Chris

I've always assumed it's just that a bunch of video game developer nerds don't think straight historical fiction is rad enough.

I think that's definitely how it is used sometimes. However, the tone in which it is said, especially on internet forums, does tend to itself be extremely dismissive and not conducive to legitimate discussion, as Argobot says.

Yes, I will be at PAX East with DF.

This is the same game as Drop7, which I've mentioned a couple times on the cast. It's the only game I have on my phone.

Are you thinking of last week's episode...?

It looks like the reason is that there's so little total material that they weren't considered to be worthwhile standalone releases. I'm raising the idea of doing a combined soundtrack.

I'm not sure why these aren't available--I can ask around, but there might be reasons they haven't been sold separately.

I think part of the point is that the player isn't supposed to have to get bogged down in managing the simulation at the level of ensuring that individual cars can't get stuck. It's just not really what SimCity is about. That's more the simulational scale that The Sims is concerned with.

Yeah, this makes complete sense.

I have an Antec Sonata II and I think it's appropriately restrained and tasteful. The specific model doesn't seem to be on sale anymore, but the current ones still look fine: http://store.antec.com/Category/enclosure-sonata_family.aspx

Welcome, folks!

I loved Mantel's usage of pronouns--I didn't consider it a flaw or weakness. It forced really close reading and lent an aura of soft omniscience to Cromwell that I thought worked well.

Yeah I mean that's a fair interpretation but it doesn't make it any more visually interesting to me.

No worries!

Oh right, of course. I totally forgot about that. Can people commute from one city to the other? That seems like what would make your scenario feasible in the most accurate way, but the way this game models simulation in a 1:1 way would make that really difficult I imagine.

Yeah I think this is the case.

I'm not sure. Other resources are definitely distinct--that's the whole point of trade--which would lead me to believe money is separate too. After all, your income is indirectly a result of how all those other resources are managed. But I don't know for sure. If they are discrete balances, I imagine there would still be nothing keeping you from funneling money from one to the other as part of your general trade policies.

City builders have such a broad remit as games, I think it would be totally possible. It would just have to be the focus of the game. Most city builders focus on other specific things, like intentional expressive city planning, or careful economic management, or constructing a well-defended citadel, or whatever, presumably because the developer in question finds one of those things particularly interesting. I think the seeds of the systems you need are already present in most city builders--both SimCity and Anno, for example, have a concept of existing structures becoming more developed over time--housing becomes denser, or more affluent, or whatever. I think you'd want to expand on those systems and maybe allow them to go in horizontal rather than just vertical directions.

I'm familiar with how city growth has changed over time; I meant supporting evidence of the claim you made, that the games themselves reflect it. To me, at least comparing SimCity and Anno, it's the complete opposite--there's not even any concept of curved roads in Anno. In the new SimCity, the game deals with crazy curvy roads and nonsense planning really gracefully. In Anno, you are very tightly restricted in the spacial relationships between different kinds of buildings, because everything is based on proximity--citizens need to be within the radius of the entertainment-providing building to get its benefit, for example. So everything ends up super dense and grid-based. It would be a lot harder to convincingly replicate the kind of unplanned organic growth of older European cities in Anno, although obviously one of the non-futuristic Anno games will feature centuries-old architectural styles that will make it look more authentically Old European regardless. (But that's pure theme, not systems.) The reality is that neither game really captures the way cities are built either then or now--they're both heavy abstractions, although they choose how to arrive at their abstractions differently.

Could you provide some supporting evidence on that? That doesn't line up with the games I've played.

You're totally right about the difference between American and European board game design, although I don't think it's totally analogous to the difference I described in city builders. Theme-heavy American board games tend to be really low on simulation, whereas I feel that's just the opposite of SimCity. And sort of ironically, I think European sims tend to be a lot heavier on theme--city builders like Anno but also grand strategy games of the Paradox variety--whereas American ones like SimCity or Civilization tend to scale back on theme and emphasize player-driven simulation. So the different cultures seem to express themselves somewhat differently in board game design than in video game simulation design. Of course, there are some common factors for sure--European board and video games are both much more economically focused than their American counterparts. But we're probably so far down the evolutionary branches in each case that we've diverged a fair amount from whatever original unifying seed each cultural block might have started with.

Mitchell has spoken about how challenging it was to write even a single sentence, because the simplest action taken by a character would require extensive research to confirm its authenticity to the period---and all of that research in turn introduced its own challenge of ensuring those sentences weren't overwhelmed by the fruit of that research.

It's even sort of surprising to me. They've apparently hired a ton of people since I left. 2K Marin and 2K Australia are both working on it as well.

What the fuck!!

Just by running around in circles with the regular movement stick.