It feels somewhat dismissive to call Infinifactory “SpaceChem – but in 3D!”, but that’s exactly what it is – indeed, that’s exactly what it’s marketed as in the Steam blurb:
LIKE SPACECHEM… IN 3D! Design and run factories in a first-person, fully 3D environment.
In fairness to Zachtronics they did make SpaceChem, and so in describing their third mass-market game this way they’ve just saved me a whole lot of bother trying to sum up what Infinifactory is about. It’s SpaceChem. But in 3D.
Warning: this might get a little rambly in places. Also the above collection of big boxes in the header image is sadly not my collection, although I dearly wish it was – image swiped from http://www.retrocollect.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8408.
I have just taken a week off that’s somehow left me more exhausted than if I’d spent it at work. For once the reasons behind this are pretty obvious: instead of spending my free time zoning out in front of my computer – whether it be playing games or watching Netflix — I actually had a couple of concrete hobby projects to be getting on with. The first of these involved building a Hadoop cluster out of five Raspberry Pis (beware data engineer-types with an overabundance of free time and spare cash) and was suitably gruelling1; I might even write something about it on here if I can both get my thoughts in order and deem them sufficiently interesting. It’s the second project I want to spend a little time talking about today, though, since it involved culling certain segments of my childhood and got me thinking once again about the slow, creeping obsolescence that eventually overtakes all PC games.
Say what you like about game developers in the ‘90s, but they at least knew how to name their games. Look at any list of releases from just about any year in that decade and you’ll find any number of punchy, pithy, interesting-sounding titles. Doom, Warcraft, Civilization - of course the fact that these games are all classics lends their names a certain familiarity and ease with which they roll off the tongue, but you’d have trouble convincing me that Command & Conquer wasn’t a genius name for the game that popularised the RTS genre. It’s three words and five syllables elegantly structured in such a way that they almost perfectly sum up the product they’re attached to. They’re catchy. They stick in the mind. They’re memorable, so much so that twenty years later just saying them will evoke fond memories of that opening GDI beach assault. They also evoke something that’s been a little bit lost in the intervening two decades; an attitude towards strategy that I wouldn’t exactly call more thoughtful or relaxed, but certainly slower. Starcraft popularised an emphasis on frenetic micromanagement that gradually became dominant throughout the genre, to the point where even the later C&C games aped it (to their great detriment), but there’s a lot of people out there who miss the older, more languid style of Command & Conquer, and would very much like it if somebody made a modern game in that now almost-retro style of RTS.
Heroes of the Storm represents something of a departure from Blizzard’s usual M.O for releasing new products. For the last twenty years their strategy has been the same: identify a market that is suitably zeitgeist-y but which is not yet saturated; do a crapload of market research and design experimentation to figure out what makes it so popular; and then make their own entry into the genre which is far from revolutionary, but which is so accessible and refined in terms of mechanics and highly polished in terms of production values that they establish dominance over the market, or at least a significant share of that market. It’s been that way ever since Warcraft II, and the most recent example — Hearthstone — is doing just as well as you’d expect by carving out a huge portion of the virtual CCG market on both PC and mobile. Blizzard like to operate from a position of strength; they’ve always been pretty good at design (even if they do occasionally make fucking stupid decisions like the Diablo 3 auction house) but if there’s one thing that makes them so good at what they do, it’s that they have the time and the resources to do it properly where other developers might feel pressured by financial constraints or publisher deadlines.
Apologies for the lack of posting over the last month. I wasn’t dead, I was playing Witcher 3.
It’s so rare these days that I play something that actually lives up to the hype.
It’s been a little difficult to find the time and motivation to write recently so posts may be somewhat more infrequent over the next couple of months.
When you say the words “expansion pack” to me, the things that immediately spring to mind are the classic expansion packs in the RPG and strategy genres. Yuri’s Revenge, Throne of Bhaal, Lord of Destruction — it’s a list that stretches on and on. Given the great success of the idea here it’s easy to forget there was once a time when the FPS expansion pack was just as popular, starting with basic Doom WADs and continuing on through the Quake and Half-Life expansion packs to Call of Duty: United Offensive, which was the last really high-profile one. FPSes have since experimented with episodic content and smaller bite-size chunks sold as DLC, but while the RPG/strategy expansion pack concept lives on thanks to the sterling efforts of developers such as Firaxis and Blizzard, first-person shooters have pretty much discarded full-on expansion packs as a decidedly old-school idea.
You’ll probably have heard of Crypt of the Necrodancer already; it’s a “rhythm-action roguelike” with a pun name so terrible it loops all the way back around to awesome, and which got a lot of positive press when it came out on Early Access around August last year. The concept was interesting enough that I broke my Early Access rule to try it for a couple of hours, but while I was pleased to see there was a lot of promise in the core mechanic of moving your character in time to a beat the amount of actual content present was a little bit limited, and so I left it to what I assumed would be a protracted period of Early Access limbo. However, developers Brace Yourself Games have shocked me by actually bringing Necrodancer out of Early Access a mere eight months after it first appeared on Steam1 and pushing it to full release last week. Unlike its Early Access phase this is something that’s gone almost completely unremarked upon by the gaming press at large (or at least the parts of it I follow), and this confuses me, because this finished version of Crypt of the Necrodancer is the best roguelike I’ve played since Spelunky.