Godmode

Spore.  You’ve heard about it.  Or, if you haven’t, what’s wrong with you?  Spore is the newest creation by Will Wright, one of the biggest names in simulation gaming.  In it you progress as a species from a microscopic life form all the way up through a great space-faring civilization.  As you progress through the game you’ll be challenged by an ever changing gaming landscape.

In the microbial stage the game plays a bit like flOw; you’re a tiny organism that gets ever larger the more food items you manage to eat without being eaten yourself.  As you progress you’ll be able to add onto your critter by using the evolution points you accumulate through your feasting.  This aspect strongly reminds me of a perhaps lesser known game E.V.O.: Search for Eden that came out on the SNES in the US in 1993 which also used an evolutionary point buy system for adding on parts to your creation.  After enough growth has been accomplished in the seething pools of early life you crawl out to be a new land creature.

Having now acquired legs (or not, depending on your preference) you now move across the land looking for food and the added goal of finding a mate.  The gameplay is still similar to the whole eat-to-live scenario played out in the cellular stage but moves from the top down, 2D view to a fully 3D environment.  During this phase you put the finishing touches on your abomination before moving on to the tribal stage of the game.

You now control an entire tribe instead of a single entity.  This stage is a bit more RTS-like in that your tribe is attempting to, by use of various means, become the dominant one in the area on its quest for civilization.  The personality of the creatures gets fine tuned here as well since from here on out you don’t get to control them directly.  Warlike actions lead to warlike species and et cetera.  At the completion of this phase the player then moves onto building a city in the civilization phase.

The civilization phase seems to be similar to another game of the same name.  Customization doesn’t stop however as players are now able to design buildings and vehicles (air, sea, or land).  During this stage you can actually zoom all the way out to planet view for the first time as well.  By whatever means suits you best you wrest control of the planet to your side and boldly move on towards the stars.

In the space stage of the game the player gets to move about the universe looking for new planets to conquer or inhabit.. or both.  Through might, terraforming, or just plain ol’ meanness the player gets to flex their stellar muscles (in the star sense, no ego fluffing intended) and spread out as far as they choose.  They receive missions to complete and occasionally have to fend off invaders to their homeworld but in general actually have a large amount of control over how they wish to play the game at this point including being able to go and play any of the previously completed phases.  Or they can just go out and blow up planets.  Really, in the Spore universe there are billions of planets to interact with and the content is constantly evolving itself.

Throughout the entire game it will be able to upload your creations to a central database and download content from the same to populate your world(s) with the machinations and beasts of other Spore players.  There will be some checks in place where you can control who and or what gets sent to your game to avoid the onslaught of genital monstrosities that already populate the database being filled by users of the Creature Creator software that’s currently available.  Perhaps more than any game prior, Spore will offer an infinitely re-playable experience where you actually will never know what sort of things you’ll be able to see and interact with.

3/4/2008

Roll in peace, Gary Gygax.

Never give up, never trade all your resources!

Or something like that!

This time we’re going to look at a new game I picked up at a recent convention I attended, RoundCon.

I’ve had the Settlers from Catan for years and love the little game.  It’s fast, simple, and a blast to play.  I’ve had my eye on one of it’s successors for a while now, Starfarers from Catan!

In Starfarers the play is very similar to the original Catan with a few interesting changes.  First the basics:  You roll dice to see what generates resources each turn based on numbers on chips on each of the resource generating locations.  You use these resources to build things.  In the original Catan you built cities and roads.  In Starfarers you build expansions to your ships, colonies, spaceports, and trading posts.  The general idea is the same: you want to be the first to garner fifteen victory points in order to win the game.  In Settlers victory points were counted from cities and towns as well as some ‘prize-like’ victory points for having the largest standing army (special cards you could buy) or the longest contiguous road.  Starfarers counts colonies and space ports but also introduces some extra competition in the form of the trading system with the alien races further away from the starting planets.  The player with the most trading posts around a particular trader gets that race’s friendship token.  These tokens are worth two victory points each!  Also you can, using the wonderful event system in the game, gain fame rings on your ship to indicate heroic deeds accomplished.  Every two fame rings grants another victory point.  You gain and lose favor with the traders and gain and lose fame rings leading to an enjoyable dynamic experience.

As a two player game it was fun but by adding more it can only get better.  As just two players the universe became divided rather quickly and after I took three of the four traders through a bit of luck and speed the game was concluded.  With more players the struggle to maintain control of the traders would be more heated and the game would last longer.  Still, that’s just taking a great cake and adding icing.  And who doesn’t like icing?  Someday I might pick up the expansion that adds two more max players (right now it caps at four players) but I hardly ever get a large gaming group together these days with my time constraints.  Those acquainted with my other site, Falling Leaves, are already aware of the little leisure time I can afford between work and school so I won’t dwell on it here.

The summary here is that the game, Starfarers of Catan is well made and dynamic enough for repeated playing.  While the four player base set maximum is somewhat constraining it does not hold back on any of the spacey fun the game presents.  Live long and build ship expansions.

Paizo’s ‘New Era’ is closer to a new ending .. And a poll!

As you probably already know, Paizo Publishing is scrapping both Dungeon and Dragon magazines. In their stead Paizo is starting a new magazine of their own concoction, ‘Pathfinder’.

Pathfinder promises to be a magazine touted towards campaigns under the Open Gaming License. While the information in their release is brief; at first glance the publication appears to be a rehashing of Dungeon, most specifically the scenarios, only using a more generic rules set than one of the big DnD ones. However, digging deeper into the dark bowels of their FAQ, it seems that the truth is far worse.

The magazine with be primarily only pieces of an adventure spread out over multiple issues. The first episode of this style will last the first six issues. Now, Dungeon had these in it, too, but it also held far more info and articles. There will be some of this in Pathfinder as well, but that’s not the focus of the magazine. It’s adventure telling, not assisting.

Each issue apparently will run right around fourteen dollars to purchase from the store and most likely a reduced cost to subscribers. So, it’s also more expensive than Dragon. So, by crunching some numbers together, the first campaign will run six issues at fourteen dollars each, so for one complete mini campaign your out of pocket cost from the store will be roughly eighty five dollars. Yes. EIGHTY FIVE. How much do you care for buying the whole core set of three-five DnD books again for the sole purpose of one measly adventure? Those pregenerated campaign books for sale run what, thirty dollars maximum? So you go out to purchase Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and return with Ptolus and all it’s ostentatiously overpriced glory. Ridiculous.

I might pick up the first issue simply to take a more informed stance on the issue; see how it’s laid out, content, how much it weighs my wallet down, etc. I hardly expect to be floored by anything other than Paizo’s vanity. I sincerely believe that the reason Dragon and Dungeon’s licenses have been pulled back by WotC was to rip them back from the gangrenous claws of Paizo’s terror squad.

So the poll:

Will you be making a purchase of Paizo’s new magazine, Pathfinder?

* Sure, how bad could it be?
* Yes, I buy all sorts of these magazines.
* Maybe.
* No, I hate those guys.
* No, I will boycott them for what they have done.

Spawn Boss Must Die ..

I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without letting everyone in on a fun little game someone at work discovered:

Desktop Tower Defense!

The premise is simple: it’s somewhat based on the defense maps from Starcraft and Warcraft.  You build multiple towers of various kinds and upgrade them with the gold you get from killing creeps (what the coder calls the enemies).  As you progress the creeps get increasingly bigger hitpoint pools and more types begin to appear.

First off there are the normal creeps.  Just a group of ten with no special abilities.  Next is group type spawns.  These little blue guys cluster ever so tightly together; which is great because it actually makes them easier to pop by most means.  Next are the annoying immune spawns.  One of the cannons you have at your disposal, the frost tower, slows creeps down in a splash radius and does some damage.  Immune creeps are unfazed by frost effects though and plow right along.  Next up are fast spawns.  These drop-shaped entities zoom right along at about double the speed of the other spawns.  Luckily the afore mentioned frost towers affect them just fine.  Flying spawns are next.  These yellow triangles are not blocked at all by towers and cannot be hit by some such as the bash and dart towers.  Finally are the accursed spawn creeps.  For the most part they’re only irritating.  That is until the boss shows up.  More on that in a moment.  Spawn creeps only arrive in groups of four but when you kill one it only splits in two.  Great, right?  So bosses are to be discussed.  For the most part they’re just larger versions of their counterparts but with greatly increased hitpoints.  The only difference is spawn boss.  He splits into two when first blasted and then each of those split into two again!  I think there’s one more level of splitting but I am unsure.

The towers at your disposal are varied.  The first one, the pellet tower, is a slow little gun that is the cheapest to build.  In the grand tradition of most games like this they are also some of the most powerful when fully upgraded.  At max level they turn into sniper towers who allow you to click on specific creeps to target as well as immensely increasing range and damage.  Following that we have the squirt tower.  This is much faster but does less damage.  When advanced all the way it becomes the typhoon tower which has slightly increased range and only a little less damage than the sniper towers.  Frost towers are fun.  I described them above and there’s really not much else to say; at top level they’re blizzard towers with slightly increased range and damage and as they increase the slow amount increases (almost imperceptibly).  Dart towers are basically missile launchers.  These cannot hit air but have a decent range and do splash damage around whatever they hit.  At max level as ICBM towers they have range almost as good as the sniper towers but don’t do as much damage.  Also they are mind numbingly slow.  General consensus around the office is that they are not really worth the trouble.  Swarm towers are fully anti-air and can hit nothing else.  They’re kind of like dart towers for flying creeps but do more damage with less range and are far faster.  Maxed out they become storm towers that are not too different from their earlier versions but do more damage and have greater range.  Lastly a new addition to the tower team as of recently are the bash towers.  They have a very small radius but when they ‘fire’ they damage everything in their radius with a chance to stun which increases with levels.  The problem with bash towers is that, even upgraded all the way to quake towers, their range never increases.  And even at max their stun percentage is only twenty percent.  They can be fun to play with but as they are also the most expensive to upgrade in the game they are usually left by the wayside.

So that’s about it.  When you get a chance give it a shot and let me know what you think.  This is everyone’s favorite gaming crab signing off.

It Lives!!

So, I love the whole Myst series.  Back in the day, when Myst came out it was on the Games 100.  High up, if I remember correctly.  Following that it was on that list the next year as well if memory serves.  Myst was a top selling PC game that nearly became a household name back then and since its inception spawned sequels Riven, Exile, Revelation, and End of Ages.  Also was the lesser known Myst Online: Uru.  Uru was online for all of the time before its release and then the project was shut down.  Uru came out as a single player MMO/sandbox type deal that sat quietly and disappeared.  Turns out it’s been revived.

Gametap aquired the liscence and now offers the online experience the game was designed for as an exclusive title through their site.  There must be something to this game.  In reading articles about its death and rebirth it seems that it was the community that brought it back from the brink.  The community lived for two plus years without the game ever having the communal aspect installed.  This dedication saved it.  This just goes to show what power gaming communities can have over their favored products.   That can perhaps bring a glimmer of hope to those of us who harbor a flame for less than popular games and wish for them to return from obscurity.  I’m looking at you, Talislanta and Unknown Armies.

More Emails!

I got some more! Check it

Wierd Emails. What Fun!

So lately I’ve been getting wierd emails. They all end up in my junk email box on Gmail and I don’t open their most likely virus infested attachments, but the text they are putting in these are fascinating and may work its way into something like a UA game or something. Maybe that Call of Cathulhu game I’m trying to pull out of the depths. Anyway, for now they won’t have any darker meanings. Presented here for entertainment and for updating my ‘blog that hasn’t happened in many moons are the messages!

Shedding Light on the Situation ..

Partying can be fun!

Today Elyssa spent some time in Qufim partying it up with some fellow adventurers. Except for a slight mishap involving some mistargetted macros, everything went smoothly. Well, mostly.

The Ice Age Cometh ..

..again. Wizards of the Coast is releasing an expansion for their Ice Age set. Yes, you heard it right, they’re releasing an expansion for a set that was made about 10 years ago in the dusky days of my high school career (+feels old).

To be fair, Ice Age was a bit before its time. Since its creation Wizards continued with their tradition of having one shot expansions. Ice Age was meant to be like the later sets, I believe debuing with Tempest, that were in cycles of three; the first set came out with the largest amount of cards and also the run of lands and then the story was advanced through the next two sets. Ice Age had the first and the third (I think) but it was missing one..

Enter Coldsnap, Ice Age’s long lost sibling. Not much is currently known about this new expansion, well, by me at least. It seems that rather than re-release the run of snow-covered lands, we’re going to see snow-covered permanents and a new kind of mana specifically for this set. So now, instead of worrying about all those snow-covered swamps (regarding which the designers brought up a good point about, in a frozen land, isn’t everything snow-covered?) instead you might have some snowy elves or chilly artifacts that you can tap for this new and improved mana cost. It’ll have it’s own symbol, of course, which is nice. However this just kinda seems like another way to handle the same thing we already had with the snow-covered lands.. without having a second grouping of lands. I don’t mind, I suppose.

Regardless, I figure I’ll pick up some packs, I usually do. The pre-release events for this set are this week (7/8-7/9) so I assume that they should hit shelves next week or the one after that.