci-fi or console RPGs, where Dragon Age isn't as good an option. Both are excellent games with superb production values, and I still think Dragon Age is a bit more superior, but if I had to choose between one or the other I certainly wouldn't feel cheated if I had taken Mass Effect 2.

If you're looking for more spoilerific information, you can look behind the fold -- just beware, a lot of events will not have quite the impact if you know what's coming.

Left 4 Dead 2: Zombie Boogaloo

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:02:57 -0600

When Valve announced Left 4 Dead 2 last year, I was not particularly happy to hear it. Being a fan of TF2, I had purchased the original at the full price largely on the expectation that it would receive the same sort of content updates that Team Fortress 2 was getting (and is still getting). While I wasn't quite ready to jump on the boycott wagon, I was happy enough with the original Left 4 Dead for all my zombie-killing needs that I wasn't going to pay full price for L4D2 when I could just wait 6-12 months and get it for half price.

My brother, however, purchased it right away and was overjoyed -- and despite my lukewarm feelings about the title, he bought it for me for Christmas. I admit that at the time I wasn't rushing to play the game -- I had just finished Dragon Age, I was picking up things right and left from the Steam holiday sale (Rome and Medieval 2: Total War have eaten up far too much of my time over the last couple weeks) and I figured L4D2 was pretty much going to be more of the same with regard to zombie-killing.

Reaching the point of burnout with Total Warring for the moment, late last week I picked up the game and tried it out for the first time, and I have to admit that my preconceptions were pretty wrong. Far from simply feeling like an attempt to cash in by selling a half-baked sequel to a successful game, Left 4 Dead 2 actually goes back and makes the original Left 4 Dead feel like a half-baked pilot project rushed out before its time. I'm not sure if that is better or worse, but I think the ire would have been a lot less pronounced if Valve had treated it that way, selling the original game at a much lower price point (25 bucks or so) to start, and marketing Left 4 Dead 2 as "the real game," though the 50 dollar pricetag still seems out of whack -- the $33 price during the holiday sale would have been about perfect though.

What makes me say this? In the original L4D, the various campaigns were well-made but seemed very workmanlike. Everything was very straightforward; each stage generally progressed in the same way, the finale events were all very similar, and even the environments were not particularly all that different. L4D2 shows evidence that the team behind the game had become comfortable with the tools -- instead of just making levels in the way of the previous game, they are using the various building blocks of the game to change the way the game is played in a very significant way. Each of the four campaigns in L4D2 feels very distinct from the others, and generally plays at least somewhat differently as well.

The Hard Rain campaign probably exemplifies this best; it has several new gameplay elements that make it stand out as a significant departure from the original L4D formula:

Instead of progressing through the stages in a linear fashion, you go from start to finish and back again, with the items and such remaining persistent -- if you take all the health kits on the way to the gas station you're going to, they won't be there when you have to go back from the gas station to the boat. This adds a lot of economizing to the gameplay and forces people to make some difficult choices, especially on the harder game settings.
While the above might seem like a cop out, as a way to only design half the levels in order to get a full campaign, on the way back to the boat from the gas station you're in the middle of a hellish storm, and much of the terrain you went through before is flooded. Walking through the water slows you down, so you need to stick to the higher ground -- walking on catwalks, roofs, and other stuff. The storm picks up into a furious, pelting rain at random points as well, usually accompanied by a slavering horde of zombies; having been in some really bad storms myself, Valve did a good job making the atmosphere during this part really evoke that feeling.
The second part of the campaign takes place in an abandoned sugar mill heavily populated with Witches, including the new type that wanders around. This definitely forces you to play in a very different fashion in order to avoid setting off one or more of them. There definitely seem to be fewer of them on the return trip, but the added problems with visibility (and hearing) in the storm make those that remain all the more dangerous. This new arrangement of familiar gameplay elements happens in the other campaigns as well, and really raises the bar for the level design from where it was in the original game.

Hard Rain has a similar ending to the finales of the original L4D campaigns, where you have to hold out for your ride after signaling for the boat to come pick you up, but it is different (as the designers pointed out in an interview I saw) because there's really no place for you to bunker down and hold off the horde, whereas that was generally the plan in the original, to the point where one of the main tactics for the endgame finales there was to hunker down in a closet, at least prior to some patches that made that more difficult. Other campaigns have different crescendo events that depart from the "hold off the horde" formula as well, though it does still fall back on that to some extent. Still, if you think you've been there, done that after the original game, L4D2 will creep up on you with some new twists and turns.

On top of those deeper differences, Valve has added a layer of creamy frosting. L4D2 adds new weapons, including melee weapons and variations of the guns that were in the original, as well as new types of special Infected. While I don't think these add as much to the game as the new campaigns, you definitely need to do some readjustment when you start playing. Melee weapons are necessary in some places like the mill in Hard Rain or one part of the Parish campaign where you emerge in a giant lot of alarmed cars, where one misplaced shot can bury you in neverending hordes of zombies.

The new special Infected add some gameplay wrinkles too. In the first one you could get situations where a Smoker might drag you into a Witch or Boomer, making your life a bit difficult. L4D2 adds the Spitter, which belches persistent acid at the players, which can be a real pain in constrained spaces or when you get attacked by the Jockey, another new Infected which jumps on your head and forces you to move in whatever direction it feels like -- often into a pool of the aforementioned acid. There are also Chargers, which barrel into you, knocking you across the map like a Tank, and then pick you up and pummel you similar to a Hunter. While I haven't played any Versus games (I tend to prefer the campaign missions, I admit), I suspect a good Infected team can play merry havoc with the Survivors with the right combination.

As far as the rest of the game goes, everything I liked from the original is back in the new one; the cinematic tones, the fun character interaction, and the excellent set dressing are all still very much present, and the fact that the scenarios are a little more varied allows them to show more of the game's setting and flesh it out a little more. The campaigns now have a clear progression, whereas the campaigns in the original were largely separate; in L4D2, the survivors are making their way from Savannah, GA to New Orleans, each campaign being another step along that path. If you play them in order, this adds a bit to the verisimilitude, if that's your thing (not everyone plays their FPSes for story though, let's face it). The characters are all at least as fleshed out as the protagonists of the original game, and they are all very different from their L4D counterparts.

So yes, I am overwhelmingly positive on L4D2; if L4D wasn't just a year old and L4D2's price point was lower, I would tell you to run out and buy this title right away if the premise sounded at all appealing. As it is, I can't really say that -- if you're happy with L4D, you can wait for L4D2 to go on sale in order to pick it up. I have no doubt that there will be another sale at least as good as the holiday sale on the game in the next six months. On the other hand, if you don't own L4D, L4D2 is worth getting if you enjoy cooperative shooters and probably worth paying full price, especially if it does get more DLC in the future; the first add-on for L4D2 has already been announced (a campaign involving the survivors from both games), and Valve has released the SDK for player-made content (which is also good for making L4D add-ons, if I understand correctly). You're pretty much guaranteed to have a good time if you can find a good group of players, and it shouldn't be that difficult if you use the Steam community features.

Idle Hands: The Isle of the Dead

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:28:14 -0600

So I've decided to try something I'm calling "Idle Hands" in order to get me to a) blog a bit more than I have recently and b) put down some half-formed ideas that don't really have a home. I have a lot of ideas bouncing around in my head that might be useful for an RPG campaign or some fiction, but which aren't really a whole idea so much as an element to be used later. I'm going to post them here just so I have them written down. Comments are welcome as always, of course.

The Isle of the Dead

Not far from the coast is a large island home to the Brotherhood of the Endless Slumber, an order of necromancers. The island spends much of its time swathed in a cloak of fog, but even when hidden from view it is not difficult to find; the smell of decay which covers the island reaches miles offshore. The island's infrequent visitors, mostly occasional trade vessels or those desperate for the necromancers' aid, rarely stay for long.

Every living person on the island, aside from a small enclave of belonging to the Gyrefell merchant house which runs the docks, is a member of the order, made up of both necromancers and mundane monks who serve in various capacities, assisting the necromancers with their rituals and research. The island does not have a city per se; the docks and the Gyrefell enclave come closest, situated in a basin along the coast; the only other part of the island with any sort of habitation is the necromancers' abbey, two miles from the docks on a plateau. There are barely more than 150 living people on the island, but that is but a sliver of its true population.

Outside the abbey and the merchant enclave, the rest of the island is populated with the undead, all of whom were once criminals and prisoners sent from the mainland to be sacrificed to anatomical study and necromantic research or ritual for their crimes. Their animated corpses, most of which are simply skeletons now, toil in agricultural fields, mine the ores of the island's mountains, and perform other manual labor with unceasing effort. After nearly two hundred years of executions and reanimations, there are thousands upon thousands of undead now walking the island; they are kept away from the merchant enclave as part of the necromancers' deal with the Gyrefells, but they can still be seen from the enclave's towers on one of the island's few clear days.

The Gyrefells built their enclave on the island fifty years ago, after convincing the necromancers that it would benefit them to have skilled craftsmen and a permanent dock on the island rather than simply deal with infrequent and unpredictable trade convoys. Few members of the house volunteer to work on the enclave, and it is seen as a hardship post, given to those out of favor with the house's leaders or new journeymen. Incense burners and fragrant herbs are a common sight (and smell) in the enclave, as the merchant try to keep the odor of death at bay.

Because of the undead, the Brotherhood produces plenty of raw goods for trade (most manufactured goods cannot be made by the clumsy hands of animated corpses), which they sell to the Gyrefells, in return purchasing manufactured goods and imported necessities for their necromancy. Many nations refuse to purchase goods from the Isle of the Dead, so much of the island's bounty is laundered through the Gyrefells' other holdings, hiding their true origin.

While a number of religious orders and other organizations have threatened the island in the past, the island's poor terrain and the army of undead make any sort of invasion a difficult prospect at best. Compared to many other necromantic orders, the Brotherhood is also fairly innocuous, keeping to itself and engaging in research and explorations of the Land of the Dead. This has kept them safe from the outside world for two centuries.

Dragon Age: Origins

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:24:58 -0600

Well, I haven't blogged in a while, and the biggest culprit for that has been Bioware's new fantasy RPG, Dragon Age: Origins. Deirdre gave it to me a few weeks ago as an early Christmas present (and vice versa), and I have been playing the hell out of it. I beat it for the first of what will probably be several times with 65 hours of play time, according to the in-game counter (not including saves and restores).

Initially, I had been very cool on the game; fantasy RPGs are not really my favorite genre, though I have fond memories of the Baldur's Gate series. The marketing campaign, which seemed focused on the sex and violence rather than on a strong story, did not really do a good job of convincing me that the game was going to be my cup of tea either. However, reviews were extremely positive for the most part, Bioware is one of the few developers still in my "I will buy anything from them" list, and Deirdre (who had followed the game much longer than I had) was pretty excited about it, so I was cautiously optimistic.

Does the game hold up to the hype? Well, to say the game is flawless would be a mistake; there were parts of the game that were pretty frustrating for me, and the game's plot is not particularly original, but it is superbly written, drawing you into Ferelden and holding you there. Dragon Age may be my favorite Bioware RPG now, and possibly close to my favorite RPG period, though I think it falls short of the Black Isle heyday. If you are at all interested in fantasy RPGs, Dragon Age should be a must-buy, especially if you are willing to put up with some gameplay annoyances for the sake of a good (if not entirely innovative) story with strong characters and a beautifully crafted setting.

As usual, this will be a two-part review, with spoilers behind the cut.

The Good:

As usual with Bioware RPGs, the writing in this game is excellent, even if the story and characters are not entirely original. Shamus Young has posted a good article on this subject on the Escapist (here's his note on his blog about it), and I agree with most of his points, but Dragon Age feels like it steps beyond the writing in Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic to me. There's a few specific cases I'll note later, but in general, characters have much deeper and complex motivations and your actions have more consequences. NPC banter is great to listen to and even more than Mass Effect, I'm disappointed I can only bring a few characters with me in any one place.
As in Mass Effect, the background material for the game is extensive and the world building in the game is well-done. One minor issue is that the Codex now gets some quest-specific entries instead of just optional background material; if you don't read some of the Codex entries, you can miss out on fairly important or at least helpful game information. The various cultures seem fairly well thought out and most seem like more than just usual fantasy tropes or historical analogues, though there's a fair share of those too. Ferelden is clearly a sort of "not-Britain" and Orlais "not-France," but elves are not exactly nature-loving, immortally wise tree-huggers and dwarven culture, while bearing some surface similarities to Tolkien-esque tropes, is quite different under the surface.
If you like romance subplots, but inwardly groan when you think back to some of Bioware's previous attempts, especially for female PCs, Dragon Age will probably be a pleasant surprise. There's a wide range of possibilities, and the "good guy" romance option is not nearly as angst-ridden as say, Carth in KotOR or Kaidan in Mass Effect. Unlike in Mass Effect, where I wasn't really that interested in any of the love interests, the romance subplot in Dragon Age actually made a difference to how I played the game, including a few key choices I had to make.
Dragon Age's tutorial-style origin stories are a great evolution of Mass Effect's "your origin affects the game" idea. While in Mass Effect that simply changed a few NPC lines of dialogue and gave you a new mission or two, in Dragon Age it changes the entire way you play the first hour or so of the game, and touches almost every part of how some NPCs interact with you. Many of the subplots in the various parts of the game are much more meaningful if you have played through the origin story related to them. This adds a lot to replay value, even if it largely only affects the dialogue and not necessarily the main thrust of the story.
Dragon Age uses the "few major locations on a world map" style of Fallout and KotOR rather than the "few major locations with a bunch of shallow optional stuff in between" of Mass Effect, which seems to make for a much stronger game. I don't think I ever found myself searching for subplots as in Mass Effect; even though there's plenty of quests to do not specifically related to the main plot, most of them take place in areas you will have to visit anyway.
Dragon Age does a good job of making you and your companions feel like some serious badasses. From time to time -- especially on the boss battles -- your characters will pull of some really awesome finishing moves, and the cinematics that punctuate the major victories in the game are pretty jawdropping.
Dragon Age uses a Fallout-style ending sequence where the long-term repercussions of your actions are described after the game is over. These are widely varied -- considerably more than the original Fallout, I think -- and change based both on your actions during the various quests and on your decisions around the endgame (mostly in dialogues).
The tactics system is pretty neat, and I was able to come up with some decent settings for my characters that let me get a bit more hands off than I was in say, Baldur's Gate. Some characters I could reliably not worry about, but mages especially still needed a fair bit of tweaking in order to ensure that they were being used properly. Still, it was annoying to have to sacrifice other skills for tactics slots (though generally only on non-warrior characters) when you could simply micromanage everything if you wanted to. Making people sacrifice abilities in game to compensate for the interface is rarely a design feature people appreciate.
The game seems very modable, with Bioware having released the toolkit, and there's already wide variety of mods available to change everything from allowing you to respecialize characters to one that lets you make custom equipment to one that removes helmets from view (as in Mass Effect) with varying success. Hopefully this means the game will have a good deal of longevity and we might even see some fan-made campaigns.
As is usual for Bioware, the soundtrack for Dragon Age is quite good; thankfully, it is in the line of their previous work for Baldur's Gate and not the Marilyn Manson in the trailers. I don't think it's quite as good as the Mass Effect soundtrack, but there's some tracks from it that are sticking with me, and it's entered my rotation of good fantasy soundtracks.

The Bad

The difficulty curve for Dragon Age has been described as a "sawtooth"; you will cut a swath through a horde of ravening darkspawn for a while, and then you will get into a boss battle or a "puzzle battle" (where the battle becomes a thousand times easier if you can figure out the one tactic that works best) that ends in a gory end for your entire party, resulting in some reloading to figure out how to win. This was definitely my experience; I'm not particularly fond of boss battles in general, but there's a few that were incredibly frustrating to the point where I needed to take a break.
Compounding the last issue is that the computer does not do a very good job of leveling up your companions when they join your party. As is usual in many games, being specialized is far more powerful than being a generalist in Dragon Age, but pre-leveled characters generalize, making them much weaker than they could be. If you get your "main companions" early on, this isn't as big an issue, but it can be annoying. Morrigan, for instance, has the Shapeshifter specialization to start with, which is considerably less useful than the other three specializations, an issue when you can only pick up two mages to choose from in the game at all. I am using a mod that allows you to respecialize characters and I highly recommend that for people playing on the PC.
Magic, and particularly some of the spell combinations, seems really overpowered. Fights that are nearly impossible without spells like Cone of Cold or Crushing Prison suddenly become far easier with them. Prior to the last rebalancing patch, it was possible to completely lock down some of the bosses with repeated uses of stunning/paralyzing spells for the entire duration of the fights. I have heard of some people playing without mages at all, but I'm a bit surprised that's viable.
Equipment overload is not as bad as in Mass Effect, but it is still a bit annoying that I am funding my world-saving quest by selling scavenged armor, and juggling my inventory was a serious pain during a few of the longer quest periods, such as in the forest ruin or the Deep Roads. It isn't as bad as Mass Effect because it's much clearer what is generally better to use, but it's still a bit of a pain. I really hope RPGs move away from this kind of loot mechanic in the future. As an important tip, whenever backpacks are available at a shop, buy them as soon as possible. The ten extra inventory slots will pay you back in pretty short order.
Only being able to take three companions was a bit frustrating. You generally need to take a tank (usually a sword and shield fighter), having a rogue to disable traps and open chests is a good idea (if not absolutely necessary), and you're probably going to want at least one mage for healing and/or crowd control with area-of-effect spells (and two is even better). There's only two mages and two rogues in the game, and the rest are all basically fighters. That really limits the options for a well-rounded party, especially when you want to bring certain party members with you on quests of special relevance to them. Even just being able to have one more person would have made the game far easier to manage, and a wider variety of companions would have been welcome too. As it is, I settled on the team of Alistair (a sword and shield fighter), Leiliana (a bowfighting rogue), Morrigan (a combat-oriented mage), and myself (a support/combat mage) very early on and rarely deviated; when I had to get rid of my rogue or one of my mages, it was pretty painful. That really limits not only your strategies but also the banter and character subplots you can be involved with, which was really disappointing. If you aren't a mage, you have even fewer choices, it seems.
If you don't have much in the way of healing magic (and sometimes even if you do), many of the tough battles can boil down to bringing as many healing/mana potions as you can and chugging them like crazy. Personally, I'd prefer fewer battles where this was the rule.
There's a fair bit of annoying mook fights, necessitating that you fight through waves of darkspawn, or cultists, or some other generally-annoying-but-not-that-tough guys to get to the main set-piece battles. Some of these are genuinely tough, simply because of the number of enemies you have to fight (many of which are archers or mages, which can be really a pain). This can cause some serious slowdowns in the game's pacing, and doesn't do great things for the verisimilitude since for the most part they are just guys standing around waiting to fight you, with no other real reason to be there. This is, unfortunately, a staple of a lot of RPGs (Mass Effect's final stages are another example), but there needs to be some more thought applied to the level design to avoid this kind of annoyance.
The blood effects are a bit extreme. It's not a giant complaint, but it's a little weird to see a cut scene where you're talking with someone calmly while you're covered head-to-toe in blood spatter. The game wouldn't really lose much if this was toned down (or even turned off, as you can do).

Appendix: Downloadable Content

I got the "Digital Deluxe" edition of Dragon Age, which comes with some extra downloadable content. Every purchased copy of Dragon Age comes with The Stone Prisoner, but the Digital Deluxe version from Steam comes with a few extra bits (some armor and some other items) as well as Warden's Keep. The Digital Deluxe edition also comes with a set of wallpapers and the entire Dragon Age soundtrack.

The Stone Prisoner was originally intended to be included with the base game but was pushed out when they thought they didn't have enough time to finish it before release. It is an excellent bonus to the game, as Shale, the golem companion you can get in the town it adds, is very tightly integrated into the rest of the game, especially the dwarven kingdom area. Shale has nearly as much dialogue and character interaction scripted as the other companions, and is definitely a useful addition to your team. The new areas this DLC adds will probably add another couple hours of gameplay as well. I'd say it was well worth getting, but if you have a legitimate copy it should be free for you anyway, so there's no reason not to pick it up. If you buy Dragon Age used, however, you will have to purchase it separately; I don't know if it is worth $15 if you do (you're probably better off just buying a new copy from Steam or something instead, since I doubt you'll get Dragon Age for less than 25 dollars used for a while).

Warden's Keep is much more self-contained than The Stone Prisoner; it adds a single new area for the game, which is basically a dungeon that will take you an hour or two to complete. It also adds a number of very good items (the best sword in the game and some very good armor for the level you happen to get it at), as well as a "party chest," something that really should have been included in the game to start at your camp, and not at a static location (there is in fact a mod to do just that already, so the DLC is not necessary for that). Seven dollars is a pretty reasonable price for what you get. I'm not sure I like the way that Bioware is trying to get you to buy the content for this one (see the Penny Arcade on the topic) but because it was already included in my version it didn't really affect me. I do hope that future DLC is much more like The Stone Prisoner, however, and integrates into the rest of the game rather than just being a bit awkwardly bolted on. I'm not holding my breath though, since that's a lot more work (which is reflected in The Stone Prisoner's significantly higher price tag).

The extra items in the Digital Deluxe edition are handy, but not necessarily all that. There are items in the game that you can find or purchase from merchants that are easily almost as good (though I admit the Blood Dragon Armor does look pretty badass). Don't feel like they are must-haves.

Forgive the shilling for Steam...

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:48:16 -0600

...but they're having a giant sale this weekend that seems well worth checking out. There's something new on sale every day, supposedly -- but today has, of note, Dragon Age, Arkham Asylum, and a few other big titles, as well as the THQ complete pack for just 50 bucks, which has something like 10 games in it (including all the Dawn of War and Company of Heroes titles, Saint's Row 2 and a bunch of other stuff). Just thought I'd give people a heads up -- you can see the deals here.

Cracking

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:59:06 -0600

So this week has had a pretty epic amount of peer pressure resistance failure on my part. After holding out from getting a Facebook account for probably 2-3 years longer than most people I know at this point, I finally gave in last Saturday and got myself an account. This was after being harangued by a fair number of friends for months, maybe even years now and generally resisting because....well, simply because I didn't really see what it offered to me I suppose. I've had a LinkedIn account for a while, which I got when I was looking for a new job a while back (that, obviously, never panned out). It seemed decent enough, but LinkedIn is very clearly a "work" networking tool, with a strong focus on the professional. For me, that seemed like enough in terms of social networking.

Facebook, on the other hand, is a lot murkier (Twitter, i think, can suffer from the same problem). That's where you see people who for some reason have their boss as a friend and then are surprised when he catches them calling in sick after posting pictures of their drunken antics the night before. Certainly, it's a networking tool that a lot of people still use to connect professionally, but the line is a lot blurrier -- or rather, people don't take into account that there's a line, even though the Facebook Lists feature allows you to segment your friends lists into "people I want to display my drunken antics to" and "people I need to maintain a professional relationship with." Not to mention it seems chock full of productivity-destroying games that may or may not be cleverly disguised scams.

On the other hand, I've also read articles and seen presentations on the web on how Facebook can be used productively -- though to be fair, a fair number of people trumpeting its usefulness are people who specialize in social media marketing. So, eventually, I cracked; already this week I've found it's a good way to keep in touch with people I don't necessarily have reason to talk to on a regular basis. Not only is this a nice thing socially, but maintaining those relationships is probably not a bad idea professionally either when I start job hunting again, or looking for roommates, or looking to unload furniture, or whatever else I might use it for. Thankfully, the games stuff can largely be avoided by judicious use of the ignore function (which I have made great use of this week). So far, I think it's been a net positive, and I sort of wonder if it wouldn't have been a good idea to get started with it long ago.

This week also marked the end of my "a cell phone is for making phone calls" mantra; after 3-4 people already got them at work, I finally went out and bought myself a Motorola Droid Thursday night. I admit I'd be looking a bit jealously at people's iPhones for a while, and I've been chatting with Deidei via Google Talk on her G1 too, which made having a phone that was a bit more than a phone seem pretty handy. When I went to Seattle this year for PAX, it was the first time when I really used a lot of text messaging and I realized how handy something like that might be when you can't really have a phone conversation.

Since the Droid is my first smartphone, it's a little hard for me to say how it compares to the iPhone, the G1, or the other offerings out there. However, I'm already finding stuff like being able to browse the web and SSH from my phone to be pretty damn handy, in addition to combining the features of an mp3 player and a PDA. Will I end up getting 30 bucks of value out of the data plan every month? I'm not sure, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised. I'm looking forward to trying out the navigation features next time I go to Chicago, as well as all the other apps you can get for it.

And despite these two failures of will, I've already got people trying to get me to join Twitter now....

Tropico 3

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:22:41 -0600

Back in August or September, the demo for Tropico 3 was released on Steam. I'd heard of the original Tropico, but I'd never played it when it originally came out. Being moderately interested in the premise, the fact that the demo was free and I didn't have anything else to mess with at the time, I checked it out.

The demo really grabbed me; I think I played each of the two demo missions at last a half dozen times, just playing with how things worked. I put off fulfilling win conditions just to try out different buildings and strategies, and really got into it. After a while though, the limited scenarios with the demo did get a bit repetitive. I bought the original first two from Steam and played the first one quite a bit; I didn't really get into the second one, but the first was a lot of fun. On the other hand, it was a big step back and a lot of annoyances that have been weeded out in the new game (I'll get to those in a second) drove me nuts. So I've been looking forward to the release of Tropico 3 for quite a while, and the repeated postponement of the release in North America was slowly driving me batty.

Finally, two weeks ago, Steam got the release and I've now finished the entire campaign as of last night, and I think now I'm ready to render a verdict on the game.

The Good

If you played the first game and liked it, you'll probably find almost everything you liked from the first game is back in Tropico 3. The flavor is very much the same and the Latin soundtrack is very catchy, though it gets a bit repetitive after a while. The customization of your avatar is there, as is all the wheeling and dealing with the superpowers and the juggling act of taking care of your island.
One of the biggest and most obvious improvements in Tropico 3 is the graphics -- they are very pretty, though there seems to be some sort of induced haze as you zoom out that made me think my eyes were going (well, more than they already are). Being able to control the camera also makes it easier to figure out how to build things and where they are on the geography, something I had a little trouble with in the original Tropico. If you're just playing the game for eye candy, it has it in spades.
One of the biggest problems I had with the first game was getting people to build things; construction workers never wanted to go very far from their home base, it seemed, so it was nearly impossible to spread out over an island without daisy-chaining construction yards across the island. Thankfully, this chore has been largely eliminated in Tropico 3 by two changes: first, roads are built instantly when placed, and second, Tropico 3 adds vehicles to the mix, meaning that travel times for your citizens are greatly reduced so long as there is a nearby garage (which many buildings, like the construction yards, incorporate). Now it is possible to build a construction yard on the other side of the map where you want a satellite town, drop a road between your main city and there, and it will get built in short order.
Following up the last point, you also seem to need fewer teamsters and dockworkers, thankfully. There was nothing more painful in the first game than seeing thousands of dollars worth of exports sitting at your production centers or on the docks, and no one can be bothered to haul them because they're busy at the pub or simply wandering the island aimlessly. Teamsters now seem more efficient thanks to the roads and you only need to have one dockworker arrive to load all of the stuff you have waiting there. While the point could be made that this makes the game considerably easier to manage and takes away some of the challenge, I consider this a big improvement.
You can now rotate ANY building. This is an improvement on the first one for me, although I admit it's mostly because of aesthetics.
Another added element that makes the game a little more transparent is that the game does a much better job of breaking down why the various political factions are or are not happy with you. In the first game, it gave you a general idea, but it was often not very helpful; several times I would find a faction was unhappy with the state of the island, but it didn't say why. In Tropico 3, you will get a breakdown of what the problems are: no armory or church, for instance, or the average wage is below the Carribbean average. That average, by the way, is now displayed prominently in the economy second of the almanac, whereas in the first one I never could figure out where that was.
The scenarios for the campaign mode are a lot of fun to play and well-written, and offer a variety of gameplay challenges that force you to work for very different goals. I never played the preset scenarios from the original Tropico, but the ones for Tropico 3 have a variety of different win conditions, from exporting a certain number of goods, to having a certain number of tourists, to amassing a large Swiss bank account, to reaching a certain level of happiness. The storyline elements that play out in the game can throw a wrench into your plans and offer very different experiences even for scenarios with similar goals. I haven't played with the scenario editor yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so.
There is a bit of new stuff in the game; oil is added as a new resource to be exploited (and an extremely lucrative one at that), there's a handful of new edicts that weren't in the first game, and there seems like a lot of new random events that weren't in the first game either.
The online leaderboard is a neat addition, which adds an online component to the game, as are the challenges. I am looking forward to trying some of the ones people have designed and developing my own.

The Bad

Building roads can sometimes be an exercise in frustration. Because they insta-build, you can't try to lay them out, then demolish them for free if you didn't place it quite right. While not as bad as in the first game, where you couldn't demolish them until they were built (which often took ages), it can still lead to a lot of wasted expense. There's a lot of places where I've tried to build a road on an oddly-shaped outcropping or through a particularly narrow pass where it has taken a dozen tries to get the road laid out properly. That ends up being a fair bit of wasted money, although roads are far cheaper than in the original game.
Islands seem smaller than in the first game; I'm not sure if this is a function of the more efficient travel or if the maps are actually smaller, but it seems like I'm much more likely to have sprawl in Tropico 3 than I was in the original, where I was much more likely to have towns separated by farms, forest, and other open spaces.
It seems like there are fewer non-industry jobs for high school educated workers. A lot of the tourism buildings that used high school workers are not in the new game, like duty-free shops. Those may have been added in expansions to the first one and maybe they will show up in an expansion for the new one, but it does give me an annoying surplus of high school workers in the tourism-heavy scenarios.
There's no real "map editor"; for scenarios you create you generate a random map and go from there, which means you can't change the placement of the palace and other starter buildings, as far as I can tell. Like I said, I haven't played with it much though so I may be wrong about that.

Overall, the game is excellent, especially at the reasonable price of 40 bucks on Steam, which comes with two new outfits for your dictator (though honestly, they weren't that awesome -- a t-shirt and jeans outfit for each gender) and two new islands for the sandbox mode, which isn't really that awesome since there's a random map generator you can use even if you don't get them. I highly recommend the game to people who liked the first one, or who haven't played it and like this style of game -- citybuilders like Caesar or Pharoah or SimCity -- and think the theme appeals to them.

To whomever called me from a restricted number at 0422 this morning...

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:16:36 -0600

...asking "if comes out of my nose when I sneeze, is that normal?", you're on The List.

This is one of the many things I hate about being on-call 24/7 -- if I get a call at four in the morning, it might be for work, so I can't ignore it. And, of course, at 0422 I wasn't exactly thinking straight so I ran in to check my email to see if something was going on instead of listening to the voice mail first. Fun.