Civilisation Revolutions

I've had a lot of difficulty writing this review for a simple reason; I don't know how to pitch it. Let me explain:
When I first started writing this blog I made the decision that yes it would be a bit random, and certainly not cutting edge, but the audience had to be wide; particularly for computer games it had to appeal to people like myself (Who have been playing computer games all be it intermittently almost all their lives - since the BBC back in 1982 when I was 4), to my partner (who frequently expresses how much she hates computer games and is on a mission to discourage me from playing them), right through to my flatmate (who works for a games company).
So a review of civilisation is tricky as if my memory serves me correctly I had a copy of back in the days of the Atari ST, if not then we certainly had it on at least one of our Amigas. This is a game therefore that spans nearly 2/3rds of my life and yet the question still needs answering why am I still so addicted to it? Why do i still find myself going on there with the intention of playing it for half an hour or so and still be there at 3am unable to leave the computer?
From that you can guess that the new version is just as addictive as the earlier versions and in my eyes the remake has lived up to the old ones in terms of playability. More importantly for me it is very playable on the XBOX and also (my flatmate informs me) on the DS.

So if you are familiar with Civ, then you can stop reading here, yes it is as addictive as the earlier versions, yes the interface does work on a console, yes that sim speak the avatars use is bloody annoying, but you can turn the volume off for that at least, and no it doesn't really add much to the previous versions of Civ except possibly a balancing of all the modes of combat and some pretty animations if that's your thing. If you enjoyed civ in the past and want a solution for your surrent games platform of choice then civilisation revolutions should leave you at the very least sleepless, even if you disagree with some of the fine tuning changes they've made.

For newcomers then, what is Civ?
Well a turn based strategy game where the aim is to become the dominant civilisation on your map. This can be achieved in a number of ways:
Military
Simply wipe out enough of your competitors that everyone else is crushed beneath your mighty war machine. IME this is one of the easiest ways to win the game, and often the most fun, still where's the challenge in easy.
Culture:
An interesting concept introduced in the new game (to me) is culture. Each city produces culture and you can do things like build temples and cathedrals and wonders (such as the hollywood wonder) to enhance your culture. If you are cultured enough neighbouring cities will want to join your culture. This is an interesting feature of the game as on my first time playing as a military domination I lost 3 of my major cities to my neighbour because i was pouring all my resources into building fighting units and the citizens of my industrial cities thought "bugger this, we'll join an interesting civilisation" and left me. Sure I swiftly concoured them back again, but that was enough of an experience to mean that the next game I played to win a culture victory which added a very interesting spin to the game with a significantly different set of objectives. i.e. every other method of winning requires a large number of cities, with culture you can win with a powerbase of just 3 cities (provided you supe them up enough)
Economic
Easy, get the most money, build the world bank, control the world. (You think that's your sword you're waving at me? You still owe me money for that :-)
Scientific
As part of civilisation you research new technologies, get to the stage of building a spaceship the soonest, and get it to Alpha Centuri before your capital is taken, then you win the game.

So lots of strategy, a multitude of tactics. Certainly not hot paced blowing aliens up stuff, but IMO far more entertaining. (BTW don't get me wrong, i still love those types of games, just see my gears of war review, it's just a case of different things for different moods).

So what else? If you're not convinced by now you never will be, so I thought I'd share some of my tactics I use while playing the game, I'm not saying these are perfect, but it may save you some time in figuring these out for yourself:

At the start of the game, siting your first city asap is vital, unless you start at a totally rubbish place, I would accept the square you land on just so that you can get producing things as soon as possible.
Attack those barbarians - they're always an easy kill.
Send your first military unit out exploring, use your second or 3rd to guard the city.
Once you have a couple of militia exploring and a guard on your first city, found a second and third city asap.
From this point on always make sure you have at least one guard unit in each city. Later in the game you'll need more then one. Three units of the same kind can be combined into an army. An army can normally defend itself against an attack by any unit of the same technology level. If you need to withstand a determined attack, (multiple units) or attack from a more advanced foe, invest in city walls. These sort of things though you don't need to worry about until later in the game.
Look very carefully at the terrain before you found a city: You need some food and some production (unless you wnat to buy everything), some science/money. You can site a city to be very rich in one of these, but you need at least a little of all of them. Also don't site cities too close to each other, once you have a courthouse you will be able to utilise squares 2 away, so don't site cities any closer thn 4 squares.
Decide early on the end game you want, ideally before you start the game - this will help choose the civilisation you want to play as.
For a military victory this is my rough plan. Early on get as many cities as possible, spread them out sparsely. As soon as you run out of land to expand into (you come across a neighbour in every direction), stop and build more cities in the bits you have missed until you they are as close as economical (4 squares). Identify which cities are your production cities and which are your money cities and skew their resources appropriately. Wherever you have the chance put the effort into food so that your city will grow, then swap effort to production/money as needed. Pour your research effort into military technology, if you don't have the most advanced military units available then you are very unlikely to win the game this way. If you are the first to get catapult/canon for example then that is the cue to go on a concurring spree. Build roads from your production cities to your cities nearest your neighbour you are preparing to attack. First make sure your base of attack city is well defended (remember which units at which technology level are best at defence and attack) then send them out with a defence force too. Once you have the initiative, press it. I often find that the computer will anticipate my above moves and prepare the nearest city for such an attack, so I will where the map allows have an initial attack on the city it expects me to attack, then in a few turns change my attack to another nearby city where there are probably less defence forces and therefore quickly capture that one. This blitz style method worked for Hitler and it can work for you too. Once you have the hang of this technique the military victory all comes down to perfecting the flow of resources and troops. Pay attention when you capture a city what it is good at and what it needs and build it up appropriatly. Always try and stay at least equal with technology and if you can get ahead and go on a spree. Once you get sufficiently large you can have two attack forces which can (if you do a thrust with one force, then with another) be very effective at catching the computer off guard.
So I would start with a military victory as that gives you the basics of resource management that you need for all the victories.
Technology Victory. Similar to the military one, but your emphasis is very much on the tech. You will at times find yourself well ahead of your neighbours in technology and therefore during these times I press my advantage and take their cities as is convenient. Also this is a stratogy to go seafaring and have bases on multiple continents. Go exploring with settlers early and have a base on each major continent and you'll be surprised how easy you can overrun your neighbours. If doing this though beware of being overrun by other's culture - you'll need to build temples/cathedrals and city walls in your seed city unless you go concurring. Watch carefully which cities are producing lots of science and equip them with libraries and universities.
Culture Victory.
A good victory to go for if you find yourself with a few very strong cities close together. Especially if this is on a large continent shared with many other civilisations. You'll eventually absorb your neighbouring cities. One tirck I found is if you're feeling a bit militant and you notice your nearest neighbour's city is on the verge of converting then go and concur the city beyond the one that is about to convert and you'll get two cities for one.

Governments:
Democracy - great if you're on a build phase where you're trying to strengthen your existing cities and don't care about going concurring. Equally good if you're falling behind others materially, but are more advanced technologically and need them to declare war on you(because you can't declare war on them as a democracy). An absolute must for culture or economic victory. I tend to use this if I'm not feeling very aggressive, often then I'll end up being ahead in one area which will mean someone declares war on me. At that point you can usually use your advantage to get at least two cities of theirs before they offer peace. Then throw your resources into getting those new cities up to spec and repeat the process.
Communism - Good for growing the number of cities as settlers are very cheap. Not bad for military either
Republic - a good one for a concurring phase as you can declare war and are reasonably productive

If I can think of any more things to do I'll add them later...

Gears Of War 2 Review

First impressions:

• Lots of cutscenes - about half the game play time feels like I'm watching cutscenes
• To add to that, it seems like someone in the first one complained that there wasn't much story, so they've tried to make up for that and then some.
  
• They have kept the duck and cover mechanic that was so much fun in the first - this is a good thing
  
• There are a few annoying parts where you need to shoot a moving target - very easy with a mouse, (How I anticipate the game was designed) not so easy on the XBOX 360 gamepad that I'm using.
• I'm first playing on the normal difficulty level and there seems to be an aweful lot of level and scare monsters. I'm looking forward to re-playing it on a harder level.
• The AIs for your companions is the best i have come across in any game - they are actually willing to push ahead without you having to force them forwards
• Ammo is (on this difficulty level) plentyful.
• They've (mostly) avoided the current trend in current generation FPSs of making everything 20,000 different shades of grey + blood. There are blues and yellows and everything. This is a very good thing - I can see the georgous game that I'm playing.
  
• The actual combat itself is fun! Contrast this to Prey.
• No more bezerkers (yet). I hated these levels in the first game - the first one was fun/new/challenging; by the 3rd time I was bored and fed up. So far they've avoided this and that's for the best. In a game that's supposed to be a fast paced shooter, sneeking around and stealth are a welcome occasional change of game mechanic, but still not what I bought the game for - stick to what you bought the game for.
• So far no vehicle section - again this is good. If i wanted to play a driving game I'd break out the steering wheel and play PGR 4 - unless they wanted to support using the steering wheel as a method of controlling the combat vehicle - then that would be cool! (for the first time anyway).
• They have a habit of doing: checkpoint, really boring easy section, section that requires you to learn new skill/figure out puzzle. So having a difficult bit after a boring bit means you have to play the same boring bit several times - which grates!
  

Overall, a lot of fun and a very very good looking game. Just don't take it too seriously, even if the person who wrote all the cutscenes that break the flow of the game did.

Webcomics

So I thought a repository of the comics I like or dislike and why. This will be an ongoing post as I'm always discovering new things; however as i discover new ones they'll probably get their own post as appropriate.

Where appropriate I'll link to the first comic in the series that I find funny/worthwhile reading. This is important for some comics as some don't get going for a while (xkcd in particular). I've broken down the comics into rough categories, obviously many of them cross multiple categories so I won't obsess over which should be in which.

Geeky Comics
So since I've started with xkcd lets put that one first. Very sciency and geeky and a big fan of using the alt text in order to convey a further joke. If you have the slightest bit of geek in you, you should read this.
In a similar vein is Irregular Webcomic. This again uses geeky humour and science as regular plot points but goes into great depth with some explanations sometimes in more detail than you could imagine. there are a number of set themes that he uses and probably the best archive system of anything out there on the net.
And whilst we're in the geeky vein how could I not mention Nukees. One of the oldest comics on the web and certainly some of the weirdest humour/plots I have know. Still it's good fun.
Of course there is also GPF. Although it is beginning to show its age a bit...

Space Comics
Ones that have space travel as their main theme, it seems to be quite a common theme.
The utterly classic freefall. Still running after over a decade, still scientifically accurate and still yet to have anything resembling significant plot action occur. Ok that's a bit too harsh, but I nominate this webcomic for the award of "Slowest plot development ever".
Ever wanted a spoof of Battlestar galactica, star trek, star trek, heroes and goodness knows what else in one place? Well either way there's Legostar Galactica.
Finally there's outrim. Placed last for 2 reasons: First I've only just started reading it, and second because it strongly overlaps with the next category. Another comic that tries to get bits of it's science accurate and where it is inaccurate it is at least sufficiently implausible that it just might happen.

Animal Comics
A massive theme seems to be one a world of intelligent animals in place of humans.
The origin of this genre must be found close to Kevin and Kell. From which I am sure many others have taken a lead. There's also Sherman's Lagoon, Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy that I recommend.

Story Comics
Most webcomics have a story, but these I class here as being story first and comic second.

This is the only place i can put Sam and Fuzzy. It's a weird comic, but it has its moment. The NDA enforcing robot being one of my favourites. What can I say? I liked it so much I bought the T-Shirt, not to mention the explicit cowbell...
Then there is afterlife blues created by the same people who did the epic Miracle of Science. Afterlife has yet to get going, but if MOS is anything to go by, we are in for a real treat.

Mad Scientist
Mad science seems to be a staple of webcomics, so here are a few of the main ones in my life:

Miracle of science I previously mentioned in the story section, but happily fits here.
The definition of this genre would be the excellent Casey and Andy. Unfortunately finished now, but the author has other projects so we can hope...
Of course considering all this mad science where would life be without some radioactive panda - smaller and infused with atomic energy. A cast complete with mad scientists, zombies, mad robots, werewolves and runaway genetic experiments.
For somewhere in between surreal and out of this world you can't go wrong with a bit of Bob the angry flower.

Gaming
Ever played D&D? Well, I love this concept; imagine a world where Tolken never existed and the story of lord of the rings came about only as part of a D&D adventure. After this the same people who did irregular webcomic went and did this superb parody of Star wars EP1.
now I have mixed feelings about Ctrl alt delete. At times it is very funny. At other times it is as far removed from humour as i can imagine. I won't dissect it, others have done so far better, especially the unstoppable Yahtzee. Suffice to say I think it's worth the read.
However one gaming comic I cannot find funny no matter how hard I try is penny arcade. I just don't get their references and even my flatmate going out of his way to point me at the best of the strips (in his opinion) didn't give me strips I found funny. Never mind, each to their own.

Unclassified
Not sure where these fit in the grand scheme of thing.
I always look to Wellington Grey for some insightful commentary on modern society.
Not sure how the tales of baby dragons fits into the grand scheme of high art, but dragontails is a joy to read to a gaming geek or fans of certain mangas.
Of course life from the perspective of a serial killer has its ups and downs. And for a usually subtle, often blatantly disturbing look on life, there's a softer world.
If slightly sick humour is your thing, have a look at Edible Dirt. In a similar vein is the Perry Bible Fellowship.
And finally in an example of how things should be done, Garfield how it should have been! Yep that's it, the best thing to happen to Garfield is to remove him from the strip.

Dungeons and Dragons

Ok so I'm a geek, I know this, I embrace this, I wouldn't want to be anything else.
But people who play D&D were looked down on even by me. However in the traditions of "Try everything once except incest and Morris dancing", when my flatmate invited me to join in one of his campaigns I decided to give it a try so that I could at least scorn it with justice.

I was quite surprised how much I enjoyed it.
I'd best describe it as a mix of boardgames, story telling, and that most important piece - roleplaying. I think it's this last characteristic that attracts the scorn because the other elements seem to be things that most people will gladly admit to enjoying; after all, lots of people enjoy a good game of Monopoly, many people enjoy reading a good book, and people who attempt to write fiction are often admired even if they aren't successful or good at it.

But let's not worry why it has such a poor image let's get onto the game itself:
The DM had a basic story that he had in mind that extracted from the game environment itself was the sort of thing you might have found as the opening to any cheesy fantasy novel. Villagers in danger, goblin raiding parties, heroes have to go and save the day, heroes go off and after a number of confrontations and puzzles return to the town and find that a greater force has come and destroyed the town while they were away.
Not the finest or most thrilling piece of fiction ever, but as a framework it served the purpose of getting people into the swing of things.
Then you had the battles: Your character was created with a number of weapons/spells you could choose from and during battle you could use these at various times to win the day. The success of any attack chosen by rolling dice. This part in itself was quite tactical and fun and if it was a board game that wasn't fantasy based (with the stigma that has attached) I think many people would enjoy it.
Then there was the role playing - well many actors do this as part of their training. I found this getting into character to be a very useful exercise and quite an interesting experience and certainly helped me in my other fiction writing efforts. So again this was all useful
Overall a great experience, so when that campaign ended and our DM wanted a break he asked if I wanted to take over; in the interests of trying it out I went ahead and did.

Being a DM I would say was a very different experience. I went and read up online as much as I could and all the advice I could find emphasised preparation and a willingness to be flexible with your players. So I did. I had multiple plot lines ready to explore, side quests ready if needed. Lists of spare character names, spare battles ready to throw at them, puzzles if needed, the whole shebang.
Good job too because the players never did anything I expected them too. It was enough to drive me insane - but it was great fun too to try and second guess them, even moreso when you were trying to think how to motivate them into shooting themselves in the foot and they did. I found myself enjoying pulling their strings a little too much as for example you had one of the character's playing a religious zelot who you could get to do some things the player himself wasn't keen on, but his character would do this thing, so he had to do it.

With the previous plot having been a bit of a cliche, I tried to make mine a bit more intricate; choosing to have my players in a conflict between chaotic good and lawful good (an elven Lord who wanted to protect the forest against a human Lord who wanted to advance civilisation) . The point was at any point the players were having to work out which side their heroes would support, occasionally coming into conflict with each other.

So all in all, lots of fun, but a huge consumer of time. I would like to do it again, but not sure how I will get the chance - there are other things that are more important. I can certainly see how it gets the bad image it has but I also believe that the image is pretty much the bad thing about it. Well it also encourages you to sit indoors, eat snacks and drink beer as opposed to getting out into the world. However it also encourages you to socialise with your friends and gives you a reason to meet up and explore parts of your character you might not otherwise do.
As with all things, just don't let it get an obsession/your life and it has a lot of potential; give it a go and you might enjoy it, what is there to lose?

The Force Unleashed Review

So I got the Force Unleashed a few weeks ago when it was released and have been slowly playing it. How on earth people are raving about this game is beyond me, it commits all the cardinal sins of gaming!

• Jumping puzzles
• Quicktime events
• Rubbish Level design that requires you to complete puzzles IN A CERTAIN ORDER - it's not enough that you have to kill all monster A , then use force lightning to activate Item B then Kill uber-monster C then use force grip on item D, you have to do it in that order or you are trapped. If you choose to kill uber monster C first, then try and move item D then forget it. You must restart the level and kill things in the order the designer intended. Even if you manage to figure all that out (in my case in exasperation by going to a cheat website) they finish it off with a bloody Jumping Puzzle
• Quicktime events
• Rubbish level design that makes it blatantly obvious that you have to destroy item A but no hint that you have to use force grip on item B to set you up for another bloody Jumping puzzle to jump through destroyed item A
• Endlessly re-spawning enemies
• Storyline Cliches that a fan-fic writer would be ashamed to use. Yes I knwo some people have raved about the story and yes I knwo I haven't finished the game yet, however I stand by what I said so far.
  
• Quicktime events for every kill more troublesome than a small mouse
• Scenery that's impossible to tell the difference between a ledge you're supposed to jump onto in order to progress and a pretty backdrop that you can't leap onto and any attempt to do so will plummet you to a quick death
• Buggy Buggy levels/engine. I'm hitting about 3 glitches per session. Be it going to a part of the map that leves you endlessly falling, or the entire screen turning white and all that happens is your character re-draws leaving a trail of you behind it as you move around or getting a monster into a place where you can trap them and attack them to your hearts content, but they never feel any hurt from the attacks you do.
• Suspension of disbelief problems. I mean seriously, I know it would ruin the game play if every single time I used a lighsabre it instantly killed the oponent, but it is seriously hard to suspend disbelief when I have hit this guy with a lightsabre literally 20 times and he still is runniing around looking like I've merely insulted him with a mildly naughty word.
• Further to the lighsabre problem I think they'd be better off if they embraced this problem that the lightsabre is too deadly. You could have foes who knew this and therefore tried to keep you at arms length or used some tactics other than stand as close to me as possible and try to hit me with their blaster. Embracing this problem and comming up with ways around it would make the game interesting and fun. As it is it's more just a case of trying to memorise as many combos as possible and follow a linear path.
• Some of the combos are ludicrous - how on earth is a lightsabre infused with a little bit of force lightening anymore deadly than the lightsabre itself???
• Bloody Quicktime events!!
• The block system is ok for a computer game, but does not tie in with the films at all. While you are blocking blaster shots you are totally vulnerable to all other attacks, you are also incapable of launching a new attack without making youself totally open to new blaster attacks. This means that you can with great ease be pinned down by a bunch of stormtroopers and the only way to escape is to take the odd hit or two while you start dispensing with the stormtroopers. Luke never had this problem!
• And back to the lightsabre - from reading other online reviews I know I'm not the only person who has pretty much given up on the lightsabre and just stuck to a combination of force lightening and force push to get most things done. If the lightsabre is supposed to be the jedi/sith's main weapon then why make it so feable compared to the other powers?
• Object Throw problems - One of the best ways to deal damage seems to be the ability to grab items from the scenery and throw them at your opponents. While I'm sure this works fine on a PC where you have a mouse to control it with finness, on joypad on a console (as I play it) you've more chance of hitting yourself than your enemies, especially of you're having to use an item not directly in line with the enemy.
• Poor Auto-Targetting. For things like force lightening you need to rely on the auto targetting which frequenty sees a nearby flower as more of a threat than the Giant 40 foot high Rancor that is 2 inches behind it.
• Camera with a mind of its own. In front of me I have a horde of stomtroopers, to the left of them there is a a random beast i forget the name of; I am running towards them. So what does the camera choose to look at? You've got it, it swings around to concentrate on a stormtrroper I just dispatched and is now fading away into nothing behind me.
• Inconsistent difficulty. last night I was working through this planet of mushrooms (inventive level design or what?!) And was cutting through the enemies like a lightsabre through a jedi's arm. A blast of lighting or two, or a lightsabre slash, or a force throw would be enough to dispatch any of them. Very easy but still quite fun. Then you get to the end of level boss and he kills me in about 5 seconds and it takes me about an hour of practice to string together a sequence of combos that work to kill him. Now I have no issue with really easy games, or really hard games. If it's genuinly that I'm bad at the game i can accept that and try an improve my technique, but this was just so inconsistent that it was infuriating and felt like the game was suddenly lauging at me.
• Baddies that die when they're damn well ready for it! After the previous end of level baddie I must have got my combo skills up to the mark because I took 95% of the health of this guy in about 10 seconds worth of combos. Clearly the game wasn't happy with this because suddenly any further hits didn't do any harm. Then a new lot of monsters spawned. Killed them quickly. Still can't cause damage to the maion dude. More Monsters spawn. Dispatch them quickly, no harm possible to main dude (even though by their health meter they must have been at about 5% health) And now another monster. Kill That. Finally a last attack of the main dude and my favourite thing - quicktime events to finish him off. Disbelief doesn't just have to be suspended, it's turning blue from a force choke.
• Unskippable cut scenes. I'm fine to make them unskippable the first time, but after the aforementioned sudden encountered difficulty wall, listening to the same cutscene 50 times doesn't do much for your mental state.

At it's heart there's a really good game here if you look hard enough. The new physics engine is very cool, I like the RPG style levelling up system they have in place, and despite all it's flaws I do enjoy playing it, but it could have been so much more. It really is buggier than an autum holiday by a scottish loch - as I say 3 times per session is the average for restarting a level due to a bug in the game. maybe I just explore the maps more than their testers did, but I find that hard to believe since I'm rubbish at finding all those holocrons you get bonuses for finding so I don't think it's that.
There really is a lot to be had out of this game and it does have so much potential that if they'd lost their obsession with jumping puzzles, quicktime events and remembered that a lightsabre is a Jedi's/Sith's main weapon, oh and perhaps tested it! If I can find this many problems without trying then their testing department should be wither sacked, or listened to my senor management. If all that was done you really would have had a great game. I wonder if many of these problems come from the designers both being too close to their own game to see the flaws and from testing it on a PC rather than on the Xbox. It really does have that feel as if how I'm playing it isn't how it's supposed to be played. I feel that like Spore this works better as a technology demonstration than as a full game in its own right.
All of that I could cope with if there was feedback to tell me where I'm going wrong, but for all the work they've clearly put into the physics engine, they seem to have put next to sod all emphasis on the actual gameplay itself and what makes pretending to be a sith warrior fun.

Oh and will someone please tell Lucasarts to lose their obsession with the Star Wars franchise. There are plenty of stories that would allow you to have warrior wizards combined with cool technology - especially if you wrote one for yourself. I can see why they are trying to milk more money out of star wars, I just wish that with this game that doesn't sit well with the rest of the Star Wars canon they'd have shown some inventiveness. Thus follows my commandments to Lucas Arts:

• Do something other than Star Wars
• Test your game on all the platforms you release it for - ideally with people who are rubbish at the game
• Learn that quicktime events aren't fun - I have Rock Band/guitar hero for pattern matching games and they do it much better than you ever could
• Realise that jumping puzzles don't work for console gamers; at best they're a distraction from the main game, at worst they make me long for a dictionary of swear words so I can learn some new ones to hurl at the computer.
• Fix the auto-target algorithm to prioritise based upon enemy threat/HP level
• If you're going to have a camera algorithm that will happily re-orient itself mid battle, try and make it re-orient itself onto enemies that are alive and a threat to you and more of a threat than the one you're currently attacking.
• When writing your storyline, get a 5 year old to read it. If he thinks it's corny and has poor dialogue, then give serious thought to re-working it. Either that or embrace the fact that is a corny story and therefore not the strongest part of the game so don't make such a big deal of it.
• I will admit the Imperial March is one of the coolest bits of music ever written, however this isn't a reason to use it for 1/2 of the soundtrack. Write something new!