If you could relive your life, would you do it all over again the same way? What if you could live your life in a better, or at least different, way? Positech’s Kudos 2 lets you chart ten years in the life of someone just starting out in the world, working at some menial job that just barely pays the bills.
I started out life as a waitress, making a pittance, going out with my friends every so often. I suppose I could have spent the next ten years doing the exact same thing, and that’s a way you can play it.
Once each weeknight, and twice on weekends, you get a chance to change your life. Friends will lift up your spirits or depress you, make you overspend on bad food or simply ignore you. Or you can study for classes, look for another job, watch TV, go shopping, take a bath, go for a walk in the park, read a book… make a choice to read up on current events to qualify for a news job, and your friends may resent you not going out with them. Go to the theater with friends when you’re in a bad mood, and they may wish you’d been more excited about being with them.
The graphs that rule my life.
I decided I didn’t want to be a waitress all my life, so I took classes, studied, learned what kinds of things made me relaxed and happy so I would do well in interviews, and found a job writing filler for a local newspaper, and later a better job for a paper that was a little too far away to walk. That meant taking the bus, and the bus fares were outrageous, taking nearly all my money. Since I couldn’t afford to see my friends very often, they abandoned me.
I joined a bowling league and would go out with the few friends I had when I could afford to, and after awhile, found a much better paying job as a reporter for a local radio station. I was making good money, it was a lot closer, I was learning how to drive, I had subcriptions to all the local papers to stay informed, and I could afford to go to the ballet and theater and stuff, but my friends were too lowbrow to keep up, and so they in turn eventually drifted away as I turned my attention to a local cable TV station that needed a new presenter.
Boring, grubby churchgoer with a radio show but few friends? I sound like a Stephen King villain.
Kudos 2 is one of those “just one more turn” games that have you playing far longer than you expected. Trying to reach a certain goal while dealing with life’s roadblocks is a definite challenge. I would never have expected that my humble reporter would also turn out to be a league bowling champion or have a dog to whom she is 100% devoted, a border collie named Lord Shep, or to be able to order food in French restaurants, in French.
I really didn’t appreciate being robbed and assaulted so frequently. The game has remedies — Lord Shep attacks robbers, and I could learn martial arts to help while walking to and from the bus station (or just learn to drive and buy a car), but I think after the first attack, I’d probably want to move to a different city…
The constant struggle to keep friends happy is the one true challenge of the game. While necessary to keep you happy and excited about life, many of them tend to be dull and pessimistic, dragging you down, or interested in things you don’t find interesting, like constantly eating out (thanks for the calories, so-called friends) or drinking beer. And not sufficiently interested in, say, bowling.
The game did crash to desktop on me once (the author has a patch for that issue already). It had autosaved recently, but when I returned to the game, I had no friends. This was oddly freeing in a way, because it allowed me to focus on studying and boosting my IQ and cultural knowledge for a better, closer job without worrying about partying with friends that I could not afford.
Buy or no buy? It’s a casual game you might play once a month. It’s fun the first couple of times, but even though you can choose different career paths, it’s still going to be the same game every time you play. At $20, it’s just slightly out of the price range of a casual game — XBox Live, Wii Store and PSN have set the price point of the truly exceptional casual games at $15.
On the other hand, Kudos 2 is by an independent developer, and if that’s important to you, then it might be worth a little more to support indie development. While I enjoy the game, I would have rather have seen it on a console, or to have ran on my Ubuntu-running Asus Eee either natively or via WINE. This might well be a perfect game for a netbook running Windows, actually. Its large, uncluttered interface is uniquely suited for the netbook’s smaller screen.
Kudos 2 has a full demo that lets you play out a sample year for free, and is fully moddable via simple text files. If you want to add new jobs or don’t like being robbed so much, help is just an edit away.
While I sit and stew because I can’t play Rock Band 2 on my PS3 yet, news comes that LittleBig Planet, the multi-player platformer where building your own levels is part of the game, will be out in less than a month.
It’s a game that, like Spore, runs on player creativity. Good stuff :) I’ll definitely be checking it out.
They have some early adopter rewards — you can see those and get more detail at the writeup on Wired.com.
(Oh yeah — Rock Band 2 for the PS3 is supposedly out October 19, so, busy week that week.)
I was exploring further up the galactic arm that is home to my main system, when after a small gap in the arm (easily bridged by Interstellar Drive 5), I came across a small T1 planet circling a yellow star…
There was no animal life on Earth, but Mercury and Titan both were harboring nests of pirates. All I can think is that pirates wiped out life on Earth.
Would the vanished inhabitants of Earth — the Earthians — really want their planet colonized by two-headed, three-legged aliens with a tendency toward cowardice, bribery and pie?
It was hard to tell what the Earthians had been like. Had they been warlike? A race of peace? Traders? The races in the local star systems venerated the Sol system, and insisted it had always been a dead world, not worth the time to visit or exploit.
We didn’t accept that, and hung in orbit for days while we analyzed the trace elements in the atmosphere, and took jaunts to the other planets in the system, most of which were singularly uninhabitable, unusual for a system of this size. We finally found a signal disk buried deep in the crust of Earth’s moon… it was just a recording of a faint signal playing back on the carrier wave of an almost extinguished warning beacon. We knew what had happened. The Earthians must have been a great civilization and explored the galaxy… but went one parsec too deep into the core.
Gas Powered Games, creators of Dungeon Siege, Dungeon Siege II, Space Siege, and Supreme Commander, is bringing the Warcraft III “Defense of the Ancients” mod to your computer in an entirely new game. Raise a demigod, crush the enemy, it looks like a cross between DotA and Shadow of the Colossus.
If you’re at all interested in multiplayer tactical PvP, they’re letting people who pre-order by September 19th into the beta.
Plus, it’s distributed by Stardock, and they’re good people.
Pre-order Demigod, Test it Today!
Gas Powered Games and Stardock are happy to announce the limited beta test of Demigod. If you pre-order Demigod from Stardock’s Impulse digital download platform, you can start testing the exclusive beta right now.
This is a limited time offer. Signups for this cycle of the beta test close on Friday, September 19th, though the beta itself is ongoing. If you miss the beta this time, check the official Demigod website to find out when the next cycle begins. While you’re there, please join our growing community of enthusiasts and testers.
Set in an awesome future-fantasy world, Demigod is a mix of real-time strategy, tactics, and role-playing. There’s an opening in the pantheon of the gods, and players pick a Demigod to wage war against others who are also trying to ascend to true godhood. Each Demigod
goes into battle with its own set of unique abilities and powers, and players “level up” to unlock even more.
When I started working for Massively, my son had just joined the Marines, and nights were quiet and free of any family obligations or having to make dinner (I eat mostly steamed rice and vegetables when I’m by myself). Every evening while the rice was cooking, I’d sit down with Rock Band, go online, and duel people on drums on HARD. THAT was a workout. I bought a mike stand so I could two-box, singing and guitar.
Then my son got kicked out of the Marines. My son is a devoted Xbox Live fan, so suddenly quiet nights were shattered by yelling and cursing at all hours. I finally had to banish him and the Xbox from the living room into his bedroom. And that was the end of Rock Band for me.
Now he and his Xbox are going off to college, and I have a PS3 that I don’t play games on.
Dude, I’m getting the band back together.
Although, it’s just me.
Rock Band 2 this month, Guitar Hero World Tour next month, buy instruments for one and they will work with the other so of COURSE I’ll be getting both (but the instruments are going to be RB2, since it comes out first).
· 311 - “Beautiful Disaster”
· 30 Seconds To Mars - “The Kill”
· Airbourne - “Too Much Too Young” — doesn’t really prevent colds, it turns out.
. The Allman Brothers Band - “Ramblin’ Man” — one of the songs the rock band I was in in college played. The lead guitarist had this thing for southern rock.
· Anouk - “Good God”
· The Answer - “Never Too Late”
· At The Drive-In - “One Armed Scissor”
· Beastie Boys - “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” — looking forward to this one.
· Beatsteaks - “Hail to the Freaks”
· Billy Idol - “Rebel Yell” — drunken frat boy fave
· Black Label Society - “Stillborn”
· Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - “Weapon of Choice”
· blink-182 - “Dammit”
· Blondie - “One Way or Another” — kind of a boring song. How about that one where Debbie Harry raps?
· Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band - “Hollywood Nights” — *yawn*
· Bon Jovi - “Livin’ On A Prayer” — Memories of this from American Idol still too fresh, these scars take time to heal.
· Bullet For My Valentine - “Scream Aim Fire” — dunno the song but I like the band name and the title.
· Coldplay - “Shiver” — hey, one for the kiddies.
· Creedence Clearwater Revival - “Up Around The Bend” — hey, one for the old folks.
· The Cult - “Love Removal Machine” — hey, one for my sister.
· Dinosaur Jr. - “Feel The Pain” — hey, one for ME finally.
· The Doors - “Love Me Two Times” — scene of Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison singing this song while getting a bj in the movie, still too fresh in my mind.
· Dream Theater - “Pull Me Under” — OMG I LOVE THIS SONG! It always reminds me of Disneyland, because I first heard it on the radio while we were driving around Anaheim.
· The Eagles - “Hotel California” — *yawn*
· The Enemy - “Aggro” — needs to learn Aggro Management.
· Filter - “Hey Man, Nice Shot” — thanks, dude
· Fleetwood Mac - “Go Your Own Way” — finally, I get to be Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood and Lindsay Buckingham… all at once!
· Foo Fighters - “Everlong” — always fun to play the Foos
· The Guess Who - “American Woman” — omg fifth grade flashback
· Hush Puppies - “You’re Gonna Say Yeah!” — and clap my hands!
· Interpol - “Obstacle 1”
· Jane’s Addiction - “Mountain Song” — my fingers are already hurting
· Jimi Hendrix - “Purple Haze (Live)” — is this where I burn the guitar controller?
· Jimi Hendrix - “The Wind Cries Mary” — okay no cynicism. I like this song.
· Jimmy Eat World - “The Middle” — omg flashback to the Mirage EQ Memories video
· Joe Satriani - “Satch Boogie” — okay singer, here comes your tambourine solo
· Kent - “Vinternoll2”
· Korn - “Freak On A Leash”
· Lacuna Coil - “Our Truth”
· Lenny Kravitz - “Are You Gonna Go My Way” — no, you should go YOUR own way.
· Linkin Park - “What I’ve Done” — dunno the song, but I’m betting it sounds like the two I have heard.
· The Living End - “Prisoner of Society”
· Los Lobos - “La Bamba” — I liked these guys back when.
· Lost Prophets - “Rooftops (A Liberation Broadcast)” — dunno this one but again, cool title
· Lynyrd Skynyrd - “Sweet Home Alabama (Live)” — somewhere, Neil Young is getting mad.
· Mars Volta - “L’Via L’Viaquez”
· MC5’s Wayne Kramer - “Kick Out The Jams” — I loved Blue Oyster Cult’s cover of this song. BTW, where’s BOC on this set list?
· Metallica - “Trapped Under Ice” — painful Jumper flashback
· Michael Jackson - “Beat It” — must be played standing at a 60 degree angle.
· Modest Mouse - “Float On” — cool, indie rock.
· Motörhead - “Overkill”
· Muse - “Assassin” — BTW, where’s Throwing Muses on this set list?
· Negramaro - “Nuvole e Lenzuola”
· Nirvana - “About a Girl (Unplugged)” — plug her back in
· No Doubt - “Spiderwebs” — they sound so dated these days
· NOFX - “Soul Doubt”
· Oasis - “Some Might Say” — which reminds me, why no Beatles? That’d REALLY rock.
· Ozzy Osbourne - “Crazy Train” — have to admit, getting tired of Oz on these games.
· Ozzy Osbourne - “Mr. Crowley”
· Paramore - “Misery Business” — LOVED their song “Crush” on DLC for RB. Looking forward to this.
· Pat Benatar - “Heartbreaker” — GHWT rocks the 80s!
· R.E.M. - “The One I Love” — and 90s!
· Radio Futura - “Escuela De Calor”
· Rise Against - “Re-Education Through Labor” — should be interesting
· Sex Pistols - “Pretty Vacant” — pretty easy
· Silversun Pickups - “Lazy Eye” — you think I like wearing glasses?
· Smashing Pumpkins - “Today” — only on Halloween
· Steely Dan - “Do It Again” — if they’re gonna mine my high school musical memories, could they at least do Dire Straits?
· Steve Miller Band - “The Joker” — another drunken frat boy song
· Sting - “Demolition Man (Live)”
· The Stone Roses - “Love Spreads”
· Stuck In The Sound - “Toy Boy”
· Sublime - “Santeria” — this is how you do ska without sounding dated
· Survivor - “Eye of the Tiger” — and this is how you do rock and sound incredibly dated
· System of a Down - “B.Y.O.B.”
· Ted Nugent - “Stranglehold” — played on the machine gun controller
· Ted Nugent’s Original Guitar Duel Recording — I hated GH3’s stupid duels
· Tokio Hotel - “Monsoon”
· Tool - “Parabola” — Tool set! My daughter rejoices.
· Tool - “Schism”
· Tool - “Vicarious”
· Trust - “Antisocial”
· Van Halen - “Hot For Teacher” — can anyone but David Lee Roth sing this without looking silly?
· Willie Nelson - “On The Road Again” — puff and pass, dude
· Wings - “Band on the Run” — now they’re really going back. Is this the oldest song they have ever had on Guitar Hero? No, I guess the Hendrix stuff is older. But see, Hendrix was before my time (amazingly). This song, I remember when it came out. Well, I guess Paul McCartney is as close as we’re gonna get to the Beatles.
· Zakk Wylde’s Original Guitar Duel Recording — hate duels.
The most fun in the game is creating creatures and space ships. Tonight I made a Pierson’s Puppeteer from Larry Niven’s “Known Space” stories — it’s been done by others, but I like mine best. I made Corporal Legs and the spaceship Serial Peacemaker from Howard Tayler’s “Schlock Mercenary” web comic, and a couple others.
I was surprised nobody had done stuff from Schlock already.
Also watched Donnie Darko and the double episode of Buffy at the end of Season 2 where Angel gets his soul back and Buffy sends him to Hell anyway. So I’m in a weird mood.
Baby Diver looks for food, flagella and true love in the primordial goo of Spore’s Cell Phase.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from playing Spore, it’s that you are unimportant, life will go on without you, and your only legacy left to an uncaring universe might be that some bit of you will live on afterward in something — or someone — else.
MMOs and other single player games try to reassure us that we’re important, at the center of the universe. Spore has no such comforts. You’re a faceless minion and you’re gonna die. At some point you have to give up your false notion that you’ll go on forever, and just enjoy being where you are, living in the moment.
Which is a pretty heady philosophy for a game, and not one I expected when I started playing. It took Spore’s Space phase to teach me that.
Finally achieving both hands and sentience, the Driver tribe discovers fire and war.
Each phase, but the last, pulls the camera back a bit. In the beginning, you control a single celled animal, and you can’t see much beyond your surroundings. You have no idea of the nature of the world, or your place in it. Even the jumps in scale as you eat, grow and evolve tell you little. You evolve because you have no choice, and invariably the world you grow into is more dangerous than the one you left.
Once you evolve enough to grow legs (skipping straight from 2D single-celled creature to 3D multicellular vertebrate in a giant evolutionary leap), you climb up on to the land as the first member of your species, but you soon find others. Here, you, Borg-like, kill or impress other creatures so that you can add their parts to your genome. As the other creatures you encounter become more difficult to kill or impress, you head back to the Creature Creator to upgrade your parts, and die to be reborn as something new. The UFOs that hover overhead occasionally, collecting your tribemates or just scanning them, are scary harbingers of doom from beyond the world.
Someday, that will be you up there.
The Driver Tribe celebrates after killing every other living creature on the continent.
After you have found enough parts and impressed or killed enough other creatures, those creatures who have advanced enough discover fire, tools, gathering, hunting and xenophobia. Naturally, your tribe has the plum spot in the center of the continent. Unluckily, though, the five other tribes soon notice the closest tribe to all of them — is yours.
You’re no longer controlling one creature; it’s a tribe of up to twelve now, and a death just means ten food and a click on the hut. Your evolution has halted forever; now your advancement depends upon taking stuff from other tribes. Whether by friendship or war, their stuff is going to become YOUR stuff. And if there are any of them left when you’re through with them, they better be out there gathering your food.
“Flea Gun”, the military land vehicle of my mech-obsessed Tabby civilization.
Once you’re conquered the continent, your tribes folk scampers to the four winds, start up cities, and immediately turn upon each other. Your job is to be the worst of them. Whether by crushing them through paupering them, killing them, or brainwashing them. The phase doesn’t end until every other city is yours — you can’t advance to space hand-in-hand with allies. At harder difficulties, your enemies will almost instantly have advanced vehicles and be cutting you off from valuable spice, and most likely attacking you. To make things even harder, you always start in the center of the continent, so you don’t get a port. This means for quite a long part of the civilization phase, you are unable to claim or defend the offshore spice platforms
It’s really just a game of rock-paper-scissors done up nicely, and soon enough you get to be both the rock and paper and you have the scissors in your sights. BAM! You unite the world, civilization celebrates in a frenzy of non-diversity, and a very fallopian-looking tube pops out a starship, your civilization’s egg to spread your DNA throughout the galaxy.
The Driver civilization remembers its amphibious roots in the design of their first starship, “Bloviator One”, based on the graceful model of a toad in mid-leap.
The Tabby civilization’s starship, “The Long Haul”, with its quantum-ball-of-yarn star drive. This ship is too complex for the Sporepedia to display, apparently…
Once in space, your focus, once as wide as your entire civilization, narrows to just you. There’s no second ship, no fleet, no aid, and soon, no fellow creatures. Having given birth to you, you are soon shoved out of the nest and sent alone into the night. (sings Babylon 5 theme).
The space game looks like a 4X (eXplore, eXploit, eXpand and eXterminate) game, but it’s not. You can explore, but you’ll come across enemies that will follow you home. You can exploit, but it will cost you. You can expand, but you won’t be able to keep what you’ve claimed. And you can exterminate, but there’s always going to be ten races that spring up for every one you kill.
Though, it’s fun to pluck aliens from their cities and plop them down on distant planets. They immediately degenerate into savagery. It’s funny how thin our veneer of civilization really is.
Space is vastly open. You can zoom out your view and see the whole galaxy, with thousands of stars, every one of them you can travel to. And for every one of the stars in the game, there are one hundred MILLION stars in our own, real galaxy. For every star in the game, there are one hundred twenty-five MILLION GALAXIES in our reality. For EVERY star in the game, there are TEN THOUSAND MILLION MILLION stars in our universe.
Kinda hard to believe we’re at the center of everything, isn’t it?
Pursued into the dense core of the galaxy by the civilization that destroyed its homeworld, “The Long Haul LXVIII” delivers a final colony to a lonely, T-1 planet not far from the center of all things, and hides for awhile to gather strength and supplies for its last journey.
Spore doesn’t pull any punches. You can stay near your homeworld and trade with your neighbors, but you are just one ship, and eventually pirates or war-loving aliens will send fleets to destroy you. I would be off trading, running missions or exploring, get an emergency message from the home world or a colony, and run back at full speed to find that a city or a colony had been destroyed. I’d die seconds later to swarms of alien ships (though I did eventually learn how to kill several of them before my own destruction).
Every colony I planted was swiftly destroyed as my enemies caught up to me. My only hope was to get far enough away that they could never catch up. I’d find a nice T2 or T3 world, plant a colony, do some terraforming, contact the surrounding empires and set up trade routes and run some missions, start exploring, and then the panicked calls would come telling of invasion. I would fight off the enemy fleets, but rebuilding was bankrupting me and I realized I couldn’t protect every colony AND my homeworld. Actually, I couldn’t protect any of them.
I bought the best interstellar drive I could find and headed corewards down the spiral arm, leaving bits of the Tabby civilization in my wake. I’d stop at each place for awhile to relax and play and earn achievements, which is the Space phase progression — everything you do adds to your progression.
When the closer colonies would eventually in their turn be attacked, I’d pack up and move on.
Now I’m at my last colony on an inhospitable world, two jumps away from the nearest starfaring civilization, and still only halfway down the spiral arm. I’m out of money, and am going to start begging for work. Part of me wants to travel back up the arm and help the colonies I left behind, or at least gather whatever spice they may have collected before their demise. But traveling to the bones of my own civilization is depressing.
Soon I’ll hear rumors of my enemies catching up to me and will have to go. It’s my hope that I’ll fill up my achievement bar just as I hit the core. And then we’ll see what happens.
I know, you want to see pictures :/ But when I’m home, I’m playing Spore! I’ll put some up tonight. If you have Spore, you can see all my stuff by putting “tipadaknife” on your buddy list. I put Bildo and Darren on, and now I have some of their stuff trundling along in my world. It’s always fun to see a friendly face, though most of the stuff on the worlds I encounter are the things I made in Sunday’s game.
I started last night from the Tribal phase, on Normal mode, rather than Easy which I’d played the first time around. I doubt I will ever play the cell game again, and the creature phase, aside from seeing all the different creatures, was pretty boring as well. The Tribe phase, with its simple RTS, at least has some replay value.
My race was an evolved form of carnivorous cat. Where Sunday’s race was a kind of herbivorous rat/bird mix with violent tendencies, my prey-hunting Tribal Tabbies were as much interested in playing their didgeridoos as fighting. I allied myself with two tribes and was forced to destroy three others — one of which attacked me as I was trying to make peace. I marched into the last tribe’s village as a parade — my villagers playing wooden horns, maracas and didgeridoos as they filed in. I laid a gift basket of food down on their food store, serenaded them with my songs, and entered the Civilization phase in Economy mode.
You can’t build weapons in Economy mode. Your only option is to form trade routes with other cities and keep donating money to them until you can just outright buy the city. Only one opponent was economy (and I took that city quickly). The others were split between military and religious. While I had to keep paying ever-increasing bribes to keep out of war, they were having a merry old time lobbing bombs at each other and occasionally picking off one of my canine Poochinator cargo mechs. And of course all I could do was protest. Well, I did eventually ally with a military empire and paid them to go destroy a particularly annoying empire that kept sending planes to bomb my cities.
I wanted my ally’s cities in the worst way. I managed to get one through economic means, but the other just wouldn’t fall, so now that I had military power from the first of its cities, I used it to attack the other city, which gave me a port. I used my new ships that could actually fight back to clear the seas of all other shipping and take the offshore spice mines for my own.
By this time, the religious Red empire had pretty much taken over the second continent, save only for one cyan city, which hadn’t responded well to five hundred foot high holographic cats yelling sermons at them all day and all night.
Red and I had had some minor skirmishes, but had managed to avoid going to war. I opened up trade routes with two of its coastal cities, and then used my special ability to instantly purchase cities with whom you have trade routes to take them both. This gave me enough cities to use my game-ending power to purchase every city in the world, and so I entered Space phase as a Trader, which has similar powers. I can buy any planet with whom I have a trade route, but they want millions of Sporleons, more than I have at the moment, but once I do, I imagine the conquest of the galaxy will be just as quick as the conquest of the world was, once I got the city-buying power.
I’ve already encountered the empire of my species from the first game :)
Even at Normal level, the tribal and civilization phases were easy. Aggressors were more aggressive, but special moves like being able to outright purchase cities (or in military mode, nuke them from orbit) make it difficult to really get in trouble you can’t get out of. Being an economy civilization meant I was rich and could afford the sort of bribes to keep my city safe while I conquered my enemies by economic means.
I may restart the game once more to go the entirely social route and see how the religious empires work. They don’t get guns, either, so if they try to convert a military city, that city can just bring out some guns and shoot the sermonizers. I guess they might be able to make some headway against economy or other religious empires, though.
I’ll have a better review up in a day or two when I have played through more of the Galactic Conquest game, but basically, here’s what I thought of it.
The game is split into a bunch of stages, most of which are very short. You aren’t in the cell stage for more than half an hour — in fact, it’s really hard to slow things down much. I found it difficult as a herbivorous single-celled animal to find new parts, since I couldn’t kill other creatures for theirs.
You advance to the land creature stage after several evolutions with whatever parts you managed to find swimming in the primordial muck. Unless you always intended for your creatures to look like paramecium with legs, you’ll have to go looking for parts by killing things or waiting for other creatures to kill things and then go rooting around in the bones, depending on where you fall in the meat/plant eater spectrum.
If you’re a herbivore — which definitely ends up being the harder path in the creature stage — you can only advance by making friends with other animals, which means… challenging them to a dance-off.
No, really.
You are judged on your ability to sing, dance, look cute (charm), and pose. The parts you choose in the creature creator influence your ability to tear it up on the savannah dance floor. If you’re really good, you can get some creatures to join your pack, which gives hungry carnivores someone other than you to chew on when Step Up 4: Darwin U reaches its inevitable, disastrous conclusion.
You’ll probably just want to skip having to randomly build your creature from found parts and just use the full creator with all the parts. This leaves you without the Siren Song ability, which calms creatures and increases their receptiveness to your breakdancing.
Next up is tribal. Make your critters stand upright, and give them hands. This and the next few stages are real-time strategy stages. You can either kill all the other tribes, make peace with them, or kill some, ally with some. It’s a VERY simple RTS and goes by quickly. You can slow it down by doing side quests like taming wild animals (which gives an achievement), but there’s little point. How you play this stage sets up the next stage, a 4X (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate) Civilization-like game of worldwide conquest. If you killed every other tribe, you become a militaristic nation. I believe peaceful tribes become religious nations, but I’m not sure.
The vehicles you design in the Civilization will reflect your strategy in the Tribal stage. And the means with which you conquer other cities determine what you can do with them. I defeated half the enemy cities through military means (including one city I nuked because I was getting bored), and then made an alliance with the remaining superpower, and that was that.
It took about four hours to go from a cell swimming in goo to my first spaceship.
After that, the game started its real phase.
Spore is a galactic civilization game. Everything else is just a prologue to it. The first alien civilization I encountered was using my mechs (my land vehicles are giant cat mechs called Ratters — look it up on Sporepedia under tipadaknife) and my Flappers (a steampunk aircraft that looks like a duck swimming through the air). So I thought that was rude of them. I am in the process of conquering them now through economic means.
Is it fun? Well, it’s like any decent 4X game — it’s always just one more turn. Plus, you can design new vehicles and buildings for every new colony, so you’re in the vehicle and building creator all the time.
Spore is really just two games. One is the best introductory 3D modeling program I have ever seen, with support for sharing that is seamless and automatic — there were almost 8 million player created creatures, vehicles and buildings in the Sporepedia this morning. I was enjoying building my new colonies with vehicles and buildings way more twisted than anything I could come up with.
The second game is the Galactic Civilization game. If you like GalCiv or Master of Orion 2 or others of the genre, you will likely want to rush through all the other stuff to get to it. Or just play GalCiv. Well, Spore is somewhat different. You go from place to place and get quests, like kill five floozles on this planet, or investigate strange signals from that system, or mine this much spice and sell it to them over there. There’s also collection quests and a terraforming mini game.
The other stages go by so fast, you’ll miss them if you blink. Granted, I was playing on Easy.
It’s a decent game. For the time they spent, I would have liked to have spent more time in the tribal, RTS phase. Even the strongest opponents fell for the simplest trick — kill an enemy villager with spears, then run back to the home village and pick off enemy villagers as they follow you to retaliate. Leaving the home village so that enemies would send in their villagers to steal your food, and then rush in and burninate their less protected village also worked well.
Was checking up on Metaplace’s progress — Areia will always be in my heart as the one game developers who actually read my resume — and got to playing with their tile transition tool. It does two things: Makes any pattern tile with itself, and then calculates transition tiles to smoothly transition from one tile to another.
It’s meant to make it easy to construct tile-based landscapes, either the 2D ones like in the Legend of Zelda, or the 2.5D games like Ultima Online and other isometric games.
Naturally, my tiles would be pretty bad for something like that… but the tool does work. And in Windows or OS/X!
I can’t believe you guys had NEVER heard of the bands I listen to. I mean, I’m hardly on the cutting edge, and these bands aren’t that obscure…
Okay, backstory here for those who weren’t on Vent last night during our Veksar run. Rogbog was web-casting our Nostalgia night to the world (interest when it was us killing dragons: high. Interest when it was us grinding levels and AA: low). Anyway, he was running some music behind the video, I asked him who it was, he said Cake, I thought they reminded me of King Missile and I happened to mention some of the bands I listened to, and nobody had heard of any of them… Now usually people make fun of my musical tastes because I like 70s bands like Jethro Tull and Blue Oyster Cult, but THESE bands aren’t old… so I was surprised.
Anyway, these bands are on heavy rotation on my Eee.
Portishead “Wandering Star”
The Hush Sound “Don’t Wake Me Up”
The Decemberists “O Valencia”
The Dresden Dolls “Coin-Operated Boy” (got into them when I lived in San Diego)
Yeah, I couldn’t see how they could make a tour of four guys pretending to play plastic instruments on stage and charge for it. But Rock Band Live is actually a (fairly cheap, considering) concert by some of the bands who have supplied downloadable content for Rock Band — Panic at the Disco, Dashboard Confessional, Plain White T’s and CAB. They’re playing all over the place — here in Connecticut, they’re playing in Bridgeport, one of the priciest cities in the state. Might be fun :)
When a bunch of the most knowledgeable people in MMOs suggest to me that I should probably look into Guild Wars because it sounds like I need something different, well, I buy the game. And yeah, even though the game could be best compared to Dungeon Siege II with massively multiplayer cities, I do consider Guild Wars an MMO. Every city, town, hamlet, guard post and quest hub I came to were filled with people, selling stuff, looking for groups, looking for escorts to far away places, offering 100% no fail inscriptions — it was alive in a way that only MMOs manage.
So, first day. I started off as a Mesmer, not knowing really what the class did but someone said “try Mesmer!” and so I did. Mesmers shut enemies down. If the monster tries to cast a spell, it hurts. If the monster tries to attack, it hurts. If a monster has a buff, it hurts (and is removed). If they stand around doing nothing, it hurts, but not as much. With elite skills (which I clearly don’t have), Mesmers can prevent monsters from using a skill, or even take that skill away from you and use it against you. It’s a pretty unique class, I’ve never played anything like it before. It does tend to infuriate monsters, so I am using the command window to send my heroes and minions ahead to get aggro before I start with the mesmering.
I chose Ranger as my secondary class, because of Franz Mesmer, the scientist who discovered “animal magnetism” (later called Mesmerization, and even later, Hypnosis). So it just seemed proper that I have an animal companion.
When I looked up my build (Me/R) on various Guild Wars sites, it wasn’t listed at all. Those two classes don’t work well together. But, they suggested, a Mesmer can do quite well without worrying about their secondary class. Push points into Domination so stuff hurts a LOT, and into Inspiration to regain some health and energy, and you’ll make your mark.
So, until I do the respec quest and can change to a more conventional build, that’s just what I’ve done. At level 12, I’ve put the vast amount of my points into Domination, with some in Inspiration and some in Fast Casting. And if I need to swap this around for specific missions, it’s just as easy as visiting any non-instanced zone. I’ve done a little bit of traveling for skills.
There are games out there where you know just how and where to use a skill, and then you do that, over and over. Guild Wars is not that kind of game, and without the many, many wikis which teach you how to choose your skills and use them together, I would be entirely lost. And I want some of those higher level skills, which build upon each other to make cities of pain. I think City of Pain is a Mesmer skill, actually.
I chose to start GW with the Nightfall expansion, because that gave you heroes which leveled up with you, and for whom you could choose their skills and gear. You start off with the hero Koss, an out-and-out tank. He tanks the mobs so I don’t have to. In fact, it gets to be such a furball of mobs most times that I don’t WANT to play a melee. Standing off a bit making things hurt makes me happy. Of course, they come at me anyway… but every time they attack me, it hurts them so much I smile :) I went with healer and motivator (javelin-throwing) henchmen. As we leveled, I played with Koss’ build a bit so he could better protect me and not worry so much about the damage. Next to come was a healer hero, and last, a disruptor hero. And not long after I had bid adieu to my last henchmen, my party size increased to eight and I was able to get them all back again as I headed to some truly awful killing fields.
Just going out and killing things won’t get you much of anywhere in Guild Wars. Quests help (and are very often the same sort of kill X, run from here to there quests you see everywhere). Your rank in the Sunspears, the impartial, a-political guardians of the region, is a major plot driver. You gain rank not only by doing quests, but by talking to the scouts on guard outside resurrection shrines, who give you a bounty buff for a certain sort of enemy in the region. While you have that buff on (permanent until you zone), you will get double experience for enemies of that type, PLUS you gain rank in the Sunspears. So the first thing you do when entering the wilderness is look up the local scout and get the buff, and if you see anything matching it, you kill it. You can have multiple bounty buffs, so in larger wilderness zones, you might be running with two or three and really pulling in the bounty.
The wilderness zones are full of side quests so that you never find yourself setting off to do just one thing. In fact, it’s incredibly easy to get distracted. Like, I’m supposed to be clearing this quarry of mobs, but this guy standing near a monument needs his tools. He doesn’t want US to run off and get them, FOR ONCE. Instead, HE’LL run off and get them, all we have to do is just guard the monument until he returns. Easy money.
The moment he leaves, the lizard-like Skale decide to attack. Wave after wave after wave of scaley awesomeness. I still haven’t survived that encounter. But combined with a Skale bounty buff, it’s excellent xp and rank, until I die, anyway. There is a sort of debuff you get when dying, but since it’s entirely cleared by just popping into the nearest town or outpost, it really only gets annoying when you’re deep into a zone and you don’t want to have to fight through all those monsters again.
There is a main plot to the game, which you pick up as you gain rank. Some evil queen wants to rule the world, and she wants the Sunspears out of the picture before the astronomical event known as Nightfall. Isaac Asimov once wrote a story about a planet with five suns, and once in several thousand years, they’d all end up on the wrong side of the planet and night would come and the stars would come out and civilization would collapse. I don’t know if the GW Nightfall has anything to do with that. But they seem to just have the one sun. My best guess: an eclipse. Anyway, the first mission — which can be repeated for better scores — was to save a village from invasion. I did that with all mission objectives completed. The second mission was to delve into some ancient ruins, solve various puzzles, be under continuous attack and take down the monster Apocrypha, who, it turns out, was the only thing keeping the undead from invading the land (oops). One secondary objective was to not kill any Sunspear ghosts, but temporary-ally Koromir, local head of the Sunspears, didn’t get the memo and attacked every one she saw. After the first one, I found you could just run away from them and Koromir would give up on it after awhile to follow. So I need to return and redo that one. These missions are full of cut scenes and remind me very much of the similar plotline missions in Final Fantasy XI Online.
Crafting is pretty complex, given you don’t do it yourself. You bring raw materials, which can be found, bought, or salvaged from trash loot. One of the first things I did was change into a nicer looking outfit. Most stuff can have “inscriptions”, which give some benefit to the armor or the weapon. You can remove the inscriptions from items that have them, giving the occasional piece of trash loot a value it otherwise wouldn’t have. You can further supplement certain items with runes, so pretty much everything you (or your heroes) use or wear will eventually be specific to you and your needs.
And everything you unlock, be it runes, inscriptions, types of weapons or armor, will be available to you on any PvP character you make. Because the PvE game is only half the story. I haven’t done PvP yet — it starts at 20 — but I have observed some matches. I bet the best teams know all about each others builds and work together for real pwnage. I’m not normally that into PvP, but this one seems based more on skill than items… might be worth a look.
And that was just the first day. Impressions? Most WoW-likes just give you little bits of the game at first, then gradually give you more, so that after a few months, you have it all. Guild Wars seems to take the opposite approach. Give you everything, VERY quickly (at level 12, I am more than halfway through the leveling process, and I think the pre-20 game really must be considered an extended tutorial). And then you spend the rest of your time in the game refining your play. And PvPing.
So, just saw on Engadget that Mad Catz is gonna take an actual real electric guitar and turn it into a Rock Band 2 controller for PS3 and Xbox 360. So, real guitar, real size, real weight… except, you know, it’s still a fake guitar.
Now, I’m really confused. Okay, you take a REAL GUITAR and make a FAKE GUITAR from it. Isn’t that… insane… a little?
Now you know what would be awesome… if it still could be used as a regular guitar — SIMULTANEOUSLY…
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