Eccentric Flower:199902/games and urges
From Eccentric Flower
«February 1999 «Eccentric Flower
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twenty-one february games and urges It is seven-thirty in the morning, which is considerably earlier than sane people are awake on on a Sunday (unless you are a church-goer - in which case you are exempted from that slur, and are also more virtuous than I). I can't sleep - I have been unable to sleep well for six nights. This is not my normal insomnia. This is a new, insidious condition where I sleep, but fidget near the edge of consciousness all night, partially waking up many times. I end up feeling worse than if I'd just tried to stay awake all night. So now it's dreadfully early and my eyes hurt, but I know I won't be able to sleep again. I'm going to talk a bit about computer games. If you don't play them or like them, may I suggest that you skip to the third section (follow the dashes), which is a good bit and also has Marvin in it. Oh, no, wait, that's a Douglas Adams quote. I hate Marvin. - - - The computer game genres I am willing to play keep getting smaller, even as the games get better. This is not good. I used to play four basic types of games. I don't like wargames - the system suits me, but there's no thrill there - and I don't like any games which happen in real-time, because I can't think on two fronts at once. I loved Warcraft but I would always get engrossed in resource management, trying to build up a mammoth army, while my enemy was sneaking around and flanking me. I dislike run-and-jump games. Tomb Raider is much more one of these than a shooter. Any game in the Lode Runner or Pitfall! school fits this category. I lack the timing skills. Category three is currently in a state of flux. A game called Half-Life came out and completely stood the genre on its head. I sweated all the way through Half-Life - it had a story; it made you think, not just shoot blindly; it was completely engrossing; and it was scary - a game where when something jumps out at you, you really startle. Anyway, having played Half-Life all the other shooters on the market are looking very tame right now, and no one's offering any new ones that interest me. I'm waiting for the genre to reinvent itself. In category one I get pickier every year. I played Grim Fandango and loved it, and will bet on a LucasArts game any day, but The Pandora Directive has been sitting on the shelf unplayed for a very long time now. I don't know why. The nasty shock of late is that I think I'm losing my taste for sims. I hate sitting around waiting for something to happen, or forever having to microtune settings. I have Railroad Tycoon II and SimCity 3000, both excellent revisions of already excellent games. I have barely played either. I hate wasting money. That leaves only category four. Civilization is in a class by itself. It's not quite a sim and not quite a wargame. It's got an element of exploration, an element of strategy, an element of battle, and an element of management. This mongrel approach was deliberate and it worked. I have a copy of Civilization II for each Mac and the PC. If there were a Unix version, I'd have one at work too. Years after I first encountered it, I can still sit and lose several hours at this game. Alpha Centauri, the game I coyly mentioned yesterday, is the successor to Civilization. It is mind-numbingly good and equally mind-numbingly deep. It will take me a long time to unlock this game's secrets. I lost Eight. Hours. to this game the day I bought it. I was too tired to play it (due to Hell Week) until Friday night, whereupon I lost another six hours. I am now scared to launch it again this weekend. - - - (Welcome back, non-gamers. This section starts out about games, but it really isn't.) So Alpha Centauri, a game where you explore and colonize an alien world, and Ascendancy, a game where you explore and colonize lots of planets, trying to build an empire, are likely to be the only two "deep" games on my shelf that I actually play over and over for the next several years. Given the number of games I buy, play a few times, and abandon, this is significant. I come back to Ascendancy after gaps of several months - the game is so intense that I can't play it more often, but when I do, I always have to devote an entire weekend to it. I think there is something fundamental in my brain that is fascinated by the idea of visiting unknown worlds and setting up a foothold upon them. There was a game in Bygone Days for the PC which involved going to other worlds and seeing if they were useful to you - whether you could mine on them, find alien artifacts, whatever. (I can't remember its name.) Eventually the hidden storyline of the game came out: The Sun was going to go nova soon. Unbeknownst to you, you weren't just looking for worlds to exploit. You were looking for a place to relocate Earth's people. Even a lousy game that involves space colonization gets a look from me, and many of them are quite good. This isn't just a field where I like a certain kind of game - there was an excellent computer adventure-game version of the Gateway storyline, in two parts, some years ago, and I remember fondly the old Traveller paper RPG, which I was discussing with Al last night. Building a galactic empire appeals even when there aren't really any game props at all - anyone remember Starweb? What's the attraction? I don't think this is just me. I think that galactic exploration hits a nerve in the human psyche (otherwise people would have discarded Star Trek for the cheap trash it was in the early Seventies). Are we hard-wired for exploration? Is it just curiosity at work or something deeper? Please tell me it's not just a boy thing, or I'll be very unhappy.
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