Sunday, January 28, 2018

Stronghold 2 - 10/20 hours

I finished the shit mission. It turned out not to be that bad. The secret was to pause the game and just build a bunch of shit buildings (way more than you think you might need) right at the beginning of the scenario. Knock that shit out early, before it has the chance to build up.

I think I might like Stronghold 2 under other circumstances. Not the part about attacking and defending strongholds, obviously, but you can hold feasts and throw balls and build churches and the like. Making sure my peasants have a balanced diet and plenty of entertainment is diversion enough for me.

My issue here is that I can't escape the feeling of being trapped by the Stronghold series. I should have spread the games out over the course of a year. One game every 2 months. Then maybe, when I got these urges to do literally anything else, I could ignore them, because I'd know that I'd only have to hold out for another few hours. Now, though, I get demoralized when I think about the fact that even if I finish quickly, I'll have to start all over again in another couple of days.

A silly little medieval village simulator should probably not devolve into a test of endurance, especially not so quickly. And given the new pollution, crime, and honor systems, it's not really that similar to the 2D stronghold games, but it's just close enough that it seems like a purgatory that will never end.

It will end, though. Just 70 more hours of Stronghold to go. And I'll get three more breaks as well. I just have to take it one minute at a time. Retreat to free build and let time pass. If I can endure Sakura Spirit, I can endure anything.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Stronghold 2 - 5/20 hours

I am staring at the computer, dead-eyed. There's nothing wrong with Stronghold 2, I tell myself. I repeat, more forcefully, there is nothing wrong with Stronghold 2. But time has lost all meaning. Meaning has lost all meaning. I am playing the sim campaign and the challenge is to clean up shit. Oh, the game calls it "gong" for some reason, but we all know it's shit. And they put you under a clock. Your workers, with their indifferent pathfinding, crawl their way towards these steaming turds and you have to fend off bandit attacks and all the while the clock is ticking. And it's not enough. It's never enough. The arbitrary deadline the game gives you for your shit cleaning task passes in a flash and I have to start all over.

So I get aggressive. I dedicate half my economy to cleaning up shit, except it's not fast enough. Even with the massive bribes I pay my population, my popularity ticks down and people start abandoning their jobs. Yet even with a shrinking population, the shit keeps piling up. I'm going to be buried in it, I think. Is there any hope left for me at all?

I thought this was what I wanted. A game where the logistics were important. Where you had to think about things like sanitation and infrastructure and the like, but I'm not up to the task. I'm too weak. My town keeps getting buried in shit and it's making me want to cry. Those poor little simulated peasants with their lack of a modern sewage system. They betray me with their untamable digestive tracts. I know it's just the game teaching me a lesson, like in a previous mission where everything caught on fire, or the lesson after that where I had to use the cargo shipping system to save a village from starvation. But it's demoralizing, having this kind of problem. It feels like such a basic failure.

I tried to get away from it for awhile, but playing as the defensive side in historical sieges felt pointless (is it just me or are the strongholds weaker in Stronghold 2) and my free build city was attacked by bandits, which seems to me to miss the point of "free build" entirely. I guess I'll just have to grit my teeth and crawl my way out from under this mountain of shit. After all, I'll only need to do it once, right?

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Stronghold 2 - 2/20 hours

Stronghold 2 is an odd beast. Its new 3-D presentation makes it look different than its predecessors, but go beyond that superficial layer and the actual game rules are very similar (all the population management stuff with the campfire and granary and happiness rating, is almost identical). But then look beyond that and there are some new mechanics which have the potential to significantly change the way the game plays.

You have honor, which appears to be a kind of experience point system, allowing you to acquire new lands (and presumably other things) by doing medieval-noble-type things like holding feasts and tournaments. There's also estates, which allow you to have satellite villages that can send you goods and tax revenue. And I'm sure there are other things I haven't encountered yet. It remains to be seen whether this will be a deep or shallow addition to the Stronghold formula, but I think it at least has the potential to improve the peaceful game by giving you some new benchmarks for success.

Speaking of which, Stronghold 2 has a new campaign mode, called the "Sim Campaign." It sounded really promising, but so far it's not been as "sim-ish" as I might like (then again, I've played The Sims: Medieval, so I'm a bit spoiled here). It seems to resemble the original Stronghold's economic campaign, right down to the part where you have to recruit an army to fight wolves (of all things). I'll reserve judgement, but I suspect I'll be retreating to free build sooner or later.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Yomi - 20/20 hours

Survival mode was a mixed bag. It was a fun and challenging mental puzzle, but ultimately the demands of playing multiple games with a single pool of hit points forced me to be more conservative than I normally like. Also, it was on a timer for some inexplicable reason, and I couldn't pause it when I got interrupted at the hotel. That was unnecessarily frustrating.

Overall, though, I liked Yomi. It may well be impossible to make a card game I won't enjoy. Possibly poker. . . because it relies too much on chance and on reading the opponent, which just so happen to be my least favorite parts of Yomi. However, Yomi has the advantage of creating a cool fighting game narrative with a bunch of interesting and distinct characters, so the element of chance is much more tolerable.

It's likely that I will play Yomi again, but I think it will definitely take second place to cooperative card games like Sentinels of the Multiverse or elaborate deck-building games like Magic: the Gathering or Ascension. The main weakness of Yomi, as far as I'm concerned, is that it's mainly focused on tactical play and there aren't enough fiddly widgets to make me enjoy the competition.

That being said, variety is the spice of life, and there may be times when I'm feeling the urge to brawl (card-game-style). I'll also be keeping an eye out for the tabletop version, because heaven knows I need more of those in my life.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Yomi - 11/20 hours

I love games with a lot of characters. I mean, a lot of characters. I'm not kidding here. The more, the better. Dozens is best. This is so much a thing for me that I even enjoyed Chrono Cross, despite the fact that most of the characters are nothing more than a special move and an accent. I think I may like games with multiple characters even more than I like games with character customization.

But there's a paradox to having multiple characters. The more there are, the fewer (in terms of percentage) you tend to use. The game requires a certain degree of mastery in order to overcome its challenges, and to attain that mastery, you must focus on a few of the characters over the others. Either that, or it's like the Bioware rpgs, where you've got a dozen shipmates, but you can only take two of them with you at a time. One of these days, I'm going to play a game that forces you to use all of your dozens of characters more or less constantly, and I'm never going to want to play anything else.

In the meantime, I've been having fun with Yomi. My current approach is to pick a character for each session and just play a dozen practice games in a row against random opponents. I learn a lot in the process, but I miss the variety.

I've also gotten some opportunities to play against human opponents. It's pretty fun and requires a sharper strategic acumen than matches against the AI, but I'm neurotic enough that it brings with it its own set of worries. I have a natural emotional reaction to losing too frequently, but then I feel guilty about having that reaction. Then, when I win, I worry that I might be winning too much, and I feel guilty about that. It's not a big thing (and indeed, I'm a little embarrassed that the people I've played against may read this and think I'm making it weird), but I am who I am, and I have this strange social anxiety. I'd prefer to just alternate between victory and defeat, but that would be an unnatural situation, and thus is probably too much to hope for.

The plan going forward is to play Survival mode. I'm not sure what exactly that entails (the game has no tooltips, for whatever reason), but I'm sure it will kill some time.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

Yomi - 4/20 hours

I don't quite have a handle on Yomi yet. I don't think it's going to break my streak of enjoying card games, but I'm still not sure how to get the most out of my time with it. The strategy looks to be pretty deep and that's a double-edged sword for me.

I tend to go on and on about how strategy games are my favorite, and how I can play turn-based strategy games more or less indefinitely, and those things are true, but I have a confession to make - I have no head for strategy.

It's strange, because I'm a relatively smart guy. I graduated from college with a degree in mathematics. And you'd think some of those skills would transfer over - looking at a problem, noticing areas where you can simplify and reduce, and working out the steps to a solution. But I think my training might actually be a hindrance, and that I tend to look at strategy as too much like a math problem. I see a likely-looking avenue of attack and then I charge down it, confident that if it turns out not to work, I can backtrack to my last point of certainty and try a different approach. You know, just chip away at the thing until it's solved.

Except I always seem to forget that I'm playing against an opponent, someone who is doing to me what I'm trying to do to them. My instinct is always to create baroque structures, traps, and combos that would be elegant in execution, were they not easily disrupted by the most trivial of enemy countermeasures.

The good part about Yomi is that its Rock-Paper-Scissors-style resolution system forces me to consider the other player's viewpoint. The bad part is that, given the impetus to do so, I immediately start spiraling. I'm like Vizzini from The Princess Bride. I can't play a throw, because I know that you have a powerful attack, but clearly, you know that I know you have that attack, so you will be expecting me to play a block, except that I know that you know that I know, and thus . . .

After awhile, I tend to get flustered and just go with my intuition, which is frequently based on nothing and overly concerned with avoiding risk, and thus is frequently wrong, and ineffectual when it isn't.

But the aggravating thing is that I know about this weakness in myself, and as much as I try to control it, I can't. I read books on strategy, and I think I understand them. Card advantage, tempo, territory control - these things make sense to me. And I can't count the number of times I've resolved to myself - "okay, this time I'm going to go in and play a disciplined, intentional game (of Magic: the Gathering, or Chess, or, most recently, Yomi) and I'm going to avoid all my characteristic mistakes." But then, the time comes, and I panic, or I get distracted by a convoluted combo that will take 3-4 moves to set up, but be absolutely sweet if I can pull it off, and suddenly I'm no longer playing for the win, but to make the highlight reel, and before I know it, I've lost. And then come the self-recriminations and the vague feeling of guilt, like I didn't respect the game enough.

That's silly, though. No one is relying on my strategic acumen, and losing a game to a friend is more fun than playing it alone. I just have accept this part of myself and remember to buy more co-op games in the future.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Yomi - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Tom Vasel's (of Dice Tower fame) Game of the Year, 2010

Yomi is a fighting game in card form. Learn your character, practice combos, and read the opponent's tendencies. 10 characters to choose from, plus 10 more expansion characters available for purchase inside the app.

Yomi captures the mindgames from fighting games such as Street Fighter, and was created by the lead designer of Street Fighter HD Remix, who was also a long-time fighting game tournament player. Yomi itself is a strategy card game that has held up to many years of tournaments. Start practicing now!

Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This

It's a funny story. A reader was going to buy this game for me in the most recent Steam Sale, but couldn't because the regional price differences were such that he could not send it as a gift (I guess to prevent complex international money-laundering schemes using Steam games as an intermediary). Nonetheless, I was so touched by the gesture I bought it myself, just so the world will not be deprived of my insightful commentary. Also, Yomi was on my wishlist anyways because I like card games and have a very low threshold for what goes on my wishlist (I kind of see adding things to my wishlist as being like methadone for my shopping addiction), so it wasn't any kind of hardship.

Expectations and Prior Experience

I have no idea what to expect from this game, but I do know that I've yet to play a card game I didn't like. The biggest obstacle I anticipate is the need for repetition. There's only 10 decks, which means 90 possible 1v1 match-ups (or 100, if mirror matches are allowed). So unless the matches take 12 to 13 minutes each, I'm going to be repeating at least some of them before this is all said and done.

It's probably nothing to worry about, though. I could play a card game in my sleep.

Stronghold Crusader - 20/20 hours

Wow, that was a rough day. The reason for me doing a single post after such a long delay is that I played for 14 hours out of the last 24. I had been procrastinating for 3 or 4 days and I knew that if I waited even one more, I'd have exceeded my target goal of a 6-day average per game. Petty and weird, I know, but I'm on a quest here, and I'm taking it very seriously.

Nonetheless, playing the bulk of the game in a single day was probably a mistake. It's not so much that the game was bad or unfun, but rather that I had to force myself to be interested. And that is surprisingly fatiguing, mentally.

I'm not sure why it should be, though. What I did was sit on the couch, cue up some of my favorite shows on Hulu, and play a series of Free Build maps while binge-watching Cutthroat Kitchen and Bob's Burgers. It doesn't make sense that something I could easily do without effort - watch television - should suddenly become an exhausting ordeal just because I happened to be playing an adequate, but not especially compelling castle building video game at the same time.

Part of it could be my divided attention. I never did like splitting my focus between multiple tasks at once. Except I don't think that can be it, because Free Build mode barely required my attention at all. Oh, you definitely have to make certain strategic decisions that will contribute to the growth of your settlement, but unless you find yourself in a spiraling food deficit, there's basically no way you can go wrong. You could just walk away from the PC and things would continue along their current trends indefinitely.

The most likely explanation is that I was playing the game like a city-builder, and it's simply not well optimized for that. So there was never anything particularly bad, but over time, a lot of little frustrations built up. Like the fact that you cannot build anything if one of your people would be underneath it - meaning that in order to expand your infrastructure in a heavily-trafficked area, you've got to hover your cursor over the location and hope that it clears up for the split second you need to click the button. Or the fact that you can't directly control your lumberjacks, which means clearing the land for expansion relies more or less entirely on luck.

Still, I liked the feeling of getting a large settlement up and running. I imagine that once upon a time, having all those hundreds of characters moving back and forth on their regular errands would have crashed my computer, but that's the advantage of playing a game 16 years after it was released. I enjoyed watching my people scurry back and forth, even if their activities were largely pointless. In the end, I don't regret marathoning the bulk of the game in a single day, because I was able to meet my arbitrary, self-imposed benchmark . . .

And isn't that what this blog is all about?

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Stronghold Crusader HD - 3/20 hours

This game is just a reskin of Stronghold with a middle-eastern flair. As such, I have nothing to say about it that I didn't already say about the original game. I'll probably have some commentary on the nature of crusades, but only if the story in the campaigns starts to deal with religious themes.

I guess I like the reskin, though. The sandstone-colored wall have a cleaner, more elegant look, and the hovels look more like permanent houses than the straw huts from the first game. I always felt bad about building such crappy houses for my people, though I soothed my conscience by reminding myself that the individual citizens were not simulated down to that level. Hovels affect your population cap, but your workers don't return to them once they are built.

My biggest obstacle going forward is definitely my petulance at having to play the exact same game twice in one month. I didn't hate the first game, but I was relieved to put it behind me. If I weren't trying to hit a deadline I'd just take it slow and casual, but forcing myself to concentrate over my own resentment is going to be a problem.

Friday, January 12, 2018

Dust: An Elysian Tail - 20/20 hours

"Tough" mode proved not to be very tough at all. Sure, the bosses were a little trickier, but that just meant I had to use my healing items instead of hoarding them. The generic enemies you encounter elsewhere in the level were no problem whatsoever. They did more damage, but I was long-practiced in not getting hit. They had higher hp and defenses, but that just meant that I could build up my combo meter to even greater heights. I probably should have started my first game in "hardcore" (maximum) difficulty. Maybe that would have been frustrating, but the pattern so far is that this game has gotten easier the more I played it, so I expect it would have evened out at some point or another.

I wouldn't call any of this a complaint, though. Sometimes it's nice to just kick back with an easy game and tear through it like an angry god. I probably wouldn't want to do it all the time, but seeing as how it's the complete opposite of Stronghold, it was a welcome change of pace.

I don't know if I'll ever play this game again. It's not an open world. There's not a lot left for me to explore. The craft system was kind of a joke (materials are so abundant in shops that it really just feels like a shop with extra steps). But the combat grew on me, and there was something ridiculously fun about using your air dash move and Fidget's projectiles to rack up a triple-digit combo score. I think, though, that if I being honest, Kingdoms of Amalur fills the same niche and has the advantage of being much larger besides.

Dust: An Elysian Tail was one of my better gaming experiences (that pun notwithstanding), but it definitely feels like a one and done to me. Maybe if the skill ceiling were higher, but that's just speculation. In any event, I realize now that I should have bought more colorful platforming-action games and fewer RTSs. So that's not nothing.

Dust: An Elysian Tail - 16/20 hours

My guess about the nature of Dust's true identity was in the ballpark, but the real answer turned out to be so weird that I'm going to forgive myself for not seeing it coming. I thought that he would turn out to be Cassius, the assassin, somehow brainwashed with magic to remove all his evil memories and become redeemed by fighting against his former allies. What actually happened is that Cassius was killed and his dead body was reanimated with not one, but two bound souls those of Cassius and his final victim, Jin. This composite being became Dust. The sorcerer who made him wanted a champion with Cassius's deadliness and Jin's compassion. The reason that he had no memories is that he was born just before the start of the game.

I'm not sure how I feel about this twist. On the one hand, it avoids the cliche (while still being close enough that the narrative has almost all of the expected beats, even right up to the end). On the other hand, thematically it has less of an impact. Dust's actions don't represent Cassius coming to terms with and repudiating his wicked deeds (and it's impossible to say what they represent about Jin because that character was only introduced in the game's last hour). Nor is there any sort of arc about the meaning of redemption or the nature of forgiveness. Dust is a hero because that's what he's always been. That was what he was created to be.

And yet, the villain thinks Dust is Cassius come back from the dead. Even up to the final battle, he acts as if he's talking to his old friend. That's probably the weirdest part of the game. General Gaius is a ruthless genocidal maniac, dedicated to purging the Moonblood race from the face of the earth, but his primary motivation when dealing with the hero is sentimentality. He's always talking about his friend, Cassius, and it is clear from the vocal performance that he's genuinely concerned. He loves this sociopathic assassin and is thrilled by the possibility that he's come back from the dead. When they meet and it appears that Cassius has been brainwashed by his enemies, Gaius does everything in his power to reach out to him and remind him of their shared bond.

It is note for note the exact same story you'd get if he were a kindly, heroic general and he were talking to a previously virtuous knight who had been corrupted by necromancy. It was bizarre, but I kind of liked it.

I'm sure I've pointed out in the past that the main problem with video game evil (and, indeed, evil in a lot of fiction, generally) is that too often villains' only interest is committing evil. They might have a sympathetic backstory, like maybe they're murdering every elf they can because an elf once killed their brother or something, but even so, they rarely have interests or relationships outside their terrible villainous urge. A Sith falls to the dark side and then can be manipulated into attacking their friends and siding with the enemy they've been fighting the whole time. Or a Machiavellian vizier is always thinking about his various schemes and never about, say, gardening.

It's understandable from a creative standpoint - you want to be economical with your narrative, not waste a lot of time establishing that the serial killer also loves his pet cat, unless you're trying to be deliberately ironic with the juxtaposition, but it does make villains seem one-dimensional at times. Which is why Gaius is so startling. As near as I can tell, there is no irony in his concern. He doesn't want Cassius back as an unstoppable weapon. He doesn't fondly reminisce over all the various genocidal atrocities they used to commit together. He just sounds vaguely worried, and at times hopeful, over the rumors that his friend might still be alive.

It's like he's perfectly compartmentalized his life. He has a job to do - hunting down and slaughtering every member of a targeted race - which he does with ruthless efficiency, and then he also has his personal life, where he's a caring, patient man who is willing to extend near-limitless compassion to the people important to him. I'm not sure how realistic that is (though I suspect that it's depressingly so) and I'm not sure if the game is trying to make a philosophical point, but I can tell you that it's not very effective. You hear a lot about General Gaius's terrible deeds from his victims, but whenever you see him, he's just kind of this hapless guy. In the end, he extends you a great deal more reasonableness than you entirely deserve (from his perspective, obviously). His eventual death feels less like a triumph than just another random thing that happens.

Overall, the story was serviceable. I'll probably skip over it when I play the game again on hard mode, but I didn't feel like it was an imposition my first time through. Besides, I've only got four hours to go, so I'll have to stop partway through either way. This next attempt will be purely for the challenge.

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Dust: An Elysian Tail - 6/20 hours

Six hours in and I've only found one new movement ability (out of at least 3 obstacle types that I've noticed). This is not a great track record. It means that I have to backtrack to areas I haven't seen in 4-5 hours, and will have to backtrack to areas I haven't seen in 6 hours or more. At some point, it strains the limits of my memory. I'll get the new powers and then I'll be forced to think "do I need to back to this area or to that area?" My plan right now is just to wait and get them all and then go back to the beginning and search every level one-by-one.

The combat in the game is decent, but not very challenging. I've managed to get through so far by thoughtless button-mashing, and I don't think that's going to change. There's a chance that there might be a difficulty spike at some point in the future, but so far the trend has been that the game's been getting easier as time goes on.

The story is pretty boiler-plate so far. The hero, Dust, woke up with amnesia and a magical talking sword, Ahrah. The sword explained to him that he could regain his memories by going on a quest to aid the land. Also, the sword's guardian, a flying cat creature called Fidget, decides to tag along as your fourth-wall breaking comic relief. Over the course of your adventures, you learn that pre-amnesia Dust was associated with some pretty shady characters and though it hasn't been revealed just yet, I'm willing to bet that this whole ordeal is actually meant to redeem him from his previous wicked deeds.

It may not be the most innovative thing in the world, but the presentation is top notch and I'm finding myself invested in he fate of the characters despite myself. I think the next fourteen hours are going to go just fine.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Dust: An Elysian Tail - 2/20 hours

I just noticed that the game's title is Dust: An Elysian Tail. Not "tale," like a story that you tell (perhaps in video game form), but "tail" as in the back part of an animal . . .

Don't do this. If you're thinking of writing a story about animals, or anthropomorphic animals, or animal-shaped robots or whatever - don't do this. It's a lame pun and it's confusing. What does it even mean? At some point in this game, I'd better wind up using my character's tail to resolve a major plot point. Otherwise, it's a played out joke that wasn't funny the first time.

Now that I've got that off my chest, I actually really like this game. It's bright and colorful, and, frankly, the screenshots don't do it justice. It is indeed just like playing a cartoon. All the NPCs have a unique and memorable character design and the voice acting is both skilled and distinct. I have absolutely no complaints about its presentation.

The gameplay, I'm going to reserve judgement on. So far, it's serviceable, but I'll need some more time to see how it evolves. If it's going to follow the classic Metroid pattern of having certain areas of the early maps closed off until you get new abilities so you can backtrack later and explore new areas, then I'm going to have to see if the progression of abilities and rewards is satisfying enough to justify it.

I'm feeling pretty good about it, though. I like the characters. I enjoy brawling with hordes of enemies, even if it's a bit button-mashy, and rpg progression is always welcome. The story is simple (and just a little cliche) so far, but at least it has the virtue of me being able to follow it.

Monday, January 8, 2018

Dust: An Elysian Tale - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

Immerse yourself in a gorgeous hand-painted world on a search for your true identity. As the mysterious warrior, Dust, your action-packed journey will take you from peaceful glades to snowy mountaintops and beyond. At your disposal is the mythical Blade of Ahrah, capable of turning its wielder into an unstoppable force of nature, and the blade's diminutive guardian, Fidget. Battle dozens of enemies at once with an easy-to-learn, difficult-to-master combat system, take on a variety of quests from friendly villagers, discover ancient secrets and powerful upgrades hidden throughout the massive, open world, and uncover the story of an ancient civilization on the brink of extinction as you fight to uncover your own past.

Previous Playtime

0 hours

Expectations and Prior Experience

I put this game on my wishlist because it looks really pretty. A lot of bright colors and rounded shapes, like a living cartoon. Then one of my readers was generous enough to purchase it for me (thank you, greatly, by the way) and I decided to use it to cleanse my palate between Stronhold games. Because one thing I know for certain is that it's not going to be building and defending castles for hours on end.

It's a platformer, for better or worse. I like the genre as a whole, but it's easy to screw up. Mostly it comes down to subtle things - the length of your jumps, the friction of your running, the inventiveness of the enemies and obstacles. I'm not worried, because I have no particular reason to think this game is bad, but if it is, i will probably take me awhile to realize it.

 My big fear is that it might be too short. Running through the same game twice in a row isn't bad, but by the third or fourth time, I really start to question why I'm even here on this planet in the first place.

Stronghold HD - 20/20 hours

I have five more of these to go. Oy.

It wasn't really that bad. It's just not my sort of thing. The best part of the game was commanding the troops, and I'd rather not command troops. Towards the end, I was just looking for things to do that would take a lot of time, but not much effort.

What I eventually settled on was playing individual Siege missions. The fascinating thing about these was that they purported to be based off of real historical castles (with a couple of King Arthur-inspired exceptions). I don't know how historically accurate they were, but I liked looking at the different designs and seeing what worked and what didn't.

The main drawback to the siege missions is that they were basically won or lost before I even started playing them. If a castle was well-designed, it stood up to the enemy. If it was poorly designed, it did not. Or, at least, I couldn't figure out any way to make my personal skill relevant to the proceedings. Moving my troops around inside the castle walls seemed to help, sometimes, but not so much that I felt like it actually changed the course of a battle.

Overall. I would say that Stronghold is fine, but I really shouldn't have bought the whole bundle. Looking at the screenshots for Stronghold Crusader, it looks more like an expansion pack than a sequel. My hope is that somewhere down the line the economic sim gets more rigorous, but taken as a group, it looks like I'm in for a lot of repetition.

But that's what I signed up for, so be prepared for these posts to get short, bitter, and surreal, because we are in for a long ride.

Friday, January 5, 2018

Stronghold HD - 10/20 hours

Time has ceased to exist. I'll play a mission or two of Stronghold and, subjectively, it will feel like an hour has passed, but when I exit the program and check the time counter, I'll see that it was only 20 minutes. Normally, a game will begin to engross me the more I play it. But this one, it's like throwing my consciousness into an ocean - instead of coming together, it just diffuses outwards and I become aware of each second passing.

I think it's because a lot of this game is waiting for things to happen. You can't construct a new building until your workers gather wood. You can't recruit a new soldier until your forges churn out some new weapons. You can't achieve the mission objectives before a certain amount of time has passed.

Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a problem for me. It's just that I feel guilty about letting time go by passively. I feel like I should be playing the game instead of just watching it. But Stronghold is an rts, not a city-builder, and thus playing it is a major chore.

It's always been a mystery to me why I like the one genre, but not the other (aside from, you know, all the grudging exceptions I've admitted to over the years). They seem very similar in many respects. They both involve building and resource management in real time, and the controls are quit often identical. Then you have things like tech-trees and sometimes even units to control (more in the games that blur the line, but still).

Yet I think I've narrowed down the key difference. An RTS tests your creation against external threats and a city-builder tests your creation against internal threats. Something like Stronghold, you have to worry about enemy soldiers and artillery tearing down your walls and razing your economic buildings. In something like SimCity, you have to worry about the unintended consequences of growth - traffic, crime, public health, and whatnot. There is some overlap with things like fires or natural disasters, but generally, in an RTS, a larger base is always better and in a city builder, a larger base is only stable after you've solved the problems created by having a larger base.

Stronghold has elements of a city-builder, but now that I've gotten up to population 250 in Free-play mode, I can say definitively that there is no special challenge in having a larger base. Population morale is trivial to manage and is only really affected by natural disasters and tax levels. Income is useless for anything besides recruiting troops. And food surplus is purely a point of pride.

I guess that means that my time of dithering is over. I have to actually commit to playing the game right. On the upside, maybe constant warfare will make the time pass faster.

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Stronghold HD - 5/20 hours

Weirdly, I am enjoying the military campaign more than the economic campaign. Call it a case of managing expectations. On an economic map, I am expecting to have to build up my economy, and thus I get quite upset when enemies come around and wreck my shit. On a military map, I am expecting to fight enemies, and thus am pleasantly surprised when doing so requires me to build up my economy. In practice, though, the two mission types are basically indistinguishable.

The main problem I've been having is that I keep overestimating the strength of my castles. I'll have this wooden gate, with five archers on top and then four guys will come to the gate, smash their way through, and slaughter my entire force . . . all without losing a single member. I'd have thought that the combination of fortifications and ranged weapons would be an insurmountable advantage against foe that did not greatly outnumber me, but I'm coming to learn that if I don't outnumber the enemy at least 3 to 1, I might as well not bother showing up, castle or no.

The other problem I've had is a sillier one. It's not always apparent to me which terrain is passable and which is not, so when I build my walls, I'll think I have them abutted against a natural barrier, and then the enemy will beeline for the one diagonal tile between them and just slip through as if there were nothing there. I've started to compensate by over-fortifying, building 2 or 3 layers of walls where 1 would look better.

Free build mode is everything I said I wanted in my last post, though once I got a chance to build without interference from wolves or bandits, I discovered that there is no depth whatsoever to the game's economic system. You can precisely control your population growth by building hovels, and then, after the fact, build the production buildings necessary to utilize and support that population. Without the threat of invasion, there's no challenge at all.

I guess that makes sense. The game is called Stronghold, not "Medieval Village Simulator." But I can't deny that this has become something of a contest of wills. Either I will bend the game to my will, or it will bend me to its, but one way or another, I am not getting through 20 hours of this without some form of creative destruction.

Monday, January 1, 2018

Stronghold HD - 2/20 hours

I had such high hopes when I saw that there was an economic campaign. I thought for sure that I could focus purely on building up my town's economy and leave all that tedious siege warfare stuff to the military campaign. And for the first mission,it seemed like that was exactly the case. But then I loaded up the second mission and wolves slaughtered all of my workers!

Apparently these are the fearless video game sort of wolves that will just attack a populated human settlement en masse. So I reloaded and tried again, and this time I was killed by bears. Then later bandits. I must have gotten to my fourth or fifth time through before I gave up in disgust.

And now, here I am. Frankly, if Stronghold is going to treat me this way, I may just have to do the military campaign after all.

I'm afraid the next 18 hours are going to be rough either way. This game really shows its age. The RTS controls are imprecise and the economy (such as I can tell between wolf attacks) is shallow. All I really want to do is build castles and their surrounding villages. I know that the whole purpose of a castle is to defend against attacks, but I don't want a real castle, I want a toy one.

Maybe there's some way I can fiddle with the settings to get a game I want to play, but I'm not optimistic. I don't think this is the sort of game that takes it easy on people.

Stronghold Series - Initial thoughts

When I was a child, I had this book. I can't remember its author or title, but it was a remarkable illustrated guide to the construction and daily life of a castle. I can't say why (other than the obvious overlap in subject matter), but something about one of the screenshots to one of the stronghold games reminded me of that book and the good feelings I had flipping through it. So, of course, I bought the whole series in a bundle because it was only $7.50.

2014 was a confusing year for me, okay.

Anyway, I've been dreading this series for awhile. Not because I think they're going to be especially bad, but because there are six of them. How the hell am I going to be able to come up with new and interesting things to say after playing six, presumably near-identical games? If I'd had any sense at all, I'd have spread them out, so that it might be less obvious, but even then, six is a lot. I distinctly remember running out of things to say about the Mount & Blade series, and there were only three of them.

That's a meta-concern, though. As far as the games themselves go, they look okay. It really depends on the balance of gameplay factors. If there's a lot of castle-building and only a little bit of rts sieges, I'll probably like them quite a bit. If I'm constantly having to defend my half-built castles from aggressive enemy hordes, I'll probably be pretty miserable.

The plan here is to do what I did with Civilization IV - alternate between a Stronghold game and something else, going back and forth for the next three months until they are all finished. Even writing it out, it sounds like a terrible chore. At least I'll be able to breathe a massive sigh of relief when it's all done.

End of Year Retrospective - 2017

I made a deliberate choice to slow my pace for 2017. It was my hope that by being less single-minded about playing video games, I'd have more time to focus on my other hobbies. And to some degree, it worked. I read a few books this year. I did some Exalted homebrew stuff that was fairly well received. I wrote about 40% of a tabletop rpg. But to be totally honest, most of my extra time was spent goofing off and watching youtube videos.

Nonetheless, I accomplished three significant blog goals this year. I finished all the games on my original list. I finally polished off the last of that Star Wars bundle. And I got down to 24 games remaining before the end of the year (though this achievement was almost immediately undone by a couple of gifts and rash purchases on my part).

My goal for 2018 is to get down to 0 remaining games. My secondary goal is to do so by June 21st. That will be the four year anniversary of the blog, and a nice place to wrap things up.

Which raises the question - why do I want to stop doing the blog? Truthfully, I don't want to stop, I just want to finish . . . if that makes any sense. I started this thing with a clear goal in mind and for much of its history, that goal has gotten farther and farther away. The idea that I could actually reach it has filled me with a kind of desperate focus - it resembles hope, but it's probably a little too furious for that.

I've started fantasizing about what life will be like when I no longer have a Steam backlog. I could go back to playing games like a normal human being. If I enjoyed a game, I could play it for as long as I wanted, even if that was hundreds of hours. And if I didn't enjoy a game, or if I enjoyed it, but only took 8 hours to get through the whole thing, I could stop.

And yet, I will miss doing this. I like collecting my thoughts about the games I play. Some moreso than others, admittedly. But overall, this blog has been a source of pride and satisfaction for me. So I don't want to think of my June 21st deadline as me committing to a retirement. Rather, I've been thinking of it as an opportunity to try something new.

The most obvious direction would be to only buy games I intended to play, and then play them right after I bought them (I know - a shocking suggestion in this day and age). It would mean the blog would stay alive in diminished form - a new game every month or two, more or less forever.

Alternately, I've been toying with the idea of keeping my challenge list open indefinitely. As much as I'm loathe to admit it, I was actually amused by being forced to play Ride to Hell: Retribution or Ship Simulator Extremes. I don't necessarily want you all to take this as an invitation to drown me in 1-star games, but know that, taken sparingly, I may grumble about having to play them, but it's a good- natured grumbling.

The final idea I've had is the most radical, and I'm hesitant to bring it up because it's a huge commitment, but it's also possible that I may change gears after the blog is finished and start tackling my tabletop rpg collection. I've been collecting rpg books for 20 years, and I have about 300 volumes. I've already read about 90% of them, but it might be kind of fun to go through my whole collection and systematically review each and every book. That might be too great a change, though.

It's still too early to lay any concrete plans, though I will make this promise - any game I purchase or receive before June 21st, 2018, I will play and blog about, even if it takes me another 5 years. I'm hoping it won't come to that, of course, but that's what I signed on for, and I intend to see it through.