Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="fucking newbie"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]What his post DOES capture is how a game can seem rich and infinite until you start playing it for a longer time. Hitchcock used to say that he felt a movie was perfect when the screenplay was finished. Like he didn't want to film it at all. (That's probably apocrypha. Or I just got the story wrong.) I know where he's coming from, though. A game these days is never more loved than right after I pay for it in Steam. But yes, it looks like he had some fun... initially. He's stopped coming here, otherwise I would link him to the discussion, but I do know that he doesn't care about the writing for a Civ game. People were giving him a hard time a while back because he was looking at Starcraft 2 like it was a multiplayer sport, and people kept bringing up the laughable campaign mode. To me it was like disliking RBI Baseball because of the plot. You've spent more time with it, I take it, and it doesn't hold up? I haven't played it. I only know that it has a terrible title and looks pretty. [/quote] That whole post up there was originally gonna be a comment on Jolt Country 'cause Caltrops doesn't seem to care about these games, but the page was broken. Let me know if I should still bother. I was hoping 4xgamer would take off and I could write something over there, but that ship's already sailed and anyway I probably did something stupid and foreign when you guys invited me to send over reports on Paradox grand strats and then got lukewarm. To my eye, there's plenty of flaws in Pandora when it comes to everything that isn't writing - from what's irritating in the UI design and camera control to tech tiers, the tech tree, diplomacy, and the range of units they chose to design; it is a general letdown and as soon as you've put in the time to get past skin-depth this is all made manifest. That he didn't get around to covering this is perhaps telling that it stopped being fun, or else that people just have low expectations of 4xes ever breaking away from the cookie-cutter formulas. Admittedly even I don't play shit like Aurora ('The Dwarf Fortress of 4x Games' and it only goes downhill from there). Derek Smart is not a direction you want to go in. Despite this terrible trend of staple design decisions and the even worse trend of indie designers getting out of the polluted stream of big 4x design only to jump into a toxic waste dump, not saying something about the genre's shortcomings would be like not doing it for adventure games and for some reason I expected Pinback to do it, no idea why. I felt like there should be a scathing review of it somewhere that covered these aspects at least a little. Turns out my ability is hampered in more than one way: apparently <a href="http://www.caltrops.com/pointy.php?action=viewPost&pid=161342">I still don't know how not to be a cunt</a>, check back next year. Tolerable writing in these games mainly serves to keep me from wincing. If you have to spend several hours looking at this shit, it can be helpful if everything about it isn't pap. If the expectation is that this will never matter because it's all pap, you can avoid that, but when one's seen the counterexamples it gets harder. I can completely agree that starcraft wasn't ever gonna be a likely source of it. Certainly anything claiming to be a spiritual successor to something of a counterexample needs to be taken to task. SMAC isn't the best counterexample I can think of, but it's one and deserves consideration.[/quote]