After the last diablog was so rapturously received (by which I mean three people said they liked it) Jim and I decided to team up to review another game we’d both been playing recently: Bioshock 2.
The Scientific Gamer
Science, gaming, and all things in between.
Category Archives: gaming
Thoughts: Gods And Kings.
Gods and Kings is the expansion pack to the much-maligned Civilization V, and it does something I thought impossible: it makes it into a good game.
Sunday Soundtracks.
Tom Clancy’s always been a neocon military fetishist, but bizarrely the development company he founded — Red Storm — took one of his awful doorstop novels and pretty much kickstarted the tactical shooter genre with the resulting game. Since you spend the majority of your time poring over a map plotting routes for your men that won’t result in them being shot in the face, Rainbow Six really did need some music that you could listen to on a loop for an hour or two without turning your brain into mushy goo. It delivered.
In Praise Of: Kerbal Space Program.
And now, the thing that indirectly led to last week’s post on Race Into Space: the Kerbal Space Program.
Thoughts: Spore.
Maxis games have always been a little bit frothy. They’re very up front about the fact that they are games, to the point where they had this as their company ident circa SimCity 2000. “Software toys” sums up Maxis games perfectly for me; they are almost universally open-ended sandbox designs where you’re set loose in a virtual playground to do what you will with the systems Maxis have provided, and they’re presented with a thick layer of light-hearted frothiness to encourage you to have fun. What made Maxis games so successful – up until this point – was the fact that that layer of froth usually concealed a deep and comprehensive game experience lurking beneath. I’ve invested dozens of hours in the various SimCities connecting up plumbing and worrying about my education budget, and even the unapologetic virtual dollhouse of the Sims is surprisingly complex for what it is. They may be frothy, but they are not shallow.
Sunday Soundtracks.
Lemmings. Specifically, the Acorn version.
Back before the wondrous digital clarity that dedicated sound cards brought us there were often significant differences in how the same piece of music sounded on different platforms, depending on the abilities of the on-board sound chip at the time. Compare, for example, the Acorn and the Amiga arrangements of the Lemmings signature tune. The Amiga one just sounds wrong to me, even though I’m sure far more people grew up with that than the Acorn version.
