This quintessential track from Golden Axe. Always puts me in mind of the Basil Poledouris score for the first Arnie Conan movie.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Category Archives: gaming
2012 End Of Year Retrospective.
I don’t see myself playing many more new games this year and I have all these words lying around, so I may as well do this now. Presented in the manner of gaming websites the world over via a serious of made-up imaginary “awards”, I figure if you’re going to pompously present some meaningless, preposterous and arbitrary awards you may as well make them actually meaningless, preposterous and arbitrary awards, so these may end up being a little bit… unorthodox.
Thoughts: Planetside 2.
Planetside 2 has not had the best of launches. New players logged on to new servers in a new game to be greeted with crashes and glitches and lags and queues that made that game nigh-unplayable. It wasn’t pretty – or acceptable, even if the game is free to play – but I’ve seen this sort of thing before with many an MMO launch and knew it would be unfair to judge Planetside based on its disastrous first few days of life. So I left it for a week, then dove back in with a character made on one of the less rammed European servers (Lithcorp) to see if things had improved at all.
Sunday Soundtracks.
Xenon, otherwise known as “I haven’t played the game in over twenty years but still I have this damn song stuck in my head.”
Abandon-What?
Shifting paradigms in gaming are hard to see coming, even when they’re already underway. Ideas often crop up ahead of their time before the technology or infrastructure exists to support them; CDs are a good example of this, being used mainly to store awfully digitised voice samples and full-motion video for a good couple of years after their introduction as a storage medium, and it wasn’t until the Playstation that they began to be filled with the art assets required to render 3D games. Graphics cards were another distinct shift in the market, and I can hazily remember after the first 3dfx Voodoo card came out that it was considered unthinkable that one day in the near future PC games would not only make use of them, they’d require them in order to run. And now we have fibre-optic broadband connections and digital distribution making physical media obsolete. If I want to play a certain game from the last 15-odd years of PC gaming history the chances are there’s a digital distribution channel somewhere which will provide me with the goods almost instantly. It’s gotten to the point where buying a game that comes on a disc inside a box feels distinctly dated.
In Praise Of: Master Of Orion 2.
Note before we start: “4X” is an acronym invented by a moron for the same reason that the term “FPS” was inserted into the general gaming lexicon: because calling games “Doom clones” and “Civ-alikes” is seen as demeaning to the ones that might actually be trying to iterate and develop a genre. Genre labels are necessary; the term 4X, however, is spectacularly awful, standing as it does for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. I sometimes wonder if the bored gaming journalist/PR bod who came up with it ever regrets this most enduring of their contributions to gaming culture. Whatever. We’re stuck with it now.
If you cast your eye back over the last decade or so of strategy titles, you might notice that the 4X genre is littered with the corpses of dead and dying space-based empire building games. Some of them have been badly made buggy messes (Sword of the Stars 2, for example). Some of them have had a limited amount of impact but are ultimately fading away into obscurity (Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire). Even though the last year has seen an extraordinary number of these titles released – I can probably count at least five off the top of my head – only one of them has had any staying power to my mind, and Endless Space is a game with many of its own problems.
Perhaps this isn’t that unusual. I’d expect sci-fi to be a popular setting for games because it requires even less thought than fantasy; you can basically do a hundred iterations of “Modern day thing X, but in the FUTURE” and then call it a day. But why the 4X genre in particular? Compared to sci-fi settings you can count the number of fantasy 4X games on one hand, and I think even historical real-world settings (which are largely propped up by Paradox’s prolific output) are outnumbered by sci-fi ones. This cornucopia of sci-fi games doesn’t exist in a vacuum, though. They exist for a reason. They’re trying to recapture and/or recreate the spirit and feel of an ancient classic. They’re trying to do Master of Orion 2 all over again.
Thoughts: Waking Mars.
Oh, what’s this? A game set on another world that features no guns or slavering alien beasties, but instead chooses a mature focus on exploration and discovery? You spoil me, indie gaming, you really do.