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The Lift by Colin Capurso
More so than any other type of game, weapon pedantry is really annoying in CYOA (“OH NOES YOU CHOSE THE KNIFE WHEN YOU SHOULD HAVE CHOSEN THE CROWBAR!”). Starting off with that kind of situation was an instant fail in my book. The only nice thing I can say about this piece is that the premise recalled the Outer Limits episode “The Elevator” for me.
The Test is Now READY by Jim Warrenfeltz (I played the first version)
Starting your game off with someone shouting “run, you magnificent bastard!” is pretty funny.
That said, I hate games that explore morality (I saw another review call it ethics and maybe that is the better term). How I play games doesn’t have enough of a correlation to how I view the world to have any kind of meaning, so you’re really only signing up to hear what the author has to say about it. Even if the author’s point is about the ambiguity of it all, again, it’s a meaningless exercise that bugs me enough that I intentionally avoid it.
Oh, yeah, I had something to say about the intro, too. I think I would have preferred the fake-prompt method to keep the intensity up, where each keypress equals one letter in the prompt, although the full-command it does here will definitely be useful if somebody plays the game on something like the ifMUD’s Floyd bot. Also, the pedant in me doesn’t like the fact that the introduction uses a command that I can’t use (“LOOK BACK”).
Response-wise, the game could use some work:
Frank says, “God, Harry, I thought we were dead for sure – I mean… well, metaphorically dead, you know, not like… well, the walking dead.” >talk to frank That’s not a verb I recognise. >ask frank about dead There is no reply. >
Frank says, “God, Harry, I thought we were dead for sure – I mean… well, metaphorically dead, you know, not like… well, the walking dead.”
>talk to frank That’s not a verb I recognise.
>ask frank about dead There is no reply.
>
Between the lack of implementation and discovering that it was a morality game, I closed the book on this one after finishing the first section.
howling dogs by Porpentine
All of the slow, looping prose felt like the CYOA-equivalent of unnecessary-IF-pauses. While being far from deducing What’s Going On, I enjoyed the ideas of martyrdom/saintdom and its relation to the persecution of women and how it is injected into a futuristic setting, but the pace was far too plodding for me and I eventually threw in the towel before completion.
Kicker by Pippin Barr
By the end of a playthrough of Kicker, it’s clear that it isn’t really much of a game (nor is it trying to be). In it, you play a football (or “American football”, for non-US people) kicker. The entire game seems to be based on random outcomes. Even when it is time to kick the ball, your success seems to have no correlation to how many times you’ve >PRACTICEd, >STRETCHed, or >EXERCISEd (I couldn’t think of any other commands to improve my chances).
While not a small amount of work to code, I imagine, I can’t say Kicker is really “IF comp material” nor is it really enjoyable. It seems to me like it’d have been better done as a Textfire game or something, where it would have had the good graces to end after one quarter. Oddly enough, the Textfire games were released in the 90s, which is also the last time I really laughed at a kicker joke.
Valkyrie by Emily Forand
According to the blurb on the IF comp site, this game is a collaborative effort among community college students. I don’t think this is a successful game as it is, but I don’t want to be harsh. Technically, there are misspellings and ill-constructed sentences. After reaching a dead-end (yes, it’s a CYOA), the ‘go back to the start’ link didn’t even work.
I don’t think the tone of the writing works well as text, but I found myself imagining that it could work in some sort of audio-based CYOA system (isn’t that a thing? I thought there was a thing) where they read the passages aloud. That might force some urgency.
STAY TUNED FOR PART THREE!
In this part (3) of a possibly two-part part, we’ll examine what I like to call core concepts, because they are concepts, and also core. These are the some of the basic overlying, or possibly underlying concepts (or "things") that you will want to — nay, have to — keep in mind at all times whilst playing a game of StarCraft II.
To refresh, "playing a game" refers to playing a 1v1 multiplayer game against some other nerd on the internet. While these core concepts apply to other game styles as well, they are most vitally important in the core game, which is 1v1.
Alright, ready? I will try to list these concepts in descending order of importance, but realistically, to rise up to the level of being a bad StarCraft II player, which is our goal, they are all nearly equally important.
CORE CONCEPT #1: Always be building workers.
Start here, and if you must, play several games focusing on nothing but this. With very few exceptions, you are going to want to always be building workers. SC2 is a game of strategic and tactical skill second, and economy first, and it is vital that you grow your economy as quickly as possible. Some might disagree that economy is more important than strategy/tactics, but believe me, if economy is not your #1 concern, you’ll never get far enough into a game to try out any of your precious strategies. And the way you grow your economy is to make as many workers as possible, as quickly as possible.
It also helps to know how many workers are effective at each base. That’s fine, and we can learn that later. Short version: about 24 on mining, and 3 on each gas. But don’t worry as much about that. Just worry about always be building workers. It’s as easy as cake, too. You’ve got your base(s) on hotkeys, and you know that "q" is the grid hotkey for worker, so two quick keypresses will be enough to get the new worker in the queue.
The only time you ever want to not be building workers is if you are going to die if you don’t do something else immediately. If you’re about to be ZERGRUSHOMGed, then some more defenses or military units are probably more important than another worker if you can’t afford both. But once the emergency’s over? See: always be building workers.
CORE CONCEPT #2: Always be building supply buildings.
One of the two most embarrassing things you can do while you’re building your army is to be "supply blocked". Your military buildings are sitting there waiting to create units, you’ve got plenty of money, but instead, they might as well be SPACE HOTDOG STANDS, because you didn’t build enough supply buildings. The word "always" in this case isn’t as precise as in CORE CONCEPT #1, because you don’t really always need to be building supply. You do, however, always need to be watching your supply counter in the upper right hand corner, and when you see you’re getting close, you need to start building it, so that you are never prevented from building more units.
Don’t get supply blocked. It doesn’t look good.
So far, if you’re following these CORE CONCEPTS, you’re developing what pilots call a "scan". A normal checking of certain things that is done on a regular basis to make sure everything’s going well. So now your mental "scan" consists of: "Am I building workers? Am I keeping supply up?" This "scan" will take you far, but it needs to be happening constantly. Many people even put a little sticky note near the screen that says "workers, supply, …" to remind them what they need to be thinking about, all the time.
It’s hard work. That’s SC2.
Now let’s add even more things to your "scan", with:
CORE CONCEPT #3: Always spend all of your money.
"Money" is a general term which is applied to the resources available in the game: minerals and gas. The other most embarrassing thing you can do during your game is have any money. This is because your economy, which you’ve built up pretty well by following the first two CORE CONCEPTS is completely worthless if you’re not spending the money that it generated.
Watch any low-level play, look up at the little resource counters in the upper right, and you’re guaranteed to see some high numbers. Anything more than a couple hundred is "high". Anything more than 500 is "very high". And anything over 1000 is embarrassing.
It’s contradictory to how you might think. You’re sitting there with 1500 minerals and 1000 gas and thinkin’, hey, things are goin’ pretty good! Look at all that cash! Meanwhile, the enemy army comes in and roflstomps you because while you were hoarding wealth, he was spending it, and spending it immediately, to convert it to force on the battlefield as quickly as possible.
Now, there are two ways to spend all your money! One is the right way. One is the wrong way. Let’s say you’re playing Protoss, you’ve got a gateway up, and you’ve got 500 minerals in the bank. Let’s look at the two ways you can spend ‘em:
RIGHT WAY* (example): Select the gateway, build a zealot (100). Select the nexus, build a worker (50). Select a worker, build another gateway (150). Select a worker, build a supply building (100).
WRONG WAY: Select the gateway and queue up five zealots. (100, 100, 100, 100, 100).
Do you see the difference? Sure, in both scenarios, your bank account is now at zero. However, in the RIGHT WAY, every last mineral is actively going to use to bring more force to the battlefield, where in the WRONG WAY, only 100 is actively doing anything, and the other 400 are just sitting around in escrow.
Queuing stuff up is one of the most common errors new players make, in fact. So don’t do that. But spend all of your money. If you’ve got a unit-building structure sitting around idle, build a unit with it. If you don’t have enough structures to spend all your money on units, build a new structure.
If you can make money as fast as possible, and spend it as fast as possible (without queuing), you cannot help but become a bad StarCraft II player. And if, god forbid, you actually want to be better than that, then none of this is even a little bit optional.
Let’s review your scan: Am I building workers? Am I building enough supply? Am I spending all of my money?
The final core concept, I was considering saving for part 2, because it may seem more advanced than these basic concepts, but ultimately it still fits into the theme of growing your economy as fast as possible, so I’ll just launch right into:
CORE CONCEPT #4: Always use your macro ability.
Link
One significant addition to SC2 from the original game is that each race now has what’s called a "macro ability". In layman’s terms, it’s a little gimmick that, if you remember to do it, allows you to build your economy faster than you would normally by just building workers. Here’s a quick description of each race’s ability:
TERRAN: May call down "MULEs", which harvest minerals extremely fast for a short period of time before breaking down.
PROTOSS: May "chronoboost" buildings, which has the effect of making that building build stuff faster than it would normally for a short period of time.
ZERG: May "inject larvae" into hatcheries every so often, which gives a one-time increase of the number of units that can be produced from the hatchery at the same time.
At first these may seem like fun little things to try out from time to time, but you will quickly learn that these abilities are not optional, and that you must be using them, every time, as soon as they become available, or your economy will fall behind, because the guy you’re playing is using them, every time, as soon as they become available.
I forget this one the most often, because Jesus Christ, don’t I have enough to worry about with the workers and the supply and the money, and by the way I’m also trying to build units and scout and deploy them to the battlefield and research upgrades and GOD DAMMIT I CAN’T BE THINKING ABOUT THE STUPID MACRO ABILITIES TOO!! It’s too hard!
Well, it is. But you still have to do it. Nobody said that becoming a truly bad SC2 player was going to be easy.
Let’s do one final review of the "scan", which contains all the things that you have to be thinking about at all times, oh my god:
Workers, supply, money, macro ability.
Burn these CORE CONCEPTS into your mind, and into your game, and I guarantee that you will definitely not suck quite as much as you do now.
(*) I realized after the fact that these only add up to 400. You get the idea, though.
Ooooh lookit me, Planet IF whoring here! I don’t think this made the feed. Rob “Flack” O’Hara wrote up his review of Get Lamp in the form… of a text adventure! Let me link you to his blog post. Perhaps you’d like a direct link to the review, which you can play via Parchment over the Internet?
There actually IS an ending to it, and a ton of things to talk about. Can you steal a virtual man’s copy of his hard-won independent documentary??
This installment is called:
Putting Your Buildings In Control Groups
That sounds like a terribly dry, boring title, so it may surprise you when I tell you that this is the most important installment that you could ever read, if you want to be a not-quite-as-terrible SC2 player. Stick with me.
If you’ve ever watched a replay of a professional (or even half-decent) SC2 match, you will notice two things:
1. Something has gone horribly, horribly wrong in your life, because you’re sitting there watching replays of other people playing video games.
2. Somehow they’re able to move their armies, attack with precision, AND build new units and buildings and upgrades at the same time!
I could never figure out how that was possible. I’d either be base-building, getting a bunch of guys together, while the guys I’d already built just sat around waiting, or I’d be taking my big group of units and attacking, while my base just sat there doing nothing. There are names for these things! You may have heard them, and if you watch a replay, you will definitely hear them:
TERM: "Micro"
DEFINITION: "Micro"-management of military units. Moving them around, having them scout or attack enemies.
USE IT IN A SENTENCE: "He’s micro-ing really well, see how he sent those marines around to the other side of the (whatever, etc, etc.)"
TERM: "Macro"
DEFINITION: Economy building, Base building, Unit building, etc.
USE IT IN A SENTENCE: "That one guy micros better, but he just got overwhelmed because the other guy out-macroed him lolz gg omfg"
To restate my problems above, I could micro or macro, but not both at the same time. And that amazing thing the pros do? Microing and macroing at the same time. That is the number one key to becoming a only-a-fraction-as-awful SC2 player. And the number one key to microing and macroing at the same time is:
To review, a "control group" is when you assign a clump of units to one of the number keys on the top row of the keyboard. If you got ten zerglings, and you want to attack, you’d put them in, say, the "1" control group. Then whenever you wanted to select all of them, you’d just hit "1". If you wanted to center the camera on them, you’d just double-tap "1".
That’s fine. But the key thing here is, you can put your buildings in control groups too!
Before I explain how to do this, I will give you an example of what it looks like:
1. Hurm, durm, here I am with my little army on control group 1, I’m gettin’ close to the enemy, this’ll be fun!
2. Oh, I should probably build some more guys back at the base, in case this doesn’t go well, cuz I suck at micro.
OLD WAY: Leave your army sittin’ there, scroll back to the base, select the production building, click on the little Marine picture (or whatever), then double-tap 1 and go back to moving your army around.
NEW WAY: Let’s say you’ve grouped all of your production buildings on the "5" key. You hit "5". You hit (hotkey for Marine). You hit 1 to go back to controlling the army.
Holy crap, right? You just started building a guy, and it took two keystrokes, and you never had to move the camera. You were looking at your army the whole time, confident that back at your base, a new guy was being built. If you had two production buildings, you’d go 5, q, q, 1, and it would automatically make one building start building one guy, and the other the other. You made TWO GUYS in less than a second, without having to take your eye of your army. Oh man.
This gives you the idea of why this is so important.
I will just tell you how I do it. You can play around with it and configure it more to your liking.
TERRAN/PROTOSS:
I put "town hall" buildings (Command Center, Nexus) on 4. All of them. Any time I need a new worker, "4, q". Boom. Need a few? "4, q, q, q". BAM. BUILDIN’ WORKERS. Also each of the town hall buildings has its own little special abilities which you’d also activate this way. As Terran, want to scan the opponent’s base? "4, x, (click on where you want to scan". KAPOW. (Note, all of these examples assumed the "Grid" hotkey system, see last installment.)
I put production buildings (any building that makes units) on 5. I already gave you an example of this. This also, though, makes rallying easy. Want to rally ALL your newly created units to one spot? "5, (right-click on rally point)". Holy Jesus, you just rallied like twelve production buildings to one spot with one key press and one mouse click! HOLY CHRISTING LORD!!
I put "upgrade" buildings (those that you don’t actively interact with except when you wish to do research to do upgrades) on 6. Want to research Warp Gates but are too busy to click around to find the Cybernetics Core? "6, z". KERSPOWW!! JOB’S DUN!
That’s it. I use 4, 5, and 6 because 1, 2, 3 I reserve for groups of military units. Note how awesome this is, though. Using the Grid hotkeys, with these control groupings, I literally never have to move my left hand to do ANYTHING IN THE GAME that you’d ever need to do.
ZERG:
Zerg is slightly different because the "town hall" building is also the only unit production building. So they stay on 4, but 5 is instead used for grouping all the "queen" units, which have special abilities you need to be constantly using — particularly "spawn larvae". Need to spawn larvae at two of your hatcheries with your two queens? "5, x, (click on minimap hatchery), x, (click on other one)". BOWFF!!! Now that’s some fine larvae-spawnin’!
Alright. That’s about it for today’s installment, see you nex—
"HEY WAIT A MINUTE, PINNER! There’s ALL SORTS of production and upgrade buildings! If you have them all grouped together, how do you select a Barracks to build a Marine, vs. a Factory to build a Siege Tank, vs. a Starport to build a Banshee? And if all my upgrade buildings are on one key, how do I research Zergling speed at the Spawning Pool vs. Air attack +1 at the Spire? Etc., etc.?"
That’s the question, isn’t it. And there’s a very special key on the keyboard that has the answer. I will give you a hint as to which key it is:
Did you figure it out? It’s the "Tab" key. And the reason it’s the Tab key is because SC2 has something called "subgroups". You may group a bunch of different types of buildings together, or types of military units together, but SC2 will secretly distribute them into "subgroups", based on their type.
So when you select "5" to select your production buildings, can you guess which key will select the next "subgroup" in your main group? Can you?
I’ll give you that hint again:
Here’s the real life example, which will BLOW YOUR FRIGGIN’ MIND:
You have two barracks and two starports, all on group 5. You’re fightin’ a battle, but quickly want to get two marauders and two medivacs building back at your base. Check it:
"5, w, w, TAB, w, w".
Your mind? FRIGGIN’ BLOWN. First you selected the whole group (which defaulted to the barracks), built two marauders with the "w" hotkey, tabbed over to the starport sub-group, and built two medivacs, with the same hotkey. And since SC2 distributes your requests to all available buildings, each of your four buildings is building one of those units.
And it took you one second, and you never had to look at your base.
I guess, to sum up, I’d say that the most important thing to learn to do as you climb the ranks of the eternally mediocre, is:
Welcome to SC2FWTB, the thread in which I will TEACH YOU, the horrible SC2 player, how to rise to the ranks of the merely bad! I feel qualified to dispense this advice, because I am a bad player. However, I used to be terrible, and have made tremendous strides by following the advice I will now begin to give you!
I will do this in installments!
Today’s installment is called:
HOTKEYS.
Make no mistake! Without using hotkeys, you will always be horrible. Your first and only job, as a horrible player, is to learn to use hotkeys.
Not only that, but you need to learn to use hotkeys exclusively. A good training exercise for this (which will eventually become the way you actually play) is to play games against the computer, without ever touching the little selection menu in the lower-right. NEVER!
This takes work, as in the beginning, it will be much quicker for you to use the mouse to click on an icon than to recall the hotkey. But this is necessary.
Now we will play CHOOSE YOUR OWN GUIDE TO BECOMING NOT SO GODDAMN AWFUL AT SC2:
If you already know the standard hotkeys backwards and forwards, skip to “CONCLUSION”.
If you still haven’t learned any kind of hotkeys well enough for them to be second nature:
I want you to immediately click on “Options” in the SC2 menu. Then I want you to click on “Hotkeys”. At the top of this screen is a dropdown, called “Profile”. I want you to click on the dropdown, and select “Grid”.
What does this mean?
This replaces all of the default hotkeys with the “Grid” hotkeys, which are so much easier to use that you would have to be an insane person not to learn them.
Essentially, it makes the fifteen leftmost (or rightmost, if you’re left-handed) alphabetic keys on the keyboard correspond to the fifteen little icon boxes in the lower right of the screen.
This has three tremendous benefits:
1. If you don’t remember a hotkey, you can just look at the icon, see where it is in the selection menu, and PRESS DAT KEY.
2. The hotkeys for all three races are now PRETTY MUCH THE SAME! No more “e” for probe, “s” for SCV, and… whatever the hell drones were. Now any time you need a worker for any race, “q” is where it’s at.
3. More importantly, you never have to move your hand. You always wondered how the pros could do fifty million things at once and it never looks like they’re flailing all over the keyboard hunting for hotkeys? This is why.
If you’ve ever dreamed of not being horrible at SC2, AND of being able to sit there calmly, your hand comfortably resting in the “home” position, being merely bad, then the Grid hotkeys are a must. There are two complaints you might have about Grid as a horrible player, which are are:
1. “The hotkeys don’t make any sense!” REBUTTAL: Like they made sense before? Now you have to press “q” for a marine, instead of… “a”. ?????
2. “‘a’ was always the attack-move command! The most important command in the game! Now it’s ‘t’!! Arg!” REBUTTAL: Look. If you are right handed, and you’ve got your hands in the right position, “a” is located so you have to curl your ring-finger back to get at it. “t” is right where your index finger is. Now all you gotta do is MASH THAT T. “But ‘a’ stands for ‘attack!!’” REBUTTAL!! Trust me, after the first ten thousand times you hit ‘t’ for attack-move (2 games), you will thank me.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion… hotkeys!
Flack had been counting down his 15 favorite video games in the JC BBS for a month now, and he recently completed the list. Down to #1, at least. Confused? Don’t be! Look, just click on this goddamn list.
I’ll admit I had my doubts when I started to play a spirited round of ATC-SIM: The Web-Based Air Traffic Control Sim. I had doubts because I am a highly-functional retarded person who is is quite aware of his own limits, to where I know better than to play an ATC game in case some Ender’s Game shit is going on and I kill thousands of people and some Americans.
Then Pinback told me that there’s such a thing as “Ted Stevens Airport” up in Anchorage, and frankly, anyone who is allowed to fly on planes when convicted felons can get airports named after them deserves what they get from that industry. There’s two people who could MAYBE get stuff named after them in Alaska: Curt Schilling and Will Riker, and every word that’s come out of Schilling’s mouth since the bloody sock game has been intolerable objectivist horse shit.
And Riker is a fictional character. (crosses arms)
“Fine,” I said to Pinback, “I’ll try to land ONE plane.” After all, Pinback has done me a fine solid over the years, playing such dear games to my heart like Knight Orc and Front Page Sports Football. Well, he didn’t vote for their page deletion in the Wikipedia, and that’s close enough.
I went to the ATC-SIM website and picked “Heathrow” because it was the one available airport I’ve been to for more than thirty minutes that didn’t make me want to drown myself in the Captain’s Club toilets. The first time I was at Heathrow, there was an announcement to not crowd the plane that was going to take me and 40 students to Edinburgh. As the oldest person on the flight and lone American, I instantly felt responsible in ensuring everyone followed the disembodied voice’s orders. However, the students crowded the plane door without any regard to order or instruction. I was shocked, nothing had at all prepared me for this, this… this Anarchy in the U.K.! Nothing! It was unheard of.
The instructions to ATC-SIM aren’t on the actual page you play the game on. You might think this meant that I had to use either notepad.exe or my own nootropic-fueled memory to play, but I did neither of those things. I asked Benjamin ‘Pinback’ Parrish for instructions in real-time, as he alt-tabbed away from his OWN game to help me. After figuring out the controls, my long experience as a gurgling text gamer came into play: I got ONE plane down onto the runway. Hooray! I am being absolutely serious when I say that landing the plane in ATC-SIM is a fun experience that actually made me happy. Like, I’m not doing schtick for a second: it was fuckin’ cool.
By this point I had a terrific backlog of departures. There were three planes that had the abbreviation “DET” next to them. I assume those three planes were going to Detroit. Why were three planeloads of questionable Britons headed to Detroit at the same time? Was Australia full or something? I’ve read my history, gents, I know the intent. I never let those planes depart Heathrow. They’re STILL there – go dump your human garbage on Mars, Lady Byng!
Anyway, in the time it took me to beg Pinback for simple instructions, he had a terrible disaster in his own game. He was kind enough to take a screenshot. Remember when he said you couldn’t crash the planes? Well…
Pinback: I cleared two planes to 2000 feet, sent them to the same fix. Pinback: Once then got there, they both started circling it. Pinback: Meanwhile I was yapping at you. Ice Cream Jonsey: Hahahah! Pinback: They ended up circling right into each other. I have a screen cap. (screencap is sent) Pinback: Your fault.
Bwa-hahahahaha!!!! Move over Osama, it’s time for something meatier!
“These blast points are too accurate for Sand People.” — Ben Kenobi
Anyway, there are now exactly THREE Flash games that are not only good, but great: Nanaca Crash, onlinegames.com/basketball and ATC-SIM. Four stars and, so far, the best game I’ve played in 2010.
An earlier time, call it 1988. A young Pinback gets his first real computer programming job in a real office (the US Treasury Department building in downtown DC). 21 years ago. So many memories.
Well, no, fuck that. A few hazy recollections of eating lunch at the goddamn food court across the street and nearly getting fired several times for coming in at 10:30, a practice now generally accepted throughout the IT world. A trailblazer to the core, this one.
The one lasting, vivid memory, though, was when I first discovered something which would stay with me from that day, to the very present:
Holy shit, you can play games at work instead of working.
Again, trailblazer, since I don’t think any IT shop in the world anymore actually does any work. But back in ’88, there was only one guy in the Treasury building not getting anything done, and that was your boy, Pinner.
The game I was playing, the only game I was playing, was called “Begin”. The worst- or best-named game in history, depending on your appreciation of irony. The full name was “Begin: A Tactical Starship Simulation”. The colon separates a noun and a verb which have absolutely nothing to do with each other. I think that’s what first attracted me to it, its completely inappropriate name. It still kinda makes me chuckle.
Look:
The version I grew up on was Begin 1.65, and in its time, it was the best starship simulator of its time.
Oh, the times we had. It was totally an 80s game — all text, and you controlled your starship by typing commands. A particularly ambitious coder could probably turn it into a zcode or Hugo game. I played it to death, but at some point you have to grow up, and I did, and forgot about it.
Then a couple weeks ago I saw the new Star Trek film, and liked it a lot, and then got all nerdy and started looking for a Trek video game. The only recent one I could find was Star Trek: Legacy for the Xbox 360, which had two things working against it: 1) the reviews were not altogether glowing, and 2) nobody has it.
Then the memory banks finally offered me a withdrawal, and I remembered Begin, and did a Google search.
The weirdest fucking thing that’s ever happened on the internet was seeing that “Begin 3.0″ had been released… in 2009.
Fucking game hadn’t had an update since 1993 (when “Begin 2.0″ had been released haphazardly after the authors apparently just abandoned the project and put out what they had.) And then here it was, my past coming back to life.
Begin 3. Holy shit.
Just to give you a sense of what 25 years of technological advances can bring, Begin 1.65 looked like this:
Flash forward to present day, and watch how Begin magically becomes transformed into the multimedia extravaganza which is Begin 3:
Finally, Begin has graphics befitting a game that was released in the decade that it was originally released in.
And look again:
21 years after I first found it (and 25 years after it was first released), it is still the best starship tactical simulator available on any gaming platform.
There is no point and click. You still have to type the commands. The Windows port is a bit clunky, as the massive graphics update actually makes the interface slower and less responsive.
It is essentially the same game it was in 1984, but the shit works. It has everything it should. Power management, system management, multi-armed tactics, team tactics, tension, and various Star Trek requisites like boarding parties, transporters, tractor beams, and all that. The only game I know that ever came close to this was Starfleet Command, in the late 90s/early 00s, but countless bugs and an atrocious interface doomed that one.
As insane as it sounds, and as wrong as it should be, Begin still fucking rules. And the new, state of the art, cutting edge Begin 3 just makes it better than ever.
Here are some links:
The Begin Wiki Ben Hallert’s Begin page, the fansite which ended up lighting a fire under the original author to keep Begin alive. Tom Nelson — author of Begin 3 and co-author of 1.65 and 2 — started this site along with the release of Begin 3. Begin Yahoo group, surprisingly active.
And now look once more:
Micro Foundry BBS Archive
This is the BBS where the authors and fans of the game would hang out and discuss stuff. This archive spans the years 1988 to 1990.
Right around page 5, you can see an 18-year-old Pinback come in and start taking over.
Misty, watercolored memories!
It all began withthis threadin which a commitment was made to find a sub game, and to play it. Why a sub game? I don’t know. I think the idea has always appealed to me because it combines so many things that I enjoy. The open water. Piloting things. Hiding from those who seek to do me harm until such time that it’s possible to sneak up on them and destroy them. These are things which I definitely think define “Ben Pinback Parrish”, and why theideaof a sub game had always struck my fancy. But many years had passed since I last played one, and even then I’m certain I didn’t “delve too deeply”. That’s a sub pun! Yaaay!
Anyway, Steam had Silent Hunter IV available, and that seemed to be the latest, greatest sub sim everyone was playing, so I downloaded it and fired it up. Long story short, since then I’ve become a submarine FIEND, and have done little else in my spare time than play submarine games, read books — both fictional and non — about submarines, and cook dinner for Robb. All three of these things have been very rewarding, but since this is the thread about subs, I will only cover two of them.
And now, some mini-reviews about the various sub games and books that I have experienced in just the three short weeks since this craziness began! I will do it in chronological order of that I experienced them:
NAME:Silent Hunter IV: Wolves of the Pacific TYPE:GAME TIME SPENT WITH IT:Hours and hours
This was the perfect place to start. It was just what I needed to really light the spark which would eventually end up in this stupid thread. More than anything else in this list, SHIV really makes you feel like you’rethere. The creaking of the ship as you descend into the depths. Trying to sneak a peek through a periscope as waves crash over the lens. The satisfying sound of distant explosions and metal grinding as you hide in the depths, listening to your latest victim sink into the sea. It’s what it’s all about, man. Of course, when I say you feel like you’re there, I guess I mean you feel like an actual sailor in wartime, put on a submarine, but without having been trained or given any sort of education about what it is you are there for or are supposed to do. Never has a 100 page manual been quite so useless. If they had replaced the entire thing with a post-it note that said “just check the internet to find out how to play”, it would have been better, because then you could have saved the time it took you to realize that the only way to figure out how to play it is to look online in user forums. A shameful display on the part of the publishers, made worse by the fact that the game had a history of being notoriously buggy. Even in the latest (likely last) patch, while everything “pretty much” works, there’s just enough little idiosyncrasies and weird things going on that the whole product, while overall excellent, seems a bit held together with duct tape. However, if you put the time in to figure out how to play, and overlook some of the rough edges, this is as compelling a sub game as you’ll find today.
RATING:Three and a Half Stars
It was compelling enough that it actually made me want to read a book about the subject, which leads us to:
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NAME:Take Her Deep TYPE:BOOK AUTHOR:Admiral I. J. Galantin
It may be the best compliment you can pay to SHIV that this book, a real-life account of the story of an American WWII sub in the Pacific, serves as a pretty decent manual to SHIV. A story more exciting than any fiction could muster, told expertly and effortlessly by the captain himself, it is the definition of “page turner”. Mixing all the humor, boredom, jubilation and terror that must have been a part of being a submariner in WWII, the book educates as much as it titillates, and every night after reading, I would go into SHIV and try out some of the tactics that the captain of the Halibut tried in the book. My success rate increased remarkably. A flawless, wonderful book!
RATING:Four Stars
NAME:Shells of Fury TYPE:GAME TIME SPENT WITH IT:A couple hours
This is a bargain-priced WWI sub simulator, with bargain-level features. The graphics are kinda weak. The sound is pretty weak. Absolutely nothing about it will wow you. But it is the only WWI sub simulator available, so if you’re interested in the topic, you get to play Shells of Fury. Take it or leave it. After reading generally bad reviews of it, though, I was surprised to find what really isn’t a bad little game, as long as you’re not expecting Silent Hunter-like production values. And the manual, though 1/3 the size of SHIV’s, is much better. The tactical highlight of this game for me is the fact that sonar hadn’t been invented, so when you’re underwater, you’re really hidden! It adds an interesting dynamic to the whole cat-and-mouse dynamic which sub games tend to excel at. Ah well, if it wasn’t a bargain title, I’d be less forgiving, but it is, and it ain’t that bad.
RATING:Two and a Half Stars
NAME:Final Run TYPE:BOOK AUTHOR:David E. Meadows
This may be the worst book of all time! My first choice for sub fiction was apoorone. Even if you can overlook the grade-school level writing, even if you can overlook the story, in which not much happens for the first 95% of the book, and even if you overlook some of the most ridiculous, over-the-top, obnoxious, dislikeable characters ever put in print, it is the sloppiest book I’ve ever read. And I can’t overlook any of those things. But, still… I’m no history major, but I am pretty sure that 1956 was not “twenty-one years after WWII ended”, as one character muses. And later in the book, a fire breaks out in the aft torpedo room of one of the subs. Wait, I mean the forward torpedo room. Wait, I mean the aft one — the book changes which end of the sub the fire is on just about every page. It gets so bad at the end that the word “AFT” is eventually put in caps, as if the author was trying to remind himself where that damned fire was. Did anyone read this pile of shit before shoving it out the door? Inexcusable. But like I said, even if you clean up all the many, many mistakes, you’d be left with a really, REALLY bad book. Worst sub book ever! And I’ve read three of them already!
RATING:Zero Stars
Anxious to get that bad taste out of my mouth, but afraid that all sub fiction was this bad, I gave it one more chance:
NAME:Voyage of the Gray Wolves TYPE:BOOK AUTHOR:Steven Wilson
Whew! Five pages in, I was relieved to discover that not all subfic was as atrocious as Final Run. Here is a book about WWII subs, from the German perspective, that is written well, that has enjoyable, interesting characters with depth, and that moves along from beginning to end. Still nowhere near as riveting as the nonfiction variety, but a fine read, when you just gotta have your sub fix.And I gotta have my sub fix!!
RATING:Three Stars
But man cannot live on WWII alone. It’s time to get MODERN!
The following three titles come bundled together:
NAME:Jane’s 688(I) Hunter/Killer TYPE:GAME
I fired this nuclear sub simulator up, played through the tutorial, and then realized that Sub Command, which it came packaged with, was its sequel, and included the 688(I), as well as two other types of subs, an updated graphics/sound.
NAME:Sub Command TYPE:GAME
I spent about a week reading the 200+ page PDF manual for this game, before finally firing it up and trying to get through a scenario. That’s when I realized that Dangerous Waters, which it came packaged with, wasitssequel, and included not only these three boats, but more subs and even surface and air units.
NAME:Dangerous Waters TYPE:GAME
I actually haven’t done much with this other than fiddling around and looking at a couple of the screens. First thing I did, though, was to make sure that there wasn’t any sequel to this hiding out there. Second thing I noticed was that the 688(I) sub part of the game looked/sounded identical to Sub Command, so I think this is really just Sub Command, spruced up with a couple more platforms and a wider-ranging campaign game.
It’s manual is600 pages long, and it’s a long 600 pages. I can’t stand reading PDFs, so I shelled out the extra $20 to get the printed manual mailed to me. Should be here in a couple days. In the meantime, here are my impressions:
This is the hardest of the hardest core sub simulation available. The various electronic doohickies seem to be modeled in excruciatingly exacting detail. You will learn things you never thought existed in the world to be learned about, just going through the tutorials.
With only functional graphics and sound, this game will not make you “feel like you’re there”, unless by “there” you mean a laboratory or an accounting office. Make no mistake, you will be spending most if not all your time looking at things like this:
…instead of things like this:
And yet, underneath all the gadgetry and blinking lights and obscure acronyms, the thrill of the chase is still there, and it is awfully satisfying when all those blinking lights come together to betray your enemy’s location and you shove a torpedo up they butt, all from the safety of the silent ocean and pages and pages full of lines and numbers and weird circles and stuff. It also has the benefit of loading up in a couple seconds, as opposed to games like SHIV, which I’m still waiting for it to load. It’s definitely the most comprehensive sub simulator ever made available to the public, but your affinity for it depends on how patient you are to learn it all.
RATING:Depends on how HARDCORE you are
But we’re just getting started here at Pinback’s World O’ Subs! Why, a bunch of new books just showed up from Amazon in the last half hour, and surely as a result of this thread, sub simulations will once again become financially viable to develop, and the gaming landscape — orseascape(that’s another sub pun! Yaaay! <3 <3 <3) — will be completely revolutionized!
The Golden Age of Subs begins now!!
Yaaaay!!! <3 <3
Over the past week or two, I’ve played quite a few indie games and demos. I will now give you some thoughts on these indie games and demos.
INDIE GAME: Dyson
THOUGHTS: I would describe this as a mix of Galcon, Phyta, and the Little Prince. Artsy, abstract minimalist presentation features “asteroids” (circles) which you have to conquer with your “seedlings” (little mosquito-lookin’ guys that grow off trees on your asteroids). This is all set to a serene, new-age background score. It all makes for a somewhat hypnotic experience, and it’s artful presentation makes you forget at first that this is really just straight-ahead 4X, almost like Galcon in slow-mo. The lack of depth and languorous pacing hurt its replayability, but it’s definitely a new aesthetic take on 4X, and worth a look if you are a fan of the genre. TWO AND A HALF (**1/2) STARS
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INDIE DEMO: Defense Grid: The Awakening
THOUGHTS: I am a veteran of the tower defense genre, in the sense that I have played almost all of the demos ever made for these games. I’ve never purchased one, or completed one, simply because by the end of the demo, I’ve pretty much had enough of it. I doubt that will change with Defense Grid: The Awakening, but if I was going to buy one, this would probably be the one. Nice graphics, good interface, and some actual quality, humorous voiceover work, which is unusual in the indie scene. But past that, you know what you’re getting. Set up towers. Kill baddies. Set up more towers. Kill more baddies. Upgrade towers. Wash, rinse, repeat. A “pleasant diversion”. THREE (***) STARS
INDIE GAME: Crayon Physics Deluxe
THOUGHTS: I saw the pre-release demo of this which gave you a little taste, and the taste I had made me think this would be the most amazing puzzle game I’d ever seen. Now the full version is out, and I’m not sure it isn’t. The goal is to get a ball to a star. Everything is drawn in crayon. And the way to get the ball to the star is to draw whatever you want in crayon, and everything you draw will behave according to Newtonion physics. You can draw a car, and it will roll down hills. Though there may not be limitless solutions to each puzzle, it sure as hell feels like there could be. You can draw anything you want! You don’t have to pick from a palette of doohickies, or pre-built mechanisms. If you can think up some contraption which will help get the ball to the star, you can just draw it, and it will behave like it should. This game might not be “in your face”, but this quiet little gem may just in fact be the most amazing puzzle game you’ll ever see. FOUR (****) STARS
INDIE GAME: Buccaneer: The Pursuit of Infamy
THOUGHTS: Let’s get this straight, I only got this because Pirates! stopped working on my machine. To call this “Pirates! Light” is getting close to it. It is Pirates!, minus the dancing and the swordplay, minus the few nods to realism that Pirates! gave you, and with the addition of some of the most obnoxious, ridiculous voice work you’ll ever hear. In the recording studio, I just imagine the producer yelling “NOT PIRATEY ENOUGH!” after every take, so the final product is so over the top and embarrassing that you just feel bad for everyone involved. And about that realism. At least Sid Meier put in things like wind, and different types of ammo, and stuff like that. None of this is on offer in Buccaneer, where you sail your ship like you’d drive a car. Including “reverse”. So it’s all very silly, and yet I’ve spent more time with this one that everything else on this list combined. I attribute this to the fact that I am just a sucker for this kind of gameplay, and Buccaneer manages to not quite be awful enough for me to not play. TWO (**) STARS FOR MOST, THREE AND A HALF (***1/2) STARS FOR ME.
