Today’s Rave: Advanced Civilization

Everyone knows the ubiquitous Civilization games, up past their fourth incarnation and founded by the much-loved Sid Meier. What you may not know about this venerable series is that it drew as its inspiration a game by those old masters of the board, Avalon Hill. Besides being responsible for dozens of board games that put modern video games to shame in fun, replay value, and brilliant design, Avalon Hill also authorized a couple of adaptations of their board games to PC.

One such adaptation was Advanced Civiliation. But let me back up. The original Civilization was a board game by Avalon Hill. Sid Meier played and liked said game; in fact he liked it so much he stole/adapted/altered the design for his own game, also titled Civilization, albeit with his name plastered in front of it. It has a decidedly military focus compared to the original Civilization by AH. Perhaps in response to this release, and also partly because the original Civilization had some balance issues, Avalon Hill released an expansion of sorts called Advanced Civilization.

Unlike Sid Meier’s games, Advanced Civilization is won mostly through clever trading and expansion. Military conquest is difficult and inherently balanced out by the games’ population system. No empire can expand indefinitely since the players use the same set of tokens for both population and treasury money. Expand too far and your cities will have tax revolts; but expand too little and you will not be able to operate at maximum efficiency.

The goods and trading system is at the heart of what makes AdCiv so special – each city generates one trade card per turn that represents a type of good. For example, if you have 1 city, you draw a card from the first of nine piles – so you’ll most likely receive an ochre or hide trade card, worth 1 point. If you have 2, you’ll draw one of two types of cards worth 2 points from the second of nine piles, and so on.

The brilliance of this system lies in the fact that cards are exponentially more valuable in sets than singly. What this means, for example is that a set of four hides, each worth one, is worth sixteen as a group (it’s the square of the number of cards times the value of the good). What this means, then, is that a fifth hide is actually worth 9 points to you (that raises the total to twenty-five), which means you would be willing to trade a good worth much more, say 7 or 8, just to get another value 1 good. Everybody benefits from this system, and no player is out of the game just because they can’t generate high-value goods – it’ll be worth something to somebody.

The other fact is that it’s not all goods in the trade decks – on occasion, you will draw a calamity card. Some of them you can’t do anything about, but others can be cleverly passed off to other players by bluffing during trading. You must trade at least three cards, and you must be truthful about two of them, but any other number of cards can be outright lies. This makes every trade exciting, because you never know if you’ll be screwed over; on the other hand, if you know that even if only two of the cards in the trade are very valuable to you, even if you get a slave revolt or treachery inflicted on you, it’ll be worth it.

Brilliance I tell you. You use these trade cards and some spare money from your treasury to purchase civilizational advances, some of which give you new game mechanics, such as winning conflicts more easily or allowing you to use money to help build cities, and some simply mitigate the effects of calamities so they don’t hurt you so much. Also, advances (called tools in the game) give you credit towards certain other advances, helping you afford the more expensive ones later on. The game ends when one player makes it to the end of the archaeological time table by fulfilling certain goals during play, though the player who ends the game may no necessarily win it, thanks to a balanced and complex scoring system.

The PC adaptation’s AI is brutal, even on its easiest setting. I have yet to end any higher than third place in a game, and I’ve played half a dozen of them by now. This game is abandonware, so it’s easy and free to get – but it’s old and you’ll need DosBox to run it (a free Dos emulator for Windows). For fans of the Civilization series, get ready for a crazy shock when you realize how a simpler and more elegant game can deliver all the addictiveness of the often overly complex Civilzation series.

Today’s Rave: Tyrian

I was around back when there were one speed CD roms. A 500 MB hard drive was considered plenty big – even huge. Windows 3.1 was all the rage. Yes indeed. Simpler times. And games from those times had much less to work with. Most serious games of that era still ran in DOS because Windows was unwieldy and Microsoft had yet to invent Direct X as a resource workaround.

Tyrian was a space shooter from that era. It was put together by the tiny software company Epic MegaGames, creator of such ancient and beloved franchises and Jazz Jackrabbit and One Must Fall. It had good music and graphics for the time (it still looks colorful and runs smoothly) and was awesome because unlike other shooters, there was a great deal of customizability. But let me back up.

A game where you are a single pilot in a small plane or spaceship taking on fleets of enemies used to be simply called a shooter or shoot’em up. Generally speaking, you couldn’t get hit even once, or you died. Once you ran out of lives, it was game over. Tyrian broke with that rule because you had both shields (which recharged) and armor (which didn’t) which on the one hand was more forgiving, but on the other made the programmer able to create much harder situations because he knew a few mistakes wouldn’t kill you (that’s right, one programmer. Singular). Additionally, in arcade shooters (pretty much the only kind available at the time), you would collect weapon upgrades and bombs mid-level, and as long as you didn’t die you would keep all of your upgrades. Raiden, if you’ve ever seen that, is the classic example of this.

Tyrian also ruled because the weapons were hugely customizable. Your score was also your currency, which you would then use to buy different kinds of weapons or upgrade them. Besides your standard front weapon, there was also a rear/side weapon and two “sidekick” slots that you could customize with missile launchers, companion ships, bombs, flamethrowers, mines, and a dozen other useful weapons. You could also buy better ships (more armor), upgrade your shields, and upgrade your generator. See, what was particularly cool about the generators is that they power both your weapons and shields, so if your weapons consume too much power then your shields will recharge very slowly while firing. This relationship meant that hotshot pilots could buy really powerful weapons, secure in the knowledge that they could dodge well, whereas lazier people like me could scale back the weapon purchases but be assured of a somewhat more forgiving experience.

But what’s really great is that the source code was released to a group who have switched out the archaic DOS code for an up-to-date SDL executable, which means Tyrian can once again be run in all it’s speedy glory with full sound, instead of relying on DOSBox.

The music is really good too. Check it out, if you’re looking to kill some time with an old-school classic. Kudos to Epic MegaGames. Gone, but not forgotten.

http://code.google.com/p/opentyrian/

Speed Screed: Scads of Hardware

As the complexity of computers increases, so too does the number of things that can go wrong. Additionally, as more and more peripherals flood the market from competing companies, the possible hardware configurations of computers are increasing exponentially. This presents a real problem for game developers.
In the old days, there were maybe a dozen basic outfits that a computer could have, with a couple variations. Beta testing on virtually all available machines was practically possible. When a game was released, there was no chance of hardware or software compatibility – the games were pretty much designed on the same computers they were ultimately going to be run on.

These days, testing is becoming the longest part of game development. Any company that wants to take a stable release seriously has to put the game through its paces for an absurdly long time. This is because there are something like ten thousand possible rigs that meet the minimum requirements, and you never know what innocuous-seeming software is going to gum up the works. Any game that is released these days has a small contingent of people who get unexplained crashes to the desktop, horrible and archaic errors like total system freezes, or the extremely dreaded monitor completely deactivating until the computer is reset.

These poor souls love to bitch about what a horrible and buggy release it was, and how badly the developers screwed up. But it often has just as much to do with a publisher. The publisher is in it to make money, and they want the game out as fast as possible because they want to make their money back as fast as possible. The developers may tell them that they need six months of alpha and three months of beta and the publishers may only agree to half that amount, instead offering a longer contract for creating game patches and the like. Many publishers don’t seem to understand the fallout generated by a game that barely runs after someone dropped fifty bucks for it at the store. Some do, though.

Blizzard (although they merged with Activision) are notorious for taking godawful amounts of time to make games. This is because they understand the requirements for making a game these days, both in terms of innovation and also product testing. Blizzard’s famous attitude of “it’ll be done when we say it is” is really the only way to ensure a top-quality release that will require minimum patching and also that it will run on a huge number of systems.

The upshot of this is that it may be easier in the future to play games on consoles, since developers only have to make sure it runs flawlessly on ONE system. Considering I can get an Xbox 360 for much less money than a state-of-the-art video card (let alone a computer), this argument is persuasive indeed.

Today’s Rant: Twisted Metal Black and Gas Mileage

Man sakes alive. You may find the idea of car-to-car combat a little weird. You may not even think it would be all that fun – I mean, cars are pretty good at going in a straight line, and then turning around. Well, at least the parallels to a joust are clear.

But let me tell you this – Twisted Metal Black (an old game for PS2, which I acquired for seven dollars) is one of the most instantly fun games I’ve ever played. And the better you get at it, the more fun it is. There’s nothing quite like nitro boosting down the highway in pursuit of weakened foe, wildly firing your machine guns and blasting missiles at him, all the while swerving and dodging around traffic and trying to avoid the mines and gas cans he’s dropping behind him.

Nope. Nothing quite like it. Which just goes to show you that anything is more fun at 100 mph. A game of chess? Better if you’re in a train going 100 mph. Don’t believe me? Try it! And then see for yourself what a liar I am.

Ahem. Anyway, rather than have this collapse into a review of this game, which I am wont to do when running short on genuine topics, I will instead lament a tangentially related topic: why car companies are bragging about the pitiful mileage their cars get.

First of all, the EPA mileage bill right now is a joke. I think it asks for like 30 mpg by 2020. It’s something really pathetic. That’s what we should have now; and by the way, most of these American companies are already capable of producing fuel efficient cars, since those are the ones they sell overseas. Only rich Europeans will buy gas-guzzlers, as gas is about $6 a gallon over there. Why Ford won’t simply produce more of those cars, I don’t know. Detroit whines about everything, while Toyota forges ahead by looking (gasp) more than 30 seconds into the future. Corporations that start leaning on the government form a dependency that’s really pretty sad to watch. Is this the American free-market enterprise that’s supposed to be the envy of the world?

So when I see a commercial touting the “wonderful mileage” of a new Saturn that gets like 23 city/28 highway, I must scoff loudly. It’s not bad mileage, but it’s not good. And then when I see the commercial for the Escalade hybrid, where apparently, via the addition of a hybrid engine, it goes from 12 city/18 highway to 18 city/18 highway, well, I think GM is trying to pull a fast one on us. Now don’t get me wrong. The Escalade is a cool car, and well, if you’re rich enough to buy one and don’t care about paying for gas, you might as well get the hybrid. But it’s astonishing that GM is still trying to sell SUVs! This is stupidity of epic proportions. What asshole keeps insisting that this is what America wants, and what group of spineless corporate yesmen don’t have the balls to tell him he’s a fucking moron? They think if they slap a hybrid engine into an SUV they’ll still be able to hock them, since people will suddenly think they must be environmentally conscious by purchasing a car that gets slightly less terrible mileage.

GM should be split up into a bunch of the smaller companies that it owns; I’m sure at least a few of them will start producing cars that we want to buy. They should set aside an SUV-making company so when it finally tanks the rest of the conglomerate won’t be dragged down with it.

Pfft. What do I know, right?

Speed Screed: Criticism

I’m not entirely certain if criticism is not one of the most useless professions in existence. I’d surely love to be a critic of practically anything, music especially, but the number of critics who actually perform a service is exceptionally low.

First of all, I think critics ought to be, more or less, optimistic. It should be a very rare occurrence that a critic turns on something and decides to tear it to shreds, and they should do it with a sense of responsibility. I don’t mean that they should promote stuff that genuinely sucks, but I know from my own experience that many things blasted by the critics are much better than they gave it credit for because they have their own personal hangups about it.

A decent critic is not one who tells you unequivocally whether the movie is good or bad, or even what is good or bad about it. Instead, a critic should probably tell you a) what makes the object of their criticism unique, if anything b) tell you things to look for that only a lifetime of experience of listening/watching the object of their criticism can provide. B is especially true in music; if a critic can help you to appreciate some part of the music (by mentioning, for example, that this phrase by Shostakovich is an inversion of the Russian national anthem, thus covertly mocking Stalin), then they have actually done something worthwhile. But as Nicholas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective shows clearly, even such well-recognized geniuses as Beethoven had scads of critics lambasting some of his most brilliant pieces of works. There was a psychological phenomenon Slominsky terms “Non-acceptance of the unfamiliar” at work, but I would say that these small-minded critics essentially failed at their job. There is little use for myopic people in criticism, as they are the people least likely to represent the most different people in their views.

You are your own best critic. If it looks like something you might like, check it out. If it’s something that you think looks stupid, don’t bother. Let your friends, or people that actually know your personality, make recommendations if you like recommendations at all (I rarely do). At least if it’s a disappointment you know it firsthand and at least can learn which critics are spot on with your own tastes.

This whole screed was partially spurred by the release of Too Human for XBox 360, a game in design for about a decade and in production for two years. There was so much hype around it that the critics nitpicked it to death when it came out, marking down heavily for things that are normally mostly forgiven. I saw more vacuous hypocrisy about that game than any to date, except perhaps Romancing Saga for PS2, my favorite RPG ever that rarely got over a 6/10 because most gaming magazines have extremely conventional tastes. They like companies to hold your hand and lead you skipping down the stereotypical linear plot. I pretty much gave up on IGN at that point for anything other than extremely basic information, and now turn solely to scads of actual players’ reviews, which were on average at least 10 percentile points more generous and review it from the point of view of someone who are trying to recommend it to you, pointing out precisely what things might irritate you and what things won’t.

Makes sense, right? Go to the people. The only decent critic is the one who truly represents the market average, and it seems like a simple amalgamation of ten thousands people’s opinions of it will give you a much more accurate assessment that one cynical chump’s inability to see something new as something positive.

Bye.

PS: I understand the inherent irony that I spend most of my time criticizing with this blog but I don’t get paid for it. I have no professional responsibility, and frankly I can be as pissed off as I want because nobody gives a damn. I would try to be one of the “useful” critics if I ever got the job. But I can’t say that I would necessarily succeed.

Today’s Rave: System Shock 2

I know it’s definitely a bad sign when the only thing I can think of to write about is video games. I know you select few who humor me by coming here do not need me to ramble on about things you could care less about…generally I try to make you care but I somehow doubt it works. Much of the time, anyway. I thought about writing a poem today but maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.

However, System Shock 2 is no ordinary game. 9 years old it may be, but in design, execution, and replay value the game is pure gaming nirvana. I just started playing it again recently, forever saddened by the fact that the poor game would never run under anything other than Windows 98.

I was wrong. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.

You may or may not be aware that the “spiritual” successor to System Shock 2, entitled BioShock, was released recently to a bevy of rave reviews, earning itself a number of perfect scores in various magazines. These scores were well-deserved – the game was extremely engrossing, with a brilliant plot, amazing 50’s-inspired atmosphere, and of course it was extremely fun to play.

I like System Shock 2 better. If BioShock is 10/10, then SS2 is 11/10.

Graphically, of course, there is no comparison. SS2 looked pretty damn good in it’s time, and although it is showing its age, it looks better than I remember. And some die-hard fans have released higher resolution textures and some new enemy models to update the look of the game a bit.

System Shock 2 has absolutely everything going for it. The game is told through scads of data logs, full voice recordings of crew members of the ship you’re on (most of whom are already dead, partially due to an alien invasion of the ship) and direct voice contact from one of the surviving crew members. This mechanic was thankfully used in Doom 3 to great success. It really adds to the feeling that you’re in a place that is, or at least was, populated. The voice acting is good. No complaints. I never really realized it at the time, but most games today someone is always bitching about the voice acting here and there. Good voice acting throughout here. This is a small miracle in retrospect. But the commitment to quality doesn’t stop there.

The game is a first-person shooter built on a HEAVILY role-playing game system. But unlike some games that have to hobble one or the other to make it work, there are no compromises in SS2. The mechanics for weapons, skills, and psychic abilities are seamlessly integrated into an action-packed FPS experience.

Due to its RPG base, the choices for character customization are massive bordering on the absurd, and what abilities you choose completely change the method you go through the game. You can be a marine, specializing in weapons skills, maintenance and repair, and learn how to modify your weapons to give them additional power and abilities. You can be a hacker and turn off security cameras, hack turrets, and just generally get your greasy mitts into every security crate you can find. You can go full-blown psi and take out enemies with blasts of ice and fire, heal yourself, boost your speed, cut up your enemies with a sword of psychic energy, and do any number of impossible things. You can be a scientist and research enemy weapons, learning to use them and turn them back on their creators. You can be any combination of these and more. It’s insane.

Particularly ingenious is the fact that you need a minimum weapon skill to even USE a weapon, unlike Deus Ex (another fabulous game, which is closer to SS2 than Bioshock) where you just suck with it, but manageably so. This adds huge replay value because a) you could go through the game and never even learn how to use half the weapons you find, and b) your inventory space is limited and you simply can’t magically carry around every weapon in the game, like in Doom (although in Doom, you NEED every weapon to stay alive).

I’m not sure I’ll even be able to shut up about this game. It’s so brilliant it defies description. At the risk of hyperbole, it’s probably the greatest game I have ever played, and possibly ever will play, though I have great hopes for Fallout 3. It has to be in the top 3, even if it’s not the number one spot, though I can’t think of any game that deserves it more.

The game is actually pretty creepy too. It scared the hell out of me at the time, and although the dated graphics may have lowered the experience a bit, all the voices, sounds, and general atmosphere are still there to freak you out.

And the final piece of brilliance was the addition of a multiplayer option with the final patch. Now you can bring a friend along and tear through the Von Braun with a buddy, each of you specializing and working together as a team. Pass off your laser pistol to your marine pal, who can repair it, mod it, and give it extra charge for you. Rely on your hacker friend to bring down the system so you can run around without having to worry about the alarm going off. Yes sir, it’s mind-blowing.

That’s enough. I’m shutting the hell up now. If you’re a gamer of any sort, this game must be played. Make sure you check out the Strange Bedfellows SS2 site for Mods and info on getting it to work on later operating systems. They also mention where you can procure this hard-to-find game for free. Peace.

Today’s Rant: 3D Gaming and the Lost Platformer

Look here: 3D and 2D.

3D must be better than 2D, right? After all, 3 > 2, so 3D > 2D, right? Who can argue with the math?

I’m not some kind of curmudgeonly fossil (at least unless I’m trying to act like one) who is going to claim that games were better back when they had 8-bit graphics and sound that was mildly better than beeps and blips. And to be fair, the old line, “The gameplay had to be better because the graphics were worse” isn’t really a good argument because they were good graphics at the time. No, I’m here to point out that in the orgiastic rush to 3 dimensions a humble standby of the old guard has been left in the dust (with the wondrous exception of the Nintendo Dual Screen, savior of the old-fashioned gamer): platformers.

You may think, so what? Jumping from platform to platform? What the hell could possibly be fun about that? Well, if it’s a properly designed platformer, it works the most core skills for practically any video game: timing and judging distance. Add some whirling blades and lasers to hone your reaction time, and you have what is probably the most basic challenge in any game: getting the hell out of the way.

Megaman, to beat a dead horse, is an excellent platformer that until recently (i.e. five or six years ago) had two ways to dodge things, (three if you want to get technical) you either jump, or you don’t. The third way is to short jump, and it was a trick that you had to master if you wanted to dodge consistently. And often enemies could only be hurt if you jumped up to eye level and then shot. Jumping dodging and shooting? Bingo. Pure platformer.

And let’s not forget the venerable Mario games. While I will always agree with everyone that Mario 64 is without a doubt the finest 3D platformer ever made (and one of the finest games) the original 2D Marios made jumping both a method of dodging and attack, which now may seem formulaic, but it was fairly revolutionary at the time.

The simplicity of dodging in two dimensions is part of the draw. This is true even in 3D games; you never really dodge in 3D: it’s usually reduced to rolling to one side or the other. Rare is the game where you actually have to dodge toward or away from your enemy or say back and to the right while jumping, mostly because that would piss people off something awful.

Much of the draw of 3D games for developers is that they are in fact (gasp) cheaper to make than 2D games at this point. Why pay an art team to draw up genuine frames of animation when you can just make a 3D model of the character and manipulate it however you want? Once you make the model, you never have to “draw” anything again. Obviously a tempting proposition.

The point that I’m failing to make here is that platformers are good games because they take more ingenuity due to their inherent limitations. Hence the revamping of the Castlevania series with RPG elements, the amped up difficulty on the GBA Megaman series, and the constantly increasing speed of the Sonic games on various handhelds (Sonic at its core is not a platformer, but a racing game). I know you’re probably trying to wipe off all the nostalgia I’m spewing at you right now, so I’ll leave you to it.

In closing, in video games as in video game music: simplicity often promotes innovation. Wish our government could get a handle on that idea.

Today’s Rave: Video Game Music

I’ve been playing Megaman like a crazy bastard. I’ve been on like a week-long Megaman binge. The original Megamans (Megamen?) for Nintendo, the Megaman X’s on SNES, PSOne and PS2, you name it. But ultimately I get most excited when I fire up the Megaman games on the original Nintendo. Why? The music. Is. So damn good. What it is with a square wave and fake drums generated by a noise wave I don’t know, but for such arcane electronic instruments those guys sure could write.

It’s funny because video game music doesn’t really fit in any particular genre. Granted, any given theme may have a rock-like edge or sound more techno or funk-influenced. But especially on something as old as the NES, who can even say what genre the instruments are supposed to be? Take, for example, Metal Man’s theme from Megaman II. Check it out:

Metal Man Theme – Megaman 2

This song is about as complicated as a song can get on the Nintendo (at least at the time this game came out): three, count them, three parts with a melody and countermelody, some sort of bass line, and as I said the drums that they have the basically make up from scratch using a waveform that is more or less pure distortion, somewhat like the sound when a TV is getting static. And yet the song is ridiculously tightly written. Granted in terms of thematic material there are basically three short sections, but the stage is only a few minutes long.

Often I think that the simpler the instruments, the harder it is for the composer to hide behind the orchestration. In this case, there is nothing to hide behind, so every note has to count. When you write music like this, everything has to be catchy because the instruments would be pretty annoying if the tune wasn’t very good. I’ve heard more than my share of horrible, horrible themes (Puss n’ Boots for NES anyone? Oh my God. I think someone had me play it on an emulator as a cruel joke) and Megaman consistently sounds like the composers actually enjoy writing the music.

One of the most interesting things about video game music is the lack of lyrics. I know this sounds painfully obvious, but most pop music of any kind is let off the hook from being programmatic or evocative because the song is about whatever the lyrics say it is. In this case, the music has to carry the thematic material. So you have to sort of turn a visual experience into an audible one. Metal Man’s stage is all gears and conveyor belts, so there’s that constant rolling countermelody lurking just under the top notes and the “high hat” (that’s what they’re trying to use) is driving everything along. Particularly sweet is the way the top theme uses syncopation to sort of split and reunite with the stuff happening under it. I tell you, aspiring composers could learn a lot from Megaman. I am so not kidding.

What I like about writing video game music myself (and yes, I may post some soon for comparison) is that it gives you the huge freedom of writing that classical music (in the broadest sense) gives you but gives you a handy crutch to lean on (the actual programmatic content of the character or stage) and also funnels your ideas into more manageable numbers for the same reason. It also serves as handy inspiration, you just have to imagine the appropriate theme to accompany character x or environment y and bam. Way easier than trying to just “come up with music” out of nowhere, believe me.

I’m just getting started on this topic. More to come soon.