Gormongous

Same, given a few days of warning to prepare.

Yeah, it's not that it's perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it's really unique, both in art style and how there is more a series of revelations about how the characters relate than a traditional plot. At twelve episodes, that makes it an unconditional recommendation for me. Also, I thought the naive viewpoint character was meant to set the audience up for learning that everyone has good, even sympathetic reasons for the things they do. Granted, it would have been a stronger theme if Yaichi and the others had appeared as more menacing in the first few episodes, but maybe I'm just missing out on some visual cues, not being even remotely Japanese myself.

Hah, my thoughts exactly. I'd bite, but I'll feel stupid if I win the key in a couple days.

I'm bringing this up exactly because it's the sort of anime that'll never be recommended, but everyone who likes period dramas should check out House of Five Leaves (I think it's Saraiya Gorou in Japanese). It's a beautiful, meditative piece with an arresting art style about a shy samurai looking for answers and the sinister characters he falls in with while searching for them. There's little action, little spectacle, even little plot, yet it captures a sense of place almost perfectly. I think it may be the best thing I've seen since I rewatched Gunbuster a year ago (which I also recommend, if only because it actually faces the personal implications of FTL combat).

The Three Moves Ahead guys liked it a lot, and the free DLC has improved almost all their complaints. I went ahead and bit, since I liked R.U.S.E. and love the military porn of Cold War hardware.

I've also been intrigued by the Japanese penchant for essentializing their national figures lately. I stumbled upon the Sengoku Basara anime while playing Shogun 2 and was totally baffled by the gleeful and crass transformation of complex historical personages into fighting game archetypes. It has a way of making the sengoku jidai seem more elemental, a clash between ideologies and a crossroads for the future, which suits its status as a foundational myth just fine. I can't recommend Sengoku Basara, though. It's utter dross. I can't even recommend the book I'm reading to cleanse my palette, Taiko by Yoshikawa Eiji. For being a fictionalized biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and a supposed literary treasure, there's just way too much inconsistent characterization and informed attributes going on. No, Troy. You should watch all the anime where they gender-swap Nobunaga and company: Sengoku Otome and Oda Nobuna no Yabou for versions set historically, or Sengoku Collection where they all go to modern-day high school together!

Yeah, Anno 2070 and Payday: The Heist are the sticking points for me. I've tried them both and hated them, but for some reason the low price tag gives me a vision of a perfect world where we'll click and all my friends will join in too. Didn't work with New Vegas, why should it work here? Or so I keep saying.

The way I see it, grand strategy games, whether turn-based or real-time, require two elements for an engaging and successful theme: context and direction. I think of context as what we consider backstory, the canvas upon which a player projects their own narrative. Direction is more along the lines of world-building, an understanding of the processes at work and how they affect the player's narrative. The landscape and ecology, if you will. Most games start out with a little of both already, because any setting has some real-world analogue and game mechanics invariably accomplish some world-building. Authored touches like flavor text and art are necessary to engage the player beyond that basic level though, otherwise we get experiences like the release versions of Europa Universalis III and EU: Rome, where a historical point of departure and abstracted but verisimilitudinous mechanics achieved an experience just about as engrossing as drawing borders on a dry-erase world map. I wonder if the reason we keep sticking on space games is that there's no real analogue to provide even the barest ready-made context. History is self-evident and fantasy has Tolkien & Renn faires, but the popular understanding of space settings is the WWII Pacific theatre. The empty ocean doesn't have much in the way of character, and even if it did it's so far removed from what actually is depicted in space 4x games that there's no signposts for developers to follow. Unless there's a strong authored vision preexisting and able to provide a framework, we inevitably get large, amorphous empires, the sole purpose of which is to fuel war machines (read: the US and Japan during the Second World War). Like Cory insists, that doesn't sink a game or even preclude it from having an engaging theme (the first Sword of the Stars is a great example), but I'm hard pressed to think of a video game with a weak or superficial theme that is acknowledged to be qualitatively better than one with a strong theme in the same genre. Theme and atmosphere are what computers do best anyway, board games handle abstraction better and novels/movies produce stronger authored narratives. I don't know, every strategy game I've ever grown cold on too quickly (Galactic Civilizations II, the newer Europa Universalis games, early Sins of a Solar Empire) were ones that felt directionless and contextless. I conquer Planet A from the Blue People using my fleet of Ships Mk. V, that gives me X more units of resource Y and a Z% increase to production? Give me a hook to hang my narrative on and I'll play it all day, but mechanics and setting can't create atmosphere on their own. I know it seems like a lot of work to build something intangible like that, especially for games set in space, but look how glowingly games like Alpha Centauri and Masters of Orion 2 are spoken of fifteen years down the line. Clearly, it's worth it, and I feel well within my rights to criticize games that merely pay lip service to it. Good show though, everyone said really smart things at some point or another. Also, does anyone else remember Emperor of the Fading Suns? That game felt like living Dune, even with the clueless AI.

So hey, I snatched up all the miscellaneous DLC since the Steam sale gave 75% off that too and found some time to play a game as the Kalbid dynasty of Palermo in Sicily. Holy hell, Orvidos, that quote you posted was right. Everything happens a thousand miles an hour and you have a million kids and one of them inherits but it doesn't matter who unless he doesn't have piety in which case you observe Ramadan and go on hajj and argh. On the one hand, the religious events for the Muslims are amazing and I would happily drop ten bucks to get the same experience for Christians, with pilgrimages to various holy sites, intrigue with the local bishop, and papal elections. On the other hand, playing as a Muslim just lays bare how important the finer points of the base game, like succession laws and inheritance, are to enjoyment. I'm not sure I'll play another Muslim after this one. I've played exactly three full-length games of Victoria II: first as the Empire of Brazil, then as Bavaria in a failed German unification, and finally as Sardinia-Piedmont in a successful Italian unification. I had enormous fun with all of them, but I hit a wall after the last one and have exactly no desire to go back to the game. For a beginner who enjoys being the historical oddball, I'd definitely recommend Brazil. It's an economic powerhouse with tons of desirable goods and the potential to be a major world power under a smart player, unless you played it during version 1.1 like me, where there was a game-breaking bug with the PoP AI that perceived it as more cost-effective to hire no one than to obey minimum wage laws and to starve on minimal welfare than get a job. A conservative's nightmare, really.

I like Fall of the Samurai as a game, but I think it's more shallow and less satisfying than the base game. Much more a power fantasy where you get to watch firearms slay samurai by the cartload. I've only replayed it twice and I'm not sure I'll ever come back, while with all the faction DLC the base Shogun 2 game seemed to have nigh infinite replayability. I've been trying to organize a game among my department where we play the five great dukes of the Holy Roman Empire (Swabia, Franconia, Bavaria, Saxony, Lotharingia). I'm not sure about pressing it so hard, because it seems like the sort of thing that could end friendships. Still, it's a dream to make it happen someday.

As I've heard from a few people who own Civ V but miss the depth of certain mechanics from Civ IV, the mod Civilization NiGHTS is apparently just what one would crave.

Eschatological ideation, in the form of the "end" of history, is a cool subject in general. Reading for my doctoral exams, it's particularly amazing how many authors writing in the twelfth century intended to include the apocalypse in their work, since it was sure to be forthcoming in their own lifetime. Otto of Freising, uncle of German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, refers to himself constantly as "one who writes at the end of time". There just must be something coded into the Western psyche that processes the prospect of a universal empire, whether the Holy Roman Empire or United States of America, as the end of human history, perhaps even the end of humanity itself. In the twelfth century, the actual upshot was the popularization and intensification of the crusade, which was largely responsible for the idea of "Europe" as its own civilization. I don't think we've seen the full scope of consequences in the twenty-first, myself.

But then again, Egypt stops being an independent culture and therefore a player in world history shortly after 1000 BC, so it's not a particularly good example there either. China is the closest to the ideal of an eternal and unchanging civilization, but only because its successive governments have been enormously invested in arguing for perfect continuity with the past. No, the entire idea of history-spanning nations is totally bankrupt from an intellectual standpoint, but it feels very authentic, so I guess we give it a pass? One of the scenarios that came with Beyond the Sword was a (somewhat clumsy) adaptation of the popular mod Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, which did exactly that. To start, you could choose one of the powers from early antiquity like the Babylonians or Egyptians, then as certain circumstances were fulfilled you could jump ship to new civilizations spawned by your actions, carrying your score with you. So you'd start as Assyria, conquer the shit out of the Middle East, reach critical mass, then either jump to newly-spawned Persians invading your empire or try to go against history by defending against them. The Greeks would be spawned by similar conquests out west and you'd again be given the choice of staying or switching. It was a fascinating idea kind of undermined by the fundamentals of psychology. It's tough to spend the first hundred turns building an ideal society, then be expected to turn tail and wreck it, but the alternative was being trapped in a decaying and increasingly marginalized society. Thematic, maybe even authentic, but as a gameplay concept I was never sold.

So uDraw is the Death Note? I can dig that.

On a related note, it's always been interesting how different versions of Civ have dealt with the existence of an endgame. I remember reading in an interview how Sid Meier agonized over how to discourage the use of nuclear weapons in a scenario where the world ends at Y2K, which makes it particularly curious that they've stuck by the hard deadline that makes such recklessness possible. Above all, it invariably leads to this weird situation where, all other metrics failing, the largest and most powerful nation left standing after six thousand years of history is the victor. So that's success, is it? I guess I'm proud to be an American then.

Oh, I'm not saying Civ V is better or worse than any other installment in the series, though it hasn't managed to capture my own heart. My point, lost in all the minutiae, was that certain design choices have made it harder to plot Civ V on the line graph of increasing sophistication that provided the narrative for the franchise's development thus far, which explains in turn the mixed reactions as much as any metric of "quality". In many ways, Civ V is more like a reboot, reimagining mechanics that have remained unchanged at their core since the beginning of the series, and reboots are always divisive, especially among fans. Anyway, we can let this drop and actually talk about the game itself. I haven't said, but I've been loving the stories.

Hmm, and now Paradox is announcing an AAR competition to drum up interest in the new Sword of Islam DLC. I have to say, it really rubs me the wrong way the few times Paradox has offered to put your name in a historical game as a prize in a contest. I know they're combing charters and prosopography databases for character names and still probably don't have enough, but at least leave me the illusion that this isn't all just make-believe...

I probably didn't articulate my point properly. I didn't mean to say that previous installments in the Civ series added nothing new. If anything, I meant to say that each new version added or expanded features, up to Civ IV. Civ V was the first game in the series where the overwhelming majority of design decisions involved revising established mechanics and how they interacted, rather than attempting to improve upon or nuance them. The only real exception I can think of is the pollution system, which saw heavy revision between Civ III and Civ IV, though you could even argue there that it didn't work as intended, whereas nothing was fundamentally broken in how culture and civics operated as mechanics in Civ IV, but they were the subject of massive changes anyway in Civ V. So yeah, the first installment that's really different kind. I think we agree, Procyon. I'm just bad at choosing my terminology.

Put more simply, maybe I should just say that Civ V overhauls so many time-honored mechanics because there was little else that could be done to improve on them. They'd been iterated on so thoroughly over the past two decades, they had become evolutionary dead ends, however refined. It may be necessary and even good that Civ V struck out on its own instead of being content with minor improvements, but in doing so it dispels the rhetoric of incremental improvement and progress that is the primary dialectic of the Civ franchise as a commercial product, which I think is the source of much frustration. And I think this will be my last post here, I've been talking way too much in a thread about a game I've only borrowed from a friend for a couple of weeks.

Yeah, but vast majority of the change between previous installments were all additive and iterative: tweaking how civics are used, refining how borders work, and so on. Civ IV to Civ V fundamentally alters how a lot of these basic mechanics have always worked: civics are now irrevocable decisions, culture is now spread by tile increments, tiles are now hexes that only support one unit, and so on. Valid or not, there's a distinct sense of discontinuity that is easy to be reactionary towards. It seems even longer to me, but I recall the backlash being over missing features that were popular in Alpha Centauri, already a two-year-old game at the time, as well as a general lack of stability. People weren't disagreeing over design decisions per se, and complaints disappeared once features and fixes were patched in. I don't think there's a patch that could resolve many of the disagreements I've seen over Civ V's design, though fixing the diplomatic and strategic AI has gone a long way anyway. I'm making some sense here, right guys? Granted, I've only been playing since Civ II, so my pedigree's not as perfect as some, but it does feel to me like Civ V is the first game in the series where the question is not "more" but "different".

I've heard the "gamers hate change" argument used to dismiss all sorts of complaints for every stripe of game. And yeah, it's a big problem, because the attitude does exist and it discourages innovation, since change can alienate fans without convincing skeptics that there's something new and interesting to be had. The thing is, it's almost perfectly counterbalanced by the "cult of the new" effect in the gaming culture. You talk about people who've dragged their feet on every new iteration of Civ, but I'm reminded of the glowing reviews Empire: Total War received from the same people who would describe it as a buggy misstep when Napoleon came out a year later. The games industry as a whole has a fierce positivist streak where change is new is better, which is especially incongruous considering that, compared to books or movies, games in a single series or franchise are seldom manifestly better or worse as media, once you factor out the technical aspects. Civ seemed like one of those few franchises where every iteration was received as a qualitative improvement by the majority of the community. Civ V broke that streak by being a different take on the same themes that its predecessor laid out, which explains to me its mixed reception as much as the drawbacks of one-unit-per-tile and the diplomatic AI.

Well, you're also playing Sword of the Stars II, one of the worst Paradox titles of the last decade in terms of playability and polish. Its predecessor definitely put the empire management on the back burner though. If you like the feelies involved in customizing each city/planet, you're going to want something more traditional in design, like Civ or Gal Civ.

Thanks for posting that LP, Orvidos. I've read a few good Crusader-Kings-to-Hearts-of-Iron-III campaigns, but this guy is a real pleasure to watch at work. Such a virtuousic player makes even the dry and sterile Europa Universalis look fun and fulfilling.

As far as I can tell, the GFWL integration is confined to occasional messages during singleplayer that you've been disconnected from their network. You can avoid even those if you make an offline account, which is totally viable since no one playing multiplayer is playing anything but Retribution, which ditched the GFWL components.

I wonder if it's not that gaming as a medium hasn't reached the point where "different" and "better" aren't expected or even required to be the same thing, at least within a single franchise. My own issue is just that I still really love Civ IV, and I don't know if I have room in my heart (and schedule) for a similar game made by the same company with slightly divergent design goals and themes. Even if I did, I think Alpha Centauri is probably higher on the waiting list. Also, seeing robc's post, I wonder if my story should have been how I once passed a world history test on the Spanish conquest of the Americas in junior high because two of the questions could be answered by naming an Aztec city off the top of my head. The Aztecs weren't such unforgivable assholes in Civ II, but I still remembered every city their antics forced me to raze...