Resource Management

He's done it again, Paolo Pedercini has made a fun, polished, punk-positive satire, but this time instead of focusing on a particular industry or scandal, he's taking a broad-view of a world economy driven and chained by oil. In Oiligarchy you play the CEO of an international oil company, drilling your way to riches and dominance. I've been looking forward to this game since Paolo mentioned it to me at Games for Change in June, he told me "the better you are at the game, the worse you'll do."

A four-player boardgame of resource management, Space Junkyard is set in, well, a space junkyard; the game is a free PDF, though you'll have to print out the components (I suggest printing onto blank, full-sheet labels, mounting on cardstock, and cutting apart).

The game is played on a 6 by 6 array of tiles, with each tile representing either an asteroid or an abandoned ship part. Each player controls one ship, which begins only with a "bridge"; the bridge can store three of each resource type, and produce one "radioactives" resource each turn. Each ship part is worth some number of victory points (from zero to four), so the ultimate winner is the player who is most successful at collecting ship parts and connecting them to his bridge.

Subscription based MMOs... it's a genre that reminds me of my retarded cousin Jamie, or Falstaff; forlorn, comically maligned, blunt in its triumphs and sloppy in its failures. After WoW hit a milestone and started making headway in China, a flood of venture capital went to start-up studios making WoW-esque subscription based MMOs - this is actually a pretty standard pattern for venture investment, but what's significant is that all of these investments demand 3 to 4 years of lead-time and tens of millions of dollars to get to a revenue event. Meanwhile the market trended toward free-to-play, gameplay patterns started warping out of the level-n-grind mode, and global consumer confidence hit the peak of a 25-year boom. A comedy of errors if there ever was one.

MMORPG Tycoon is an interesting experiment in meta-game design, created in just over a month for TIGS' procedural gameplay contest. On hearing this concept, you're probably thinking a lot more grandiously than what's actually delivered, but that's ok. You'll find yourself boxed into the RPG model, adjusting monster and class numbers, setting up zone distributions for a smooth leveling curve - you won't be doing any bold economic or social experiments with your virtual MMO (so meta). What you will be doing is getting an interesting insight into the 'script MMO business, and if you have any experience working in an MMO studio or have friends who have, then you'll get a good chuckle as well.

The game involves setting zones with level ranges, trying to keep them distributed so your servers don't overload ("due to the coding practices of ShadiSoft"), making sure there are enough towns and respawn points, and trying to keep monster and class stats on keel. Your primary metric for success is your forum buzz, you want more positive posts than negative, and the main factor for this is how hard or easy the game is. Here's where the punchline starts getting set-up: no matter how well you do a portion of players will complain the game is too easy, and a portion will complain the game is too hard. However, as long as you've got some content in, and you've got a half-competent balance, people will play, get addicted, and you'll grow, even though your churn rate might only be slightly lower than your growth rate. And you'll make money. You only have to get the basics down and then just let the game run. The implication is that you don't need a good game, you just need an addictive game. It smacks you in the face with a procedural resonance, the derivative names of the rival MMOs are just icing on the cake.

In addition to being a clever commentary and fairly interesting experiment in procedural content, the game also features a really slick vector-graphics engine. I don't know if Trevor Powell has experience working in MMOs, polishing derivative content just enough to let the McDonald's-esque cognitive process do its work, but I sure hope he keeps doing innovative stuff with procedurally arrayed vector patterns. I'd also like to officially christen a new genre of games that lampoon shady design and business patterns in the game industry, with Petri Puhlo's game being the original. Or is there some obscure game from the 80s that I don't know about?

If Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is the heroin of gameplay, the SMAC(k) if you will, then tower defense is the crystal meth. How appropriate then that some of the best games in the genre involve crystalline gems whose interrelated properties weave together in pyramidal symmetry just like the molecular structure of a jewel.

Gem TD has been out for a while; Gemcraft is just released. They both gripped me with euphoric insomnia, coupled with vitamin C depletion, grinding of teeth, and paranoid hallucinations of creeps, endlessly marching. Like all tower defense games, they evoke a superb linearity of thought, a simplified psychology of marching enemies, marching resources, marching upgrades, ever forward, ever higher. I can't belabor this meth analogy enough.

Let's face it, money is as imaginary as time. The only difference between the cash in your pocket and the Monopoly bills buried in a cardboard box at the family lake house is this: your government mandates that the cash is accepted for all debts, public and private. In other words, it has value because they say so.

Rod Humble recently commented in an interview that someone should take another look at Cultivation and it's a good thing I did. Replaying this game has proven to me something I should have seen a long time ago: Jason Roher is a commie.

Who else would be inspired by a community debate involving Wal-Mart to make a game that features Kermit-The-Frog-eyed gardeners sharing resources? I don't know about you, but sharing resources isn't what I was raised to do, no free rides. And why else would he make the games characters all bi-sexual hermaphrodites? What's he trying to do to America's youth? Apparently, gardening is really important to godless hippies that couldn't appreciate the special sauce on a Big Mac if a cow came up and licked them. This game is trying to tell you that we should all just tend the earth, develop permacultures, and "share fruits" with whatever transgendered wingbat comes along. Not in my country. I like my food grown the way god intended, by pouring oil all over a field of genetically modified seeds. And I only share fruits with the ladies, sir.

If you were in one of a handful of places in 1995 in the United States, you knew that a revolution was starting. It's been going on quietly ever since, even though most people are still blissfully ignorant of it. This game, Settlers of Catan, was the opening shot.

There is a reasonable probability that a hard take-off event will occur in the relatively near future. A prototype AGI, sitting on a university server, achieves a form of sapience and begins self-directed action. Less than two years later, it reverse-engineers the quantum super-structure of the universe and achieves apotheosis. Everything we know to be true is proven a mere 1 or 0, adjustable at the operant's condition.

The location: 14th century France. The objective: to develop the most valuable district of Paris. The story: irrelevant. This is a German game, after all, so it's all about the gameplay.

This is primarily a game of resource management. You have three resources: gold, cubes and rats. Cubes let you take your normal actions each turn, as long as you don't run out of them. Gold lets you take a special action at the end of each turn, as long as you don't run out of it. Rats accumulate each turn and do nothing, as long as you don't have too many... but if you collect more than 9 of them, really bad things start happening to you. Most game actions involve gaining more Gold, gaining more Cubes or reducing your Rat population. And if you concentrate entirely on managing your resources, you should have no problem keeping them all under control.

Naturally, the object of the game is to score Victory Points, and most actions that get you VP don't do jack squat for your Cubes, Gold or Rats. It's a constant balancing act of how far you can push your resources without everything breaking.

Player interaction comes in the form of a CCG-sealed-booster-like "draft" at the start of each round. You draw three cards (representing three of the nine possible actions in the game), keep one, and pass two to the left. You then receive your right-hand opponent's two passed cards, keep one, pass one to the left, and receive the discard from your right. Each turn you choose two of the three actions to take. So, you never know exactly what actions will be available, and much of the strategy comes from balancing your need to keep actions that are useful to you with your desire to not pass actions that the players to your left desperately need.

There are several more nuances to the game, but all in all it's a game where you have lots of good options at every decision point but you can't do everything, so every time you gain something you know you're also giving up something else. The level of complexity is similar to Puerto Rico, so if you like that game you'll probably enjoy Notre Dame as well.

This game does have one advantage over other games in its class. Most games of this complexity, due to their strategic depth, take about 90 minutes to play. Notre Dame takes half that, allowing it to fit in shorter play sessions.

This is mildly entertaining -- it's a promotional Flash game from a Swedish company called Thule that's selling somethingorother I can't quite figure out from either the game or the website, but then, I don't really care, either. It's a mildly satirical remake of Oregon Trail, and its main appeal is that a sort of retro nostalgia: It looks like an early 80s game, with CGA-style graphics, sparse MIDI sound, and all controls via the keyboard. Instead of pioneering the wilderness, you're taking a road trip from Chicago to the West Coast, and your resources are mainly fast food from the mini-mart, and gas.