Comments on: A Varied Gaming Diet

By: DoctorDisaster

DoctorDisaster — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:21:19 +0000

I feel the opposite way about GalCiv vs Civ Civ. I bought GalCiv after reading your diaries and enjoyed it enough, but I found it didn’t have whatever magic keeps me coming back to Civilization. I think it’s partly that space makes for really dull terrain, partly that I don’t really respond emontionally to GC’s rival leaders, but mainly the micromanagement. Installing every single component on every single iteration of every single ship makes me feel more like a mechanic than a galactic overlord.

Certainly there’s a good bit of red tape in Civ, particularly in the endgame, but at least you’re dealing with [i]lordly[/i] minutiae. Generally I end up spending more time than I’d really like wrangling an excessive military once I’ve progressed to a more scientific phase of development. In GalCiv, however, those moments of tedium are almost always spent arm-wrestling budget screen bureaucrats over the exact apportionment of state resources. (Or, as I mentioned, playing interplanetary Lego-Ship-Builder-In-Chief.)

And while certainly GalCiv makes different planets differ wildly from each other, Civvers get that fix from the strategic importance of the terrain your cities allow you to culturally control. Resources, roads, water features, and defensive hideouts are very important stuff to control.

By: Menaum

Menaum — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:28:05 +0000

While I agree that there’s less inventive to steal other people’s property in Civilization IV than in GalCiv II, I think there’s an argument to be made that that doesn’t necessarily devalue war in Civ IV.
In Civ IV, possession for possession’s sake is more important than in GalCiv II. In GalCiv, even hugely disadvantaged underdogs with control of significantly fewer planets than the leaders can, as your first GalCiv War Diary showed, go on to win a game. In Civ IV, this is less the case. The number of cities your civ has can pretty easily make or break your entire game. Putting aside production and research, which it shares with GalCiv, more cities mean more Great People, more influence (which is often more important in Civ IV than in GalCiv), more resources, etc. Even with few cities, of course, Cultural victories can be won, but those generally require a lot of effort to be put into them, even in the very early stages of a game. Diplomatic victories are possible too, but honestly, if you’re at the bottom of the charts, there’s almost always going to be some dickwad leader with the Aggressive trait who’s going to have everyone on his side and either steamroll you or win a diplo victory himself. Basically, even though cities in Civ IV aren’t as immediately valuable as planets in GalCiv II, they’re made equally valuable simply because of their necessity. Basically.
I agree with Tom Lawrence, though, that the last third of the game is incredibly boring. I usually end up leaving my games somewhere during the Industrial Era, simply because of how much of a pain it is to keep track of all my cities. And because I think the music in the Modern Era sucks.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:26:15 +0000

She started with default breast-size, and I’d actually turned it down from there in a costume redesign before that shot.

Unless that’s what you mean?

By: TooNu

TooNu — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:45:55 +0000

Breast slider abuse.

By: Chris R

Chris R — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:55:28 +0000

Dan, thank you for introducing me to Obsidian Conflict. That is an excellent mod that my friends and I were unaware of! Cheers.

By: Man Raised By Puffins

Man Raised By Puffins — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:40:49 +0000

It’s worth persevering with Gratuitous Space Battles if you enjoy tinkering around, trying to eke out every last ounce of speed from a particular frigate hull say. But that early learning curve needs a lot of work. Even after reading all of the tutorial text boxes it still took me around half a dozen attempts at the first mission to beat it on easy (not helped by that being the only mission you can attempt when starting off). Once that first victory is under your belt though it’s relatively plain sailing and great fun.

By: Lack_26

Lack_26 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:47:24 +0000

Oh yeah, first had to delete the String which had set CoH to installed. Also, sorry for my horrible grammar in the previous post.

By: Lack_26

Lack_26 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:45:28 +0000

Ahha, I managed to get opposing fronts to accept the CD key for my original CoH copy. I lost the box ages ago you see so lost both the CD key and CD, so found my old PC and hooked it up and ran regedit to retrieve the CD key wrote it down. Plugged my new one back in, so enter the CD key to try and unlock the CoH content, “please enter CoH CD” well that doesn’t help since I haven’t got it any more.

So run regedit again, go to the CoH area, made a new string. Entered (on a hunch)

“CoHproductkey [CD Key goes here]”

Start up CoH:OP, hurrah, it works I now have what I’ve paid for and can play with all 4 factions.

By: Ludo

Ludo — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:23:18 +0000

Playing through Ep1 with friend Dante on Synergy. Haven’t made much progress because we spent too long playing catch with combine corpses and the super gravity gun…

By: Pod

Pod — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:32:42 +0000

“Gratuitous Space Battles: Sort of like ‘Space Battle Manager 2080?: you design the ships and fleets but the battles are hands off. I like the concept, but the tutorial is five hundred and sixteen text-box interrupts that I am not even close to having the patience to read, so I have no idea how to play.”

After the third box, I got annoyed and just fucked them off and just guessed at how the game works. It’s not ahrd to figure out how to play it — it’s hard to figure out how to win, which the boxes don’t tell you. TBH, I feel no inclination to keep playing the game. I just don’t seem t ocare about it, which is odd, as looking at the videos etc I really really wanted to play ;(

By: Bret

Bret — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:12:44 +0000

I played Minerva multiplayer myself.

The elevators in the second part were the bane of our four man group.

On the upside, the endgame fun of running to the helicopter, thus dicking over your friends and being the only one to escape was excellent.

Enjoy the death lasers. Suckers.

By: Tom Lawrence

Tom Lawrence — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:09:35 +0000

James: Sadly I have nearly always found in my Civ 4 games that I always have the resources I need, except in the very earliest stages of the game, where I often lack copper. But I can nearly always ensure I have some iron in time for the traditional Swordsman Lebensraum war.

By: Smurfy

Smurfy — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:43:55 +0000

Obsidian Conflict is SO awesome.

By: James

James — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:28:58 +0000

As someone that’s played quite a bit of Civ in my day, I know what you mean about the “There’s nothing that I want” sentiment. It changes game to game, of course, and there’s nothing like the panic you get upon researching a landmark technology and realizing you have no coal for railroads, or oil for tanks and planes, or aluminum for ships, and without a war to get these resources, you’re going to get stomped in the next 40 turns. That’s when it gets fun.

By: Tom Lawrence

Tom Lawrence — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:26:17 +0000

The Civ 4 vs. Gal Civ 2 thing is interesting. I love both games.

Gal Civ 2 has a sci-fi theme which I love, a streak of humour, neat space battles with LASERS, and with the expansions, really significant variation between the sides. But the fundamental game mechanics aren’t anyway near as satisfying (it annoys the crap out of me that I can’t run my labs and my factories at full capacity at the same time even when I COULD afford to, for instance, and the population/morale mechanics always bemused me)

Civ 4 is so much cleaner in terms of mechanics: everything links together so well, it’s packed with interesting and meaningful choices, they really are a large number of valid approaches. The civics screen is particularly well conceived.

Contra your comment, I’d say that Civ 4 has done a far better job than ever before in Civ of making individual cities fell particularly significant. One of the things I like best about it now is how much actual sense it makes to deliberately develop some cities to churn out military units, some cities to pop out great people, some cities to just farm up as much commerce as physically possible…

Neither game has figured out a good way to make the latter third of the game less tedious.

By: ZeroByte

ZeroByte — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:10:45 +0000

Synergy is great funs. Me and a friend have played through HL2 and the episodes over a couple of weekends (HL2 involved a 14 hour marathon gaming session) and it is tops with voice comms. We tend to take the story a lot less seriously and muck about with the characters while exposition is taking place. Somehow the impending doom of the world makes everything funnier.

By: EGTF

EGTF — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:44:45 +0000

How’s Sven Co-Op source coming along does anyone know?

By: Lack_26

Lack_26 — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:32:03 +0000

Spent my last few days getting CoH: Opposing Fronts up to date (about 2 gigs of updates) and playing with various mods, I played Shattering of Countries till I had it up to date. Now I’m playing the newly released (about 2 days ago) Normandy 44 (v3.00 beta), which is absolutely brilliant. Oh yeah, and the AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity demo.

By: SIbilantjoe

SIbilantjoe — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:35:49 +0000

@Pentadact: While OC does indeed have a large number of custom maps, it has, more or less (there are some “fixes” to make the campaigns playable for more than one person, as you’ve probably seen in Synergy already) the original HL1 and HL2+Episodes campaigns.
I can’t find a good video showcasing the lobby system, so I’ll try to briefly explain.
All players in the server are spawned into a large lobby, complete with vending machines, NPCs, and a pretty fountain. All around the lobby are doors, which lead to different maps. In order to select a map, players must break down the door (which takes collaborative effort), and go through it, which causes the selected map to load. For HL campaigns, the same system is in effect, except that a chapter is being selected, not an individual map.

A quick screenshot of the lobby can be found here:
http://www.obsidianconflict.net/ocscreenshots/oclobby/oc_lobby_b10000.jpg

All of those doors lead to maps.

By: cixelsyD

cixelsyD — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:44:31 +0000

Civ IV has a limited Demo that’ll suck you in. I don’t really like Civ IV. I always feel like the AI is really annoying. It doesn’t help when they plant a city right in a spot that your settler was going to reach the next turn.

Tf2 also has free weekends, those’ll rope you in nice and quick.

By: spuzman

spuzman — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:31:31 +0000

Synergy needs a better explanation for how exactly it works. A friend and I attempted to play through HL2 game together, but spent the whole time in a strange new level that wound up in a dead end.

Also, are any of these games free, or at least have demos? I’d love to try one of them out.

By: Jazmeister

Jazmeister — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 02:05:48 +0000

Me and my brother had that plan with Synergy, but I guess we just forgot about it. I love doing playthroughs with people. Synergy pubs are weird, though, because the server rotation always includes some crazed community map where everyone has to run from ten choppers or something. I love community maps, though.

By: Pentadact

Pentadact — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:39:41 +0000

Interesting! Does Obsidian Conflict let you play with just the original weapons and abilities? What I’ve read about it made me think it was new maps and weapons.

By: SIbilantjoe

SIbilantjoe — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:14:04 +0000

THANK YOU, Dan. Obsidian Conflict is the superior mod, with support for everything from Half-Life 1 to Episode 2, and also has a lobby (literally!) for choosing maps democratically. Why its whiny little brother, Synergy, got Steamworks status and not OC is absolutely beyond me. OC has a larger playerbase too, but it sounds like you’re going the “play with a friend” route, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

By: ZomBuster

ZomBuster — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 01:05:19 +0000

I envy you with your 2 completions.

One day.. one day I’ll get there.

By: Nicomallo

Nicomallo — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:04:11 +0000

I played Minerva metastasis on synergy the other day and found it way more enjoyable then the single player had been. While the levels were really good I found the shooting all too boring until I had a friend with me, and then I realized that Minerva’s single path through an open level layout meant that it was perfect for situations where one person can cover another.

Almost every area can be seen from the area before, and having a mate wait back and cover you with the pulse rifle makes everything much more tactical then either straight Minerva (which turns into run and gun) or Half Life 2 synergy (where the rooms are all too disconnected to provide good flanks and sniper nests).

By: A Varied Gaming Diet · fushou

A Varied Gaming Diet · fushou — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:54:01 +0000

[…] Read more here: A Varied Gaming Diet […]

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:32:20 +0000

Synergy is nice but I tend to like Obsidian Conflict more, because… well I don’t know but there’s a load of little side games in that one that are pure fun. Plus I had made a machinima film in OC so I am inclined to like it a bit more