The Empire Strikes Out

Finally got a chance to play a little SWG Sunday morning. In my quest to max out the space part, I've got the series of missions coming up that get you the TIE Bomber/TIE Interceptor piloting skills (pretty cool missions - you're helping the Empire rebuild the Deathstar around Endor). I thought, "No sweat, let's do this." Ole Bald Angus' evil Jedi Imperial pilot had been helping me out, but I figured I'd tackle this one solo.

I started about 10:30, and over an hour later I was _still_ getting ordered around. "Escort these guys. Ooops they were captured by Rebels, go back and get them. Now hunt that Rebel Spy down and get some information from him. Now go rescue a stranded freighter. Now go back and escort another freighter," and so on. At some point I said, "The hell with this, I'll finish it later," and bagged it, thinking it would work like some of the other chained missions and let me pick back up at Step 4 of 10 Million or whatever. Nope, you just failed the mission, loserboy, go back and try again from Step 1. Ouch. There's an hour+ wasted.

That's Entertaible!

Just got a link to the Entertaible, which looks about 30" x 20" or so, with a touch-sensitive surface. Philips wants to use it at bars, restaurants, and maybe have a home version, so that folks can play multiple boardgames/quizgames/whatever on it.

This'd be just the thing for the remaining geezers with tweezers (I kid, I kid!) that play hex-based wargames, but no sane developer is gonna chase that market, because if there's 100,000 hex wargamers in the United States, I'd be surprised. Being able to play something like Civ4 face-to-face would be cool.

Here were some ideas a coworker and I came up with in a few minutes discussion:

• Replace the Giant-Box-O-Standard-Games with this thing. Throw on chess, checkers, parchisi, backgammon, chutes and ladders, Chinese checkers, 20 different kinds of solitaire, maybe scare up a license for Monopoly. Throw those in with one cool game when you buy it.

• A multiplayer RTS suited for the platform. Something that would work well with the limited UI options (touchscreen).

• An as-yet uninvented game where both the pieces and the board can move, with the board shifting under the pieces.

Probably be overpriced and underpowered, but heck, anything can happen.

Do you know how fast you were going, ma'am?

Part 2 of my brother's two-part wedding was last Saturday, and since I stayed up til 3 AM playing board games, I figured I'd let Kathy drive while I napped. This was working out so well for me that I slept through the last leg, from Portsmouth to Huntington on US 52, which I normally drive.

Unfortunately, since she never drives it, she doesn't know where all the speed traps are along the way. Welcome to Hanging Rock, please have your driver's license, registration, and proof of insurance handy. And I'm here to tell you that the comments on that link must be from the biggest bunch of suck-asses on the planet - everyone who lives down there knows that it's a wide spot in the road that has a cop merely for the purpose of catching speeders at the county line where it drops from 65 to 55. The cop was as cordial as could be, but in the end we still end up with a ticket.

PC Gaming Disappointments

Seeing a mention of Circus Maximus reminded me of my ongoing wish for a PC version of something like this, which reminded me of a wish for a PC version of Car Wars, which in a roundabout fashion takes me to this list of my all-time at-the-moment PC gaming disappointments.

• Interstate 76 - this is the one that made me think of the list. I really liked MechWarrior II when it came out, but for some reason Interstate 76 just didn't click for me. Maybe because I didn't have a good steering wheel controller. For whatever reason, for me it went from, "Car Wars on the PC! This is gonna kick ass!", to "meh".

• Master of Orion III - Loved MOO, loved MOO2, played this one _once_ and put it on the shelf. I might have even thrown it away in my big PC game cleanup a couple of years ago, and all I threw away then was trash.

• IL-2 Sturmovik - Maybe I'm getting too old for combat flight sims, maybe turning up the realism is a big mistake, but I could never get flying in this sim to feel good. I'd always be in some weird attitude, nose pointed one way, plane going the other, yank the stick and end up in a spin.

• Rome: Total War - loved Shogun: Total War. Loved Medieval: Total War even more. This one just came off as 'okay', mostly because at the start you can only play three different Roman factions. Word on the street is that if I can manage to win with one of these, it'll unlock other factions. With that being the case, this one might deserve another chance.

• Outpost - unlike some of the games on this list, I wasn't the only one disappointed here. Pushed a lot of people's hardware to and past its limits, but made up for that with gameplay that bordered on nonsense. The classic example from the game was the case where the colony's air is turning brown, the people are down to 400 calories of rations a day, and everyone in the colony goes on strike at once to protest the presence of hookers in the town common areas.

If I rack my brain I'm sure I can come up with more, but these stand out at the moment.

CGW and SWG:NGE - how's that for cryptic?

Last month's Computer Gaming World promised a review of Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experience. This month's CGW delivered on the promise. Unfortunately they had an old-time SWG player do the review, and in general he seemed pretty pissed off about the changes.

In all fairness to the reviewer, if I signed on one day and a good percentage of all my stuff was useless or worthless I'd probably be a little disgruntled too. I can also see that some folks who spent literally _months_ on the treadmill to reach Jedi could conceivably be miffed at all the little prefab Jedi running around who got Jedi by clicking on the 'Jedi' button. I'm not the least bit surprised that most people who liked it the way it was are screaming bloody murder since it changed.

However, I don't think that review answers the question, "Will I have fun giving SWG a/another chance?" If I ask that question and get a litany of 'All my old stuff is busted', 'Now everyone can be a Jedi', and so on, that doesn't have anything to do with my fun. That might be a selfish attitude, but so be it. In all fairness to the NGE, they needed someone new to the game to either review it, or offer their review as well.

My capsule review as a newbie: the quests all seem to be functional so far. The point-and-click combat is different, but not so much so that you think you're playing Unreal Tournament rather than SWG. A lot of stuff is not as polished as WoW (there goes Booder bitching about the Bazaar Terminals again), but I can live with it. It looks like combat classes are combat classes, crafters are crafters, and never the twain shall meet. A lot of the social and community stuff still seems to be there, so if being a moisture farmer or town mayor is your thing, knock yourself out. In short, if what you expected was a Star Wars-flavored EQ/DAoC/WoW-style MMORPG, that's what you've now got.

Railroad Tycoon - the boardgame

Among the other presents Santa brought me was Railroad Tycoon. This is a sort of simplified version of Age of Steam , with a good bit of the pain removed and a little randomness thrown in. We've got a 4-player game going on at work, where we try to get a few turns in over lunch. When I got it I thought that it would be a nice game for the more casual gamers, but not in the league of Age of Steam. After a few plays, I think I actually like it more than I like Age of Steam. Age of Steam is fun, but it's a real brain burner compared to most games - one misstep at the start of AoS, and you get to spend the next 3 hours kicking yourself in the ass while losing, assuming you get to finish at all. Railroad Tycoon is a little more forgiving, a little looser. You might still be able to hose yourself completely over on turn 1, but you'll still think you're in it up to the end.

On it's downside, it is completely huge, with a 3' x 4' board. It might fit on your dinner table, if you can put a leaf in the middle. My copy has the warping problem that other people have reported - it'll start out flat and within 30 minutes will be fairly severely bowed. I might be kidding myself but it looks better than it was on the first playing, since I'm bending the boards backwards after every play before putting them away.

To sum it up, if you like Age of Steam, get it. If you like train games, get it. If not, I'd recommend something else.

Star Wars Galaxies - NGE

One of my Holy Grails of Gaming has been a good multiplayer spaceflight sim. I've tried Eve Online twice, and dropped it twice, because at the early levels there's no there there as far as I'm concerned. I played Jumpgate for a while a few years ago, but the spaceflight model in Jumpgate, while probably a little more accurate than 'WW2 Fighters In Space', was just not my cup of tea. Jumpgate's broken economy didn't help. So sooner or later I was going to try out Star Wars Galaxies. Santa brought me the all-in-one pack for Christmas, and I gave it a try.

Despite what you may have heard, I don't think the game is nearly as bad as everyone says it is. The NGE changes seem to have WoW-ized the ground game, at least from what I've heard about the old SWG. Much like most other MMORPGs you now pick what you want to be; Jedi, Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, etc, and gain appropriate powers and stat bonuses as you level.

If anything, SWG has taken WoW's quest system to extremes. In some of the quests I'm doing right now, you can get almost a quarter of your level's experience for finishing a relatively simple quest. I'll grant that I've only seen it in action up to level 26 of 80, but so far the quests have been _very_ rewarding as opposed to straight farming.

The ground game is not without it's quirks. I'm probably not the first to complain about not being able to climb a 12-inch curb to get to where you want to go. Weapons provide a base damage listing but no rate-of-fire/attack numbers, so you have no idea what the DPS is going to be until you use it. You soon learn pistols are fast, rifles are slow, carbines in between, and so on, but base DPS numbers would be nice. The Bazaar Terminals are nice, in that there are plenty of them, but a 'show usable items' checkbox would be really nice. Weapon/tech levels where appropriate would be good too. In short, it's got its rough edges but seems okay so far.

But for me, this is more of the icing on the cake, as the part I'm interested in is the Jump To Lightspeed part. You can be a Rebel, Imperial, or Privateer pilot, and I'm not convinced that this has anything to do with your status on the ground, i.e. you can remain neutral on the ground but fly for the Imperial Navy. You'll get your newbie ship right at the start, and Imperials and Rebels get access to the the familiar set of Star Wars ships. Privateers get a different set of ships. Currently Ole Bald Angus is shepherding me along through the Imperial missions, and maybe we can tackle some of these together some day when I get more than an hour or so online.