War

The most telling aspect of carry is its subtitle. Most RPGs, as proud descendants of wargames, are games of war. carry is a game about war. The Vietnam war to be exact, but also war in general. The game doesn't focus on the combat; the focus is on how the combat affects the people in the war.

The day after 9-11 I mowed the lawn on the rider, burning gas to halve flora on non-food producing land, then I played a videogame using brown electricity. Had I been playing Stallions In America or I Was In The War then the circle of life would have been complete - unfortunately we didn't have the technology back then.

Cactus' game is an action shooter, using the ASWD and the mouse to run and gun. You play four superstuds with soy-processed American Cheese(tm) names like Cody and Mitch, and you go through every US State slaughtering everyone, birds, bees, pigeons, peacocks, men, women and children. The moral of the story is, I guess, that they hate us because we're free.

Supreme Ruler, like Making History or Europa Universalis, is an extraordinarily detailed and complex grand strategic game covering the entire globe, with economic, military, and diplomatic aspects. As long-time readers may know, I'm a sucker for this kind of game.

Unlike the others, Supreme Ruler is set in the modern world -- sort of. It's set in a hypothetical near future, which is canny of BattleGoat but also somewhat disappointing; canny, because if you try to simulate the real world, you're always going to get flack on minute levels of detail (e.g., "I am from the country of Mystflx, but why don't you show the iron mines at Qwertyuiop?"), so it's easier to create a game that is representative, but not an explicit simulation. Disappointing, because playing around with a good version of the real world would be interesting.