Finished
Brutal Doom 64, in time for Halloween. Awesome fps. Well it's pretty much a classic Doom experience, so that's a given, but 64 may be my favorite because of the ambience. Brutal makes a few tweaks that increases the challenge, adds new enemies, and soups up some presentational details. I died a lot and it was great. Want to try Doom 64 Retribution, which sticks closer to the vanilla game, but with the sorely missed pump/reload animations for shotty and super shotty, which Brutal put back in as well.
The game got so vicious after a whiIe I was dreading picking up key items or going into empty, arena-like rooms, knowing a dozen or more pipe hittin' motherfuckers were going to be unleashed as soon as I touched a key or walked into the middle of the room.
Got my first victory in
SMAC. Transcedence with the Peacekeepers. Only on Specialist difficulty, so nothing to grab my nuts about, but I want to learn the ins and outs of the game in a gradual fashion. I only played once before, University, and got caught up in seemingly endless base defense and dropped it.
But fuck the game is brilliant. The amount of labor put in this game by the developer is unreal. Besides cooking up a complex play system, there is all the writing, which blows away most games that are supposed to be "about story"; a single in-game quote demonstrates more literary chops and intellectual substance than most games' entire narrative. Then you have to consider the time and seeking it took to compile all the live action video footage, if it wasn't captured by the team themselves. The amount of thought put into the research tree, the consideration of technical, social, ethical, and economic issues, their effects and ramifications in game and on a theoretical"what if this were real life" level. I could go on, but y'all know
Having some experience with Civ, I had victory in the bag on that difficulty, but I wasted a lot of turns. I didn't use Formers to great potential, actually disbanding all of them at a certain point because I thought they were no longer useful
. Used Supply Crawlers only a couple times, before I read about their potency from other players. Wasted resources and production time on too many military units that I didn't need (had as many as 12 just sitting in a base). Didn't adjust social engineering policy until the latter half of the game, and only twice to knock down accruing Inefficiency. And I just became overwhelmed by the amount of shit I could build. The new buildings, projects and units just kept coming!
A certain amount of fatigue set in. I was always only about 300-400 energy away from economic victory, but couldn't concentrate enough to figure out how to increase my income. I had far more votes than any other faction, but not enough to be elected supreme leader, and also couldn't concentrate to raise pop after a point. But research was popping, so transcedence seemed like the quickest option at that point, and I was ready for the match to end. So I settled on building every building that gave me research bonus and used my large energy reserves to rush the necessary projects .
Anyway this game is an embarrassment of riches, and I scarce understand how they acheived this accomplishment of the medium. If more devs , across genres, were rewarded economically for working at this level, or just had the balls to do so regardless, we might have been spared The Decline. Like, I can't accept what is being done with Cyberpunk with games like this existing. A rich, detailed system, and it looks like CDPR aren't using even 60% of it. What a waste.
