Current Mood: aggravated
Current Music: Helloween - High Live (Disc One) - Time Of The Oath, The (Squid's Redoubt)

Bit of a reply to the post someone else made on the Sins of a Solar Empire forum yesterday:

……if the only way to conquer a planet is by genocide. I know, I know, its only a game, but am I the only one who doesn’t like bombarding the entire surface of a planet with nuclear weaponry? The concept of nuking a planet’s entire civilian population makes me a little uneasy, even if its just a game. How about a forced evacuation or some kind of surrender if you coordinate a successful siege for a certain length of time? Is there no other option except planetary extinction? If there is anything I would ask of a future release it would be the ability to wage war with some code of honor. (OK, I’ll get off my soap box now, lol)

This caused an endless cascade, but there came a time even I had to weigh in:

It’s probably worth noting that the Advent have an entire interstellar cannon that fires PURE F’IN LOVE across massive distances, impacts a target gravity well, and causes the people on the planet in question to swoon and think happy thoughts about them.

If it’s any help, play the Advent and imagine the bolts of psychic energy descending from the heavens over the besieged worlds is made of Pink Ponies and Pure Rainbows, convincing the populace that you’re In The Right. And there you go. Tilt your head just so and it kind of looks that way, too.

Me, I’m blowing merry Hell out of the homes of politicians, pacificists, and other undesirables to free the poor downtrodden masses to toil in my space-mines in freedom.

As much as I gripe about the twitch-reaction speed of 12-year olds in Call of Duty 4 and how frequently they shoot me in the face while chatting amiably about the rampant faggotry, at least they’re keen enough to know there are some people that just have to be shot in the face to properly be dealt with. It’s been an inviolate and understood tool of statecraft since there were three guys standing around and two of them started reaching for a rock because the third was trying to take their women. (This is differentiated from the alternative case, the origin of government, where the two reached for rocks to take the third’s woman. And so began the organized taking perfectly good things from good people that they’d collectively get less use out of than if they’d simply left it alone in private ownership.)

My personal feeling is that if you want to hand-wring about the kind of lives you’re taking on poor planetary environments, perhaps you ought not to be playing games that involve hundreds to thousands of ships populated by abstract tens of thousands being blown to shite every hour. You know, just a feeling. There is no Amish faction in Sins.

And thank Hades for that.

Current Mood: predatory
Current Music: Wine, Woman, and Song - Around My Cabin Door - Our King (Squid's Redoubt)

After a rousing evening of running Canthan New Year missions with Kay and getting shot in the face in Call of Duty 4 with point5b, I decided to actually give in to my urges toward megalomania and hunger for destruction, and pick up where I left off in my last game of Sins of a Solar Empire. Luckily, I was bright enough to save it and the save game is still compatible with the latest patch, so in a brilliant fit of insight and genius, I just loaded it up and felt the command chair settle in around me.

I think my summary of the Advent, the faction I’m currently playing, to point5b was, “Imagine a race made up entirely of obsessive-compulsive psionic hive-minded Communist 12-year-old girls. Now put me in their overmind.” As a hint, this is what the Sins site itself says about the reaction of TEC (the ostensibly “normal human faction”) to discovering the progenitors of the Advent:

Shocking acts of deviancy, at every level of society, violated the venerable taboos common to all the Trader Worlds. Sinful cerebral integration technologies, unrestricted biological experimentation, strange forms of collectivism, and the wholesale usage of countless neurochemicals were but a few of the transgressions.

The voices for all the ships sound like petulant pre-teens on a bender and their fleets and defense forces lean heavily on fighter operations. Of course I’m having an absolute blast playing them.

This is a Deliverance Engine. It takes 18 Tactical Slots in planetary orbit to construct (by way of comparison, a big space laser gun takes one slot and a hangar for three bomber squadrons takes six.). What it does is act like a giant space mind control cannon that, when pointed at any planet in a solar system and charged up with antimatter and the trigger pulled, fires a big pulse of psychic energy at the target that temporarily makes them all mentally aligned to the Advent and gives any ships in combat in the system of the same faction as the firer a massive boost in power and morale.

It’s an Orbital Mind Control Satellite.

I fired it at my enemy’s homeworld. While my fleet was currently bombarding it to kill and enslave his population.

This is what it looked like:

You can’t see all my fleet, as it is arrayed all around the planet, the elements which can bombard doing so and the rest on the lookout for targets, but this is right after the Deliverance Engine gave everyone on the surface a bit of attitude adjustment. I now own this planet. I still need to hunt down the remnant of his colony worlds and destroy the pirate base system which is somewhere on the map, but I all but have this one in the bag.

Man, this is fun.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Olivia Tremor Control, The - Dusk At Cubist Castle - Green Typewriters (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) (

Let the pretty begin.

I managed to put together a decent set of screenshots from Sins of a Solar Empire for the moment, along with a lot of other associated artwork. I need to put together some nice screen backgrounds as well, but it’ll wait.

So, who’s with me on ravaging the stars with our mighty evil?

Current Mood: groggy
Current Music: Audra and the Antidote - Hello? - Ruby Fever (Squid's Redoubt)

Or rather, today is the release day of a game I’ve been anticipating for quite a while, Sins of a Solar Empire, which is a real-time 4x game with online multiplayer. For the hardcore old-school computer gaming geek like myself, this is the sort of thing you end up wondering where it’s been for the past decade or so, since it’s just not been done well. Or at all. Sins does an incredible job of joining the deeply pretty FX you expect in multiple fleets of ships flying around blowing the Hell out of each other with developing your homeworlds and resource bases for further conquest.

If you ever played Homeworld and wondered why it couldn’t be more like EVE Online, with multiple fleets under your command, starbases and planets, with vast sweeping fleets of destructive force issuing forth from your fingertips — but without the thousands of griefing assholes whose biggest fun is getting yours to be elsewhere — well, Sins is the game for you. And for me. For extra crispy goodness, Sins is being put out by Stardock, who also do Galactic Civilization, releasing it with no copyright protection because they trust their players and know a good game sells itself. GalCiv, for those in the know, is the pre-eminant 4x title at this point, powerfully leaving everything but Master of Orion II in the nebulaic dust of it’s passing. It’s that good.

I’ve been in Sins beta testing since release 1 and I have to tell you, it’s really undergone some serious refinement. It started out as a kind of mess of units and an interesting idea for a management interface, and they’ve really pulled it together. Basically, the idea is that the UI should be as minimal as possible. The epitome of that is a sort of tree-like break-down of your multiple fleets which hangs on the left of the screen. It displays, symbolically, where your fleets are, what they’re made of, and what they can do. And you can give every order in the game from that tree. Above, you have pull down panels for research, diplomacy, etc. And the bottom has a bar for doing special things with units with special powers, though they largely look after themselves. That’s it. The rest is full of a truly beautiful space window showing a smooth, continuous zoom from the scale of a single two-man fighter ship in deadly duelling combat across the surface of a frigate, all the way back to gazing at the galaxy as a whole, the nodes of star systems and jump-lanes between them, colour coded with the icons of the forces vying within.

Diplomacy deserves a special note, Unlike AIs in most games, the AIs in Sins can be influenced, and directly. But more importantly, indirectly. Say that you and I are playing and I decide I want your forces smashed, but I don’t really have the manpower to do so. What I can do is put a bounty on the heads of your forces, a reward I pay to whoever whacks one of your ships. Put the bounty high enough and it’s not just the hard-sccrabble pirates who’ll look to jump you, but even other human-run empires looking for the cash. You’re a wanted being. And I get to keep my claws clean.

Official release time for Sins is roughly 17 hours from now. If you want in on it, you can buy Sins directly from Stardock, and you should be able to download it by 8p Eastern. Everyone buying direct from Stardock gets the Collector’s Edition:

Sins of a Solar Empire comes in two forms:

Standard Edition ($39.95) which is what is available at retail.

and

Collector’s Edition ($49.95) which is available direct as well as certain retailers (I think Fry’s is one).

So what’s the difference?

The Collector’s Edition box includes the following bonus items:

• a foldout tech-tree poster
• artwork posters
• a hotkey card
• a music CD

For users who are doing download only, the Collector’s Edition is only $44.95 but they will still be able to get the music CD (we’ll be providing it as a digital download shortly after release) and PDF versions of the other materials (which we will also be providing after release). Since there’s less physical materials, it’s $5 less than the actual boxed version.

If you decide later you want the boxed unit, you can order that for $5 plus the cost of shipping and handling.

Also Collector’s Edition users will receive the Sins of a Solar Empire MyColors theme:

Users who didn’t buy the Collector’s Edition will be able to seperately purchase the digital content starting in late February.

If you buy the game directly from us, you are getting the Collector’s Edition (pre-order, beta tester, etc.). It is the only version of the game we sell digitally or box.

If this seems like the sort of thing you’re into (and I’m looking at you point5b and you, Kay, you wanna-be world-devouerers, get in on this fun stuff while you can.

Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Trace Adkins - Big Time - Big Time (Squid's Redoubt)

It says something about me that in my travels around the Net, I managed to find an RPG inspired by Gurren Lagann. Not only that, but the mechanics are rooted in InSpectres, possibly the best of the supernatural horror / reality show hybrid RPGs ever written.

OK, the only one. But you get the idea.

I almost want to run it. Almost. But then again, I kind of want to run a Bliss Stage inspired by a mix of Gundam and Grey Ranks focusing on the inevitable horror, suffering, misery, and just plain damn coolness of giant robots in war.

So many things I want to do, so few people nearby to do them.

But I’m sure __oni_no_kaze__ will be amused at the Gurren Lagann RPG and introduce his Navy buddies to it forthwith.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Bob Rivers - Twisted Christmas - I'm Dressin' Up Like Santa (When I Get Out On Parole) (Squid's Redo

bluelang posted a request for the indie games his friendly local game store should carry. I’m a geek so I wrote a fairly lengthy response, and now I share it with you:

If it were up to me …

• Sadly, you can’t put Bliss Stage on the pile, yet, but if you could, I’d be forced to demand it with great sincerity. Seriously, ultimate stuff. It successfully manages to marry shoujo sensibilities and focus on the pure relationships between characters with giant robot action. That’s cool, no matter who you are.

• Grey Ranks is top contender for Most Depressing Set-Up of All RPGs, but it rules the roost for generating gritty, emotional connections to characters in what might be legitimately one of the worst situations in world history. It’d be hard for me to find a group to play with just because it’s such serious stuff, but I want to.

• Capes is a must-have, not just for superheroes roleplaying, but as a core system when you want to see a setup that is GM-less and focuses directly on the conflict between aspects of the dynamically generated setting.

• With Great Power sticks next to Capes above. It’s far more “traditional” in it’s mechanisms (GM-full, etc), but the structures it uses are more narratively driven than the old standards like Champions, the calculous of gaming.

• Panty Explosion and it’s follow-up Homeroom Deathmatch absolutely have to be in that order, not the least reason being just the titles, man! But more wholly, because they take stripped down mechanics and spin in some of the most intimate anime tropes in unstinting ways. PE starts by simply defining that all PCs are Japanese schoolgirls. Period. HD starts with the assumption that you’re in Battle Royalle so … don’t get too attached to that character, K? Awesome stuff.

• Polaris was the game the guy who assembled Bliss Stage did first, and of all the things I’m recommending here, is the only one I don’t own. Reviews and actual play reports are fantastic and across the board, I think I feel pretty safe in suggesting that it should be in here. Besides, anything that John Sneed says utterly repels him is worth stocking in my book!

• Primetime Adventures is something you can’t talk about Indie without covering. If it eliminated the GM/Director position altogether, I’d like it somewhat better, but as it stands it’s fantastic and is one of the grounding texts for moving away from thinking about task-based resolution and into conflict-based resolution. Plus, c’mon, damn fun game, hello!

• InSpectres isn’t new, but it’s still one of the best indie game designs ever put together and every single indie-stocking game store should carry it. A rollicking weekly game of InSpectres in the back of a store should do more to sell indies than any amount of studied pontificating, and will.

Why don’t I have Polaris, you might ask? The answer will surprise you, “I have no idea.” But if you want to get it for me, or some other piece of indie gamery, Indie Press Revolution (IPR) is the place to go.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Various Artists - Nico / Femme Fatale (Squid's Redoubt)

Supreme Commander demo's up on Fileplanet.You know what that means.

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: drained
Current Music: Helloween / Dark Ride, The / I Live For Your Pain

I can blame nyxsis for making me reinstall Homeworld 2 and get back into commanding my fleet of starships in their perverse meander across the galaxy.

Alright, not nyxsis per se, but the fact that we listened to Ender's Game on the way to NC. Books-on-disc are great travel fare, and EG is a piece that keeps you engaged the whole way. It was inevitable that I'd want my crack at Command College rather than Battle School, and had the tools to do so.

The degree by which Card's EG is prescient about the field of modern RTS design is rather eerie, though only Homeworld's series really captures the ideas by which the book describes with any real faithfulness. Other games, like ORB, obsess too much on old-school RTS mechanics like varying resources for harvesting and not enough variation in ship designs and the difference in scale between fightercraft and capital ships.

No one, of course, really hinges play on the idea "the enemy gate is down." In my play tonight, the real statement is "the enemy gate is mine!" after I actually jack its control rig and repoint it wherever I want it to be going. Between the last time I played this game and now, apparently my skill in 3d space tactics and strategy has greatly improved. In the fourth scenario, midway through, I have a fleet of frigates and fightercraft that looks at targets the way sharks look at blonde skinny-dippers, just before I split off specific pieces to go deal with particular targets. The flak frigates act as a core around which the rest are built, turning enemy fighter groups into kibble in deeply scary ways.

Plus, the clouds of exploding flak look damn cool.

The torpedo frigates flank the flaks, and pop out heavy seeking missiles at range to thwap the heavy cruisers and such with payloads of great degree.

The Marine frigates flank those, and are my tactical reserve to send in and capture enemy ships worth taking. Why destroy something when you can steal it?

In front, there's an umbrella-like shield of interceptors, bombers, plasma corvettes, and other high-speed light-weight craft which cut things apart, bit by bit. Its actually really cool to watch the furball start as they swarm over and through enemy positions, whipping from side to side to acquire targets. The hard part is often watching a fleet's content and sending units that're damaged back to dock before they get wholly destroyed, with squadrons going zip-zip-zip. I often wish I could assign control of a battle group to another human to look after and marshal.

Not a perfect reproduction of Ender's Command College game, but it certainly could be. If, you know, they added the strangelet cannon ...

Current Location: 30045
Current Mood: angry

Make sure before you release your deeply, abidingly fun game on the public that you test to see if it's functional with Microsoft's handicapped access StickyKeys utility enabled. If its not compatible, do not release your game because you've just fucked over the folks who are working hardest to play your game that you've undoubtedly designed for all ten fingers on the keyboard anyway.

Insult to injury is not fun.

I'm looking at you, NetDevil and Pandemic.

Oh, yes, and if you have an online tech support interface, be sure that it doesn't throw an ugly error when someone tries to submit an issue.

Like this one:

Internal Server Error:

Server id: 13->3
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the site's support team and inform them of the time of the error and what operation
you were performing when the error occurred.

Thank you for your patience.

Is it really that hard to run a decent support architecture? Really?

Current Mood: grumpy
Current Music: Slim - Deathwish Debbie

Ah, yes, E3 is gaining IQ points like snow accumulates in Texas:

The video game industry's 2006 E3 Expo trade show in Los Angeles is getting a make-over -- banned are the swarms of sexy, semi-clad "booth babes" that in years past took the unveiling of new games and technology to titillating new levels.

Rules prohibiting the use of scantily clad young women to peddle video games are nothing new, but the handbook for this year's show in May outlines tough new penalties, including a $5,000 fine on the spot for the booth owner if the "booth babe" is semi-clad.

Right. So, the folks in Los Angeles, home of 80% of the sleazy porn production houses in the US and, worse, Hollywood, feels that scantily-clad women are inappropriate adjuncts to the advertising of the latest digital epic of destruction and chaos. Hades forfend that geek-boys and -girls see some bulging breast-line standing in front of an HD plasma popping the latest eye-watering graphics with a slow-motion sniper-round burrowing through some sad-sack's brain-pan. Might be inappropriate.

I don't want to seem like a hypocrite here. We all know I'm a great aficionado of sex and violence. More of both, please! What comes off looking hypocritical is the E3 show directorship, and in the worst kind of way: transparently.

Besides, if the companies producing a booth at E3 actually have to compete on the basis of their gameplay and not the tired monotone of the under-employed model standing with a second-rate knock-off of a plastic railgun showing a little mammary and thigh, who'll actually end up having folks go by the booth at all? The rest we can get in the comfort of our own homes from the websites of every company on Earth.

With popcorn. And slightly fewer women trying poorly to seem nice.

Current Mood: impressed
Current Music: Rush - Freewill (Squid's Redoubt)

Just a reminder, Shattered Union is due to be released on the 17th. We're talking both Xbox and PC releases, so no matter your preferred online solution (though why you wouldn't want to play it on the PC eludes me, with superior graphics and a better interface), you can join the reclamation of the United States!

Incidently, yes, I do intend to play the Confederated States as my preferred faction. What, me pass up on commanding a column of Lee tanks? Never!

Story:

Following a great increase in terrorism, internal strife, and ultimately, the nuclear destruction of Washington, D.C., the United States shatters into a half-dozen nation-states that descend into war. Take the helm of one of these newfound sovereignties (or the "peacekeeping" European Expeditionary Force) and struggle to reunify America�by any means necessary!

Features:

• Modern 3D tactical war game viewed from a "bird's-eye" overhead camera.
• Non-linear mission progression with changes based on player-made decisions.
• Real-time resolution of turned-based moves. Take your time while you decide your move, but once you have selected your action, see the results all play out in full animation models, exploding vehicles, and burning cities and forests!
• Fully destructible terrain/environment. As the battle proceeds, everything from explosions and destroyed buildings permanently mark the terrain. Moving tanks will leave tread marks that stay for the duration of the mission. At the end, very little will look the same.
• Fight your way across the United States! Had enough of the windy city? Then go ahead and bomb Chicago! Invade across the Rockies into California, capture the tank factories in Ohio, and lay siege to New York City! You decide - the fate of the nation is in your hands!
• Choose to play as one of seven different factions: California Commonwealth, Pacifica, Republic of Texas, Great Plains Federation, The Confederacy, New England Alliance and the European Union.
• Call up National Guard forces equipped with M1 Abrams battle tanks, Apache helicopters and stealth bombers. Or make a deal with the Russians and equip your boys with MiG fighters and T-95 Heavy Tanks.
• Online and offline multiplayer on all platforms.