Click Nothing

Critical Condition

So for those who don't know, I've been on vacation. In fact, I have just gotten home from being on vacation from my vacation. Even better, that nested vacation followed hard upon a vacation nested in my honeymoon nested in my vacation. So it has been a long time chilling out for me.

Prior to that - which I assume you do know - I was shipping my game (hence the necessity for multiple nested vacations) and prior to that, I was merely working on my game. At some point during the 'working on my game' era, I more or less faded out of the blogging community.

Boy have things changed in the last eighteen months.

The prequel to this post came about after I found Tom Francis' cool blog and chatted a bit over there as he was finishing out FC2 and all his regulars were (politely) damning me for my misestimation of the frequency with which one would encounter armed guard posts in a failed Africa state.

Anyway - two years or so ago, I was lamenting the relative lack of game criticism (as opposed to reviews), and apparently at some stage during the long quiet that emanated from Click Nothing, my lament was answered. Not only do we have Tom Francis, but my sporadic last days and weeks of looking around at the game blogging community have kicked up a good number of really awesome blogs.

A surprising number of these bloggers are wicked smart and have been buzzing around like busy little bees making me look like some sort of Salinger-esque recluse at best, or washed-up slacker at worst. I'm hgappy to say that (despite what you will find on the forums - which are exploding with haterz) a good number of them seem pleased with - or at least very intrigued by Far Cry 2... many having written actual criticism of the game.

Tom Chick, Ben Abraham, Chris Remo, Stephen Totilo and Mitch Krpata (among others) have given the game some high praise - in some cases listing it as or among their games of the year, with Ben citing the immersive qualities of the game as critical to his enjoyment, while roBurky challenges the game's application of immersion. Meanwhile - on the 'less related to me, but more important from a critical thought perspective' front, Steve's thoughts on Immersion are more engaging and more general, riffing off of Jon Blow's fantastic keynote at the MIGS 08 conference and picking up where my own thoughts on Immersion - as examined by The Brainy Gamer - were left weakly dangling. Thanks for picking up the slack guys. Hmm... that sounds condescending. How about 'thanks for bringing the rope, the sand pit, and two tug-of-war teams to a limp little noodle of nothing-but-slack I might have dropped in the playground somewhere'.

And speaking of slack... Iroquois Pliskin gives me none for my obtuse phrasing of 'ludonarrative dissonance'. He's right. But judging by the number of hits that crazy post still draws, the term itself seemed to somehow become a rallying cry - popping up wherever smart people were talking about game criticism, or the lack thereof (again, nothing to do with me - on August 18th game-story duality was the furthest thing from my mind... I was on a plane to Leipzig I think).

I said in my lament just over two years ago:

"We are this close to having an explosion in the field of game critical analysis. When Bogost doesn't have to spend half his time lamenting, and I don't have to spend five times as many words reiterating - when there does exist a small but noticable and steady stream of this kind of media analysis, all these wasted words will disappear and be replaced with more criticism and analysis. Bogost and myself and dozens of others will shift from complaining about not having the analysis to actually providing it. It's a tipping point. Once we reach it the slow linear growth of this kind of material that we see now will shift into a period of exponential growth, and we'll have arrived."

So I think we have arrived... even as Gamasutra lists 'not arriving' as their #2 biggest disappointment of the year. Maybe that's my contribution to this year in the game blogging world that I feel like I missed. Maybe - for what it's worth - stumbling back out into the wild with last year's map still in my hands is the perspective that I get to bring back in exchange for the perspective that you've all provided.

Let me say it again - things changed a lot in the last eighteen months. And it's great.

(Oh, and that part about being willing to pay a thousand dollars to overhear critical discussion of my game because I'd make it back tenfold... well, on double-checking my math, I take that back...)

In Sid We Trust

"You say you want a Revolution. Well, you know, we all wanna change the world."

Change the world? As far as I'm concerned, for the first time since Alpha Centauri, Civilization:Revolution [2] has allowed me to do it. More than that, it has, itself, changed the world.

I never played Civ or Civ 2. The first time I had a PC that could really do the job SM:AC was the flavor of the day and I got my first taste of Meierian awesomeness as the Spartans. Locked into an abusive relationship with the Hive, I was unable to do anything except what they demanded for over a thousand years. Until I got the bomb and began stockpiling. I was eventually forced to win that game by carpet-nuking the entire planet, wreacking untold devastation on every enemy city - and even some of my own - spartan concrete and iron cities shattered under the overpressures of proximal planet buster detonations. If the only honorable death is in service of Sparta... I unleashed a lot of fucking honor that day. Only a handful of domed Spartan cities remained - awash in a radioactive sea.

Civ 3... I must have played it ten times and never finished a game. Somewhere around the Renaissance - either at the tail end of the Middle Ages or the dawn of the Industrial Era at best, I would become swamped. With hundreds of units in play and often well over fifty cities, I would not be able to maintain any forward momentum. The sheer weight of Civ 3's background systems would drag the pace of the game down to a standstill. Maintenance, Inefficiency, Unit Support and proper basing, Pollution... all of these factors would fall like a hammer on my growth and mire the game down into turns that would sometimes take me over an hour to execute. My PC would then need to churn away on the turns of the other factions - sometimes for 30 or 40 minutes or more.

I never even considered playing another Civ game after that... until they announced it was coming to console. It was then that I realized there was no way they could even release a game whose turns would take two hours to complete. They would be forced to deliver a game that could be played from beginning to end in that time. The only question was whether or not the game would be fun with all the complexity stripped out? How much simpler and lighter could you make Civ without it becoming too easily solvable or too degenerate.

I've now bought the game twice. Once on DS and once on X360, and I have played the game upwards of 20 times. In almost every case I have finished the game (after having played it 5 to 8 times, I would tend to abandon a fresh game if starting terrain seemed particularly lop-sided either for or against).

So what's so great about Civilization: Revolution?

You will finish every game you start
And you will do it in between 2-6 hours, depending on how you play, which path to victory you choose, and how singular your commitment to your strategy. Playing on DS will be faster as you can skip the animated depiction of combat... cutting quite a lot of dead time from the game.

It is 'Civ:Lite'... but in a good way
A lot of the heavy underlying systems of previous Civ titles have just been removed. Not consolidated. Not automated. They are just gone. Unit Support? Talk about hidden numbers that have very far reaching effects... this concept is gone entirely. Efficiency? Again - a hidden 'tax' on what a city could produce that diminished the further the city stood from the capitol - it's gone... simply removed from the game. Does this unbalance the game? Now you can support 10,000 units if you want. Now growth is unchecked by efficiency. Isn't that a problem? Well, we could talk about it for hours, these sorts of questions are rooted in fundamental questions about game themselves. In the end, I am pretty certain that the answer we will arrive at is 'no' ... boy I could write 100 pages on that...

It's the same game on X360 and DS (and presumably other platforms)
This is what is world changing for me. In a game development climate where we seem to be trying to release a version of a game on every imaginable platform and we seem to have to do a lot of work and make a lot of compromises and a lot of changes for each platform (often staffing an entirely new team to deliver the game on each platform), Civ:Rev proves that you can release the exact same game on a handheld as you can on a Next-Gen 'living-room' console. Why - oh why - have our DS games tended to be shoddy reskins of other DS games painted up to look like whatever AAA console title we're launching. Why - oh why - do the big console versions of handheld titles seem almost like a joke of an 'up port'? For me - this is the most important statement made by the game. It is the thing that proves Sid Meier still fucking ownz all our asses. It is the thing that calls into question all of the assumptions we've made about game development for this entire generation - even making Will Wright's statements about player creativity and proceduralism, and the 'second processor' and sharing, ranking, rating - seem a bit off the mark. How do we deal with the current generation's 'divide' between the big machines from Sony and Microsoft and the generation-winning machines from nintendo? Sid just showed us.

The Air War
My friend Greg loves kicking people's asses with air-power. From the TIE Defender to SMAC's shard helicopters, nothing can stop him gloating over his air power as he pounds the fuck out of everything with endless waves of aircraft that seem to materialize around him when his singular Goring-esque commitment to air-war pays off at the start of the end-game. Civ:Rev's air-war is different. Civ: Rev wins the air-war thus; there is no better game to play while on an airplane than Civ:Rev on a DS. Period. Trust me. I flew to Africa, Tokyo, Sydney, Shanghai, and then Africa again with Civ:Rev DS. If you don't have a DS and you have a flight coming up, it is worth buying one right now, just so you can play Civ:Rev on it while you fly.

What's wrong with Civilization: Revolution?

It is degenerate
The game is degenerate. Keep in mind, I still had to play the game ~10 times to lock down degenerate strategies, but lack of some of the above mentioned overly-complex balancing features leads to two major problems. The first is that aggressive growth strategies always win. I typically win the game with 20+ cities compared to my next leading opponent having 8 or so, and behind him a cluster of opponents with 4-6. The AI simply does not seem able to keep up with even moderately aggressive player growth strategies.

Another unfortunate degeneration is that the Aztecs simply seem unbeatable. The ability to have units always heal to full, plus the later bonuses that this Faction receives (Temples producing science, reduced cost roads, increased gold production) all stack up to make a faction that is just too powerful.

Geographical Determinism
As I mention above, I tend to restart a game within 50 or so turns if the starting terrain seems too lop-sided. If a kind of bias to a theory of geographical determinism is leveled against Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, then nowhere could this bias be more clearly expressed than in Civ:Rev (note - this is a failing of all the Civ games I ever played, not just this one). The reality is, there are myriad ways in which the starting geography of the game can determine the entire outcome of the game, and after you have played half-a-dozen times, you will probably want to abandon about one game in three after the first 45 minutes or so should the geographical advantages be too extreme.

No customization
A sadly missing feature is the ability to customize - even to a slight degree - the nature of the planet you will play on. The planet tends to always be a fairly similar Pangaea, causing games to often play out in similar ways. In Civ 3 and SMAC you could tell the world generator how much to age the planet, how wet or how dry to make it, how eroded, how old, etc. I miss this feature. For example, I would like to try a very naval focused game playing as the Spanish, English or the Japanese - but the probability of an archipelago-style world being generated by the game is low. Also, you cannot choose which factions you will play against. Having the ability to customize the planet generation parameters and the opponents allows you to play some interesting edges of the game... setting the world up as an archipelago and playing as the Spanish - but offsetting your naval advantages by filling the world with powerful military factions like the Mongols, Germans, and Aztecs forces you to play a game of aquatic commerce and culture, which is very different from the 'typical' game which is imposed by the  degenerate elements. I miss that.

Anyway, that's my review of Civilization:Revolution for the XBox360 and Nintendo DS. I highly recommend you try one or the other (or both).