🚀 go-pugleaf

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>... Oddly
>enough, the increased level - while pleasant to look at - made the
>game actually that much less immersive, since its increased realism
>only brought into contrast many of the inconsistencies of the game's
>world (like, if the war was over 200 years ago then why are there
>still-fresh corpses from the war all over?).

That bothered me about Fallout 3 too.  There was one place that had tents
outside a high school or something, so I went an investigate to see who
had put up the tents.  Based on documents I found it turned out it was
some sort of temporary military HQ setup just before the bombs dropped,
not sometime in last week or two as I assumed.  Somehow these tents had
managed survive virtually undamaged sitting out in the open for 200 years.


Dungeon of the Endless

The first game I played last month was Dungeon of the Endless.  It's a
cross between a tower defence game and a roguelike and set in the same
universe that Endless Space and Endless Legend are in.  The goal is to
protect your generator while exploring the level looking for the exit
to the next level. You start with two characters at the bottom of the
dungeon and can recruit up to two more.  Each time you open a door to
a new room it counts as "turn".  Each turn you produce resources which
you use can use install defences and modules that produce more resources
and other things.  Each turn also has an increasing chance of causing
monsters to spawn to attack your characters, modules and generators.
That's where the tower defence part comes in.  There are two difficulty
levels, "Very Easy" and "Easy".  As it turns out "Easy" is very hard.
That, plus the dungeon exploration, is where the roguelike part comes in.

I was never able to get very far on "Easy" but I was able to eventually
beat the game on "Very Easy".  Overall, it's not a bad game, and I think
the mashup of tower-defence and roguelike works, but havng beat the game
I don't feel that much interest in replaying it.  It's not like FTL
(the closest similar game I can think of) where replaying offers the
possibility of finding things you didn't find on previous attempts or
trying with a different spaceship.  There doesn't seem to be enough
potential difference for to making replaying Dungeon of the Endless
that much fun.  Choosing different characters to start isn't going to
make much difference except at the start, you're still going to want
characters that can fill the same roles.


Civilization V

The second game I played last month was Civilization V.  After playing
a couple of 4X games not-named-Civlization earlier this year (Endless
Legend and Warlock) and rolling over their weak AIs, I decided I should
challenge myself with a game with a decent AI.  Not that Civlization V is
all that great, but I did have to restart a few games because I was doing
badly, and seldom was my victory assured even when I got a good start.
I decided I try to get the three victory acheivements I hadn't gotten
yet, space victory with an order civ, and conquest victories with order
and authoritarian civs.  The last two victories were the hardest for me
(though I only squeaked in the space victory one turn before the game
ended) since I'm kind of player who likes to build up their own cities
rather than take other cities.  The game itself makes conquest victories
harder by imposing "warmonger" diplomatic penalties for capturing cities,
and having pretty big penalities for large empires.


X2: The Threat

Finally, the third game I played last month was X2: The Threat.
This a sequel to X: Beyond the Frontier and is a fairly standard space
combat/trading simulator, like Privateer or Freelancer, though with
less emphasis on combat than trading.  I've played the original X game,
and decide to skip its expansion X-Tension.  The graphics are noticably
improved in X2 and the game interface has had big improvement, though
remapping keys still is pretty much non-existant.

I haven't gotten very far in the game so far though.  That's mostly
because one big problem I discovered with the game.  While X used a simple
constant-width font in its simple interfaces, while X2 switched to a
variable-width font.  This would be a good thing, except the numbers in
the font they choose to use are also variable width.  In a game about
trading, displaying various columns of numbers all over the place,
this a cardinal sin.  Numbers should be all the same size so they line
up digit for digit when appearing columns.  Otherwise you get problems
like 1111111 looking like a smaller number than 444444 because despite
been one digit longer it's drawn shorter on screen.

So I spent a week or so figuring out how X2 stored and displayed its
fonts so I could create my own font generator program for it.  Mostly the
exercise served to remind me how bad game programmers are, but I managed
to figure out the quirks of the game's font system and am now playing
the game with much better looking text.  There are still issues, like
the text being displayed a a half-pixel off, smudging it a bit, but
fixing that would require patching the game and probably another week
of delving into the ugly innards of the game.

					Ross Ridge

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //