Weregamer's Game Musings

The Steam Summer Sale is an evil plot an excellent opportunity to try the games you were curious about or didn't want to pay full price for. It's been my chance to pick up some of the 4X space games that have come out recently. First up is Galactic Inheritors. This is a cool and innovative little game. Some of the traditional mechanics are bare-bones, and the overall turn-by-turn flow is a bit clumsy, but the new stuff is interesting. In particular, your military ships are built by contract with private companies, and each company "levels up" on a skill tree; you can thus specialize each company in one area, though they only gain "XP" from building ships and ships are a big investment. All in all, this game felt like something that I could get involved with and dig into, except for two factors. One is that the main screen color scheme is hard on the eyes - the grainy white background, like that of Distant Worlds when zoomed out only more so, is a short...

With the announcement of the launch date (and price point for non-upgraders), I looked into the reports on Windows 10 with an eye toward my primary use: gaming. There are a lot of articles out there on this topic that boil down to "new games get improved DirectX 12". Ho hum. I want to know if trying to use my PC will make me tear out my hair and scream out of the room, and I could give a flying fart about new hardware I'm not likely to buy in the next year or two. I found a couple articles, like this one , on the UI changes, and I'm encouraged. I'll certainly try it on the Windows 8 convertible that I don't use because Windows 8.1 still sucks. I'll probably even replace Win7 on my main rig.

This game was on one-day sale on Steam this week, and it had some really glowing reviews (especially at Rock, Paper, Shotgun which is one of the sites I trust most). After playing for a couple nights, I have realized that I like this game a lot but I'm not enjoying playing it. Some of the problem is the inept Windows coding and lack of display settings. No video settings at all - it can only run at desktop resolution, and while it might have been OK in 2010 when the game was first written, that makes things just too tiny on a moderate screen at high resolution. A bigger part of the problem is that the screen is uselessly cluttered for manipulating stuff or watching the details of what happens when there are more than a couple things on screen. If you are used to EVE, or otherwise can adjust to a UI where you see things on the screen but have to use menus to select and manipulate them, it's only annoying (like EVE, but without the good reasons EVE has this problem). But if...

This game continues to hold my interest, despite the bugs, and the latest update fixed almost all the ones that were annoying me most. One thing that the game manual actually says, and the UI for game setup supports, but that is just not true, is that the various races are interchangeable - that you could apply the traits for one race to another one and get an identical result. There are two ways in which the underlying racial choice affects play, and they are both significant. First, each race has three or four unique technologies that only they can research. These generally complement the default settings for that race to some degree (for example the Pollops get a planetary building that reduces food consumption by photosynthetics *only*, by 0.5 food (to zero)), but are of varying utility overall. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, the number and arrangement of squares in ship hulls is wildly different for each race. A few of the races have an advantage in number of squa...

Hmm. I went on a short trip with my windows 8 convertible laptop (long story, my good win 7 one died). I was astonished at how poorly the game worked with the touch screen interface enabled. It can't have been tested very well, because key buttons - like the ones to buy up the ship system you selected - didn't even respond to taps. I'm wondering what's going on at Firaxis. When a one man shop like Zero Sum can produce both an excellent game and completely normal windows behavior, how come a place with years of experience on the platform messed up so badly? Perhaps they are losing interest in the PC, and in the rich games that live on it. Although if that's the case, why are they doing so much on iOS and ignoring Android, which is both a much larger market and (in my experience) more attractive to high end geeks?

This title came out of early access recently, though it still needs (and is getting) some work. It was on sale this week on Steam, so I gave it a try, and I'd encourage any fan of 4X space games to do so too. It's possibly the most ambitious 4X space game since MoO3 or the original Macintosh Pax Imperia (which has almost no relationship, sadly, to the very stupid, dumbed down, realtime "sequel" of a few years later). Doubly impressive because the developer is a single person (Daniel Dicicco). The influence of MoO2 is obvious but heartfelt, and switching the strategic game to turn-based from the realtime of Stardrive 1 was a really really good move, making time and attention for the details that don't work in an RTS. Seeing the patchlog, I'm pleased to see consistent progress with good priorities. The game is already playable (though some parts don't work as well as they should) and looks likely to be really "done" in another couple months....

OMFG, I've barely started the game and I'm already hooked and feeling alt-oholic. I only looked at character generation and the first few minutes of play last night, as I can't afford to miss a day of work just for a new game any more. But I'm already sure that this game is living up to high expectations. It's not perfect, there are some flaws that Rock, Paper, Shotgun already did a good job describing, but this is better than many of the game I've paid $60 for over the years. Going to be hard to tear myself away long enough to keep my wife and toddler from getting upset at me this weekend.