Master of Orion Impressions

Indulging a Whim

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Due to some strange glitch in my blog… I am apparently writing this blog post for the second time this morning.  Unfortunately I am probably not going to be able to go into nearly as much depth as I did previously…  because I am running out of time.  Last night I indulged a whim and gave the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion a spin.  For years Master of Orion and Master of Orion II were those go to games when I wanted to spend an afternoon clicking the “next turn” button.  They sit firmly in the 4X genre, so when I want to Xplore, Xpand, Xploit or Xterminate… they serve as a great way to destroy an entire day.  I am not joking about that aspect because there are absolutely moments in the past where I have started playing Master of Orion II at around 1 pm… and then realized suddenly that it was apparently 1 am and I should really go to bed.  I love this franchise… but previously I had to put an asterisk at the end of that statement.  Master of Orion 3 was one of those games that I was looking forward to in 2003 more than pretty much anything else.  The problem being when I finally got my hands on it… it was largely indistinguishable as a Master of Orion game.  The aspects that existed… were buried beneath a horrible interface that made the game play itself a chore.

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So imagine my glee last night when I booted up the Wargaming.net reboot and found that pretty much every single aspect of the game was instantly familiar to me.  Those things that had changed were leaps of simple logic and not necessarily problems for me to figure out.  Traditionally when I play Master of Orion I have always played the Silicoids, a race of rock creatures that have the interesting trait of being able to colonize quite literally any planet that is not a gas giant.  This always allowed me to get an early lead on the total number of star systems… which would ultimately give me a lead in the ability to crank stuff out of my industrial complex.  While I see the Silicoids on the website, they are apparently not yet available in game.  So instead I went with the bugbear-like Bulrathi which started me with a significant military advantage…  one which I tried to keep the entire game by denying the other races the technological increases they kept asking to buy from me.

Familiar Patterns

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When I play one of these games I tend to play it in the same pattern, and it absolutely worked here once again.  I am an early expansionist, devoting most of my resources to generating colony ships and a skeletal fleet to protect them and defend planets.  While not as useful as the Silicoids, the Bulrathi do have the ability to colonize heavy gravity worlds… which allowed me to snap up a bunch of planets that the other races could not.  From there I focused on improving each of the planets and cranking out as many tech advances as I could.  There were many points in the game where the other races were one to three weapon grades behind me, which meant when the tables turned… and I shifted into my other game mode…  it was a blood bath.  Generally speaking when I play a 4X game I play extremely peacefully.  I stick to my own worlds and build up my engine…  and then whichever race makes the mistake of picking on one of my worlds…  I flip everything from producing infrastructure to producing war machines.  Last night it was the Psilons that had the poor decision making skills to pick a fight with me, at which point I sent a fleet of Carriers…  which ended up being my high powered Capital Ships to destroy them.  As soon as I could churn out new troop transports I was moving the fleet on to the next planet and conquering it.

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Towards the end of my march across their star systems, the Humans got in on the act of bombing their planets from orbit.  This is when I saw what might be the first significant glitch in the AI.  I had no formal alliance with the humans, and they simply decided to start attacking the Psilons on their own as well.  There was a period of time where I had to wait on a troop transport, and they easily could have landed their own and took over the world.  The problem is… they never did… they just continued to bomb the populace from air.  I am not sure if they simply lacked the technology to create troop transports… or if the AI was confused by having a contested planet.  Ultimately I landed my own troops, took over the planet and the humans left orbit considering the planet was now being guarded by one of my cruisers.  It was around this point when I realized that it was 11:30 pm and I really should be logging for the night.  Once again I had frittered away an evening playing this game, and enjoyed every moment of it.

But Early Access

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If you have ever loved Master of Orion in your past… then I highly suggest you check this game out.  It does a great job of washing the bad taste of MOO3 out of my mouth, and making me forget it actually exists.  I will go so far as to say that from this point on… the Wargaming.net reboot of Master of Orion is probably replacing MOO2 as my go to game for scratching that 4X itch.  It is an Early Access game, and I have no clue when it will be “finished”.  The game already looks extremely polished and I am guessing that most of the remaining development time is adding additional races to the available list, and multiplayer balancing.  I’ve only played single player at the moment, but I would absolutely try playing this multiplayer…  but I just have to find a time when me and several friends have entire afternoons to blow away as we furiously click that “next turn” button.  The only concerns I have is how Wargaming might try and monetize this later.  I could see them selling races, or selling various bits for the game…  but at this very moment it feels a very good single player gaming experience.  Time will tell but for the time being I am happy I picked it up.  As far as playing it on a regular basis… I will probably finish the game I started last night and see just how it ends up, and then neatly pack the game away until it launches.  This seems to be my current method for playing those early release titles…  test it out, kick the tires… and then leave it along until launch.

Of Chicken Horse

More Friends

After crashing extremely early last night, I ended up getting up fairly early.  From about 5 pm onwards I didn’t really get proper sleep, and mostly just laid there quietly until shortly after 6 pm.  The result was me getting to PAX and parked at around 8 am.  The parking situation was much improved, and that at least took one worry off of my mind.  By the time I got through the random bag fondling that they have been doing upon entering this year… Dallian was milling around in the Coffee Shop area.  So we sat there for a good while fiddling with street passes while waiting on others to show up.  I am not sure why I have been obsessing about street passes, but that has really felt like my overarching goal.  I guess part of it is the fact that I realize I will not have access to this many in one place… until I end up going to PAX next year.  So I spent pretty much any free time clearing out one batch of streetpasses and playing the picture puzzle and find mii game.  I am up to 392 Mii characters on my 3DS which is a significant boost to the 90 or so I had before coming this year.  Before coming this year I had completed zero of the slides… and after this year I have seven fully unlocked.

While hanging out there and chatting… and waiting on the rest of the folks to show up we had a random encounter with a couple of awesome folks.  The two of us were sitting at a table for four, and a couple came up and asked if we minded them joining us.  When you play board games there is a convention of playing with the box lid standing up, to signal you are open to letting other people join your game.  I wish there was something like that for tables, because I felt bad commandeering a table…. but I also wanted a nice place to sit while we waited.  What followed was an awesome conversation about Destiny and the Division, and a bunch of other console and PC games rolled together.  The funny thing is… we had this lengthy conversation all without introducing ourselves, and it took a fifth person joining the conversation to actually make that happen.  Now I hope to actually keep tabs on Hatti and Rabbit over twitter, and maybe even interact more between now and next year.

Everyone Must Play

As the day went on we managed to catch up with Tick, Damai, Thalen, Paragon, Ashgar, Rae and her brother John… and eventually Rowan, Sctrz, and Genda and his wife.  I believe when we were playing several rousing games of Code Names, we had ten around a table in the gaming area.  I believe the game was chosen in part because it scaled nicely regardless of how many people happened to be playing it.  While playing a rapidly snuck a few blurry pictures which I am totally using on my blog without talking to the individuals first.  However of the several photos I have… I picked the one with the people in it that I didn’t think would actually care.  I am also not naming anyone by name….  so hopefully no one gets cross with me.  Today was a lot of trying to sort out what to do, after we played a half dozen rounds we ended up breaking up into smaller groups and never quite joining back together.  I spent a lot of time circling like a shark trying to decide what to do… and alternately spending time with Exale and Maovis, who were cosplaying Venom Snake and Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China.  Lo Pan was an insane hit, and we ended up spending a lot of time stopping so folks could take photos.

I think the highlight of the day was dragging people to the Ultimate Chicken Horse booth just like I had done to me.  I cannot adequately elaborate on just how fun that game really is to play.  It takes a few rounds to get into it… but before long folks are cheering at the screen or groaning when they fail to complete a level.  There is something so deceptively simple about the game… and the iterative gameplay of each person adding a piece to the greater level keeps it fun and engaging.  I think the best feature is the fact that there is a fixed number of attempts that everyone can make, and regardless of the outcome someone will be crowned a winner.  I am already extremely partial to the chameleon who does this silly rainbow dance when you manage to win with him.  I also do not mind at all the Raccoon, and my lanyard now sports a button since they apparently ran out of Chameleons.  This is definitely going to be one of those games that I pick up immediately, and probably start buying for all of my friends so that they can join in the multiplayer madness.  I forsee us talking about this game a lot on the coming AggroChat.

Parking Debacle

Pax Day One

The first day of pax was interesting, mostly because it started off on a bad foot.  I wrote about yesterday how I failed to charge my cell phone over the course of the previous night.  The positive of that however is that I learned my power bank does a phenomenal job of charging phones, and by the time it took me to drive from the hotel to the convention center it was sitting around 63% from the previous 15%.  Last year there was a plethora of parking options up and down Commerce and Market streets, but unfortunately yesterday every single lot had a full sign.  I finally ended up parking in a surface lot, having to pay $20 for 8 hours.  On the way to the convention I stopped and chatted with one of the attendants at the garage I parked in last year, just to find out what time of the day it actually filled up.  Turns out that some other corporate event is going on downtown, and that a company had booked pretty much all of the city run garages, greatly reducing the amount of available parking space.  She said that today they would be open again, so here is hoping that I can get into the garage I am used to.

As far as the day itself, it took a little while to connect with everyone.  I met up with Dallian in this coffee shop area near a giant Pax South sign, where we milled around until we joined up with Paragon and Damai… and eventually Ashgar.  Since we had not heard anything from Thalen yet, we wandered into the con and around the floor.  All the while I was on lookout for trying to sort out where exactly my first appointment was.  Turns out it was downstairs at the river level…. which is not something I even knew existed.  The rooms down there were super nice however, and in truth I liked them better than the area the Motiga suite was last year.  When I went to scope the place out I got nabbed by Deanna from Perfect World, and ushered into their room to hang out while waiting on time for my appointment.  They had this really great spread of brownies and other pastries, but unfortunately… I had just eaten a large breakfast at the hotel thinking it might be awhile before I found food on the con floor.

Livelock

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I will of course be writing a proper piece for MMOGames.com once I have more stable internet, but I still wanted to talk a little bit about it this morning.  I have to admit I was not really sure what to expect from all of the press announcements leading up to me actually getting to test it.  I had a basic idea that it would be a top down shooter, but I was not really certain past that.  I turns out that the game as a whole is a love letter to the twin stick shooters of the past, updated and infused with modern gameplay mechanics.  So in my head it feels like Ikari Warriors meets Diablo meets some almost MMO mechanics.  When the game is finished it will include three mechs that have specific niches, and in the discussion they mentioned tank/healer/dps holy trinity.  It seems as you level up your character to 30 you unlock ways to swap up your abilities and make them more defensive or more damaging.  I asked the ever important question about how big of a detriment a new player will be to seasoned players… and apparently the game is more skill based.  Level 1 characters and Level 30 characters have the same health, and the upgrades to abilities don’t really crank up the damage value, but instead change the way they work.  So in theory this might be a great game for impromptu co-op with friends.  That has always been the challenge in our own little circle, that if someone was not there on the first night… it is often difficult to play catch up and be viable until everyone simply hits the level cap.  The other nice thing about this game is that it is a straight up $19.99 game, and I grilled them a bit about future monetization plans.  It seems like right now they have no plans to offer a whole bunch of DLC characters or anything like that… they are just trying to design a really tight three player co-op experience and that is in many ways refreshing.

Ultimate Chicken Horse

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The other game I really want to talk about from yesterday is Ultimate Chicken Horse.  Now this is a title we have talked about before on AggroChat on our PAX Prime Show.  While Tam, Kodra, and Ashgar tried to explain the game to me… I didn’t really “grok” it until I was sitting there yesterday with a controller in hand playing it myself.   The idea is pretty simple…  you have a platformer that you compete with up to four other players.  The level designs are pretty classic and relatively simple to complete.  What makes the game amazing is that each round, each player gets a block that they can place somewhere in the level.  Some of these blocks help the players out like springboards or platforms…. and others will kill the player like crossbows that fire arrows, or spiked floors.  The goal of the game is the make the level difficult enough for at least one of the people you are playing with to die…. but not so hard that you cannot beat it yourself.  If everyone beats the level… no points are awarded.  If no one beats the level…  no points are awarded.  Things start to get really insane about five rounds in when the map becomes a field of death and destruction.  I can already tell this is going to be one of those must own “go to” games for hanging out with friends.  The best part about it is the fact that it does couch co-op and does it amazingly well.  The only problem I am going to have is that I am not sure if it supports network co-op, and I simply don’t have a group of people to play it with on a regular basis in local mode.  I am absolutely going to buy the game regardless because I want to support this flavor of insanity.  If you get a  chance, you should totally check it out when it ends up on steam shortly.

Ending the Day

The big problem with the day yesterday, was the fact that I was super paranoid the entire time about the crappy parking option I had.  Previously the $10 lots were for as long as you cared to stay, meaning I could be there late at night without much issue.  I talked to the parking attendant about the lot I happened to be in, and she mentioned that it was a privately owned lot and they were super quick to boot cars.  So the entire time while roaming around Pax I kept looking at my phone to check when it was time to walk out and get the car and try and move it to someplace better.  I finally headed out around 3:30 in the afternoon to do that, and in the time it took me to exit that surface lot… someone had already taken my space.  I drove around Commerce and Market streets and all of those lots still showed the “Full” sign, so I circled back around to the lot I had parked in… which now had a barricade across its entrance as well.  So everyone went off to Dave and Busters, and I instead went to the Hotel and played 3DS until my wife and friend got in a few minutes later.  Once the traffic had died down we went out roaming for a bit, because we needed some pop to throw in the hotel fridge.  The day took a lot more out of me than I realized, and I ended up crashing really hard about 9 pm.  Over the course of the day I walked a little over 15,000 steps, which is something I am just not used to right now.  It was fine and well while I was in motion, but once I got back to the hotel room… it took its toll.  Overall was a really good first day, other than the parking bullshit.  Next year I am going to sort out the bus system and just use it, because in theory there is a bus that picks up right outside this hotel and drops off near the convention center.

 

Cats and Wolves

Cattes a Plenty

NekoAtsumeAt some point last year, lots of folks in my feed showed up with this Japanese app on their phones called Neko Atsume.  From what I can tell it roughly translates to Cat Collector, and it is one of those passive things that I tend to refer as a “maintenance game”.  The thing is….  I like cats.  In fact as I write this post I have one on either end of my desk sleeping on their blankets.  I for the most part avoided the game until recently when for some strange reason I decided to give it an install.  Firstly I’ve talked about my problems with mobile gaming in general.  I tend to install a game, play it a few times… and then never touch it again.  Largely my life is not exactly mobile friendly, and if I have access to games….  I am generally at home when I can use a more traditional gaming system.  This game however…  fits that realm of do something…  leave it sit for awhile… check back in on progress for a minute or two.  I’ve found myself popping it open while waiting on a meeting to start, and the jolt of happy kittehs doing stuff seems to help my mental state.

The concept is really simple.  You purchase cat toys, place them in your virtual yard… and the neighborhood cats will come visit you and leave you gifts if they enjoyed themselves.  The gifts come in the form of silver or gold fish… with the later also serving as the cash shop currency of the game.  As far as advancement… I have zero clue how that works.  I know I have seen screenshots of folks with much bigger yards, but I have no idea how that actually occurs yet.  The starter yard has a fixed number of mount points for items, and at any point you can pick the items up and replace them with other items from your inventory.  I have a pretty simple yard right now, but it seems to draw cats in pretty well.  You can play the game completely free and there is a conversion between silver fish and gold fish… but it is pretty painful.  You can get 10 Gold fish for every 250 Silver fish, which is doable because over the course of a few days I have earned over 250.  Right now it gives me tiny doses of happy especially when I pop over and my yard is completely full of cats doing adorable things.  I fully expect that within two weeks time I will have abandoned this mobile game just like I have abandoned so many others.

Slowly Leveling

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The other big project I have had over the last several days is working my way through the content in Destiny on my Xbox 360.  This has been a somewhat crazy side mission, and I have to say…  it has been interesting leveling from scratch for a second time.  There were a lot of things I struggled with in Destiny playing through it that very first time, and for the most part none of them are big deals this time.   I guess all of the time I have played on the Playstation 4 really has made me significantly better at the game, because swapping consoles has been a non-issue.  Sure the 360 controller feels a little strange, but I seem to be able to switch hit between it and the dualshock without much problem.  Admittedly I find the dualshock 4 significantly more comfortable, and if there was a way to make it work on the 360 I totally would.  I guess you might ask yourself why exactly am I leveling on a last generation console…  well I still have friends playing it.  I have been really damned impressed at just how well the game plays.  I mean admittedly it feels like someone smeared vasoline on the screen because everything feels a little fuzzy… given the lower resolution and with it lower texture detail.  However the moment to moment game play is exactly the same… and the weapons and movement all feels just as responsive.  I am sure at some point I will pick up an Xbox One, and at that point…  in theory my 360 characters get to transfer over so any work I am doing now I can carry forward into the next system.

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There are so many lessons that I have learned from playing through the first time.  This time around for example I am stockpiling every single blue engram drop that I happen to get.  The idea is that if I can wait to open any of them until level 40, I will be able to push up my light level quickly and get to a viable position to start doing content.  I am investing a lot of time right now in this platform, but the hope is that eventually it will be the sort of thing I only play when I have people to play with.  I still greatly prefer the Playstation 4 version, and those are the characters that I really care about.  In theory I could have spent my level 25 boost on my Titan and probably would have been done by now, but there is something fun about doing this legitimately again.  At this point I have beaten the main storyline of the original game, and darkness below.  I am also a fairly significant way through the House of Wolves storyline, but it was getting late last night and I did not really want to deal with the Vault of Glass mission, so that is where I will pick up next time I play.  I’ve reached level 25, which concerns me a bit… given that I have quite a bit to go before I can function very efficiently in the Taken King content.  I mean in theory I could already be doing that… but sub 35 some of those later missions are a pain in the ass.  Generally speaking on Destiny alts I push all the way to 40 before even really starting Taken King, so that I can burn through it easily.  Given I need leveling fuel… I will more than likely start Taken King as soon as I finish up with House of Wolves.  I guess I could do some Strike grinding, but I really really hate the Omnighoul strike, and that seems to be all I ever get in the level 20 range.