Month: April 2013

I never got into the first Sims, I only half paid attention to it’s plethora of expansions or the sequel Sims 2 and it’s additions.  I had friends what played briefly and I never saw the attraction.

It wasn’t until my roommate was playing one day, the 3rd day in a semi seasonal binge, that I started paying attention.  I asked some questions and soon found myself playing my own copy of Sims 3.

I can tell you some things about Sims.  First… try it.  It’s cheap now and if you like Simulations you might find yourself telling stories sooner than you think.  But make no mistake, this is a Simulation.  You can attain a level of direct control but many of the facets are randomly generated from the game itself.

Second, get the expansions.  The core ones at least.  The Stuff Packs are just stuff, naturally.  The full expansions add content such as new careers, places to explore, venues to socialize.

Third, check out the forums or fan pages.  You can download a disgusting amount of additional content for your game for free.  Dresses, couches, house plans, makeup, etc.  I only briefly skimmed one page and saw more than I would ever probably use.  My roommate spends an hour or two there each month picking up new things for her collection.

As for the game.. You start with a single Sim during what we’ll call Character Creation.  You can make this sim tall or short, fat or skinny.  You pick traits like personality, favorite foods and life goals.  You can expand your sim to a full family adding children from toddler to young adult, a spouse.

Gameplay focuses around tasks like cleaning up around the house, watering plants.  A context sensitive menu appears on each thing you click on to offer you options.  More options open if you have certain skills.  I once had a sim who could fix the TV when it broke and managed to modify the Oven to be Self-Cleaning.  Of course, this didn’t mean jack when he tried to fix the teleporter after a rigorous workout and wound up electrocuting himself and died.

On the Sims in your immediate family are within the range of your control, a green gem called the plumbob hovering over their head to signify focus.  You can meet other sims, call them up for chats or invite them to parties.  If you manage to woo them into your family as a married partner then you get them and all their assets to command as you wish.  Similarly, if they leave your family you them and their possessions.

Sims have goals, dreams and desires, that they can sometimes complete on their own.  “Gaze at the Stars” is easy if you have a telescope and the sim will accommodate themselves at their earliest convenience.  In fact the games’ automation can make for an interesting ant-farm approach with you only having to perform a minimum of dialog choices.  Chief among the choices you’ll have to involve yourself in are purchases.  Sims go to work, they make dinner or order pizza, they’ll bath and clean but one thing you will have to do is buy them stuff.  Couches, bookcases, Computers, etc.  Sims will develop Wants about having a thing and you will have to involve yourself to buying that from the shopping interface.

That being said.. you might wind up spending a lot of time here.  This same interface lets you modify the layout of your house, add rooms and decorate.  A function that’s important as a house without a smoke detector is liable to kill a sim.  Add a clock and a picture, raising the decor and relaxation value of the room.  A sparse house isn’t very relaxing and your sim won’t want to spend time there.

This is a game where you can lose days playing and telling the stories to friends about your fake people.  The ridiculous dramas and exaggerated reactions.  I’ll leave you with my recommendation: Buy it, play it, see if you like it.  If you do, get the expansions and drop me an email.  I’ll link you to a website where you can get some mods i’m told “Make the game work.”  I never had problem with the base unmodified game but I hear the mods make the game loads better.

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My first Sim was a guy, technically apt and aspired to the Engineering career.  He met his wife socially on the street and married her in short order.  Their daughter aspired to be amazingly famous from day 1 and spent all her time after school playing guitar on the steps of City Hall.  This went swell until Dad died one day and Daugher spent every waking moment in mourning for 3 days.  Get out of bed. Cry. Go Pee. Cry.  Take Shower. Cry.  Make Sandwich.  Cry.

It was barely over when mom died of old age and the process began anew..

 

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And I think most of you should get it.  PC and XBox.  Fairly cheap, 15 bucks apiece, 45 if you’ve got three other friends who want to play.  I haven’t played yet though my mind is getting crushed by the idea of getting home and trying it out.

Brief reviews I’ve skimmed all say great things about it.  It’s got some kind of campaign that tells a story, amusing and interesting gameplay and the screenshots don’t do it justice.  We’ll talk about it later, once I’ve burned a couple of hours into it.

On a side note, i’m setting up an email point where you could ask me about anything and I can talk about it here.  I’ll do a whole post about it so it’s clear and easy to spot.

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Among my Winter Season I crossed many games.  Some of these inspired by my recent viewing of Star Trek: Voyager.  I played some games I’d played before and some new ones I’m about to talk about.  As a introduction I’ll go into the short and narrow of what a 4X game is.

4X stands for eXplore, eXploit, eXterminate and eXpand.  In short you shoot some dudes, take their territory, take their stuff and poke your nose where it usually doesn’t belong.  Some games do more and less with this, naturally.  Some games run an incredibly detailed technology tree, others a varied and detailed world map with many kinds of resources.  Most games of this genre take tens of hours to see to completion.  These are games of empires slugging it out in old wars, of resource managing and “Just One More Turn” mentality.

Space Empires was my first large-scale 4X strategy game.  And like any first love, will always hold a place in my heart.  Space Empires (Iterations I-V) set you as ruler of a stellar empire starting on a small handful of worlds.  Each planet rated in terms of atmosphere (for colonization) and three resource values, form the economic backbone of your empire. Research is generated by facilities on planets buying into selected categories.  Ship construction, paid for and maintained by economic output, is accomplished first by selecting a ship size and then dragging components onto the design.  Combat is largely automated, but you can take manual control if you wish to put your fine touch on space battles.  In terms of depth you’re able to build Carriers, Troop Transports and Stellar Minefields.  You can create planets from rubble, explode stars and construct Ring Worlds and Dyson Spheres.  The whole game plays like a board game, being turn based and each ship having a number of movement points.  Movement between systems occurs via connected warp points and no ship has what might be termed FTL travel.  Each empire in a game can be a custom mish-mash of traits and abilities including efficient engines or Psychic abilities (the Allegiance Converter being my personal favorite).

Sword of the Stars varies on the topic by summarizing planets a little more succinctly.  Systems are summarized to one planet, the only planet of theoretical value.  They’re habitability identified by a climate scale and a cost to colonize (the cheaper, the more native to your species).  Empires are among the several listed with no option to customize traits.  the thing that makes SoTS and it’s sequel SoTS2 unique is that each race has it’s own technology for interstellar travel.  Humans travel along connected warp lines, another race uses a drive that teleports them across the galaxy at a cost for in-combat maneuverability.  The token bug race use travel gates that take years to establish but allow instant travel from any one gate in the network to another.  The tech tree suffers from being brief, but SoTS paints itself into a corner being a shorter overall strategy game and less of an eon spanning traditional 4X game.  SoTS2 changed the system layout and added additional planets at each location representing a real system, but otherwise kept many of the previous elements.  Ship design between both SoTS games is accomplished by selecting mission and ship components for the body as well as what weapons are on the hardpoints.

Endless Space being the last of our turn based offerings brings a large-scale space opera feel to the game.  You can earn heroes to lead your colonies and fleets.  The tech tree seems short while incorporating a solid amount of depth.  Planets themselves categorized by A) Environment and B) Natural features or resources.  It is possible to have a volcanic planet your colonists hate while having them able to produce ample food.  Trust me, that doesn’t happen often in this game let alone any other.  Ship design is simplified by picking a hull and then adding components to it like filling a basket.  The heavier, better components taking more space. Of the things Endless Space does differently are the natural resources.  Berries, flowers, magic oils or industrial elements, etc.  They’re -everywhere- and it’s relatively rare to find a system that doesn’t have some kind of trait modifying it’s base values of Food, Industry, Dust (money) and Science.

Distant Worlds is the last game I’ll talk about today.  It deviates from the classic 4X design by being real-time.  It also delegates almost all it’s tasks to automation at first.  Your combat ships will defend transports, your construction ships will set up mining locations, colonies get planted, research gets managed, etc.  The game is divided between State and Civilian ships, the latter getting built automatically to handle the needs of the industrial backbone.  The game map is laid out like a sparse representation of our galaxy with your homeworld(s) located among nebulas, black holes and exploded stars.  Each star surrounded by planets, moons, asteroids and derelict fields or ships, some of those having resources your industries will harvest to fuel your ships or enable construction.  Occasionally advisers will offer suggestion on what to build next be it a defensive structure near a critical colony or additional exploration ships.  Alien lifeforms lurk around the planets and pirates inhabit stations hidden in clouds and systems simultaneously offering to help you with information or special projects at a price or raiding your supply centers and making a general nuisance of themselves.

I can’t tell you how many days i’ve wasted into the genre.  From Civilization 2 back in the early days of my interest all the way up to spending hours watching my ships flit back and forth in Distant Worlds in the recent weeks.  There’s a satisfying feeling when you watch a carefully organizing military campaign produce results.

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