Category: Game
March 20, 2007
Supreme Commander: Fun Diversion
So, over the weekend I got to try out the Supreme Commander demo. It was created by the same person who created Total Annihilation back in 1997. TA was great back then. It was the first true 3D RTS. It was also a lot of fun because it wasn't just another Command and Conquer. Sure, as an RTS, it had all of the familiar elements but it also never became very popular. I liked it because of the novelty.
So, when I saw that the same person had created Supreme Commander, I was immediately interested. I was hoping that maybe there was something new and unusual. Chris Taylor hasn't disappointed on this.
First, the game actually leverages multi-core machines. Some people have shown that it doesn't use all cores at 100%, but it certainly can use more than one. It also has an advanced 3D engine for wonderful graphics. I was hoping it would work well on our 2560x1600 display at full resolution and it does! Leveraging our 7950GX2 and our QX6700 to good effect, the play is quite smooth in the demo, even with hundreds of units running around.
Trying to switch to split screen, though, at that resolution does slow things down. Maybe when we can get a couple of 8800GTXs or an integrated dual card we can try that again. In any case, that's a novel new mode that I'd love to try out. We don't have two monitors on that machine, so I can't try out the dual monitor mode, but I would imagine it would also get a bit slow.
As an RTS, the development is pretty standard. Build things that can build more things. Build your defenses well to save your units and build lots of units. At least, that's how it went on easy mode. Reports show that the harder levels are actually quite good and don't run in to the same sort of problems other RTS's have had in the past (e.g. things like pre-made attack plans that if you withstand the AI just goes to sleep and never rebuilds).
Most of the controls are wonderfully simple and intuitive. There are some things that I couldn't figure out from the key layout. For instance, I couldn't figure out how to get a transport to automatically ferry units. I had to load them and choose their target each time. That was annoying. I also had trouble with loading some units in.
My favorite new feature though is how it handles the campaign. Traditionally, the first few levels or so of a campaign would be very small maps introducing you to new units. If you spent any time building up or doing defense you'd likely soon learn that the current mission was over with and you'd have to start all over very soon. Sure, that's good practice for the early build-up stages, but can also feel like a waste of time.
In Supreme Commander you do start with a small map but instead of ending the mission your map is expanded with a new goal to meet. In the first mission, this happened quite a few more times than I expected it to. This meant that all of my early over-buildup didn't go to waste. In fact, it was often not enough for later goals in the mission.
The only downside to this is that you really have no idea how long a mission will last since they keep expanding. This led me to end up playing much longer per mission than I had anticipated. In the second mission, I was supposed to be done after an hour but instead took two and half hours! Whoops...
I'd consider buying it if I had more time to play games. However, I think I want to find time to play through the missions on the hardest level first to see if the solo missions can be challenging enough for using good, tactical building rather than just swarming. If that is the case, I might give it a shot.
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(0)February 4, 2007
Age of Steam vs Sid Meier's Railroads!
Age of Steam, a board game that we played for the first time Saturday night. I really enjoyed playing it, although I felt a little bit lost. I want to get it so Laurie and I can play. Even though it lists 3-6 players, having played it we don't really see any reason why two couldn't play. Some of the turn order stuff wouldn't be nearly as competitive, nor would be board fill up as fast, but that could be solved with other little tweaks.
One thing struck me, though, throughout the game. It was very familiar to me.
The basic game involves selling shares to get money to build tracks.You then use these tracks to hopefully make more money back than you spent, or you can make a bigger train. You then collect money based on certain metrics on how you used your tracks and then you pay for expenses.
This reminds of a computer game that came out recently and that we have: Sid Meiers Railroads!
Sid Meier's Railroads!, a computer game that is basically a railroad simulator in interesting settings starting around the time railroads were just being put in within the US. This game is very fun and I enjoy it greatly.
In the game, you start with a little bit of money and a railroad company. You can start building tracks and putting trains on them. You can also sell shares in your company to have extra cash to develop your railroad company faster than the competition. Sound familiar?
All of this is, of course, in real-time. Besides just doing the build, you also need to do the routing of the track, which is made more difficult based on the game settings. Then you have to design routes over the track based on what cities produce and what other cities want. In addition to this, you also can buy various industries in the cities to make even more money when stuff is produced with them.
As I mentioned, you can sell shares to get some extra cash on hand. However, you have to be careful because one of the game winning conditions is owning all of the competing railroad companies. Yes, that means you can also buy shares, should you have extra cash on hand. You can buy the shares in either your own company, to keep other companies from buying them, or buy other companies' shares so you can try to take them over. When you do, you get all of their assets should you choose to keep them.
There are plenty of other complications within the game, but it's actually fairly easy to play. Performance is pretty good on our machine (a QX6700 with 7950GX2 video card on a 2560x1600 display) but when a lot of rails are around with a lot of trains it tends to start slowing down. (It doesn't appear to be a multithreaded app, though.) It's also crashed a fair amount, too. I could avoid this be restarting from a save that wasn't too far back, but the last time I played I couldn't recover from the crash condition. Maybe a future patch will fix the problem?
In any case, Age of Steams was very familiar because it has a lot of similar features. Sid Meier Railroad games have actually been around longer, but both are unique in their play and style (and not just because one is a computer game and one is a board game).
January 27, 2007
Done & Dusted: Age of Empires III Campaign
So I just finished the AOE3 campaign. It only took me about a year. Luckily, I have the War Chiefs expansion to look forward to now, and it's already installed and updated.
The Black family storyline was actually not too bad, for a real time war game. I'm a girl gamer. I don't like things whaling on me too much while I build my little towns and fortify. When the bad guys come and burn everything I've built so nicely down, I get annoyed and don't wanna play anymore. Thus it takes me a year to finish a game... Well, really it took be about a month of casual gaming since I have only really been playing since Thanksgiving when we got the new computer monitor.
So you can guess, I set the difficulty to Easy. Even *I* was able to get through the whole game without too much trouble here. About halfway through, I considered adjusting the difficulty but didn't after one particularly annoying part where I had a really hard time snatching the caravans away from the bad dudes. They kept changing back to the enemy side and I had a hard time winning in the time period. I had to restart once there. After that, I paid more attention to what the goals and objectives of the mission were. I even would avoid doing the primary goals long enough to enjoy completing the secondary ones. Still, I like my towns organized and fortified, even when the AI doesn't have too many random bad dudes wandering around.
The Black family narrators had a decent story, although the antagonists never really... resolved into a concrete thing. The final battle was, sadly, no harder than the prior battles, and I felt a little let down at the end.
I don't feel like the little guys running around on my side were that distinct. My tactics mostly involved very simple things like:
(1) Artillery demolish buildings well but keep them away from foot soldiers and cavalry
(2) Cavalry are good against foot soldiers
(3) Don't send cavalry against guys with long sticks
(4) Make lots of expendable indians with blowguns and little canoes
(5) Avoid the giant canons unless they belong to you, then spend all your time blowing shit up
(6) Big boats sink slower and hit other things harder, target land-based units with them and then sail away
(7) Build lots of tower gun things. Outpost things.
I didn't use the hero's special abilities much. I did learn to monitor my resources and how to tweak things better to keep them all high enough. I was always meticulous about where I planted my towns on a map. The resources and map layouts were fantastic and well balanced. The superb graphics and variety of terrains made it very fun to play 1-player.
I would say that my favorite part of the game is the variety of upgrades and buildings and types of people you can have, to make the game interesting strategy-wise. The campaign was interesting because there were a variety of goals, from building a solid fort and defending, to chasing down bad guys and freeing prisoners, to protecting miners as they demolish bridges, and finally, knowing when to flee to safety.
If I could change one thing about the game... hmm. It's easy to say make it longer, or more complex... but let's just pick a mechanic. I would make you able to zoom in and out just a little bit more. Especially out. I often found myself scrolling around on my giant 30" monitor and still I wasn't far enough out to select the army I wanted to make march.
Still, I really enjoyed this game and I am not much of a computer gamer. This is the second game in the last 5ish years that I have played all the way through (the other being Sid Meier's Pirates!).
December 14, 2006
Thurn and Taxis Board Game Mini-Review
Thurn and Taxis, published by Rio Grande, is an interesting and fun board game for 2-4 players that involves players building postal routes in the 17th century. You do this by playing cards that represent cities on the game board. They must be adjacent, of course. When a route is built and scored, houses a played in cities based on particular rules. This serves to get towards various bonus goals that give one points. As you build larger routes, you get better mail carriages that are also worth incrementally more points each. The game ends when a player gets the largest carriage or runs out of houses. This keeps the game length to about an hour.
The rules of the game are fairly simple, but there are a number of small "note" type rules that are rather important to the game (like if you can't play a card on to the route you're currently building you have to discard your entire route or if you don't have any cards you have to draw two). The game play, for our first game, was very quick. If we get a chance to play more, I imagine Laurie and I could pound out a couple of games in an hour.
One interesting aspect to this game is that it doesn't really have the direct conflict aspect like some games. About the only thing you ever run in to conflict with is if you happen to take a card that's showing that your opponent wanted. Other than that, it's just a race to get points first. Most of the points come in the form of bonus point piles where the first one to get that particular bonus gets more points than the next and so on. Since the first person to run out of houses or get the biggest carriage causes the game to end at the end of the round it's also a race to build long routes (to use up your houses) and build them quickly (to get to the big carriage first).
Some may say that this makes it a "solo multi-player" game, but it doesn't totally come out that way. You do need to watch what the other players are doing so you can try to gauge how much time you have on your strategy or if you should go after one type of bonus rather than another because some else will beat you to one. However, it's also good because you don't have to pay as careful attention if you don't want to. In fact, our first game had many distractions with a couple of people around that weren't playing that game at all.
Laurie and I will definitely be playing more of it, though. We enjoyed it and expect it fit the shorter and more casual game role. Setup does take a little bit of time because the bonus piles have to be sorted out and place, as well as some cards. I can't tell yet if it will get boring, though, since it doesn't have the depth or variety of play like some games (such as Runebound or on the lighter side, Caylus).
December 12, 2006
Mini-Review of Domaine, a Board Game
Laurie and I just finished playing Domaine for the first time. In brief, it's about making domains around your castles to get money to make them larger to get victory points to win the game (what else?).
It's good for 2 to 4 players, although the 2 player rules could use a little clarification (you use a neutral guy when placing pieces at the beginning, but it's unclear if you should play for the guy or just let the stuff sit there). It takes about an hour or so to play and comes with lots of little plastic pieces (sorry, no wood found here).
The board changes each play for some variety in play. Having played it once, we both found it was fun to play but requires a bit more direct confrontation than we are used to in games. (We like games that don't require it -- more of a race style than direct competition style.) I can see that for four players it will get very crowded very early in the game. Luckily, the victory points are reduced as the numbers of players are added.
Basically, you take turns either playing (and paying for playing) an action card to expand your territory or strengthen your territory or you sell a card to get some money to have more options in your next turn.
Scoring happens immediately. At first, it was unclear why scoring was done while playing since score can go up and down. But you win instantly once you reach a certain score, so the victory points track is important. However, should you lose your place, you can recount the scores easily. That is, the score is represented by what your territory encloses and mirrored on the victory path for easy counting.
In our first game, Laurie had a couple of rather large domaines that she made a truce with my neighboring ones, effectively protecting the from me. I was then stuck with the other part of the board both trying to get points while not letting her get more over there. For about 10 moves before the end, she was within one move of winning while I was struggling at less than half her score. For quite some time it seemed quite futile to me. However, we weren't playing the neutral character. Had we been, it may have been quite different. That said, she also did have her castles much closer to the edge than I had mine.
She didn't want to play again right away. So here I am writing this. Maybe she'll let me play again soon. ;)
I liked the game because the rules are relatively simple, gameplay is quick, and you don't have a whole lote of choice of what to do (you either play or sell a card and then draw). Although it didn't feel totally balanced while playing two player, I'll have to play more before judging that completely.
More information can be found here at catan.com.
January 30, 2006
Fun Weekend
I haven't been posting much lately. Work has been crazy busy, of course.
This last weekend we had gaming Saturday, followed by a chocolate fountain to test it out for at our reception. Sunday was then a movie and lunch out. Lots of visiting with friends and such.
We played Metro, a subway game placed in Paris in 1898. This particular version was brought over directly from Germany and so we had to find English instructions online. Although the beginning of the game was a bit slow with 5 people and there appeared to be a lot of amiguity within the instructions, after the game got rolling it started playing much better and everything turned out fine with the assumptions we made. I think the 5 of us that played enjoyed it. After everyone left that night Laurie and I played it again alone. It played out quite a bit differently, and was fun although arguably much harder because you have more choices and more opportunities to miss stuff.
After that we almost started a game of Hoity Toity (sp?) but more people arrived and we had too many for it. Instead, I think we played RoboRally next a couple of times. I really enjoyed it, although I think it would turned from a random mess of confused robots with 8 people to a careful strategy game with only two players so I'm not sure if we'll try to pick it up at some point.
We played a game of Munchkin with Munchkin Fu mixed in. Something didn't sit well with me in the game, so I was happy to see it end when it did. :)
After that, we were up to about 10 people to play a fun game of Sabateur. Although it plays similar with 10 as it does with 3 or 4, each individual person has less say in the whole map and if you have two pieces you can play by the time you get to go again you may not be able to play the second piece due to changes. The limited number of cards and the small hands also mean it's more likely that one or two people can hardly help their side at all. Curiously, though, it also usually meant that after the first round everyone had a pretty good idea of where the gold was. Six of 9 of use learned that we had been playing a particular rule wrong (a "fix" card with two tools can only fix one of the two -- we'd all played where it could fix both of them -- a distinction that can help nearly guarantee that breaking two or three tools on someone in this size game would keep them out the rest of the game -- in fact, we found that true in many cases since the fewer plays meant you usually had less of an idea whoe the sabateurs were until the round was almost over).
The chocolate fountain distracted us for quite a while as well as gave us all sugar and caffein highs as well as the fall off not long after. We also demonstrated Fjords to a couple of people (well, they played). Again we realized we had been playing one particular rule wrong. Fjords is designed by the same designer as Carcassone (a game we've been enjoying a lot lately). You have to touch two sides and we had been playing where you could just touch one side when laying a tile. We played it Sunday with these rules and actually didn't like it nearly as much.
The last game for the group on Saturday night was Niagara. Again, our copy was directly from Germany, however it came with English instructions and we were playing with someone who had played it before. Interestingly, our box came with a DVD. It's PAL, so we haven't stuck it into our player yet to see what it is, but we are interested. This was actually a pretty fun game, but it can only be played with 3 people (although I'm not entirely sure why -- it seemed like it would play fine with only two). It was quite a bit different that other games and the whole river flowing thing was a bit odd (and our board needs to be broken in a little more for it to be smoother). The plastic inside the box is brilliant with individual slots for every single piece.
Sunday we went to see Underworld: Evolution. It was almost exactly what I would have expected. I think I liked the first one better, but it was more good story. The world they have created is pretty neat, although they seem to have killed off all of the big bad guys fairly easily. It is totally set for another sequel, though, which is cool.
Later on after getting home we picked up Settlers of Catan the Card Game from our mailbox -- it had been sitting there all day Saturday. It's only a two person game but it's really quite a good game. I'm not sure if it's better than the 2-player variant of Settlers of Catan, but it definitely captures the essence and flavor while having it's own, unique gameplay. It isn't published anymore, so we had to pick it up off of eBay.
There was almost no computer gaming or even computer usage for most of the weekend. I think I got maybe 45 minutes on the PSP -- all which I spent either playing Wipeout Pure or downloading stuff for it. I'm just borrowing it, but I may have to see how cheaply I can pick up a copy on eBay. :)
*yawn*
(To give an idea of how busy work is, I've had the 5 minutes of downtime I needed to write this spread out over the last 7 hours. )
September 18, 2005
San Juan: The Card Game for Puerto Rico
I don't write about games all that much, but I play them frequently. Lately, I've been playing more frequently than normal. Additionally, I've been more into looking at what games are out there. I'm not referring to video games, either. For that, I've most just been playing some Xbox games (Pirates!, Dark Alliance (yeah, it's old, but it's co-op), and such) and PC games (Neverwinter Nights).
Tonight, I just got back from playing San Juan for the first time. It's basically a port of Puerto Rico from a board game to a card game. I really enjoyed playing it (and this had little to do with the fact that I won two out of three of the games).
It's published by Rio Grande Games (Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, Niagara, Medici, and dozens of other games) and designed by Andreas Seyfarth (Puerto Rico, Zorro, Manhattan, and some others). Being a card game, there isn't much in the box. It contains a deck of cards, some role pieces, and a few resource price pieces. In addition, it comes with a pencil and a score pad that is a nice addition, although not required for play.
The cards are everything. They are buildings you can build, money you can spend (1 card per cost), and the resources you build. This replaces many different items in the full board game. There are two types of buildings: production buildings and the so-called "violet" buildings that either give special abilities or extra victory points.
The goal is to have the most victory points at the end of the game. The game ends when the first person reaches 12 buildings. Usually buildings are built every round and you start with one which means the game is often as short as 11 rounds.
We found the game went quicker each of the three plays. Also, curiously, both the highest and lowest scores kept going down each game.
We all found "The Library" card to be very powerful and useful for us. We normally followed fairly similar strategies, where possible. You can't always do exactly what you want to, though, because there are a limited number of each type of card and it's possible to keep cards out of other peoples hands if you really want to.
So, overall, I really enjoyed playing the game and I'm going to try to figure out how Laurie and I can get it soon as it's a 2-4 person game -- and small to carry around.
Additional reviews can be found over at BoardGameGeek as well as reviews of the other games I mentioned.
September 2, 2005
Catan for the N-Gage!
This is a translation of the Settlers of Catan boardgame, one of our favorites. This may seriously make be drag out my N-Gage for a while again. Heck, it might even get Laurie using it. ;)
Settle, harvest and build your civilization to dominate the island of Catan in the first hand held version of the classic best-selling board game. Roll the dice to see what recources will be given to you, then put them to use by building new roads, villages and cities. Place your settlements wisely, and with a bit of luck the island will be yours! The captivating mixture of strategy and interaction make the game intense and instantly addictive. The high quality graphics and attractive Japanese style illustrations guarantee that the game also stands out visually.
I'm sure it means virtually roll the dice, but still. It sounds great. It's due for release this month, too.
July 2, 2005
PSP Games From MemoryStick
Actually, it's more like PSP Game (singular) From MemoryStick. Or even better yet, Your Own PSP Game That Was Just On A Cheap UMD Disc Now Runs From Your Overpriced MemoryStick.
It's really too bad that the PSP uses MemorySticks. I mean, I know it's Sony and they want to help push their forms and all that. What, with a 2GB MemoryStick being $200-$300 and a UMD disc weighing in at 1.8GB and PSP games costing $40-60 it just doesn't seem like it's worthwhile. I mean, if you want to carry all of your games around on a pack of MemorySticks. If you're determined to get all of the games for free, you can always carry a laptop around to swap around the games before you want to play them. It kind of makes it all less portable, though.
Personall, though, I think it's all about the emulators.
PS2NFO.COM - PLAYSTATION, PS2, PS3, PSP, DS, XBOX, GBA, GAMECUBE
Retail PSP Games Run from MemoryStick : Gizmodo
PSP Launcher released for Lumines - Engadget - www.engadget.com
February 7, 2005
Unexpected games on webpages...
In what looks like the background image on the following page you'll see what looks like a Space Invaders animation. In fact, it turns out to be a playable game. Just click on it with a mouse. Arrow keys moves left and right. Space bar shoots. It's far enjoyable than one might expect. ;)
via Kotaku.
archived here for fun.
