The Five A.M. Hall of Fame
Last night saw me still playing a computer game at 5:00 in the morning. I'd lost track of time. There are very few games that can do that to me. Doom did it. Frontier: Elite 2 did it. X-Com and Master of Orion (I and II) did it. I think waaaaay back in the day Summer Games (by Epyx) for the C-64 did it - though it has to share the distinction with Forbidden Forest because BOTH games were being played alternately during the night - Summer Games was just the one that had been going for at least an hour before the sun came up and warned us what time it was. Civilization I did it. I vaguely recall some of the Ultima games doing that (notable 4 and 7).

I think few action games make this list because the intensity of the gameplay can be wearying. RPGs - especially the modern real-time oriented one - can have the same problem. Daggerfall made it to 3:00 AM multiple time, but then the breaks where you have to read and follow plot gave my fatigue a chance to catch up with my brain and tell it that I was going to pay a hard price the following day. Turn-based strategy games are my biggest vice... like a highly addictive drug, you can start a game thinking that you can play a few turns and quit whenever you want, but sooner you find yourself anticipating your next turn before your current one is finished, and you just need one or two more to see your current plans to fruition. Your "quick fix" turns into an eight-hour-long session, and you've kissed all hope of productivity or a good night's sleep goodbye.

And now, newly indoctrinated into that personal FIVE-A.M. Hall of Fame for me is: Galactic Civilizations, by Stardock. Hey, and it's an indie title to boot!

On the surface, it looks like Master of Orion. In fact, there's a lot of similarities - you could say this is what Master of Orion 3 should have been, if MOO3 hadn't been released as a highly polished bag of unplayable crap. Do I sound bitter? Good. I bought Master of Orion 3 a couple of years ago, INSTEAD of this game, because I was a nice, boring, loyal fan of the brand, even though few of the team members had anything to do with the original classics. I tried hard to like it, and even endured two very full, VERY long campaigns to give it a fair shake. We're talking 16-20 hours of gameplay here. If a game hasn't shown you it's good side in that much time, you may as well just stick a fork in it anyway, because it's very done.

Okay - moving away from that sad, sad topic. Galactic Civilizations + the Altarian Prophecy. I'm a latecomer --- GC2 is due out "soon." There's plenty of reviews archived out there for this game, so I won't try and review it. I'll just bullet-list some points that struck me as interesting - some good, some not so good, some just in-between.

* I really missed the ship-building and fleet-handling of the MOO series. This isn't necessarily a bad thing --- it was kind of a clunky side-game in the first Master of Orion, and it kept getting worse from there (to the point of unplayably horrible in MOO3). But I still miss it --- having unique technologies and seeing them play out in front of you were a lot of fun. In GC, the ships just automatically upgrade, and the battles are simple Civilization-style affairs... these ships battle these ships, ZAP-ZAP, next move.

* The game has a fun, informal sense of humor. I love that. The text messages aren't intended to be killer jokes, but they are obviously not intended to be taken seriously. It gives the game a fun personality. I nearly fell out of my chair when an enemy race that had brutally attacked me, but then been beaten back severaly, decided to negotiate a cease-fire. (The skilled diplomat began, "Hi. Um, how's it going? About this war..."

* The tech tree is suitably huge - I have YET to complete a game with a completed tech tree. I'm curious as to what happens if you do complete the tech tree.

* There are SEVERAL paths to victory - and you can control which ones will be enabled for any particular game (I think there's at least one that only the non-player races can reach). This adds something of a non-directly competitive race aspect to the game --- you can be closing in on the victory conditions in one area, but another race is doing the same in another area, and it's a question of who meets their criteria first. This keeps things very interesting.

* Possibly due to the multiple-paths-to-victory thing (and maybe it's because I've only been playing on the easier difficulty levels), but the other races don't seem to be as genocidal as other games. They actually act reasonably from time to time. In fact, they exhibit the unheard-of behavior of actually volunteering gifts to the player (!!!) - mainly if you are a potential warmongering bully and they are trying to buy you off. But it actually feels more like a boardgame between real players - you don't get the sense that all the AI are secretly collaborating to prevent you from winning. (MOO 1 felt this way too, most of the time).

* One thing I really don't like is how so much of the game is represented by just a handful of numbers. You find all this cool, exotic-sounding technology that could be very cool... and all it does is give you some extra bonuses. That's very unsatisfying. It would be nice if more of these technologies opened up new options to the player.

* It's also really hard to figure out where all those numbers come from over time... you end up with a bunch of insignificant bonuses (or penalties) that you don't notice, but they all add up over time. It's also hard comparing these numbers to see how they work --- but some of that may come with more time playing.

* There is a "good-evil" alignment in the game, as in an RPG. This effects how other races treat you, and your alignment can change based on your actions to several moral questions that appear during the game. These are really cool - you are given one of three choices. The "Evil" choice usually gives you a quick and significant bonus, while the "good" choice involves some kind of sacrifice. I like this, though it's a little unclear what the advantage is of being good - unless it makes it much easier to gain good alies (I haven't seen how well evil nations band together - though it's easy to imagine that they aren't the most loyal of allies in the game). It might also effect the economy and morale of the people (after all, that corruption's gonna trickle down...) I need to read up on this to understand it more. Assuming there are some real long-term benefits to being good, then this is a really cool and interesting mechanic.

* I really love the ability to gain bonuses to your ships by exploration. In most 4X games, you can gain a few bonuses or new technologies early in the game through exploration, but by mid-game that's all over. From what I can tell, these little space anomalies or pieces of junk keep spawning over time. While you may not be able to keep up with advancing technology through exploration alone, it is a viable "supplement" to the tech race. Of course, you can gain techs by espionage and conquest as well, so there are plenty of options if you don't want to focus too much budget into research.

* I wish there was more ability to bombard / blockade a planet from space. There's no opportunity to "soften them up" with bombardment before launching an invasion. Maybe that's not entirely unrealistic (I have heard that the "softening up" of German forces by air prior to D-Day had a negligable effect), but its still frustrating to have no real way to besiege a highly-populated system prior to invasion.

* There is a LOT of depth in the game, and a lot of factors you have to juggle. It's hard to win with just a single strategy, and except for the "cakewalk" difficulty level it's impossible to just be great at everything.

* Speaking of which - the difficulty factors (including new mods from the Alterian Prophecy expansion) show a really huge range of challenges. I really don't like games like this that make you feel like an idiot because you get clobbered your first few times at the easiest difficulty levels, when you are still learning, or that take such huge steps in difficulty that you find yourself helplessly stuck "between levels" as one is boringly easy and the next is frustratingly difficult. (I did play on "Masochistic" difficulty level briefly - it seems like it drops you into the middle of the mid-game with starting technology and little elbow room... ouch!)

Anyway, while I have plenty of nit-picks (more room for the sequel, I guess), overall it seems a worthy addition to the "Five A.M. Hall of Fame." Unfortunately, I have way too many things going on right now to indulge in much of that (ah, to be young and back in college where I could just blow of a class the next day if I was so weak...)
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:06 PM (Permalink)