Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Disney acquires LucasFilm, new Star Wars Films Starting in 2015.

I may not write as often as I used to, but considering my interests and areas of expertise, now and again a story comes up that absolutely cannot be allowed to pass without comment. This is one such story. The media giant The Walt Disney Company has been snapping up or producing geek-friendly properties for a while, with a recent buyout of Marvel Comics, their publishing of the Percy Jackson teen olympian series through Hyperion and a general increase in science fiction and fantasy on network programming (They own half of A&E and all of ABC Television.) Today, they dropped a bomb on geekdom. They bought out LucasFilm and ILM for just over $4 Billion USD and are getting straight to work on cranking out new Star Wars movies.

"I've got a bad feeling about this" jokes will be EVERYWHERE in a day or two.

Reactions have been immediate and scattered. We're not prepared for this. The automatic knee-jerk reaction to a huge media conglomerate buying a beloved property and making something new out of it is supposed to be fear and disgust, but this is Star Wars. More importantly, this is Star Wars without George Lucas at the helm, which is something geeks have been praying for in the "never gonna happen but wouldn't it be nice if..." category.  Every geek is going to have to face something that we may secretly dread. We're going to have to judge new Star Wars films based on their own merits, and confront the possibility that we might not just be able to blame George Lucas if the franchise moves on past being something we can enjoy, and we just plain... hate the new stuff, trapped in our dreamy memories of the originals. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Lucas will be kept on as creative consultant, but the new films will have LucasFilms' Kathleen Kennedy (I'm calling it now, this is a name that in a few years will be thoroughly idolized or vilified, spat like a curse in geek circles) at the helm. They are in active development for a new trilogy, with Episode VII to release in 2015, and beyond that, Disney plans to continue making a new Star Wars movie every 2-3 years until people stop paying to see them.  They know there is money to be made whether the hardcore Star Wars fans approve or not, and so long as that is true, there will always be a new Star Wars. Maybe, just maybe... that's a GOOD thing.

Hey, even if it turns out bad... an Evil Empire ruining the franchise is TOTALLY Star Wars,
so... there's that.

Hear me out. I am tentatively excited about this announcement.  Maybe the new films will be great, maybe they'll be crap. We know that without George Lucas running the show, even if they are crap, they'll be crap for different reasons, not because one guy decided that his creation wasn't bigger than him after all, and it'd be his way or not at all. Even if the new films are bad, there's an opportunity there for new Expanded Universe fiction, new video games, all sorts of properties that traditionally make the most money by being satisfying to US. Those properties are way more likely to be developed and put in the hands of someone capable of doing them right if there's a new film coming up to tie them into. No matter what they say today, geeks are going to go see every one of these films, and more science fiction is pop culture means one thing for sure...

There is gonna be sexy cosplay in 5 years of characters that don't even exist yet. Nice. Best Blogger Tips
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Wednesday, October 24, 2012

XCOM: ...and Now. (2012 Firaxis.)


I meant for this follow-up article to follow within a few days of my profile on the 1994 original. However, when I got the new XCOM on launch, I realized something. There would be dozens of articles within days of launch written by foks who had put a handful of hours into the game and written to hit a deadline. I knew after a few minutes playing that I was going to be into XCOM for some time to come, and the best way to talk about it would be from someone who had sunk enough hours into the game to consider themselves a veteran. In the last two weeks, I've sunk nearly 85 hours into this game, making it the second-longest played game on my Steam account, beating out Borderlands which I played weekly with friends for months, sometimes staying up all night. Early this morning, I finished the game in the manner it is intended to be played: Classic Difficulty, Ironman mode. I now feel qualified to talk about it.

XCOM has the guts to do something new.
 Instead of eventually beating the game being a matter of persistence, you can sink dozens
 of hours into a game of XCOM, and lose. Planet is taken by the aliens, Game Over.

So many of the reviews I read and listened to did the same thing. Spent a few sentences talking about what a good game XCOM is, and then the rest of the review talking about flaws, many of which were just design decisions they didn't personally understand. Make no mistake, there are a few bugs here, and they frustrate, especially in a game with permadeath and a mode which does not allow you to reload saves when something unfortunate happens. However, even in its current state, XCOM is a triumph. Turn-based strategy is a genre that is mostly found in niche titles or older games, with the notable exception of the Civilization series. XCOM has the potential to change all that, with a big-budget, slickly produced title that modernizes the gameplay and provides modern polish.

The game is, like the original title, about running a global organization to combat an alien invasion against a foe that outnumbers, outguns, and strikes without warning anywhere in the world. They start with weaponry that can kill a human or destroy a building, while the best soldiers in the world with our finest technology can only kill one of their weakest number with concentrated fire, assuming they don't panic before doing so. What provides hope is the strategic and tactical command of the leader of XCOM (you) and the researchers and engineers who take bits of alien technology and study and replicate it in order to develop new weapons, armor, ships and techniques for turning a bunch of scared rookies into a force capable of striking fear into alien hearts. Turn by bloody turn, difficult choices are made, and the tide slowly turns from barely surviving to kicking the aliens the hell off our planet.

You can customize everything about a soldier except their assigned class, Country of Origin, and gender. I named this squad after characters played by myself, my wife and friends in tabletop RPGs over the years.

In the strategic layer, you need to manage limited resources to build up the base, get satellites covering most of the globe, research and develop the tech for the soldiers on the ground, build and arm craft to shoot down UFOs and manage global panic to keep your funding in place. The game is played through the tactical missions, but won or lost based on the strategic layer. The missions are usually "find and kill all the aliens," but sometimes there will be a VIP to escort or locate and protect, bombs to defuse or civilians to protect. The pace of the game is careful and deliberate, with risky play resulting in failed missions, wasted resources and dead soldiers who need to be replaced with raw recruits. The best and worst turns of the game are when you make a minor mistake, exposing a new group of aliens to your squad's position, and your soldiers are at risk, even if they have advanced equipment and abilities.

Every soldier is assigned a class on promotion from being raw recruits, and as they participate in missions and kill aliens, they level up, gaining more powerul abilities. You can customize the soldiers, they gain nicknames automatically, and it hurts to lose a leveled-up soldier knowing it was your fault. That's going to happen. I lost surprisingly few soldiers in my successful Classic Ironman game, but two of them were Colonels (the highest rank) with dozens of kills each, and they died in the same mission on two subsequent turns. Each soldier can move twice, move and fire, or just fire their weapon without moving. Certain special class abilities or weapons require you to stay still, and others end your turn as though you had fired a weapon. You make hard choices. Save India, Canada, or Russia? Reload now, not knowing if you should instead get that soldier ready to fire on an alien you can't see? Try to outflank the enemy and risk alerting more to your position, or take a risky 35% shot and feel maybe like you wasted a precious action?

The result of poor planning, squad panic, rushing forward too quickly, or just plain bad luck.

Having played a bit with the multiplayer (point-based, competitive mixed squads of humans and aliens on static maps) and beaten the game on Normal and Classic Ironman, albeit with two wins out of thirty games attempted, I don't think XCOM is quite done with me yet. I might not take on Impossible difficulty with any degree of seriousness, but Firaxis is committed to long-term support, especially with a game that has done so well. Reviews have been nearly universally rave, and DLC is planned, with the first post-release content announced yesterday. A subplot focusing on China with custom maps and new missions will be the focus of "Slingshot," with a Chinese gangster available as a hero character, and the possibility of early access to a powerful endgame weapon as the reward. With more DLC planned, and the inevitable expansions and sequels, I feel bad. So much death is coming. Aliens, poor squaddies, and a whole lot more of my free time.
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Monday, October 8, 2012

XCOM: Then... (1994 Microprose)


Tonight at just before midnight, one of my most anticipated games of the year is releasing. That's a bold statement in a fall that is so packed with amazing game releases for PC and consoles that even someone without a job or school commitments can't possibly make the time to play everything. When XCOM: Enemy Unknown arrives, I expect that my time with the other fall releases, as well as the games I still have from the Summer Sale that didn't get the time they deserve will come to an abrupt halt. I've spent a week watching videos and reading reviews. I'll give a full review of the 2012 XCOM once I've emerged from a likely weeklong bender playing it. To understand why I am so hyped for this game, you have to look at the game it is a remake of, 1994's X-Com: UFO Defense (known as UFO: Enemy Unknown in Europe.)

The Global Geoscope view is, along with base-building and the tactical combat, 1/3 of the X-Com experience.

Most games from almost 20 years ago don't hold up very well. Even if you can get past the dated graphics of years gone by, when you take off the rose-tinted glasses, gameplay has come a long way. The original X-Com is still compelling, still brutally difficult, and still fun if you can actually manage the downright hostile user interface. I've made my love of turn based strategy well known, between Jagged Alliance and Civilization I've spent countless hours planning, plotting and fighting battles one turn or action point at a time. Xcom is a game that I realize even now I've never gotten very good at. In the year 1999, Aliens invade and the Earth pools its money to fund a global organization to combat the threat. The situation is near-hopeless, but you are the last hope for humanity.

I can say that with many hours into the game, I've never won. I am still challenged even on beginner difficulty in a game that has veteran players modding it to further increase the challenge. X-Com does not tailor itself to the player, from the beginning, the aliens are playing to win, independent of your skill or decisions. Globally, you have to manage bases, respond to threats and learn where the aliens are and what they want. You fight on the ground with normal human troops each with unique names and statistics over landed UFOs or crashed ones you've shot down. Capturing alien technology for research, figuring out where alien bases are, even capturing live specimens for study are goals from day one, and even surviving the aliens is a challenge.

Inside an enemy spaceship, the squad from an Escapist Magazine forum's Let's Play
faces a dreaded Chryssalid. Zombification imminent.

Your soldiers get better with time, but against alien weaponry they die. Even once armor has been researched and produced, and you have energy weapons at your disposal, in a single turn a soldier can be killed, and death is permanent. Every battlefield is procedurally generated, all terrain (aside from UFO walls is destroyable, and if you have the action points, you can issue a wide variety of orders to the troops. Grenades, rocket launchers, and stun batons supplement conventional weaponry, and tanks can be loaded into transports to assist your troops. If a psionic alien can be captured alive while it is mind controlling your troops to drop grenades into the middle of the squad, psychic powers can be researched, and psi-soldiers trained.

The new game has big shoes to fill. Along with Sid Meier's Civilization, X-Com was one of the titles that made Microprose huge in the 1990s. Luckily, Sid Meier's own studio, Firaxis Games has taken up the challenge, and I look forward tonight to seeing Sectoids mind-control my hapless squaddies while Cyberdisks move in for the kill and Chryssalids happily turn civilians into zombies to panic and terrorize the citizens of a likely doomed Earth. Should be a lot of fun.
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Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Quick One. Taking on Writer's Block.

It has been two months since my last post. This bugs me way more than it does anyone still reading or checking for updates. I've got a ton of decent reasons and bad excuses, but the biggest factor is that I've been struggling with completing articles in my usual format. I have 3-4 posts 75% done that I just hit a wall on. The one and a half page with 3-4 images and 5-9 link articles were draining me, and I came to a point of total creative burnout. Had trouble writing anything, designing anything, etc... if it wasn't for weight training and a TON of awesome video game releases, I'd have been just pretty much sitting here staring at a computer screen and occasionally sleeping. However, there are new games, fantasy novels, TV shows and other geeky things that I think I need to write again.  Maybe to bust that creative block, what I need to do is play with the format a little bit, try some shorter, punchy articles. See if people like the shorter format and if the pressure to write hundreds of words several times a week doesn't get to me.

For a preview of what I'll be talking about first, in a 2-part series, I refer you to the following image.

Not Enough Time Units Remaining!

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