Category Archives: Games

Games

Drab and uninspiring city builder

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I received Civcity: Rome for free from a PR representative of 2K Games so I feel obliged to write something about it. Unfortunately, it’s a very dull game that I have no desire to really play. For one thing, despite the fact that it was first released in 2006, its graphics and general polish are so drab that it looks like more of a 2003 game. Its gameplay mechanics are also rather dodgy and uninspiring.

This is rather disappointing as it has been a while since I last played a good city builder game. In fact, I don’t recall a game of this genre really grabbing my attention since the closure of Impressions Games who were responsible for such titles as Caesar and Pharaoh in the 1990s. As its name implies, Civcity: Rome uses the same Roman theme. You’re a governor who is instructed to construct various cities in different bits of the empire and each level of the campaign game presents different challenges and geography.

One immediate disappointment is that new buildings are plonked down whole onto the map. Contrast this with the fantastic Settlers 2, where you order your workers to construct a building and they progressively move the required materials to the chosen site and you can watch them build it almost brick by brick. Most buildings only cost money, but better versions of residences can’t be built but must instead be upgraded by the people themselves once various goods and services become available in the city.

One interesting aspect of the game is that one type of upgraded residence lets you put them above shops, which helps save space in your city, but you eventually need to upgrade them again into extensive villa style buildings which take up lots of space. The odd aspect of this is that you can move around these residences anytime you wish, which I suppose make the game easier but really detracts from the feel that you’re building a real city.

Overall a solid thumbs down. It’s sad that practically no one is making this kind of games these days but if you really feel nostalgic you’re better off going back to one of the older games than making do with this one.

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Games

A Game: Sword of the Stars (Ultimate) + Argos Naval Yards

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There’s no denying that Kerberos Productions has their priorities right: in a space-based 4X game, the big draw are the ships and Sword of the Stars, with all of its expansions added in, delivers that in spades. Want to build a missile boat with launch tubes dotting its entire surface? You can do that. How about an impactor ship that can fire powerful long-range rail cannons but whose arc of fire is limited to enemies directly in front of it? You can do that too. As of the A Murder of Crows expansion, you can even build drone carriers if fielding a swarm of carrier-based fighters is your thing.

As I’ve previously mentioned, Sword of the Stars is best understood as a space-based version of the Total War games. While the turn-based strategic layer is present, it’s extremely streamlined and designed to be able to be played quickly in order to facilitate multi-player sessions. A campaign game takes place in a randomly generated galaxy and you’re given a huge variety of options on what your galaxy looks like, including total number of stars, average distance between stars and the overall shape of the galaxy. The galaxy itself is in true 3D, which can be hard to make sense of since you’re going to have to constantly pan and rotate the galactic map. If that’s a problem, simply choose a disc-shaped flat galaxy to make things more or less 2D.

Continue reading A Game: Sword of the Stars (Ultimate) + Argos Naval Yards →

Games

The torture of playing Arkham Horror

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As previously mentioned on this blog, we’ve purchased Arkham Horror but had to wait until we got new tables to actually be able to play it. We finally got around to it last Sunday. We knew that it was going to be a long game so we planned on it taking the whole afternoon. For the first test game, my wife and I opted to take only one character each, chosen at random, but a hand-picked Great Old One, Nyarlathotep, that I’d been told would make for a shorter and slightly less challenging game. Four hours later, we gave up in disgust without completing the game although it was clear that we would eventually lose.

Being such good sports, we tried again in the evening, this time taking two characters each for a total of four characters. We did play this one to completion, though we had to leave the board as it was overnight and continue on Monday evening. Total playing time was around five hours and we lost, but only just barely, during the Final Battle. I’ve written a fairly extensive post on our experience over on QT3 so I don’t feel like repeating myself too much here. The subsequent comments from others are worth reading as well. Summary: my wife felt that it was like being tortured the whole time. In my case, it felt like a game in which things happen to my characters rather than my character actually doing things.

We’ll probably try again another time, and this time, we’ll have a better idea of how to play to beat the game, but probably not too soon! For my wife, it’s a novel experience as it’s the closest we’ve come so far to a more traditional RPG, but to me, the game mechanics feel too archaic and clunky. We probably can enjoy the game, but it just takes too long and is too arduous to play.

On a lighter note, here’s a photo of our session at CarcaSean last Saturday where we spent a little over two hours playing Agricola. Amusingly enough, there was another person there who wanted to play the same game and had friends coming but we eventually decided to join together for a four person game including the friendly shop owner Sean. As expected Sean ran away with the game but I don’t think I did too badly. Agricola is a wonderfully elegant design and that I’m tempted to buy just to experiment with possibilities but it plays quickly enough that it’s probably a better idea just to play it at the cafe.

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Games, Personal Life

Arkham Horror is here

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I thought it might be fun to take some photos of my opening the Arkham Horror box that we’ve just bought. Of course, since I just sat on the floor to open it, Spidey wandered over to curiously poke her nose in everything, which just makes it more fun. As you can see, the board is pretty big, certainly bigger than I expected it to me. There are also a lot of cards (nearly 400) and lots of tiny cardboard tokens and markers. We’re going to have to get a bigger table than we planned to to play this. I can’t even imagine what it’s like once you start adding the expansions with boards of their own.

We’re probably not going to actually start playing it anytime soon either. I’d like to get the cards into some protective plastic sleeves first because my hands tend to get sweaty, and we have to think about a way to store all those markers and tokens once we’ve punched them out of the cardboard sheets. We’re going to have to find a way to roll dice fairly without having them go all over the place too. We had a shot of making a dice tower of our own, but it ended rather badly. Unsurprisingly, cellophane tape isn’t sufficient to hold together a robust cardboard dice tower.

Incidentally we did manage to play a game of Battlestar Galactica at CarcaSean even if it started later than we planned and kept us out until much later than we usually like to stay. We were worried about Spidey being left alone in the room for too long. I wrote a simple after action report of our experence on QT3 that you can read here. Spoiler: my wife is a Cylon!

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Fun, Games

Real life Fallout

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Remember how I gushed about Fallout 3 in this blog? Well, my fanboyishness pales in comparison to these intrepid fans from Russia. Check out this site for more cool photos. I’m not sure what they mean by playing the game for real. I sure hope they aren’t shooting at each other!

Actually to tell the truth, I haven’t been much of a Fallout 3 fanboy lately because so far I haven’t bought a single one of the DLCs for it. The first of the DLCs available didn’t seem that interesting to me, and when I actually tried to buy them, I was put off by the complicated process of buying them for the PC on the Games for Windows website. I keep telling myself that I’ll just buy them when they eventually get collected onto a DVD, but I have so many games to go through at the moment that I’m not sure if I’ll even get to that.

Currently looking forward to our CarcaSean session on Saturday when we’re scheduled to play a game of Battlestar Galactica with Sean and his other invitees. My wife is panicking at the thought of being chosen to be a Cylon!

Games

Playing with toy soldiers

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I’ve been swamped at work lately and didn’t have the time to put up these photos. I’ve always had a fascination with miniatures, especially Warhammer 40k, but I’m well aware of how expensive and time consuming getting into the hobby will be. This is why something like BattleLore is the next best thing. It’s a simplified wargame that you play with plastic miniatures on a game board. My wife and I tried it out at CarcaSean last Saturday (handily they already had the board and pieces out for a game of their own).

My first surprise was that the miniatures are really, really tiny. I mean, I’ve looked at photos of them on the net, but you have to hold them in the hand to realize how small they really are. I guess the size is necessary to fit the more than 200 figures into the box and to keep the game board at a reasonable size. After all, each hex needs to be able to hold four infantry figures.

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The second surprise is that contrary to my expectations about it being a complicated game, it’s actually quite easy to set up and the game flows smoothly once you understand the basics. Granted, we’ve only played the first two scenarios, so we haven’t gotten into the Lore stuff yet, but we’ve had a very enjoyable and the number of scenarios makes this a very promising long term prospect. With all the extra Lore and War Council added in, this will be a game with plenty of legs indeed.

We liked it so much in fact that we’ve decided to buy a copy of it. We’ve said as much to Sean. The only problem is how to store the huge thing. I don’t think stuffing the miniatures back into the box once it’s been opened would be practical so we’re going to have to get a big table to put everything on. We’ll probably get around to that by the middle to end of this month. As you can see, Sean hasn’t bothered to paint his figures and I doubt I’ll ever get around to it myself. I can just imagine the difficulty of trying to point the tip of the brush at just the right spots on the little things!

In the meantime, it seems that my long ordered copy of Arkham Horror has arrived, so we’ll be going on Saturday to pick it up. So many games, so little time!

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Games

Research & Development – The Mod

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I’ve been playing an awful lot of strategy games these days, so getting through Research & Development over the weekend made for a nice change of pace. It’s a mod that requires Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and it’s been winning praises all over the net. It can be downloaded for free from ModDb. The main focus of the mod is on puzzles. There are action sequences as well with plenty of enemies out to kill you, but the player never gets an actual weapon. Instead, with the help of the trusty Half-Life 2 gravity gun, you’re supposed to use your wits to figure how to defeat your enemies and get to the next area.

The most fervent of the mod’s admirers have compared it to Portal, but I wouldn’t go quite that far. For the most part, the puzzles are cool without being really clever and are difficult enough to be satisfying to solve without being too frustrating. The hardest part is probably figuring where to go next, as opposed to what to do, as sometimes the only exit from an area is a tiny crawlspace. The lack of any narrative hurts it too. At least Portal cleverly put its puzzles within the context of a scientific experiment that’s supposed to be filled with puzzles.

All in all, a mod that’s well worth downloading and checking out, especially if you liked the puzzley elements of the Half-Life 2 games. Personally, I liked the action elements more than the puzzley ones, so I’m somewhat lukewarm on this mod. Not bad for a relatively short game, but I wouldn’t want to devote the time for a full length version. It certainly is a very impressive effort for just a one-man team. Just be sure to play in short bursts or your brain might hurt.

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