Humble Choice December 2023

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It is, as I write this, the first Tuesday of December. What’s in the box?

Expeditions: Rome is a turn-based tactics RPG with a historical setting. According to Bret Devereaux, official guy-who-would-know, its historical setting is pretty garbage once you get past the superficial elements. Bret’s standards for this kind of thing are very high, so failing to meet them isn’t really disqualifying, but it does mean that the game can’t justify its 50-hour time investment on those grounds. Its historical accuracy is good enough not to be marked against it, fine, but it’s not really a point in its favor, either – I already have plenty of games that get ancient Rome kinda right.

That key selling point stripped away, what’s left is a game constrained by its veneer of historical accuracy from having any rad wizards or dinosaurs in it, and while I love XCOM, much of what I love about it is that its turn-based tactical framework is linked together by strategic gameplay. Expeditions: Rome is also somewhere in the 40-50 hour length. For a time commitment like that, it needs a pretty strong selling point, and so far it seems to manage “eh, good enough” at best.

Midnight Fight Express is a third-person (pretty zoomed out camera, too, I want to call it isometric but I’m not sure that’s quite right) brawler game where you are a criminal and need to beat up like a million other criminals in order to save the city from crime. It takes itself more seriously than that, but the plot is still plainly a vehicle for the combat, which looks really good. By which I mean, it looks like it’s really fun to play. Actual graphics are kind of mediocre, but not so bad that they get in the way of the gameplay. How Long To Beat says it’s only six hours long, so this is an easy get.

Elex II is a post-apocalyptic science fantasy RPG, the sequel to a game that’s been on my wishlist for yonks. It got recommended to my by Steam and I wishlisted it so I wouldn’t lose track of it, but the state of my backlog being what it is, I never got around to buying and trying it. It was always a low priority, but not one that I want to totally give up on. I may as well pick up the sequel now, seeing as I’ve already paid for the Humble Choice. There’s decent odds that when I get around to this series, I won’t like it well enough to reach game two (and I don’t see any reason to believe I should skip the first game for this one), but there’s decent odds that I will.

Nobody Saves The World is an action RPG about a character named Nobody who saves the world by transforming into stuff. I’m really not feeling the gameplay hook, so I’m giving this one a pass.

The Gunk is a game about exploring a planet overtaken by the titular gunk. The only trace of gameplay I can find in the game’s Humble Choice pitch is that it involves using a power glove somehow. It’s less than 5 hours long, though, so I’ll grab it on the grounds that exploration is fun and that is real short, so I can take the chance.

The Pale Beyond is a game about a polar expedition that has to manage meager resources and political division to survive the harsh conditions of the South Pole. So apparently someone got so restless waiting for Frostpunk II that they decided they’d make it themselves. There’s no citybuilder gameplay or anything, but it’s got the same resource management core. This game doesn’t look bad, but I didn’t like Frostpunk so badly that I want to try out also-rans like the Pale Beyond.

Last Call BBS is, I guess, a nostalgia vehicle for 1995? I missed the BBS scene. The gameplay here is a collection of eight minigames, none of which look super compelling on their own.

From Space is a Boxhead game that’s put on a higher-graphics neon aesthetic in the hopes that no one will notice it’s a refugee from 2005. That’s probably unfair, the topdown horde shooter genre probably isn’t all knock-offs of a flash game I happened to play in eighth grade and which had already aged poorly by the time I was in tenth, and the Boxhead comparison is made pretty much purely because From Space is clearly in that genre, but that’s the only thing I can think of when seeing the game. The pink aliens don’t seem functionally different from the Boxhead zombies.

The bundle also comes with a 1-month trial of DC Universe Infinite, which looks to be one of those dealies where you pay a subscription fee for .pdf access to all of the comic books on record for a specific publisher. Maybe there are some specific exceptions, but broadly the idea is that the ravages of time have made catching up on comic book backlogs infeasible for anyone short of millionaire collectors, and sometimes not even then, so DC and Marvel now so digital access to a complete archive the same way companies sell streaming subscriptions. I’m not big into super hero comics, though. If something is going to be in comic book form, it should be visually stunning, and while super hero comics do sometimes have the kinds of characters and locations that are worth paying money to see, the vast majority of comic panels could be replaced with writing “Batman stood alone in the gloom of the Batcave” as prose and I would picture something basically identical to what the artist would’ve drawn. Certainly it is possible to draw something so evocatively that, even if it’s just a werewolf or something else where I have no trouble picturing it, the picture itself looks better than what I would’ve imagined just from the prose, but comic books are made on a tight schedule and the artists rarely have time to wring such work out of their canvas before they need to ship.

That’s three pickups, bringing my total up to 159. StarCraft games are long and so is Borderlands 3, and also I spent a lot of time in November watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Two of the games are short, though, and I’m through the Borderlands 3 main campaign and into the DLC, so I can probably get this back to 156 before the end of December easy.

StarCraft Can’t Keep Team Colors Straight For Protoss Or Zerg

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In the Terran campaign of StarCraft 1, we start out as Jim Raynor’s blue Mar Sara militia of Terrans (characters occasionally talk to the player character as though they’re a real person, but you also usually have one protagonist character whose perspective you follow for the entire campaign, and for the Terrans it’s Jim) fending off the orange Garm Brood of Zerg. This campaign is spent almost entirely fighting other Terran factions and the plot keeps good track of who is where. After joining the Sons of Korhal to escape the Garm Brood, our units turn red, we recruit the purple Antiga militia to the cause and fight the white Alpha Squadron before recruiting them, too.

We convince Alpha Squadron to defect by saving them from the Garm Brood and the new blue Surtur Brood, but having no insight into how different Zerg broods even work, that’s no surprise, we can assume there is a second Zerg brood around for any number of reasons. In the next few missions we fight the orange Delta Squadron and brown Omega Squadron, still loyal to the Confederacy, before the ninth mission where we use the Confederates’ own tech against their capital world to summon the purple Zerg Jormungand brood to attack them, then have to protect Jormungand from the blue Protoss Sargas Tribe.

The Korhal officer in charge of the mission, Lieutenant Sarah Kerrigan, is abandoned after the Sargas Tribe are defeated and the Jormungand Brood begins an overwhelming attack, which convinces Jim Raynor to defect, turning back to blue Mar Sara militia and fighting against both the red Sons of Korhal and the white Alpha Squadron on the way out.

If any of that seems confusing, I promise it’s because I recapped ten missions in three paragraphs with an emphasis on proper nouns because they’ll be important later. It’s all very straightforward in play.

But then the Zerg campaign starts, and now we’re playing as the Jormungand Brood from the moment of its creation. The premise of the first mission briefing is that you are a freshly spawned cerebrate just now coming to exist and command the Jormungand Brood. You’re on Tarsonis, the Confederate capital that was getting wrecked in Terran mission 9, so you might think this mission takes place between Terran 8, when the Zerg are summoned, and Terran 9, when the Jormungand Brood has a fully developed base that Kerrigan is tasked with defending from the Sargas Tribe. But, no, you’ve already got the chrysalis that will eventually hatch into infested Kerrigan – you and your brood were created specifically to protect her while she’s being infested. Maybe the old purple Zerg got destroyed in the assault and now you’re being created to replace them? But destroying a cerebrate requires a dark templar, that’s a whole plot point later on. So are the dark templar on Tarsonis? That would actually make a certain amount of sense, since the Sargas Tribe met them at some point between now and Zerg 8, but in Zerg 7, everyone is super freaked out that a cerebrate has been killed. If it had happened on Tarsonis, you’d think they’d bring it up.

And the only reason any of this gets brought up is because Terran 9, a mission with 3 teams, used purple for the Zerg brood. There are 8 team colors in StarCraft, so even with the player locked into red and the Protoss being locked into blue, there were six options for what to do with the Zerg. The orange Garm Brood seems to be the main ones in charge of wrecking Terran space, since they show up on both Mar Sara and Antiga Prime. The brown Grendel Brood, white Baelrog Brood, and yellow Leviathan Brood are totally unaccounted for. The timing of the Baelrog Brood’s appearance as an enemy does suggest they were created specifically for the attack on Aiur much later, but even that is speculative, they might’ve just been doing something else before the swarm was assembled for the attack. The purple Jormungand Brood is the only Zerg brood that we know can’t be here.

Continue reading “StarCraft Can’t Keep Team Colors Straight For Protoss Or Zerg” →

StarCraft II Hates Brood War

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StarCraft II’s plot is trying as hard as it can to pretend Brood War never happened, short of actually making any retcons.

In Brood War, a new Terran faction is introduced, the United Earth Directorate, so powerful that they force all the other factions (including Zerg and Protoss) to band together to defeat them. They succeed in this, so it makes sense that the UED is no longer the overwhelming force they were in Brood War, but they’re a total non-entity in StarCraft II and Arcturus Mengsk’s Terran Dominion is again the dominant Terran faction in the sector, just like it was at the end of the core game.

In Brood War, Fenix is killed by Kerrigan during her second betrayal. In StarCraft II, they reverse this to make Fenix alive again, again. It’s not even the first time he came back to life, so it’s not like this is some unprecedented break in the lore (and Edmund Duke, killed in the same betrayal, gets to pound sand in Hell), it’s just the reversal of another one of Brood War’s plot points.

Most jarringly of all, in Brood War, Kerrigan fakes a face turn, falsely claiming her evil Queen of Blades persona was a result of the Overmind’s control and ended when it was killed at the end of the core game, and then it turns out nope, she’s still evil, and she betrays the rest of the anti-UED coalition twice in order to come out of the titular Brood War as not only the ruler of all Zerg, but also the dominant power in the sector. After her second betrayal, her pre-infestation lover Jim Raynor swears that he will be the one who kills her. In StarCraft II, Kerrigan’s evil Queen of Blades persona turns out to be the result of the dark influence of Amon, a secret turbo-Overmind who was controlling the Overmind. Jim Raynor finds an ancient alien artifact that reverses Kerrigan’s infestation and makes her a good guy again, so, exactly the opposite of the direction the narrative went with her in Brood War.

This is the main plot of the Terran campaign of StarCraft II (which was released as a standalone game). The scene at the end of SCII where Jim Raynor carries Kerrigan’s deinfested body out of the hive cluster feels like an AU from Brood War. Like, yeah, Kerrigan has that line to Jim Raynor in the original game’s Zerg 4 about how she’s with the Zerg now, and coming as it is nowhere near the end of the game, that’s clearly setting up another beat. The obvious way to play it is that she is not, in fact, with the Zerg now, or at least not permanently, but Brood War’s payoff to that setup is that she fakes not being Zerg but then actually is Zerg. And also Kerrigan then has to be immediately reinfested so she can be the protagonist of the Zerg campaign.

The closest thing to a plot point from Brood War actually coming up in SC2 is when characters from Brood War make what amounts to cameo appearances. UED vice admiral Stukov is in Heart of the Swarm, but he got himself infested in the meantime so he’s basically just another infested Terran for Kerrigan to bounce off of and may as well be an original character. Kerrigan and Stukov were enemies last time either of them checked, which they have to clear out of the way before Stukov can take up his new position as Kerrigan’s sidekick. Duran, also introduced in Brood War, was Kerrigan’s previous infested sidekick, but is retconned as secretly being a psychic demi-god relevant to the plot of SC2, which has nothing to do with anything he did in Brood War. Duran may as well have been replaced with an original character for all he resembled his depiction in Brood War, and Stukov gets stuck playing Duran’s role for some reason.

It really seems like, when Blizzard finally got around to making SC2, they found they really didn’t like the setting they’d left themselves with at the end of Brood War and wanted to reset to just the core game being canon, but Brood War was really well received so they couldn’t actually do that and settled for completely ignoring every plot development.

Also, the final mission of Wings of Liberty, the Terran campaign of SC2, was a huge letdown. It’s a defense mission while a space artifact charges up to instakill the entire Zerg hive cluster. The Zerg forces are generated pretty arbitrarily, not coming in distinct attack waves the way a player actually harvesting resources and producing units would have to, but instead sending mobs of units almost continuously. The cut scene at the end of Jim Raynor and his marines retrieving the deinfested Kerrigan from the hives not only feels like an AU, it feels really unearned, since all I did was flip the switch on the Zerg-Kill-o-Matic. StarCraft 1 was almost entirely made of missions that were just a knock-down drag-out fight with a huge enemy base, and while StarCraft II’s reliance on alternative objectives was initially a breath of fresh air, there wasn’t really a single destroy-the-base mission in all of Wings of Liberty. And the final mission would’ve been the perfect place for it, a siege crawl across the surface of Char to reach Kerrigan’s citadel. A cut scene of marines walking through the tunnels in the aftermath would’ve been really satisfying coming on the heels of having just spent two hours cracking that base open with a fleet of vikings and banshees screening a company of siege tanks.

The Prime Directive Is Stupid

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I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but the Prime Directive from Star Trek is dumb. At least in TOS it seemed to be taken as more of a friendly suggestion than the pre-eminent rule of Starfleet. That’s in direct contradiction to its name, but also makes way more sense. “Avoid interfering with other civilizations unless they will clearly be worse off if you do” is not a terrible rule the way “don’t interfere with other civilizations ever even if they’re facing imminent extinction” is.

But by TNG, the Prime Directive is living up to its name as the first and most important rule of Starfleet, so we get things like S1E22, “Symbiosis,” where there is a planet of drug dealers and a planet of drug addicts, the latter of whom think that they’re infected with a terrible disease and that the dealers’ product is a treatment that alleviates the symptoms, when in fact it causes the symptoms via withdrawal. And apparently it would violate the Prime Directive to tell the addicts this. Totally cool to mediate negotiations between the two for sale of the drugs! That’s not interference. Sharing information about the nature of the “illness,” though, that’s strictly forbidden. Repairing ships that facilitate the drug trade wasn’t a violation of the Prime Directive in the first half of the episode, but in the second half of the episode, now it is. Captain Picard is pretty clearly changing what counts as “interference” in order to suit himself – so why doesn’t it suit him to share some information for the addict planet?

They try to justify this at the end of the episode with a historical precedent, but the show takes place 300 years in the future so the historical precedent is completely made up. So rather than drawing on real historical precedent to say “we may not understand why, but clearly interfering in other civilizations harms them in the long run,” the show is instead saying “I’m totally certain that interfering in other civilizations harms them in the long run despite being totally unable to provide any reasons why. Just believe me now and assume that the evidence will show up later.”

The implicit justification is that species have some kind of natural evolution to warp flight and that interfering with this prevents them from achieving their full potential somehow. If you think of it as “we should not use our superior technology and economy to turn single-planet civilizations into dependent states” then that is at least a coherent justification, although it’s not like there isn’t historical precedent for dependent states being perfectly capable of picking themselves up and carrying on when big brother crumbles. Sure, the smaller states often suffer, but the suffering is in the form of no longer receiving the benefits they used to. But regardless, sharing a bit of information isn’t turning the addict planet into a dependent state of the Federation (and they’re already a dependent state of the dealer planet!).

Rather than a practical concern about dependency, this justification seems more mystical if you scratch the surface, like they do in S2E15 “Pen Pals,” that each species has some kind of destiny that they would be held back from if the Federation shared its knowledge and wealth with them. In reality, people generally flourish in abundance and grow weaker in poverty. The popular idea of harsh conditions breeding strength and resilience is completley in opposition to real history – powerful empires are usually people who go around starting wars, not having wars declared on them, and they start those wars because they have a position of superior wealth and power from which they expect to win, and nine times out of ten, they do.

There’s also echoes of the American isolationist movement here (and Star Trek was made in America, so that’s not surprising), that big powerful nations trying to help small ones usually goes poorly for the small ones. But that’s not really true. Like, obviously when a big, powerful nation sends an invasion force that doesn’t become a good thing just because the troops have been instructed to shout “we’re here to help!” before mowing down every native who voices support for local sovereignty. And sending out gobs of free stuff blindly to poorer nations is a terrible long term solution to their economic problems and can destroy local industry by forcing them to compete with donated hand-me-downs. So there are defintiely forms of intervention that are bad for the smaller nation. But disaster relief is pretty purely a good thing, and whether or not trade ends up being good depends mostly on the smaller nation’s own government. Trade creates wealth, and whether or not that’s a good thing depends on who gets to have that wealth. The Marshall Plan worked out great for western Europe, so just giving people a shitton of money for infrastructure projects works at least some of the time. The Belt and Road Initiative is struggling and looks like it’s going to collapse, but those were loans, not gifts.

Again, this is voiced more explicitly in Pen Pals, but that explicit voicing just makes it clear that TNG is committing to stupidity. Picard insists that there’s no clear delineation between intervening in a natural disaster and intervening in a war, but yes, there is! One requires temporary economic aid to offset a disaster and/or scientific expertise to mitigate or avert the disaster, you can swoop in, solve the problem, and rocket off with no longterm entanglements and without having killed anyone. A war is going to require either years of investment, a massive bodycount, or both. Saying “taking sides in a war might go poorly, so let’s not save people from natural disasters either” is absolutely braindead.

Things like comparing the Marshall Plan to the Belt and Road Initiative (and in defense of Star Trek, the latter was not a thing during the production and original airing of TNG) makes it clear that it’s not immediately obvious what interventions are going to be beneficial to smaller states, but also that it is totally possible to intervene beneficially. A Prime Directive of “no interference, ever” only makes sense if Starfleet is a domineering organization with a history of malicious interference that the Federation needs to slap down with a straightforward, inviolable rule, even if that leads to a few cases where Starfleet refuses to intervene even when it would clearly be beneficial to do so.

This hardly seems to be the case in Star Trek – the Enterprise crew are consistently portrayed as highly ethical and highly skilled professionals. Even if other ships tend to be less competent (which does seem to be the case), the Enterprise crew never brings this up when justifying the Prime Directive. No one’s ever like “hey, sure, this specific intervention would probably be good, but if we set a precedent of this sort of thing for the rest of Starfleet, those clowns on the Constellation Class ships are going to start orbitally bombarding any pre-Warp civilizations who refuse to embrace pacifism.” They always act like the intervention itself would somehow be harmful in the long run, and their justifications for why are always paper-thin. It ultimately boils down to “because the Prime Directive is Star Trek-y,” and that slavish devotion to the established lore of the show is in direct violation of the general spirit of progression to a brighter future pushed by the show.

Chrono Cross Character Quests: Endgame

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Through the machinations of rival supercomputers FATE and the Prometheus Circuit, Serge wound up DNA locked to the security system of high-tech future city Chronopolis. Lynx, an agent of FATE, swapped bodies with him so he could unlock the security system, but the enemies he made along the way are fighting tooth and claw to keep him from returning to Chronopolis, unlocking the security system, and once again giving FATE the power of the legendary artifact called the Frozen Flame. Cat!Serge, stuck in Lynx’s body, was cast into an alternate timeline, which isn’t even the first time this happened to him. After sorting out how to cross between timelines again, he has linked back up with the anti-FATE coalition and helped them rebound from Dark Serge’s attacks.

The six dragon gods of the region seem sympathetic to the anti-FATE coalition, but they’re reluctant to provide direct assistance for unclear reasons. They rescued cat!Serge when FATE collapsed the alternate timeline version of Chronopolis on top of him, but they haven’t been flying around torching Dark Serge’s ships or anything. For that matter, they won’t even pop a new body for cat!Serge out of Fort Dragonia, which cat!Serge needs in order to get access to Chronopolis before Dark Serge can. Cat!Serge already has (an alternate timeline version of) the Dragon Tear used for bodyswapping, all he needs is a body to swap into, and the dragons say they can provide it, but apparently he needs to first obtain their blessing by reaching and defeating each of the six of them in turn. Only then will Fort Dragonia create a new body for him which he can use the Dragon Tear to swap into (best not to think too much about what happens to the discarded cat body).

This is a lie. The Black Dragon created an army of monsters to control Marbule basically just as a fuck you to some imperialist colonizers who tried to invade it. Any one of the dragons can create a new body for Serge no problem. The real truth is that they were on the losing end of a war with Chronopolis 6,000 years ago, fought for control of the Frozen Flame, and that Chronopolis has been unstoppable since winning and getting control of the Frozen Flame. The storm that DNA locked Serge to the Frozen Flame’s security system, locking FATE out of it, was the first chance they’d had to meaningfully fight back against FATE in millennia. So long as Serge’s DNA, whether in Dark Serge or reincarnated Serge, is outside of Chronopolis, Team Dragon is still in the game. If either copy of Serge gets to Chronpolis, unlocks the Frozen Flame, and then does not hand it over to Team Dragon, the dragons are fucked. They need to be absolutely positive Serge has what it takes to crack Chronopolis open before he goes in there. If Serge isn’t going to succeed, they’d rather he die somewhere where one of them can immediately obliterate the corpse, and maintain plausible deniability about whether or not they’re in the anti-FATE coalition in case Dark Serge gets back into Chronopolis.

But they don’t want cat!Serge to know any of this, because it’s very important they maintain their mystique as vaguely benevolent nature gods of El Nido. Pretty much any one of FATE’s minions can theoretically sit down with cat!Serge right now and explain that the dragon gods are the nature deities of a third, radically different timeline where dinosaurs won the ancient war with cavemen (something which happened in this setting, it’s in Chrono Trigger) and an entirely different civilization developed. And their basic plan here is to kill all humans to recreate their old timeline in this one. The dragon gods have been lucky that FATE is so spectacularly bad at diplomacy that no one’s ever said that to cat!Serge and he probably wouldn’t believe them if they did, and if Team Dragon swaps the mystique of “dragon gods work in mysterious ways” for “we’re not confident you can defeat FATE’s robot army,” it might encourage cat!Serge to think of them as less incarnations of benevolence and more as conventional allies who might betray him after their common enemy is defeated. FATE has done most of the damage to a potential anti-dragon coalition all by itself, but the dragons don’t want to bungle it at the last second.

While running around gathering up the blessings of the six dragon gods, cat!Serge also runs into a few final allies.

Continue reading “Chrono Cross Character Quests: Endgame” →

Did Tassadar’s Sacrifice Make Sense In Context For Anyone?

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The objective of the final mission of StarCraft is to reduce the HP of the Zerg Overmind’s outer shell to zero. Once this happens, regardless of how much of the Zerg base or forces you’ve destroyed, you go to a cut scene in which Tassadar sacrifices himself to ram the Overmind and kill it. According to his dialogue, this is necessary because your forces have been severely weakened in the process of cracking the outer shell. Naturally, how much sense this makes depends a lot on how the mission went. If you were running low on resources, you may have indeed pushed a carrier fleet through the perimeter and ignored incoming Zerg reinforcements to reduce the Overmind’s shell to 0 HP while being pretty much tapped out for any base-clearing operations.

On the other hand, if you’re neurotic about leaving survivors, you might have scrupulously killed everything before allowing your units to target the Overmind and end things, making Tassadar’s final dialogue pretty much exactly the opposite of true. I’ve got eighteen carriers, man! Not only is the entire Zerg base cleaned out, but I could go clean out another base of similar size right now without even producing any more units, to say nothing of the fact that I have three active resource-gathering bases.

This is an inevitability of RTS gameplay. Besides unsatisfying cheats like auto-respawning destroyed buildings or units in the core of the Zerg base so that it’s impossible to clear the base before taking down the Overmind (StarCraft II is more prone to doing this kind of thing to guarantee that the map resembles what it’s supposed to be in the story no matter how much effort you put into clearing it, and I hate it), you can’t prevent the player from overkilling the mission to the point where Tassadar’s sacrifice comes across like nonsense. For example, in the eighth Protoss mission of the Brood War expansion, you are supposed to capture and defend a temple long enough for some psychic ritual to kill all Zerg on the planet Shakuras. There are three Zerg AI, one in front of the temple and two behind it. The two behind the temple have considerably larger and more heavily defended bases. It’s certainly possible to wipe out the Zerg completely making the psychic ritual at the end seem kind of ceremonial, but the most straightforward way to complete the mission is to leave the largest, toughest hive clusters alone and focus on securing the temple.

But it’s not just possible to do this sort of thing in the last mission of StarCraft 1’s core campaign, I strongly suspect that it is the average player’s first experience of the mission. Sure, they probably don’t bother clearing the entire Zerg base before hitting the Overmind down to the last building, but they probably do clear out all the active defenses and only avoid destroying ultralisk caverns and defiler mounds because those are tech buildings, not unit producers, and they’re not necessary to the objective, so why bother? They still end up in a position where their army/fleet is completely stomping Jormungand Brood (and Tiamat Brood, if there’s anything left of it).

The only reason you’d end up doing the thing where you rush your attackers in to hit the Overmind without destroying the defending swarm and spore/sunken colonies is if you’re either speedrunning or you don’t have enough resources to plausibly take out the whole Zerg base, so you go straight for the objective and hope for the best. Nobody speedruns a game on their first try back in 1998 when you couldn’t stream a gimmick like “blind speedrun of [game],” and the mission has such a gargantuan amount of resources that you can’t really lose by running out. You either get your base overrun because you weren’t able to harvest and spend those resources quickly and effectively enough, or else you have everything you need to create 24 carriers and 24 battlecruisers and a dozen siege tanks and a dozen arbiters to cloak them all (you have both a Terran and a Protoss base and they have separate supply count, so the maximum size of your army is immense). That would take a long time and there’s not really any point when the Zerg base can be cracked with much less, but the resources for it are there. There’s six empty resource nodes on the map and one of them is a mineral patch big enough to overcome the Overmind’s defenses at least five times over. That one absurdly mega-huge resource patch could probably pay for the last three or four missions combined.

That’s not to say the mission is extremely easy, because you can still get overrun, but I find it pretty unlikely that the average player wasn’t in a position that ranged from slightly to extremely advantageous when Tassadar sacrifices himself on the grounds that their position is super precarious.

Also there’s a weird bug in the AI of both of the last two missions where the enemy just gives up once you’ve penetrated their base. Drones stop harvesting resources, reinforcements stop getting brought in. It’s like the Overmind saw my carrier fleet rip through the spore colony perimeter and said “well, can’t do anything to stop that, guess I’ll just die.” The StarCraft 1 AI isn’t smart enough to produce counters to enemy units it spots, so it’s kind of right – trickling in hydralisks and mutalisks stands no chance of defeating the fleet, what he really needs to do is amass lots of scourges and defilers (the Brood War AI does this) even then it’s questionable whether he can trade effectively with my infinity minerals. But it’s still weird to see the AI go afk.

Moneyball

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I just watched Moneyball recently. I’ve known the story for a while and it’s the go-to shorthand for ignoring flashy spectacle assets in exchange for 5% here and 8% there adding up to a stronger result in aggregate, but I never saw the movie. And the movie is honestly kind of depressing with some of the artistic choices they made.

See, the movie is the story of how a statistics nerd is way better at assembling baseball teams than any of the old men in the decision-making seats because they make decisions based on shallow metrics like healthy aesthetics and flashy spectacle plays like home runs. They’re really just ascended baseball fans with no sense of professionalism or capacity for real analysis but a hubris born from the fact that the people currently in charge are also in charge of picking their successors, and they pick other baseball fans (including retired baseball players) to replace them, which means statistics nerds who look at the result over the aesthetics don’t get to play and prove how much better they are. But things turn around for the statistics nerd when an aggro dipshit with nice hair takes up the cause of statistics-based baseball because said aggro dipshit is desperate for an advantage that can bring his horribly underfunded team up to par. This is not a terrible story, except that the aggro dipshit is the main character.

That would be fine if that was the real story of the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season, and the fact is that the statistics nerd is a fresh college grad who more-or-less had his shit together while Oakland Athletics’ manager Billy Beane had stumbled through a series of false victories into a death spiral and really needed something to turn around for him, so even if Billy Beane’s greatest asset is his hair he’s still the better character because sometimes that’s how real life is.

But that isn’t how real life was! The actual real Billy Beane is not an aggro dipshit with nice hair whose only smart move was finding someone smarter than him to take orders from under the disguise of hiring on an advisor. The statistics nerd from the movie is a complete fabrication. Not a conglomerate character, but made from scratch. The closest thing to the statistics nerd in real life was Sandy Alderson, the manager prior to Beane. The Oakland Athletics came under new ownership during Alderson’s tenure and the funding for players was cut from the highest in the league to the lowest, with predictably disastrous consequences for their wins, so Alderson started using the statistical methods of Moneyball to create an aggressively cost-effective team. Billy Beane learned that method while working as assistant manager and, evidently, got way better at it than Alderson was after he took over in the late 90s, leading up to the poorest team in the league reaching the playoffs four years in a row in the early-to-mid 00s. Moneyball was published as non-fiction in 2003 about how the Athletics pulled off their 2002 upsets, and other teams’ managers adapted to the strategy over the course of the next couple of years, which is why the Athletics’ performance fell off after a couple of years.

You can even hear traces of this true story in some of the montage audio which is, I believe, a direct quote or even actual audio of baseball commentary of the season. They talk about how Billy Beane built the team off the theories of a book that he read, not a nerd who he met in person and took orders from while barking loudly enough to preserve the delusion of being in control.

Billy Beane wasn’t a front man lending good looks and “confidence” to a helpless but brilliant nerd, he did the analysis himself. Hollywood evidently decided this story would be better if Billy Beane was at-best mediocre at his actual job of managing baseball teams and had to find someone much better at it to do the job for him, and also that the more competent person had to be a nerd reluctant to advocate for themselves who had to be bullied into taking their shot at greatness (through Beane) so that the protagonist can retain a veneer of being in charge. The Moneyball protagonist version of Billy Beane isn’t even a particularly good negotiator or charming or anything, his only “social skill” is a willingness to be a jackass, and while that isn’t nothing, it’s the same mediocre-at-best level of competence as he demonstrates as a manager.

The movie makes a lot of smart artistic choices with the true story. Cutting Alderman to compress the 5-ish year process of developing Moneyball into a single revolutionary season where drastic action was taken in response to a devastating gutting of the team helps to make the Moneyball story more dramatic even when told from the people who were closest to it, when in reality, if you’re close to the process, by the time it’s paying out huge dividends it usually does so after many smaller victories which makes the big wins seem like a matter of grinding inevitability. There’s a throughline in the movie about how Beane signed up for professional baseball because the Mets were impressed with a bunch of attributes that turned out to not mean fucking anything to the actual winning of the game, passing on a scholarship to Stanford to do so, and movie!Beane hires the statistics nerd because the statistics nerd accurately assesses that he might have had the appearance of being “the complete package” but his stats showed someone who was mediocre at everything that mattered.

But apparently it was also super important to this story that the protagonist had to be a moron cheating off of someone else’s homework.

Atlantis City Builder

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Zeus: Master of Olympus is a city builder set in Greek mythology (and occasionally actual ancient Greek history). It has an expansion, Poseidon: Master of Atlantis, which introduces something strange but effective for a city-builder game: A second playable faction. Atlantean citizens have slightly different needs from Greeks, although in most cases it’s just a palette-swap. This also moves the action from Greek mythology to a blend of Greek mythology and Atlantean conspiracy theories. Atlantis is a pyramid-building civilization on a giant island in the Atlantic Ocean, and sail westward to the Mayans and eastward to the Egyptians, where their pyramid-building ways would influence both of these two civilizations to build pyramids of their own (because a lost trans-Atlantic civilization is required to explain how two completely different civilizations could’ve independently decided to tidy up the corners on a pile of stuff). Then twenty years later they released Hades, an isometric roguelike action game, which was a weird direction to take the series.

Poseidon is an expansion pack to an existing game, so its scope is pretty limited. It swaps out olive oil for orange juice, swaps out Greek culture buildings like theaters and philosopher podiums for Atlantean super-science buildings like observatories and laboratories, and it replaces the Greek stadium for the Olympic games with a hippodrome for chariot racing. The main draws of the expansion are filling in some holes in Greek mythology (in the original game’s twelve deities, for example, Olympian Hera is swapped out for Chthonic Hades – the expansion adds in Hera and Atlas, the latter mainly because a god of carrying things real good is actually very relevant to the game’s mechanics) and six new playable “adventures,” the game’s story campaign. The original game only had seven adventures, so six is a lot, and those are the main draw of Poseidon: There’s more Zeus. It’s an expansion pack, that’s what they were selling.

But the concept got me thinking about using Atlantis as the frame for a city builder game that spanned multiple different ancient civilizations. Sort of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate but for the Impressions city-builder series instead of Nintendo. The city-builder series also included Pharaoh, Caesar, and Emperor (the latter was for ancient and medieval China, which is casting a Hell of a wide net). Those three focused on history over mythology and I think they were weaker for it, so partly I’m just daydreaming about versions of those games that had mythology-based scenarios instead of sticking to a linear historical narrative and which are also accessible from the same menu. China and to a lesser extent Rome would be a bit out of place with the Atlantean frame story, but, you could have Mayan, Celtic, Norse, and Persian factions and it wouldn’t be any more anachronistic than the Athens adventure from Zeus setting the Persian Wars in the 9th century BC. You could rope in the Chinese (and the Indians, while we’re at it) if you went full Conan with it, having a world made of fictional expies for various civilizations that weren’t coterminous, because hey, who’s to say where the Po Dynasty and the Telleroi city-states are in relation to each other, I just made those up, I can put them wherever I want.

Mechanically, all these factions won’t be hard to design. Everyone’s food supply and resource extraction is going to be nearly identical, it’s only cultural buildings and exactly what goods people demand that will change the fundamental citybuilding. You also want some very different endgame projects with very different mechanics for each faction to help really set them apart from one another, even if it’s not super important for simulationist reasons if a Temple of Artemis and a Sphinx are basically the same. Making them have significantly different effects when built will make playing Greeks and Egyptians feel different, though.

There’s also some more fundamental resource differences, for example, Egyptians have more different types of farms and other things that are built on riverlands like clay pits, tying them very directly to the Nile, which means their cities tend to be packed around a narrow but continuous strip of useful land, while Greek maps have mountain meadows, ore deposits, and shorelines for piers to ship goods in and out all in different locations, and thus tend to focus more on connecting all these different resource nodes together – you need to ship food to your mines and trade piers to feed the workers living there, and ship bronze and silver from your mines to the trade piers to trade for whatever goods you can’t produce locally, and then ship those goods out to the meadows and mines to supply the workers, and then find some way to defend it all from enemy raiding parties.

Whereas an Egyptian city is surrounded by empty space that’s hard to find use for, which means both that you shove all your military buildings out there because they have way fewer continuous needs (you need to ship weapons and armor out there, but those aren’t consumed at a steady rate, so it’s fine if it takes a while), and that empty space also provides a defense: you have plenty of time to muster an army and meet an enemy in the field when they spawn at the edge of the map, Greek maps are full of sprawl and are more likely to build near the edges, so you need actual walls to slow an enemy down while your troops muster, especially since the least valuable space where you cram your military buildings in might be in the geographic heart of your city, a midpoint between the mountains, meadows, and piers.

But since that’s almost entirely in map design, we don’t need to build fundamental mechanics into the Greek and Egyptian factions to reflect that. We don’t need to ban Greeks from using clay pits and making pottery, just design maps where the clay deposits are usually made wet by seawater, so it’s not arable anyway, so of course you put your clay pits there, the land isn’t useful for anything else. If you put a Greek city on a Nile map, they would play much more similarly to the Egyptians, just with different endgame monuments and also it would be one of those maps where you have to import all your olive oil, but that happens even in Greece.

But while the mechanics for a game like this are quite manageable, the number of art assets would potentially be a much greater challenge. The Greek agora and the Egyptian market have basically the same mechanics, but you would still expect them to look different. The mechanics of Greek theaters and philosophy podiums might be basically identical to Egyptian jugglers and musicians, but that means it’s entirely on the appearance and sound of the buildings and walkers to distinguish the culture of the two. A lot of buildings are mechanically fully identical to one another, like a wheat farm or a maintenance post (used to prevent buildings from collapsing or catching fire), but the building still needs to look like it was built by Egyptians/Greeks and the people working it to show that it’s operational (as opposed to lacking resoruces, workers, etc. etc.) need to be dressed like Egyptians/Greeks.

Part of the reason why I wish I could go back in time and tell Impressions to make this game in 2002 is because they had a bunch of assets right in front of them: Pharaoh, Zeus, Emperor, and Caesar III all look pretty similar to each other, and it’s not jarring to go from one to another. A couple of assets might need a redesign to look good next to others, but even that shouldn’t be too common, because you don’t build two different cities of two different factions on the same map, so the only units from a civilization that will be seen in context of another are military units.

Foretales

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Foretales is a card game set in one of those anthropomorphic animal fantasy settings that indie games seem to like. It’s not small-child-scary-world industry-dominating phenomenon, but it crops up semi-regularly.

Foretales is a card game, you have a party of hopefully three characters, and you draw a hand of six cards in even proportion, so with three characters, that’s two cards from each deck. Once a deck runs out, your hand size goes down with it. If one of your three characters is out of cards, you only have four cards in your hand. Cards do different things when played on different location cards, so if you play the thief protagonist’s Nimble Hands card on a market place, he’ll steal some gold, but play it on a tavern and he’ll steal some food. If you run out of cards, you can no longer really interact with the game at all, so you’ve got to rest, which gets you back three cards for every party member but usually comes with some consequence, like increasing the number of enemies on scattered around different locations or, if you take too many rests, just slapping you with an immediate game over.

When you end up in a fight, you can use assorted resources to convince enemies not to bother fighting you. Fame, which you generally get for being nice, works especially well on guards, while grim, which you generally get for being mean, works especially well on bandits, but you can use either if you have enough of it. Gold works well on both of them, but not so well on cultists, who only respond to grim. Failing that, you can actually kill the bastards, and every foe killed gives you grim. If you reduce enemy morale low enough, whether by bribing or intimidating them or whatever or by violence, surviving enemies run away and you get fame for each one who runs.

That’s a bunch of weird mechanics attached to nifty little decks that help differentiate a cast of characters from one another. Is it fun? Eh. Fun enough that I didn’t mind playing through to the end of the game once to get a bad ending which then sent me back to the beginning for a new game+, but not fun enough that I felt the need to try and get a good ending. The game is all about getting dire visions of the future, and the new game+ starts right after you get the artifact that inflicts the visions, so the idea is that your failed runs are visions of doom from the artifact. I like it when games incorporate failure into the narrative instead of asking you to reload over and over again, slowly crafting a single canon run where the hero never fails out of a dozen or more non-canon failures, but Foretales doesn’t even do that entirely, since any time you get just plain old run out of HP or cards+rests you still just reload.

But more importantly, this setup demands you replay mostly the same game several times, and it’s not nearly enough fun for me to bother with that. Sure, I learned a lot about how to play during my first playthrough and could play much better my second time through, especially in the early quests where they’re quite easy, and there’s different routes through the game so (rough guess) only maybe a third of the quests would be repeats. Like, the cut scene of the bad ending I got ended with a pretty heavy-handed hint that I should immediately start hunting down the doom cult you confront in the final act of the game, ignoring all other concerns, whereas in my initial playthrough those other concerns had seemed sufficiently pressing (friend on death row, guards about to massacre a striking miners’ union) that I never got around to confronting an annoying aristocrat who later on turned out to be a cult leader. So, okay, ignore the other disasters and sprint straight for her.

But I know from the way the quest select screen is laid out that I’m definitely going to be replaying some of these quests because there just aren’t enough empty slots for my second playthrough to be wholly unique, and even if it were, the mechanics were already starting to lose my interest at the end of my first playthrough. It couldn’t be more clear that this game is meant to be played multiple times so this isn’t really complete, but that just means I’m putting it into regrets. I just don’t want to play anymore.

Why Is Zeus Better Than Pharaoh?

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Back in the 90s and 00s, Impressions Games made historical citybuilder games. I mainly played two, that being the Egyptian themed Pharaoh and the Greek themed Zeus: Master of Olympus. Zeus is much better. Why, though? The only major difference between the two is their art assets. Other differences are numerous and non-trivial, but converting Pharaoh to Zeus’ mechanics would’ve been more the realm of an expansion pack that a sequel. And yet, these relatively minor mechanical differences add up to Zeus being a much better game, which makes me sad because sometimes I wanna build a cool desert city. So what are the differences that made Zeus better?

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