Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Pinback trolls hard with review of failed spiritual successor for Alpha Centauri

[quote name="insomniac newbie"]Jesus Christ, Jonesy. Say something to the man, get him to have his memory checked. <a href="http://www.joltcountry.com/">Look at this shit</a> (by which I also mean <a href="http://www.joltcountry.com/index.php/features/2150">this shit</a>, that being the broken page where the review SHOULD be, I am linking to your site frontpage out of necessity here). Pinback does not strike me as a fatally stupid man, he presumably knows how to keep a life from falling apart even if he can't get on with anyone here because he's not cut out for mating with you mutant porcupine-wolverine hybrids. He also gives me the distinct impression of not having time for bullshit, hence my guess that he's old enough to have been a PC gamer in the nineties. So then he gives Pandora: First Contact a great cock-slobbery review all about how it's a polished civ game with all the tiresome nonsense taken out and great story or whatever. He says nothing about how their writing is shit stolen from EVE Online and other such mulch, how it's a general mashup of popular shitty space games from this last decade, or how it's learned little to nothing from the last thirty such games outside the Civ formula in terms of not being an incredible irritant. Pandora: First Contact was hyped to be the SMAC spiritual successor on a heap of sites and their fucking studio didn't exactly go stand in front of that and say, no, we're at best vaguely inspired by those guys - they did not say, please do not judge us by that old accomplishment. They soaked up the fucking name recognition and pushed it. This isn't something you ignore if you want to cover its fucking pedigree, so if you look a game over and find it relatively inoffensive on its own merits if kind of a bland little timewasting piece of shit, but that game is DOOM 5, you're missing something. Maybe you're missing your Alzheimer's medicine. The ONE saving grace of this game is also completely bypassed: how well it could probably serve as a mod platform for someone who wanted to use it to MAKE a real SMAC spiritual successor. This is a spiritual sequel in that it's a franchise-sinking piece of shit the way a lot of sequels are. THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS A LIST OF DETAILS POINTLESS TO MOST OF YOU EXCEPT AS NOSTALGIA BAIT AND CROCODILE TEARS, IGNORE IT: Here is a short feature comparison off the top of my head just to drive home the point that developers have no ambition because that horse skeleton isn't dead enough yet, I haven't played Pandora in a while so I'll miss a lot of incisive examples: -Unit design: SMAC had pretty interesting combinations possible, Pandora's is worse in every way. -Animations and UI field of view fuckery: SMAC was acceptable in its day and even now has some cool features, Pandora plays like it wasn't playtested for very long when tooltips and contextual popup menus overlap key selection buttons that you have to press this turn and still makes the same mistake as Warlock: Master of the Arcane half the time. Enjoy the camera flying around completely outside of your control every turn. -Terrain and its strategic implications: If you can't master this shit in SMAC it's fine but boy does it add something to literally move mountains and alter crop fertility and all that shit, you can starve the enemy to death. Pandora doesn't try. -Resource & unit management: SMAC innovated at least a little, Pandora doesn't even remember the lessons of the last five good games. Clicking through fifty cities to find which one needs its shit reallocated is fucking awful and should die, when are we gonna learn from the last five such games and their pitfalls - let alone some ancient shit like <a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=106267">Imperialism?</a> -Immersion bullshit, I won't even say mimesis: Why the fuck would you even advertise a game as SMAC's spiritual successor if you go so far as to not bother with all the secret projects and fun descriptions and character quotes and videos? Okay, Slitherine is four guys so nix the videos but really, no secret projects or significant character output or fuckin' anything above a fifth-grade level? -Writing. SMAC had genuinely good writing, it used many different in-universe sources to achieve some sort of coherence, it was internally consistent, and characters like faction leaders had some sort of integrity when it came to motive and action - they all thought they were following their idea of an ideal society to the letter, even the human hive guy at least wanted to set his people free of the world by overriding their optic nerves in a nice virtual one. The Slitherine writer decided to try to make every faction in the game out to be as awful as possible, let's not even get into the other writing like story. And all the typical shit wrong with civ games is broken in this one. Diplomacy's fucking retarded, difficulty is wrecked, unit variety is boring - not even a good game of rock-paper-scissors. The tech tree is kinda-sorta randomized, inoffensive at best, athematic at worst, and fucking mediocre.[/quote]