Pretty Good Week for Gaming

[Yegolev]

Velorath, I've been told by people making Wii games that the wiimote is tiring.

Just sayin.'

It occured to me when I read this that game programmers are not the primary target audience for the Wii.  Game programmers are, I think, generally of the traditional hardcore demographic.  The next thought I had was that game designers and developers working on the Wii are going to be tasked with making a lot of games that they probably would not want to play themselves.  I don't play a lot of non-gamer games, the bulk being children's edutainment stuff, but they are generally of inferior quality when compared to "real" games.  Well, those not produced by EA, that is.  The question is, is it because of the disconnect between implementors and the product, or because kids don't write angry letters when JumpStart First Grade crashes and eats their display settings?

As for being tiring, I can definitely see that.  Still looks lke it could be fun.

[HaemishM]

Sure, it can be tiring. I'm not surprised, it'll be working muscles most GAMERS don't work for long periods of time normally.

Give it 1 month, and it won't be an issue. Either the lardass no-exercise gamer will have grown a muscle besides his wank hand, or he'll collapse from a nacho artery blockage. Problem solved.

Seriously, the sandy vaginas talking about how tiring a Wiimote is going to be are astounding me. It's going to be no different than learning to play with DDR mats, Guitar Hero controllers or fucking bongos.

[Velorath]

Velorath, I've been told by people making Wii games that the wiimote is tiring.

Just sayin.'

Without any sort of context around that (how many hours they're playing and what kind of games for example) that doesn't mean a lot to me.

[Velorath]

Try my little experiment for a full 5 minutes, and tell me it doesn't get really tiring and really annoying extremely quickly.  Until then, you're just talking out your ass.

Honestly, I'd much rather just try one of the demo units whenever they get to stores for 5 minutes or longer if possible and get an indication of how it actually feels (not to mention if the games are fun).

[NiX]

Velorath, I've been told by people making Wii games that the wiimote is tiring.

Just sayin.'

I've been told by Jesus that if I masturbate I'm going to hell. Shits to that, eh?

I really don't get why you're all arguing this. This really comes down to if you really want to do it. If you feel like you won't like to nudge your hand every which way to play games, you're obviously going to get sick of a Wiimote in 10 minutes or less. For those playing cause they think it's a good idea, well, they're obviously not going to care that they have to move their hand around. Probably won't notice after awhile either.

[Sky]

Sure, it can be tiring. I'm not surprised, it'll be working muscles most GAMERS don't work for long periods of time normally. Give it 1 month, and it won't be an issue. Either the lardass no-exercise gamer will have grown a muscle besides his wank hand, or he'll collapse from a nacho artery blockage. Problem solved.

Wow, that was insulting.

I don't want to play Zelda for hours with a Guitar Hero controller. Games are for gaming, not working your wanking muscles (not sure why you think it'll work other muscles). The exercise angle is stupid, the whole thing is stupid. But that's ok, I just won't buy one, I'm certainly not sandy-crotched over it like I am with those fucking 2142 ads.

[Signe]

You shouldn't wank anyway.  It's dirty.

[WayAbvPar]

It doesn't have to be dirty!

[HaemishM]

Sure, it can be tiring. I'm not surprised, it'll be working muscles most GAMERS don't work for long periods of time normally. Give it 1 month, and it won't be an issue. Either the lardass no-exercise gamer will have grown a muscle besides his wank hand, or he'll collapse from a nacho artery blockage. Problem solved.

Wow, that was insulting.

You're welcome.

My insult was aimed at the people complaining that it would be tiring. They don't know that it will be any more than I know it won't be. But it sure sounds like folks wanting to find a reason not to like it. Just like I look for things not to like about the PS3 because I am wholly offended by the price tag. Thankfully, Sony keeps making it easy to find.

[Strazos]

I'll just have to wait and see.

[Yoru]

Guild 2 is finally in stores. My EB had one and only one copy (which I dutifully snatched up). First inspection reveals no Starforce bullshit, so installation is a go.

I'll probably write something up on it, although I really don't expect anyone but myself to go for medieval-themed business dynasty simulations. :P

[Strazos]

Is there a Demo? I have never played any Guild games, though the premise seems interesting enough.

[stray]

I'll probably write something up on it, although I really don't expect anyone but myself to go for medieval-themed business dynasty simulations. :P

I find most simulation games to be amusing, no matter the subject matter. I'm just a bit wary about this one. Supposedly there's a lot of bugs.

Either way, don't wait too long for that writeup. 

[Yoru]

I'll probably write something up on it, although I really don't expect anyone but myself to go for medieval-themed business dynasty simulations. :P

I find most simulation games to be amusing, no matter the subject matter. I'm just a bit wary about this one. Supposedly there's a lot of bugs.

Either way, don't wait too long for that writeup. 

Definitely buggy; I played through the tutorial (took about an hour) and there's certainly quite a few annoying bugs - for example, during one tutorial level you have to chat with four people. The spoken dialog finishes long before the lipsyncing animation completes, but the conversation doesn't "end" until that animation is done, so you sit there for several seconds watching someone flap their jaw silently.

The camera controls are a bit wonky (the mousewheel zoom isn't smooth at all!) and the new interface is... not so hot. There's a number of bizarre and unintuitive things in it.

I'm hoping the simulation itself is deep and interesting enough to stay engrossed through the sharp learning curve. In the two seasons I managed to play (yay time compression), the raw materials market appears to have gone into chronic shortage. It's not fun to sit around waiting for fresh raw materials to arrive with little else to do.

[Trippy]

Sid Meier's Railroads!

Somehow I hadn't heard about this. Is it like an updated Railroad Tycoon or something?

First impressions based on playing the tutorial -- it's Railroad Tycoon 3.25 with shinier graphics, dumbed down slightly (in ways both good and bad), none of the PopTop developers (Phil Steinmeyer having left a while ago), and the de rigeur crappy crappy Firaxis UI.

[Stephen Zepp]

Sid Meier's Railroads!

Somehow I hadn't heard about this. Is it like an updated Railroad Tycoon or something?

First impressions based on playing the tutorial -- it's Railroad Tycoon 3.25 with shinier graphics, dumbed down slightly (in ways both good and bad), none of the PopTop developers (Phil Steinmeyer having left a while ago), and the de rigeur crappy crappy Firaxis UI.

Any thoughts on what is up with the dumbing down of the game mechanics in these types of games? Alpha Centauri had the best--user customizable units, and since then things have gotten "easier", and way the hell more boring.

[Trippy]

First impressions based on playing the tutorial -- it's Railroad Tycoon 3.25 with shinier graphics, dumbed down slightly (in ways both good and bad), none of the PopTop developers (Phil Steinmeyer having left a while ago), and the de rigeur crappy crappy Firaxis UI.

Any thoughts on what is up with the dumbing down of the game mechanics in these types of games? Alpha Centauri had the best--user customizable units, and since then things have gotten "easier", and way the hell more boring.

Probably to try and make games more accessible to the "non-hardcore" gamers.

[stray]

I like the new Firaxis UI's.

Not sure if I'm not "hardcore" or not. Probably not, at least when it comes to Civ.

[Trippy]

First impressions based on playing the tutorial -- it's Railroad Tycoon 3.25 with shinier graphics, dumbed down slightly (in ways both good and bad), none of the PopTop developers (Phil Steinmeyer having left a while ago), and the de rigeur crappy crappy Firaxis UI.

Alright I played through the first scenario (I lost) and my second impression is that train routing/track management is a fricking pain in the ass and the game doesn't really offer any improvements over RT3 except for the graphics and some minor UI improvements which are poorly implemented (and major UI regressions in other areas). If you already have RT3 or RT2 (my favorite of the PopTop series) I don't see any reason to get this game. If you really really have to get it, you might want to wait for the patch.

[Trippy]

I like the new Firaxis UI's.

Not sure if I'm not "hardcore" or not. Probably not, at least when it comes to Civ.

Here are just some of the UI issues with SMR:

Scrolling with the mouse is way too slow, even with the setting on max. Yes you can speed up the scrolling by holding down the Shift key but then it's like turbo scroll. The keyboard scrolling is faster for some inexplicable reason but I don't like reaching across with my left hand to scroll with the arrow keys cause that bothers my carpal tunnel and yes you can remap the keyboard but why couldn't they just set the damn mouse scroll speed properly?

You can rotate your view with the middle mouse buttton but it just stops when you reach a certain point in both directions which forces you to reverse direction to get to the angle you wanted if you are too far in one direction. Who TF decided that was a good idea?

You can't zoom out far enough to see a good chunk of the map at once. Basically you are always zoomed into the map and the only direction you can zoom is to get in closer. And you have to spin your mouse wheel a bazillion times just to zoom in and out the very small amount that you can.

The towns and cities all have exaggerated building heights now, which is cool looking but that means all sorts of stuff is obscured behind them like, you know, your tracks and stations. So you are trying to lay out a track through a city and you can't see where it's going exactly so you have to somehow rotate the view with the middle mouse button while holding the left mouse button down. And there doesn't seem to be an undo feature so if you let go of the left mouse button accidentally you better hope you have a recent save.

As you mouse over things you get nifty popups showing you things like what raw materials something produces or requires to produce other materials. Unfortunately it's very sensitive about the "hot spot" that will trigger the popup and you spend much of your time hunting for the proper spot. And then when it does pop up much of the time it's obscured by other objects being displayed so you have to try and rotate the view so you can actually read the information in the popup but then you bump up against the rotation limitation and have to spin the view all the way in the other direction just to see what the frick it's saying.

Deleting track sections is incredibly painful. It's backwards from every other building game out there that uses a bulldozer-style tool in that it makes you select the track segment first and then hit the delete icon and on top of that in my first game 99% of the time I got a "you can't delete this section of track" error when trying to delete portions of my track and no there were not any trains sitting on those sections.


Some of the useful UI improvements they made are that buildings will move out of the way of your tracks so you don't have to worry about the placement of stations like in the PopTop games. Also there's no station resource "radius". There's just a green circle you have to put your track inside to be able to gather whatever resources. That also makes it a lot easier to place things.

There's all sorts of helpful popups now (when they aren't obscured) showing you resource information like what cities are demanding certain resources and the like.

Track laying is perhaps a little too user-friendly now. It'll by default create bridges, tunnels, flatten terrain and create elevated tracks for you when you stretch out a track. You can override some of that using keyboard commands which you often want to do because all the "help" it's giving you is costing you extra money but it's somewhat of a pain to do.

Edit: fixed typos

[Trippy]

Sid Meier's Railroads! is just broken:



Despite having a nice little "triangle" south of Phoenix the game will not let me route a train from the vineyards to the west to Phoenix. Argh!

[Riggswolfe]

Any thoughts on what is up with the dumbing down of the game mechanics in these types of games? Alpha Centauri had the best--user customizable units, and since then things have gotten "easier", and way the hell more boring.

Not to derail but I'd pay in blood and intestines for a copy of the Alien Crossfire expansion for Alpha Centauri. Probably one of my dumbest moves ever was buying it for my ex and not myself.

[Sky]

Any thoughts on what is up with the dumbing down of the game mechanics in these types of games? Alpha Centauri had the best--user customizable units, and since then things have gotten "easier", and way the hell more boring.

I actually put that back to Civ2. Colonization made such great improvements to the core Civ game, yet it was all ignored making Civ2 (which was arguably the best Civ, but could've been better). For instance, the entire building of structures you could actuall assign citizens to, having specialist citizens rather than happy, content, unhappy simplicity. Having the school to teach citizen skills, being able to use indians or train them as citizens, missions and missionaries. Refining buildings, a glimmer of a great trading sim buried in there...such wasted potential, I feel Brian Reynolds was the man, not Sid. Alpha Centauri and Colonization were my two favorites...and Reynolds had to go RTS #@%*.

Not to derail but I'd pay in blood and intestines for a copy of the Alien Crossfire expansion for Alpha Centauri. Probably one of my dumbest moves ever was buying it for my ex and not myself.

I had the abandonware version (Firaxis: if you don't want people to "pirate" it, SELL IT I WANT TO BUY IT and not at $85 fucking dollars), but it was buggy as shit and would crash after maybe twenty turns.

I'm bummed they made another railroad game instead of SMAC or Colonization.

I also dislike the new UI for the reasons Trippy lists. Finding an comfortable zoom/tilt in Civ4 just doesn't seem possible. I hate the way the scale is all off, too. Moving to 3d took away a lot of the boardgame feel and now the scale of units/cities/environment just looks silly.

[Riggswolfe]

I had the abandonware version (Firaxis: if you don't want people to "pirate" it, SELL IT I WANT TO BUY IT and not at $85 fucking dollars), but it was buggy as shit and would crash after maybe twenty turns.

I'm bummed they made another railroad game instead of SMAC or Colonization.

I also dislike the new UI for the reasons Trippy lists. Finding an comfortable zoom/tilt in Civ4 just doesn't seem possible. I hate the way the scale is all off, too. Moving to 3d took away a lot of the boardgame feel and now the scale of units/cities/environment just looks silly.

Same here. I did see on the Firaxis site that they are considering a sequel to Alpha Centauri. And sadly, I considered ponying up the $85. The amount of play I got out of the original alone would make it worth it but it just hurts to much to lay down that kind of cash for an expansion. I'm sort of hoping EA will put out some kind of "Sid Meier's Greatest" collection that will include it. Maybe in the Super Duper Civilizations Universe Collection.

[Sky]

There was a laptop collection that I boneheadedly didn't buy at walmart or some retail outlet like that. I think it had SMAX.

Oops, I just did a search and now that's going for $120 (originally $20). WTF.

http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Arts-The-Laptop-Collection/dp/B0000CE1L7

[Riggswolfe]

I'm in the same boat on that laptop collection. I read somewhere that Alien Crossfire is now one of the rarest of these kinds of software titles.

[Sky]

I should've emailed Sid. RR Tycoon is going for $10 on Amazon. RRT2 is $6. RRT3 is $12. Alien Crossfire is $85 and the collection with both is $120.

Guess which one you should've remade, dipshit? 

Hell, Colonization is going for $27 for crissakes. I'd be more interested in a SimGolf remake than the stuff he's been doing (pirates and railroads).

[Xanthippe]

I'm disappointed but not surprised that the Guild 2 game is buggy.  The first was also, which made me wistful.  I don't like being wistful, so I think I'll pass on the Guild 2.

I was also disappointed that Colonization got dropped more or less as a venture.  It had a great deal of potential, some terrific ideas but it missed in some vital way for me.  Still, I was looking forward to something being made from it that was better.

The screenshots of SM: Railroads (or whatever it's called) reminds me a bit of that old RR simulation made by Maxis? I think called A-Train.  I really liked it, but it also missed in the simulation end of things, just didn't quite have it down.  Again I was disappointed that nothing came of it.

The bells and whistles of graphics and sound only take me so far, but if the game itself is flawed, then that's the deal breaker.  Why do people spend so damned much on bells and whistles and not so much on gameplay?

[Yoru]

I'm disappointed but not surprised that the Guild 2 game is buggy.  The first was also, which made me wistful.  I don't like being wistful, so I think I'll pass on the Guild 2.

I intend to do a real article, but the gist of it is... pass on it. The new interface is the sux, the gameplay has been reformed into some grotesque RPG-sim hybrid, and there's a lot of systems that just came out poorly (politics/favor is completely broken - in the bad sense). Oh, and it's also really buggy.

One particularly amusing bug I call "The Gout". About half of a person's facial polygons puff out, stop animating, and get a ghasty white pallor, so it looks kind of like they have a big bloated face staring forward while their body, scalp and neck gently bob up and down around it.

[Trippy]

One particularly amusing bug I call "The Gout". About half of a person's facial polygons puff out, stop animating, and get a ghasty white pallor, so it looks kind of like they have a big bloated face staring forward while their body, scalp and neck gently bob up and down around it.

Sounds avatar worthy.