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Real Time “Strategy”
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I’m playing Age of Empires III right now, Microsoft’s real-time strategy game about building colonies in the New World. To tell you the truth, it’s kind of a hassle. Playing it feels like doing homework. The problem is that they made it a big pain in the butt to control your units. In order to be successful at the game, you have to collect tons of food, wood, and gold for your empire. Unfortunately, this task is accomplished by a crew of Village Idiots you train one by one at your town center.
Your Village Idiots (and you need a horde of them to survive) pop out of your town center standing there with their hands in their pockets waiting for orders. Get used to this posture becuase just like real life, your workers are lazy drones who care nothing about productivity. Tell one to chop down a tree and he’ll work diligently as long as you are watching him like a hawk. But as soon as the tree falls down, he will stand there waiting for more orders. Ditto with gold mines, which become exhausted very quickly, berry bushes and game birds. To make sure you have enough resources to keep your army, navy and economy going, you have to constantly harangue 60 or so Village Idiots.
Your army is recruited from the same population of morons. When you lasso up a bunch of units and order them to march somewhere, they will rally up in a neat, efficient combat formation. Cool! But at the first sign of an enemy unit, they will devolve into a disorganized mob, each one pursuing a different enemy across the map. Then they get mixed in with your villagers, and, unless you want your gold miners marching off to the front, you’d better zoom in and pick them all out before resuming battle.
These are not the skills of a governor or a general. They are the skills of a Kindergarten teacher.
“Cody! We don’t eat paste. Use it to glue the macaroni to the construction paper. No, like this. Jennifer, what did you do to your hair? Oh my goodness. I’ll take you to the little girls’ room in just a minute. Andre, did your gold mine run out? Don’t just stand there, go two feet over there and start on the next one.
Strategy? Ha!
Katamari! Haikeeba!
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I finally got a copy of Katamari Damacy to play. It’s a blast. It harkens back to the old days of gaming, where everything was from Japan and there was no rationale whatsoever for what was going on.
Like, Super Mario Bros. What the fuck? Mushrooms? Flying turtles? What does it all mean?
Katamari Damacy is the same way. See, you’re this little guy, and you’re about two inches tall. And you roll a ball of stuff around and it collects more stuff until you’re this gigantic Lovecraftian monstrosity, collecting people, cars, buildings, and the random objects that litter the landscape with no rhyme or reason.
The houses and cities you roll around in are a zoning commission’s nightmare. Bears and clowns on beach balls walk around in the middle of the street. Small stuff like batteries, coins, thumbtacks and fruit is just scattered everywhere.
When you’re done, you launch the terrified, screaming clump of humanity and objects into space to be incinerated and form a star. Then the King of the Cosmos yells at you because it is too small. Unless you play it for about 50 hours and get good at it, which I just might do.
Then, a little girl says she can feel the cosmos, and … forget it. There’s no explaining it. It’s like Super Mario Brothers. It makes no sense, and it’s weird and wonderful and fun.
Civ strike
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I am now on strike from playing Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. Sid, I’m not playing anymore until you patch the game so it runs more than 20 minutes at a time before crashing due to memory leaks.
I think this strike is going to cripple the economy, and there are going to be a lot of pissed off New York City commuters until we can work this thing out.
Think of the children, Sid, patch the game!
Update: The strike worked in seconds. But the patch is, like 44 megabytes. That’s going to take awhile to download with my 2400bps modem.
Believe, Obey, Play!
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John Tynes has a great article about fascist ideology in video games in The Escapist magazine, one of my favorite Web sites at the moment. I know video games have influenced my political decisions. Last year I voted for John Kerry because he used the M-16 to kill a dude who had an RPG . Everyone knows the RPG (number 5) is way better than the M-16 (number 3).
Most video game really are fascist, though. You usually annihilate everyone and everything in your path in the name of some nation-state. Builder/strategy games like Civilization are the worst about this. There really is no way to have a successful, peaceful civilization on hard difficulty levels or multiplayer.
Mussolini said that people could only be happy if they were violently struggling together for some common purpose. War, to him, wasn’t a means to an end, but was an end in itself. You know what? He was right. War, the violent struggle, removed from all consequences, is fun as hell.
Quiz time!
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Which is crossdressing comedian Eddie Izzard, and which is Raiden from Metal Gear Solid 2?
“Where’s your flag?”
”Are you a bad enough dude to have your crotch grabbed by the President?”
Thoughts on Metal Gear
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Okay, this is four years late since Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty came out in 2001. I just got done playing it this morning.
What a great game spoiled by anime! As my brother puts it, “I hate anime, and I hate people who like anime.” I don’t hate all anime, mind you. There are like three or four pieces of Japanese animation that don’t suck. But most of anime is like a Pearl Harbor attack on your brain. Let me explain: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is the first game ever to actually give me a stupidity headache.
Literally, I was playing the game, marvelling at the stupidity of the plot, when I actually experienced a peircing pain in my frontal lobe. I don’t normally get headaches, so I can only assume this was brought on by the utter ridiculousness of what was happening on the screen at the time.
What was happening was this: The President of the United States had just grabbed the crotch of the game’s effeminate male protaganist and said “so you ‘re a guy!”
This was the acme of stupidity in a game that includes conspiracy theories deemed too outlandish for the Rollye James Show.
I’m not going to bother with a detailed review since I am the last person on earth to finish the game, except to say that it was awesome except for all the ridiculous plot twists and existentialist philosophy.
