I was wrong about an impossible difficulty taking the pressure off. I
survived on difficulty 10 for a little over two hours, and towards the
end I started thinking to myself "hey, what if I make it."
Like,
seriously, I entertained the notion that I, as a complete novice could
somehow (presumably through a combination of dumb luck and natural
strategic acumen) defy the odds and survive indefinitely in the most
difficult part of an already notoriously difficult game. I mean, I'm not delusional. I knew that it wasn't likely. But I successfully conquered a star system. I survived several waves of reprisals. I thought I'd be dead within minutes and miraculously I wasn't.
So I decided to play slowly and methodically. To not take any risks and carefully consider each attack. To only move when I was at my unit cap. And it seemed to be working. Until I made a newb mistake and was almost instantly overwhelmed.
It turns out that even losing the game takes more time than I'd thought. So my plan to move down the difficulty levels is probably untenable. I can only assume that as I go down the list the time to die will take progressively longer. Every time I start a new game, there's the possibility that it will be my last.
This is complicated by the fact that, thanks to a tip from Bremen, I learned that there are a bunch of scenarios and optional units that I could enable. So I started an easy game with all the options enabled. I've had a couple of interesting encounters, but it hasn't been the overloaded conga-line of complications that I was expecting.
I think I'll start a Difficulty 9 game and see how long it takes to kill me and then if it takes too long, I will go back to my kitchen-sink game. My agenda now is to learn as much about the game as possible before No Man's Sky comes out.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
AI War: Fleet Command - 5/20 hours
I think this game might be a long one. I finished the tutorial at the 5.7 hour mark and that was only a ten star galaxy and the suggested size for even an easy game is 30-40.
My big question now is "does game length scale linearly with galaxy size?" And the only answer I can think of is "not if you lose." Which is to say that I'm pretty sure the tutorial mini-campaign is the only game of AI War I'm ever going to win. Either I will be on the path to victory in a campaign that will take more than 16.3 hours or I will lose repeatedly.
In a normal situation, where I was approaching AI War as something I might explore over the course of weeks or months, I'd just start a game on a low difficulty level, play through for a couple dozen hours, and then ramp up on my next attempt if the victory proved to be unsatisfying. Since I want to finish this game in a couple of days, that's not really a viable plan.
Instead, I'm going to try and play to lose. Not intentionally. I'm not going to throw the game or anything, but I am going to defy the game's advice and start on the highest difficulty. If I'm knocked out in a few minutes, I can scale down to the next highest level, and so on and so forth until I reach a difficulty where I can survive until the end of my remaining time.
It's a ridiculous way to play the game - I don't have anything even approaching the skillset necessary to survive on level 10 - but I figure that facing impossible odds against a superior foe is the game's core theme. If I am to really understand AI War, I need to confront this outcome head-on.
I'm not sure how I'll deal with it, emotionally. Normally, I hate it when a game wrecks my stuff before sending me into an inglorious defeat, but this time I'm deliberately courting that fate. Against a level 10 AI, the death of the human race is all but assured, but how can I be upset about this. No one has even suggested I try level 10. I imagine there's not an elitist hardcore gamer on the planet that would scoff at me for avoiding max difficulty after only a single tutorial mini-campaign.
And that's very liberating. When you go into something knowing you're destined to fail, it takes the pressure off of you to try and succeed. Of course, I know myself. If I manage to make even trivial headway against the level 10 AI, I'm going to at least partially convince myself that it's possible to go all the way. And then the pressure is going to all come rushing back.
So here's to a series of quick and decisive losses! It really is the best thing for me right now.
My big question now is "does game length scale linearly with galaxy size?" And the only answer I can think of is "not if you lose." Which is to say that I'm pretty sure the tutorial mini-campaign is the only game of AI War I'm ever going to win. Either I will be on the path to victory in a campaign that will take more than 16.3 hours or I will lose repeatedly.
In a normal situation, where I was approaching AI War as something I might explore over the course of weeks or months, I'd just start a game on a low difficulty level, play through for a couple dozen hours, and then ramp up on my next attempt if the victory proved to be unsatisfying. Since I want to finish this game in a couple of days, that's not really a viable plan.
Instead, I'm going to try and play to lose. Not intentionally. I'm not going to throw the game or anything, but I am going to defy the game's advice and start on the highest difficulty. If I'm knocked out in a few minutes, I can scale down to the next highest level, and so on and so forth until I reach a difficulty where I can survive until the end of my remaining time.
It's a ridiculous way to play the game - I don't have anything even approaching the skillset necessary to survive on level 10 - but I figure that facing impossible odds against a superior foe is the game's core theme. If I am to really understand AI War, I need to confront this outcome head-on.
I'm not sure how I'll deal with it, emotionally. Normally, I hate it when a game wrecks my stuff before sending me into an inglorious defeat, but this time I'm deliberately courting that fate. Against a level 10 AI, the death of the human race is all but assured, but how can I be upset about this. No one has even suggested I try level 10. I imagine there's not an elitist hardcore gamer on the planet that would scoff at me for avoiding max difficulty after only a single tutorial mini-campaign.
And that's very liberating. When you go into something knowing you're destined to fail, it takes the pressure off of you to try and succeed. Of course, I know myself. If I manage to make even trivial headway against the level 10 AI, I'm going to at least partially convince myself that it's possible to go all the way. And then the pressure is going to all come rushing back.
So here's to a series of quick and decisive losses! It really is the best thing for me right now.
Sunday, August 7, 2016
AI War: Fleet Command - 2/20 hours
I'm starting to worry about this game. I'm two and a half hours in and I'm still in the middle of the tutorial. But it's not really the complexity that bothers me. When I started the tutorial, it warned me that it was possible to lose . . . in the tutorial. Now I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise to me. The very premise of the game is that you're outclassed by an overwhelming enemy. It's just that it didn't really feel real to me until I saw that tutorial intro.
Ominous foreshadowing of doom aside, I've been enjoying AI War so far. It doesn't have the most interesting tech tree or the most compelling unit design, but it's enough to keep me engaged. My hope is that once I play a full game, with the expansion packs unlocked, I will be able to unlock deeper, more complex units and strategies. Whether or not I'll be able to use such things effectively remains to be seen.
Other than these vague first impressions, I can't really say anything about the game as a whole yet, though. One thing I've gathered from the tutorial and from reading the "which difficulty should I select" article on the wiki, is that in the real, non-tutorial game, a lot of the strategy revolves around trying to manipulate the AI - what in other games might be called exploits, where you try to find the blind spot in the program's decision-making process and fool it into making bad decisions.
The interesting thing about this is that in addition to a straightforward difficulty slider, you can choose a personality for your AI opponents, which determines its overall strategy (such as focusing on a strong defense and not making attacks on the lower end or always destroying their planets rather than allowing them to fall into enemy hands on the higher end) and gives it certain bonus units or technologies. This means, presumably, that the "find the inevitable weakness of the underlying algorithm" game can be played dozens of times and still be different every time. It's a neat approach to setting difficulty, though I doubt I'll play long enough to learn much about it.
My next move is to try and finish the tutorial and then jump into the recommended "Beginner" setup to see a slice of the whole game. At some point during these 20 hours, I'm going to have to lose a game, because from everything I've heard, that's what AI War is all about. I have my fingers crossed, however, that my first defeat will not be in the freaking tutorial. Proudly difficult game or not, that would be humiliating.
This shouldn't really come as a surprise to me. The very premise of the game is that you're outclassed by an overwhelming enemy. It's just that it didn't really feel real to me until I saw that tutorial intro.
Ominous foreshadowing of doom aside, I've been enjoying AI War so far. It doesn't have the most interesting tech tree or the most compelling unit design, but it's enough to keep me engaged. My hope is that once I play a full game, with the expansion packs unlocked, I will be able to unlock deeper, more complex units and strategies. Whether or not I'll be able to use such things effectively remains to be seen.
Other than these vague first impressions, I can't really say anything about the game as a whole yet, though. One thing I've gathered from the tutorial and from reading the "which difficulty should I select" article on the wiki, is that in the real, non-tutorial game, a lot of the strategy revolves around trying to manipulate the AI - what in other games might be called exploits, where you try to find the blind spot in the program's decision-making process and fool it into making bad decisions.
The interesting thing about this is that in addition to a straightforward difficulty slider, you can choose a personality for your AI opponents, which determines its overall strategy (such as focusing on a strong defense and not making attacks on the lower end or always destroying their planets rather than allowing them to fall into enemy hands on the higher end) and gives it certain bonus units or technologies. This means, presumably, that the "find the inevitable weakness of the underlying algorithm" game can be played dozens of times and still be different every time. It's a neat approach to setting difficulty, though I doubt I'll play long enough to learn much about it.
My next move is to try and finish the tutorial and then jump into the recommended "Beginner" setup to see a slice of the whole game. At some point during these 20 hours, I'm going to have to lose a game, because from everything I've heard, that's what AI War is all about. I have my fingers crossed, however, that my first defeat will not be in the freaking tutorial. Proudly difficult game or not, that would be humiliating.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
AI War: Fleet Command - Initial Thoughts
About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)
"You are outgunned. You are massively outnumbered. You must win." These are your orders.
Humanity has already fought its war against the machines -- and lost. AI death squads stand watch over every planet and every wormhole, the few remaining human settlements are held captive in orbiting bubbles, and the AIs have turned their attention outward, away from the galaxy, to alien threats or opportunities unknown.
This inattention is our only hope: a small resistance, too insignificant even to be noticed by the AI central command, has survived. These are the forces you will command. The AI subcommanders will fight you to the death when they see you -- but your glimmer of opportunity comes from quietly subduing those subcommanders without alerting central processing to the danger until it's too late.
You do have a few things going in your favor. Your ships are much faster. You have safe AI routines to automate defenses and mining outposts. You have production techniques that can churn out fully-outfitted unmanned fighters in seconds. There will never be more than a few thousand of your ships versus tens of thousands of theirs, but through careful strategy you must somehow reach and destroy the heavily-guarded AI cores.
Go forth into the galaxy, steal AI technology, recapture those planets you must in order to achieve your ends, and save what remains of humanity. But draw too much attention to yourself, and the full might of the AI overlords will come crashing down.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
Like most of my purchases, it was on deep discount and I impulsively snatched it up. I didn't really know anything about it except that it had an intriguing premise, it was made by the same developer as The Last Federation, and the bundle included all of the DLC.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I'm a little nervous about this game. It looks like a pretty intense RTS, which is a genre that's given me a trouble in the past. According to the store page, it's a twist on the regular formula, where you have to balance production against stealth. Not being especially experienced with the genre, I'm not sure how much I'll appreciate the nuance of this reversal, but the novelty has piqued my interest.
The failure state here is if the game proves to be too hard, if it requires me to react to quickly or focus on too many things at a time. But that's just my typical RTS anxiety. My only real concern that's specific to this game is that maybe managing the AI's aggression will prove to be a frustrating chore, where I'm punished every time I start to feel like I'm doing well.
On the other hand, maybe this game will prove to be an arresting strategic challenge. Maybe I'll get that rush of good feelings that comes with solving a problem and the overwhelming power of the AI will only make it more satisfying to defeat.
"You are outgunned. You are massively outnumbered. You must win." These are your orders.
Humanity has already fought its war against the machines -- and lost. AI death squads stand watch over every planet and every wormhole, the few remaining human settlements are held captive in orbiting bubbles, and the AIs have turned their attention outward, away from the galaxy, to alien threats or opportunities unknown.
This inattention is our only hope: a small resistance, too insignificant even to be noticed by the AI central command, has survived. These are the forces you will command. The AI subcommanders will fight you to the death when they see you -- but your glimmer of opportunity comes from quietly subduing those subcommanders without alerting central processing to the danger until it's too late.
You do have a few things going in your favor. Your ships are much faster. You have safe AI routines to automate defenses and mining outposts. You have production techniques that can churn out fully-outfitted unmanned fighters in seconds. There will never be more than a few thousand of your ships versus tens of thousands of theirs, but through careful strategy you must somehow reach and destroy the heavily-guarded AI cores.
Go forth into the galaxy, steal AI technology, recapture those planets you must in order to achieve your ends, and save what remains of humanity. But draw too much attention to yourself, and the full might of the AI overlords will come crashing down.
Previous Playtime
0 hours
What Was I Thinking When I Bought This
Like most of my purchases, it was on deep discount and I impulsively snatched it up. I didn't really know anything about it except that it had an intriguing premise, it was made by the same developer as The Last Federation, and the bundle included all of the DLC.
Expectations and Prior Experience
I'm a little nervous about this game. It looks like a pretty intense RTS, which is a genre that's given me a trouble in the past. According to the store page, it's a twist on the regular formula, where you have to balance production against stealth. Not being especially experienced with the genre, I'm not sure how much I'll appreciate the nuance of this reversal, but the novelty has piqued my interest.
The failure state here is if the game proves to be too hard, if it requires me to react to quickly or focus on too many things at a time. But that's just my typical RTS anxiety. My only real concern that's specific to this game is that maybe managing the AI's aggression will prove to be a frustrating chore, where I'm punished every time I start to feel like I'm doing well.
On the other hand, maybe this game will prove to be an arresting strategic challenge. Maybe I'll get that rush of good feelings that comes with solving a problem and the overwhelming power of the AI will only make it more satisfying to defeat.
Vertiginous Golf - 20/20 hours
I don't know how I got so jaded about this game so quickly. I mean, it's a game of clever geometrical and mechanical challenges, where baroque steampunk contraptions float in the sky and success revolves around unraveling complex chains of cause-and-effect. Which normally sounds like the sort of thing I at least pretend to enjoy (and bear in mind, Vertiginous Golf actually is a pretty enjoyable golf game).
I had a theory that Vertiginous Golf lacked that certain critical element of all-American kitsch that characterizes all the best real-world mini-golf courses. I'm not sure what windmills, miniature skyscrapers, and dinosaur mouths would have brought to the holes that the game's pneumatic tubes, moving platforms, and conveyor belts would have lacked, but I do think I'd have enjoyed seeing steampunk interpretations of these mini-golf staples.
However, I don't think that's really that much of a factor. If the putting environment was a bit more sterile than I might have liked, it was compensated by the fact that the courses were more abstract and (theoretically) easier to read.
Overall, Vertiginous Golf was a perfectly adequate game, about which I have no major complaints. I think I was just cranky when I played it. I felt like I had it all figured out in the first couple of hours . . . and after twenty, I can say that feeling was mostly correct, but there was really no reason for me to be such a dick about it.
By way of apology, I will make an embarrassing confession. At one point, my total score for the game's most difficult course was +51 over par. It was almost entirely down to a combination of the radically unpredictable obstacles and me not knowing how to putt. I eventually got my score down to +4 over par (112th best in the world!), but there are several courses I never got to revisit, so my total ranking is still terrible. Even if I am wise to Vertiginous Golf's tricks, I still have a lot to learn.
I don't think I will, though. Despite its science-fiction trappings, Vertiginous Golf is still a sports game, a member of a genre which, you might have noticed, has absolutely no presence in my Steam library (kind of surprising, too, considering how many games I own). Maybe it's just some lingering nerd-obstinance from a childhood of resolutely avoiding sports or maybe it's because there aren't a lot of sports games that have turn-based resource management, rpg character-progression elements, or freeform voxel crafting, and thus nothing to really hook me into them, but the sports game genre is normally totally invisible to me. Like, I'll go into one of those stores that sells vintage video games and see that they've got a whole shelf of NHL 96 or Madden 98 or whatnot and I'll think to myself, "oh, they don't have any SNES games to sell."
My brain literally processes them as detritus, the stuff that's left over as a console sheds its user-base and becomes a historical curiosity. It's not fair, and it's not wise, but it's a blind spot that has been exposed by my time with Vertiginous Golf. If I want to become a true video game aficionado, I should probably address that, but honestly, I have no idea where to even start.
So, while I found Vertiginous Golf to be mildly enjoyable, but mostly pretty forgettable, that opinion must be understood in the context of my own staggering ignorance.
I had a theory that Vertiginous Golf lacked that certain critical element of all-American kitsch that characterizes all the best real-world mini-golf courses. I'm not sure what windmills, miniature skyscrapers, and dinosaur mouths would have brought to the holes that the game's pneumatic tubes, moving platforms, and conveyor belts would have lacked, but I do think I'd have enjoyed seeing steampunk interpretations of these mini-golf staples.
However, I don't think that's really that much of a factor. If the putting environment was a bit more sterile than I might have liked, it was compensated by the fact that the courses were more abstract and (theoretically) easier to read.
Overall, Vertiginous Golf was a perfectly adequate game, about which I have no major complaints. I think I was just cranky when I played it. I felt like I had it all figured out in the first couple of hours . . . and after twenty, I can say that feeling was mostly correct, but there was really no reason for me to be such a dick about it.
By way of apology, I will make an embarrassing confession. At one point, my total score for the game's most difficult course was +51 over par. It was almost entirely down to a combination of the radically unpredictable obstacles and me not knowing how to putt. I eventually got my score down to +4 over par (112th best in the world!), but there are several courses I never got to revisit, so my total ranking is still terrible. Even if I am wise to Vertiginous Golf's tricks, I still have a lot to learn.
I don't think I will, though. Despite its science-fiction trappings, Vertiginous Golf is still a sports game, a member of a genre which, you might have noticed, has absolutely no presence in my Steam library (kind of surprising, too, considering how many games I own). Maybe it's just some lingering nerd-obstinance from a childhood of resolutely avoiding sports or maybe it's because there aren't a lot of sports games that have turn-based resource management, rpg character-progression elements, or freeform voxel crafting, and thus nothing to really hook me into them, but the sports game genre is normally totally invisible to me. Like, I'll go into one of those stores that sells vintage video games and see that they've got a whole shelf of NHL 96 or Madden 98 or whatnot and I'll think to myself, "oh, they don't have any SNES games to sell."
My brain literally processes them as detritus, the stuff that's left over as a console sheds its user-base and becomes a historical curiosity. It's not fair, and it's not wise, but it's a blind spot that has been exposed by my time with Vertiginous Golf. If I want to become a true video game aficionado, I should probably address that, but honestly, I have no idea where to even start.
So, while I found Vertiginous Golf to be mildly enjoyable, but mostly pretty forgettable, that opinion must be understood in the context of my own staggering ignorance.
Thursday, August 4, 2016
Vertiginous Golf - 15/20 hours
Having tried out the course creation mode and about a hundred more user-created holes, I can say with confidence that I won't be a great golf course designer any time soon. The trick to making a great mini-golf hole, as far as I can tell, is thinking like a golf ball. You have to break your hole up, shot by shot, with each stroke telling its own story. This is especially true of a complex golf setup like Vertiginous Golf, where there are conveyor belts and air cannons and precipitous drops at every corner.
I'm not entirely sure that every designer of a user-created hole understands this. Sometimes, a hole is so thick with obstacles that getting through it is mostly chance. Other times, a hole has a clever idea, but is laid out in such a way as you can easily bypass it. A few get it right (sometimes spectacularly so), but it's become clear to me that hole design is a delicate art. And I simply don't care enough to try and master it.
I've been hoping for an epiphany. Something that will flip a switch in my brain and make me interested in golf, but it has not come. Every time I play the game, I feel like I'm just going through the motions. I don't think it's the game's fault. I don't even think it's golf's fault. I think I might just be in an awkward place intellectually right now. Between Starbound last week and No Man's Sky next week, I can't stop thinking about space. That's where I want to be. I want to fly between planets and explore exotic environments. Hitting a virtual golf ball hundreds of times in a row just seems to pale by comparison.
(I know, weird, right?)
That's probably why I've been focusing so strongly on the user created courses. Each one is different, and if I don't get the true golf-game experience of learning a course and then mastering it through endless repetition, then at least I can still enjoy the thrill of discovery. And I do like seeing what my fellow sky-golfers have come up with. I've yet to see a fan community that hasn't impressed me with its creativity and dedication, and it surprises me that such a community could coalesce around such an obscure game as Vertiginous Golf.
With five hours left to go, I guess I'd categorize my mental state as "open, yet distracted." The golf itself is mildly pleasant in the way that visiting with a kindly relative or long-lapsed friend is pleasant. You can recognize that they are perfectly nice and skilled in the art of noncommittal small talk, while also acknowledging that you have almost nothing in common and that noncommittal small talk is the deepest your relationship will ever get.
And playing Vertiginous Golf is exactly as unpleasant as making mild small talk with a distant acquaintance while you are in the middle of an exciting book or when you know that there is a parade or concert or once-in-a-lifetime television event set to start in the next half-hour or so. The game is completely blameless, but the knowledge that I could be doing something else has been gnawing at me.
I'm not entirely sure that every designer of a user-created hole understands this. Sometimes, a hole is so thick with obstacles that getting through it is mostly chance. Other times, a hole has a clever idea, but is laid out in such a way as you can easily bypass it. A few get it right (sometimes spectacularly so), but it's become clear to me that hole design is a delicate art. And I simply don't care enough to try and master it.
I've been hoping for an epiphany. Something that will flip a switch in my brain and make me interested in golf, but it has not come. Every time I play the game, I feel like I'm just going through the motions. I don't think it's the game's fault. I don't even think it's golf's fault. I think I might just be in an awkward place intellectually right now. Between Starbound last week and No Man's Sky next week, I can't stop thinking about space. That's where I want to be. I want to fly between planets and explore exotic environments. Hitting a virtual golf ball hundreds of times in a row just seems to pale by comparison.
(I know, weird, right?)
That's probably why I've been focusing so strongly on the user created courses. Each one is different, and if I don't get the true golf-game experience of learning a course and then mastering it through endless repetition, then at least I can still enjoy the thrill of discovery. And I do like seeing what my fellow sky-golfers have come up with. I've yet to see a fan community that hasn't impressed me with its creativity and dedication, and it surprises me that such a community could coalesce around such an obscure game as Vertiginous Golf.
With five hours left to go, I guess I'd categorize my mental state as "open, yet distracted." The golf itself is mildly pleasant in the way that visiting with a kindly relative or long-lapsed friend is pleasant. You can recognize that they are perfectly nice and skilled in the art of noncommittal small talk, while also acknowledging that you have almost nothing in common and that noncommittal small talk is the deepest your relationship will ever get.
And playing Vertiginous Golf is exactly as unpleasant as making mild small talk with a distant acquaintance while you are in the middle of an exciting book or when you know that there is a parade or concert or once-in-a-lifetime television event set to start in the next half-hour or so. The game is completely blameless, but the knowledge that I could be doing something else has been gnawing at me.
Tuesday, August 2, 2016
Vertiginous Golf - 10/20 hours
I don't want to say anything too harsh about Vertiginous Golf's
story mode. They obviously put a lot of thought and effort into it. The
little messages you get by hitting your golf ball into the scattered
targets are not only voice-acted, they're voice-acted well. There
are distinct characters who are portrayed believably. And the story
itself is competently written. It had a beginning, middle, and end and I
could easily understand how the different events related to each other.
I have absolutely no complaints about the craftsmanship that went into
story mode.
Its only flaw was that it was ill-conceived from top to bottom. I mean, there's this golf course in the sky. It floats in mid-air and is filled with a bunch of overly-complicated contraptions that knock your ball around. Is there anything about this premise that needs to be explained? And, assuming you absolutely had to have detailed worldbuilding in your game about implausible miniature golf, why would you make your story a dour, self-serious affair about class warfare, where the world is divided into the privileged sky-dwellers and the unfortunates they left behind to endure terrible pollution and who only get to enjoy the elite sport of sky-golf by strapping themselves into a machine that will psychically project them into the body of proxy golfer. And then you make the player character into one of these ground-dwelling unfortunates and have them activate a huge, dangerous-looking sci-fi reactor to lift the city in order to aid the rebels who want reunite the kingdom and depose the king.
And . . . you know what, never mind. Suffice to say, the story doesn't fit the tone of the game, at all. Put all the sci-fi trappings you want on it, at the end of the day, we're still talking about miniature golf. It's intrinsically frivolous. The highest stakes I want from a mini-golf game are who has to buy the ice-cream afterwards.
It would be funny if this were a world where mini-golf were taken deadly seriously and players approached each hole with the intensity of soldiers entering the battlefield, but that's not really the approach Vertiginous Golf takes either. There's this super-serious plot about a revolution that touches on themes of freedom, equality, humanity's relationship with technology, and the preservation of the environment . . . and you just happen to be playing mini-golf in the middle of all this.
I suppose the game's backstory could be a commentary on the colonialist implications that come with using steampunk imagery (and it's probably not a coincidence that the evil king is named "Leopold"), but the question then is why? Call me old-fashioned if you must, but if I'm playing a sports game, I want it to tell a sports story. That Vertiginous Golf went another way is bizarre.
It doesn't really matter, though. The story is but a small part of the game. The real draw is to play mini-golf through a variety of ridiculous obstacles. To that end, I dabbled in a few of the community courses, created by my fellow players.
Seeing the ingenious cruelty of those who came before me has kind of put me off trying to make my own holes. Some of these user-created holes have had their traps laid out with such intricate precision that I just know that anything I could come up with will seem sloppy by comparison. As always, I'm amazed at the dedication and talent that fans can bring even to the most obscure hobbies.
I'll probably still try to make my own hole, because it's an available game mode and I feel an obligation to test it, for posterity's sake, but I'll certainly be too embarrassed by the results to share them publicly.
Its only flaw was that it was ill-conceived from top to bottom. I mean, there's this golf course in the sky. It floats in mid-air and is filled with a bunch of overly-complicated contraptions that knock your ball around. Is there anything about this premise that needs to be explained? And, assuming you absolutely had to have detailed worldbuilding in your game about implausible miniature golf, why would you make your story a dour, self-serious affair about class warfare, where the world is divided into the privileged sky-dwellers and the unfortunates they left behind to endure terrible pollution and who only get to enjoy the elite sport of sky-golf by strapping themselves into a machine that will psychically project them into the body of proxy golfer. And then you make the player character into one of these ground-dwelling unfortunates and have them activate a huge, dangerous-looking sci-fi reactor to lift the city in order to aid the rebels who want reunite the kingdom and depose the king.
And . . . you know what, never mind. Suffice to say, the story doesn't fit the tone of the game, at all. Put all the sci-fi trappings you want on it, at the end of the day, we're still talking about miniature golf. It's intrinsically frivolous. The highest stakes I want from a mini-golf game are who has to buy the ice-cream afterwards.
It would be funny if this were a world where mini-golf were taken deadly seriously and players approached each hole with the intensity of soldiers entering the battlefield, but that's not really the approach Vertiginous Golf takes either. There's this super-serious plot about a revolution that touches on themes of freedom, equality, humanity's relationship with technology, and the preservation of the environment . . . and you just happen to be playing mini-golf in the middle of all this.
I suppose the game's backstory could be a commentary on the colonialist implications that come with using steampunk imagery (and it's probably not a coincidence that the evil king is named "Leopold"), but the question then is why? Call me old-fashioned if you must, but if I'm playing a sports game, I want it to tell a sports story. That Vertiginous Golf went another way is bizarre.
It doesn't really matter, though. The story is but a small part of the game. The real draw is to play mini-golf through a variety of ridiculous obstacles. To that end, I dabbled in a few of the community courses, created by my fellow players.
Seeing the ingenious cruelty of those who came before me has kind of put me off trying to make my own holes. Some of these user-created holes have had their traps laid out with such intricate precision that I just know that anything I could come up with will seem sloppy by comparison. As always, I'm amazed at the dedication and talent that fans can bring even to the most obscure hobbies.
I'll probably still try to make my own hole, because it's an available game mode and I feel an obligation to test it, for posterity's sake, but I'll certainly be too embarrassed by the results to share them publicly.
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