Rob Zacny

Episode 420: Classic Year in Review: 1993

Recommended Posts

Three Moves Ahead 420:

Three Moves Ahead 420


Classic Year in Review: 1993
Rob, Rowan, and Troy "my arcology's economy is based on poutine" Goodfellow fire up the Wayback machine once again to visit the pixely past of 1993. It is a monumental year for games as Doom is unleashed onto the public in a swath of blood and gore while Myst is released in a swath of ambient music and confusion. Have you heard of this new-fangled contraption, the CD-ROM? What a time to be alive. Strategy heavyweights Master of Orion and SimCity 2000 hit the scene, establishing groundwork that gamers will know for decades to come. Join us in the hazy past that doesn't feel like 25 years ago but it is and oh my God I'm old.

Doom, Myst, NHL '94, Gabriel Knight, Master of Orion, SimCity 2000, Warlords 2, Merchant Prince, Clash of Steel, Fields of Glory

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I played Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. Or At least, tried to. It was horrendously, horribly broken in its design and execution.  It was essentially impossible to win. For example, your first flight of a man into orbit might have a 10% chance of success if you didn’t launch an unammed mission first. Chance of success if you did? 11%. If you did have a failure the reliability of your vehicles plummeted dramatically rendering recovery from such failures basically impossible. The concept was good but as a game it was just odious. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

You weren't there when our boys cast ice storm on those frostlings and all perished, Rob. You weren't there.

 

Peculiar episode. 1993 was probably a good game but I don't see why you chose it to talk about strategy gaming. I suppose Master of Orion casts a long shadow (though as you've noted MoO2 has a bigger influence) and SimCity is a classic, but other than that you talked about some wargames and sport games. Rowan brought JRPGs into the discussion and that sounded interesting but there was no one to continue the discussion. I didn't get what all those wargames were and was especially confused about Fields of Glory. Because recently you've talked about Field of Glory 2 and that was a turn-based classical era wargame. And FieldS of Glory is real-time strategy about Napoleonic warfare. Huh.

 

I also felt you don't really want to talk about MoO specifically, probably because you talk about it indirectly all the time anyway, but also didn't say much about SimCity. I only played the very first one and don't know what's the SimCity 2000 deal, why is it important. In general the podcast felt very superflous when you talked about strategy, Doom and Myst discussion were the meat of the episode. Nothing wrong about that, just looked like you're forcing yourself to talk about other things as if you have to.

 

Also a little story about Alladin! I grew up in the 1990's in ruins of Soviet Union. Gaming was outdated and pirated to hell back then. You were lucky to get NES, and it wasn't official one, it was one of those things, unofficial clone of NES clone. All the cartridges were pirated of course, I don't think it was even possible to get a legal console game back then (only by the end of 90's you could get a legal officially translated version of contemporary game). So we got our pirate cartridges and as I later realized many of them were Chinese unofficial ports of games. Thus I played both Genesis and SNES Alladin on my NES. I think it had half of sprites the game was supposed to have, Genesis one had view size dramatically reduced. Both had lost half of the levels. SNES Alladin had ended half way in, just after a magic carpet level. Genesis lost some levels in the middle so you could sort of have a full story. Graphics looked even great for NES. But then there was unofficial bootleg one, ported from SNES. And it looked much better than official Genesis ported one so I never suspected that the game was unofficial one.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I am enjoying the show a lot. Good to hear guys who know their stuff and appreciate gaming history talking about those early days.

I was late to the party so I only know the games discussed by reputation; but I'm fascinated by the historical development of the industry.

Thanks guys

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Thank you for this show !

 

1993 is indeed an amazing year, although it wasn't as impressive as 1997 for strategy games.

 

Warlords II would probably be my favorite strategy entry of the year, even I only play the Deluxe version (1995) nowadays. It's a great Empire-like game, very easy to get into : it works very well on an android tablet with Magic Dosbox.  The core mechanics are quite similar to the first game, but it adds a lot of replayability, with five maps instead of one and the option to use random maps. The scenario editor that was sold separately was very easy to use and added a few more maps and unit sets.  

 

Empire Deluxe is a great version of the founding father of the 4X genre : the end game can get very tedious though.

 

Master of Orion I is still my favorite 4X space game : it's simple to grasp, not too heavy on micromanagement, while retaining quite a lot of strategic depth.

 

I only discovered Clash of Steel very recently and I find it an excellent streamlined WW2 strategy game. It must have been a big inspiration to the creators of the Strategic Command series.

 

EA published three excellent tactical games. The podcast mentioned  Syndicate, but there was also Space Hulk, a tactical game with a "dungeon master-like" first person view where you play a squad of Space Marines fighting against Genestealers,  and my  personal favorite :  Seal Team, basically a proto "Operation Flashpoint" set in Vietnam.

 

I played quite a bit of Ambush at Sorinor five years ago and had a great time with it. I actually prefer it to Siege, because it has more tactical variety, some fun units (the infamous war chicken!) and you have to manage your funds wisely to hire and replace mercenaries.The AI is unfortunately very poor.

 

Stronghold is a pretty unique real-time kingdom simulator with some RPG elements. Like Majesty or Populous, you don't have direct control of your units. It has been released on GOG.com.

 

SimCIty2000 is a classic and my favorite city-builder (sorry City Skylines !), but Maxis also published the excellent SimFarm  : I never thought a farming simulator could be so much fun !

 

Shadow President is a very fun political simulator/grand strategy game where you play as the president of the United States.

 

The first Settlers was also released : still my favorite of the series.

 

Concerning management/trading games, I enjoyed Merchand Prince but I also liked On the Ball and Premier Manager 3, two soccer management games with a heavy focus on the business aspect of the sport (building your stadium, setting the prices of the seats, finding sponsors, etc.).

 

1993 was a huge year for point-and-click adventure games : Gabriel Knight, Day of the Tentacle, Return to Zork, Sam & Max : Hit the Road, Simon the Sorcerer, Companions of Xanth, Legend of Kyrandie : Hand of Fate... And Legend Entertainment released two great interactive fiction games : Eric the Unready and Gateway 2. It was also the rise of the CD-ROM adventure games, with 7th Guest and Myst.

 

The RPG lineup was very strong : Betrayal at Krondor is a masterpiece, Dark Sun is a diamond in the rough, Lands of Lore is a beautiful and streamlined Dungeon Master like,  Ultima VII : Serpent Isle is one of the best entries of the series, Might and Magic V is a fine conclusion to the classic era of the series, Shining Force II and Ogre Battle are fine tactical RPGs... Breath of Fire, Secret of Mana and Phantasy Star IV are also beloved by many (not by me though).

 

The action lineup has of course Doom, a lesson of level design, but also two very good puzzle/platformers, The Lost Vikings and Fury of the Furies, two impressive (if not actually very good) rail shooters, Starfox and Rebel Assault, two excellent old-school amiga shooters, Uridium 2 or Disposable Hero, the manic Gunstar Heroes , and  my favorite action game of the year after Doom, The Chaos Engine, a frantic gauntlet-like game by the famous Bitmap Brothers.

 

There were some brilliant flight sims and space sims as well : X-WING and Privateer have been mentioned, but there was also  Ace over Europe, Elite II,  Strike Commander, Subwar 2050, Tornado or TFX. For me, Strike Commander is probably the strongest of the Commanders along with Wing Commander Prophecy and Privateer, while Tornado is a very detailed flight sim with a amazing mission planner.

 

Understandably, the podcast focused on american sport games, but a few interesting soccer games were released, like FIFA soccer, with great graphics but mediocre gameplay ; European Champions, a neat arcade soccer game with unusual control scheme ; Goal, a game that rewards technical skills and by far Dino Dini's best effort in my opinion.

 

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So thinking about why some genre standard bearers suck all the air out of genre while others don't.

I think a large part of it comes down to while Masters of Orion II is a great game but it's not a perfect one. There are clearly places where you would want to add to the design. SimCity2000 on the other hand has almost no minor tweaks screaming out to be done. If you want to make another city builder, you have to radically change your assumptions from those chosen by Will Wright. So you can get the Impressions walker city builders and the Anno series which don't work anything like SimCity.

 

People seem to like the skeleton of the MoO design but the perfect version hasn't been done yet. It's an unsatisfied market so any space 4X will always get pulled towards that black hole of demand. Where as people who want SimCity can just play it (or Cities Skylines ^_^) but the demand for that exact design is filled.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I never really thought of how important Doom was for the FPS genre. My 90's gaming history is a little spotty, sadly - was born in '88 but I only really remember the naughties onwards (I have played 90's of course, but not sure when exactly).

 

I've always held Halo as one of the most defining Video game releases. Not more so than Doom, but I think Halo gave rise to more tactical/narrative shooters. I always associate Doom with Quake type FPS.

 

In terms of the rest, I played X-Wing, although like you guys said TIE Fighter was so much better. I played Rebel Assault a lot. I found it bizarrely hard and I don't know if I ever finished it. I completed Rebel Assault II. You got to make out with the main woman from the first game. My younger self found it neat.

 

SimCity2000 wad probably the only other '93 game I played a lot (or at all). Didn't realise until this episode it wasn't released in 2000. Whenever I got bored I'd load up one of those late game saves the game was pre-loaded with and summon the Alien ship to come blow everything up.

 

Excellent show guys, really enjoyable!

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Quote

Not more so than Doom, but I think Halo gave rise to more tactical/narrative shooters

As far as I know, Half-life (1998) is the game usually credited for the giving birth to the tactical/narrative shooter, but you had these kind of games as early as 1994 :  Bungie's own Marathon or Origin's System Schock introduced elaborate plots, more tactical and more open ended gameplay compared to Doom, while the little-known Cyclones already had stealth elements.

What makes you think Halo is one of the most defining video game ever released ? I must admit I wasn't impressed by it at the time, but I would be happy to give it a second try someday and to revise my jugement.  

 

Quote

So thinking about why some genre standard bearers suck all the air out of genre while others don't.

I think a large part of it comes down to while Masters of Orion II is a great game but it's not a perfect one. There are clearly places where you would want to add to the design.

I don't know if MOOII really sucked all the air out of the genre. Space 4X is an old genre that already had most of its basic elements defined in 1983 with  Reach for the Stars (ROS). A lot of the space 4X games that came out in the nineties, MOO included, were variations of the the ROS formula. And after MOOII came out, you still had games with a different approach to the genre , like Stars Wars  : Rebellion (1998), Emperor of the Fading Suns (1997), Fragile Allegiance (1997), or more recently Distant Worlds or  Sins of a Solar Empire.

 

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Quote

SimCity2000 on the other hand has almost no minor tweaks screaming out to be done. If you want to make another city builder, you have to radically change your assumptions from those chosen by Will Wright. So you can get the Impressions walker city builders and the Anno series which don't work anything like SimCity.

 

Quite a few SimCity-likes didn't radically change the core gameplay. For example,  the two first Caesar games (1992 and 1995) used the same building radius mechanics as SimCity and played a lot like it. The walker mechanics was introduced later, with Caesar III (1998). This doesn't mean that the first Caesar games were mere clones : they were mission-based and added warfare and a (very thin) province management  layer. Another example : Afterlife (1996) from Lucasarts played a lot like Simcity 200, although it had a unusual theme and some added complexity.

 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Finally listening to this episode, and god damn I did fall down the Privateer rabbit hole. So very much. Worked so hard to become a millionaire and killed ANYONE who got in my way with my Steltek gun.

 

Then Righteous Fire took that gun away, and I couldn't go on. I'm still angry.

 

Sadly I went back to Privateer recently and it.......it's real tough to go back to.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
On 2/5/2018 at 10:55 AM, Arasmo said:

Warlords II would probably be my favorite strategy entry of the year, even I only play the Deluxe version (1995) nowadays. It's a great Empire-like game, very easy to get into : it works very well on an android tablet with Magic Dosbox.  The core mechanics are quite similar to the first game, but it adds a lot of replayability, with five maps instead of one and the option to use random maps. The scenario editor that was sold separately was very easy to use and added a few more maps and unit sets.

 

I played the heck out of that series. I really liked being able to make your own units in II (I have memories of making units of Star Wars ships in the pixel editor thing - look, it made sense at the time alright?)

 

Warlords III: Reign of Heroes and Darklords Rising were the pinnacle of it though. The last before it moved to the Battlecry series. I keep hoping for a GOG release for it...

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Really loved this one, took me down memory lane, I wished you had talked more about the games that eventually became Lords of the Realm II. Although I am sure you saving most of that for the 96 podcast. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
On 2/3/2018 at 5:12 PM, CaptainKoloth said:

I played Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. Or At least, tried to. It was horrendously, horribly broken in its design and execution.  It was essentially impossible to win. For example, your first flight of a man into orbit might have a 10% chance of success if you didn’t launch an unammed mission first. Chance of success if you did? 11%. If you did have a failure the reliability of your vehicles plummeted dramatically rendering recovery from such failures basically impossible. The concept was good but as a game it was just odious. 

 

This was not my experience :-D

I loved BARIS! Loved it to death. It was a game with a Big Idea, which was that manned spaceflight is much more dangerous than you think, and (IMO) it did a great job of communicating that while still remaining fun and playable.

 

The whole game was built around a relatively simple structure. There was a series of missions that you had to successfully accomplish in order to get to the moon, starting with launching an unmanned satellite and working up all the way to a full manned moon landing. You had to choose space hardware to get you through each step, and develop an astronaut corps with the skill to operate that hardware. And each time a space vehicle completed a mission successfully its reliability would increase, making future missions with that hardware a little safer.

 

That was important, because each mission had multiple stages -- launch! orbit! extravehicular activity! docking! lunar insertion! lunar orbit! lunar landing! lunar EVA! lunar extraction! re-entry! -- and each stage involved a die roll against the safety factor of the hardware you were using. So you could have a vehicle with an 80% safety factor and think "wow, that seems pretty solid," only to realize that there were going to be a dozen d100 rolls against that safety factor in a single mission, and suddenly 80% doesn't sound so reliable anymore. And if a mission failed -- and it only took one failed roll to fail the entire mission -- the safety factor of that hardware would fall through the floor. So the challenge was to use each set of hardware just enough to build up its safety factor to a point where it can make it through all the dice rolls you need it to make it through, without doing one mission more than you needed to, since each mission was basically a crapshoot. The result was that every mission was a nail-biter, as you prayed that you hadn't pushed ahead too far too fast.

 

There were also big-picture, budgetary decisions to make. You have a budget, given to you by the political Powers That Be, and that budget tracks the ongoing success of your program. So if you're doing well you'll have plenty of money, so much money that you can consider things like doing for a direct-ascent moon landing using the gargantuan Nova rocket. And if you're not doing well, you find yourself willing to take on more and more risk to try and turn things around. Maybe it's worth trying to go all the way to the moon in a two-man Gemini capsule, which you've already developed and teched up to a respectable safety rating, rather than starting from scratch with the three-man Apollo. Or maybe it's worth abandoning disposable capsules altogether and going with a reusable mini-shuttle, which will have a higher up-front cost but save you money with each consecutive mission. There are a lot of these kind of big strategic choices to make, and they're all crunchy and satisfying.

 

If this all sounds interesting, I'd encourage you to try out the game yourself. The rights to it reverted to the developers in the mid-2000s, and they generously open sourced the whole thing, so a version that will run on modern Windows machines without a hitch is just a click or two away. (And the source code is on Github, if you want to root around in its guts.) It's not a perfect game -- a few missteps early on can crush your budget, for instance, making it more practical to just give up and restart than to try and soldier on -- but it rewards patience and teaches some important lessons about just how many risks both the US and USSR ran in their pursuit of lunar glory.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I recently went back to listen to all of the Space 4X episodes I could find. I was trying to understand what the community thinking was on Endless Space 2 vs Stellaris vs Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars (2016). In all the dicussions, Master of Orion (1993) and Master of Orion 2 of course come up a lot. And came up again here. From my memory of the two, and this is touched on a bit in this episode, many of the "problems" that have carried forward from MoO and MoO2 are really from the second installment and didn't exist in the first. A few of the points of criticism:

  • Tech tree becomes too predictable: In the original MoO the techs available in each game for each player are somewhat randomized. And, when each research is completed you have to choose from a list of possible targets. Even the Psilons, so overpowered in MoO2, can't have every tech because they will fall behind if they try to research everything. Their advantage allows them to choose from more possible techs. This structure mixes games up a bit. "The one where no one had shields" is one I remember clearly. It worked better with smaller games tho, since more players meant more chances that any given tech would be in the game.
  • Star lanes make for boring terrain: In MoO higher tech levels eventually (in some games, because of the tech shuffle described above) led to unlimited range, so that movement wasn't constrained by Star lanes. This meant you could attack deep in to enemy territory. Hyperspace communications allowed you to recall fleets in transit. I thought this turned the structure of the engagment more towards naval tactics than trench or holding territory. I am not an expert on real-world tactics though. The one thing I remember still missing was the ability to intercept a fleet in transit. That isn't something in many space games at all, but is important in naval strategy (I think?).
  • Too many ships in tactical battles: MoO amassed all ships of a class in to one "chit" that was moved around the tactical field. It isn't "realistic" but it was a lot of fun!

I played many, many hours of MoO and was very much looking forward to MoO2. But because of the points now widely agreed to be problems, I never got that far in to MoO2.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I disagree that Moo1 is simply "civilization in space", the game's systems are so far removed from civ's that they don't really have a lot in common. 

 

Its sequel on the other hand, Moo2, certainly was a step from Moo1 into a direction more like civilization particularly in the way tech is researched and planets are managed.  I loved Moo1 and only played Moo2 much later, but like some of the comments above, I really bounced off it.  Planetary management, gaming pacing and fleet battles were all major steps down for me.  I remain baffled as to why of the two games, Moo2 is the more popular and the more influential.  I can only assume it is because the game and its successors are more civ-like in their execution. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now