How To Spot A Psychopath

You know when you read a review of a game that says that one part of the game, say the battles between spaceships, looks great and is tons of fun, but the rest of the game is kind of boring?

Gratuitous Space Battles is that part of that game, without anything else.

(And before I say anything else, note that there’s a free demo.)

You pick a fighter, frigate or cruiser hull for each of your vessels…

…you kit them out with weapons and shields and engines and so on, you deploy an armada of ships of different sorts (or all of the same sort, if you like), and then you give them all orders. Concentrate all fire, prefer to shoot enemies that’re already wounded, shoot this kind of ship over that kind, protect this ship of ours, protect any ship of ours that’s damaged, stop at this range from the enemy and plink with your long-range missiles rather than charging into beam range, et cetera et cetera.

And then you click the “Fight” button, and sit back and watch.

For the actual battle - which is fought on a 2D battlefield, though ships can go over and under each other - you’re a pure spectator. GSB is like a tower defense game, in that regard. (Many tower-defense games let you build new towers during a battle, though; GSB does not.)

You can speed up and slow down the battle, and you can zoom in and out. From a distance, the action looks like this:

(In this battle, I’m employing the Unsporting Crowd of Torpedo Frigates strategy. I’m also playing at full resolution on my huge monitor, so the full-sized screenshot is 2560 by 1600 pixels and rather a lot of kilobytes.)

Zoom in, and you can see…

…each individual weapon shot, repair drones patching flaming holes in hulls, and fighters weaving around the capital ships. (Full-sized screenshot here.)

When you win a battle you earn “honor” with which to unlock new hulls, equipment and the three whole alien races besides the one you start with, the Federation. (The big Federation ships, rather delightfully, all look like a hybrid of a Starfleet vessel and a Battlestar.)

It’s all a lot of fun, and should become even more fun as the game expands. Cliff Harris, the indie developer of GSB and a few other games, is actively patching bugs and adding stuff, and GSB is also very moddable. Fans have already, according to the ancient tradition of the first few mods for any game, created a few rough-and-ready super-battleships by just adding more module mounting points to existing hulls. Some proper high-quality mods with all-new graphics, like unto the Babylon Project mod for Weird Worlds, should be arriving soon.

So try the free demo and see what you think. The full game takes into account what you’ve done in the demo, by the way, so you won’t have to play the tutorial level again if you don’t want to, and get to keep whatever honor you earned.

(GSB is Windows-only at this point, but because it’s not a very demanding game it generally works fine on other OSes if you play it in an emulator.)

Gratuitous Space Battles is $US22.99 from the developer, or only $US20.69 on Steam.

Note that there’s a graphical glitch in GSB that affects people who’re using an unusually high horizontal screen resolution (so, one giant monitor, or a row of smaller ones). It…

…turns a column of screen to the right into stripey repeats of the last correctly-drawn column of pixels.

I think this was meant to be fixed in the recent patch, but it doesn’t seem to have been. No problem, though; just go to the options and disable “Gratuitous Shaders”, and with very little eye-candy reduction, the whole screen will draw properly again.

A guy who glories in the name “Spaz” has been producing neat Supreme Commander videos for some time now. He did one for each faction in the game - prominently featuring the nifty extra units of the BlackOps Unleashed Unit Pack mod - and then promised a great big battle at the end, to be released in January this year.

That didn’t happen, so I assumed he’d given up on the project. But whaddayaknow, here’s the last one!

If you’ve liked my previous SupCom Eye Candy posts, you’ll know to not even sully your brain with the YouTube versions, but go directly to the full AVI downloads. Here’s one for the last instalment, and this forum post has umpteen links.

The HD downloads total 294Mb for the first four videos, and 356Mb for the last one all by itself.

Herewith, a promo video for the 4th Dimension mod for Supreme Commander:

(I think it’s well worth getting the 214Mb AVI version.)

At first glance, this mod is just a particularly-well-done member of the “this game’s OK, but it needs more humungous mecha” genre, but there’s actually more to it than that. There’s a version of 4th Dimension for the original Supreme Commander, but the current version requires SupCom and the the Forged Alliance expansion pack (which is sort of Supreme Commander v1.2).

If you ask me, SupCom is only becoming more attractive as it ages, for people like me who liked the original Total Annihilation (and, heck, Kingdoms too; Demigod is the SupCom engine’s Kingdoms-equivalent). You can still reduce an arbitrarily powerful computer to one frame per second if you play a big enough game, but your standard four-person weekend LAN game is much more workable on current mass-market hardware than it was when SupCom was new, back in ‘07.

You can get SupCom and Forged Alliance together in the “Gold edition” pack, which is cheap on eBay. (Here’s the same search on ebay.com.au).

Why do you need a new CPU?

Well, isn’t it obvious?

(See also here and here.)

TV shows about computer games are, as a very reliable rule, terrible.

So when I read on Rock, Paper, Shotgun that “X-Play’s review of X3: Reunion single-handedly validated that show’s existence”, I had to check out said review.

I wholeheartedly agree that X-Play did not miss this wonderful opportunity to grab the Kha’ak with both hands.

(The people who made that game are German, but the game has voice actors in it, for Pete’s sake. So I can’t help but think they must have done it deliberately.)

I do not like the phrase “this person has too much spare time”.

It is severely overused, and is frequently deployed without the slightest thought, to unfairly denigrate someone who’s done something quite wonderful.

I confess, however, that sometimes, through the laughter, I am entirely unable to avoid saying it.

This is one of those times.

(There’s more - much more - on the main U9 page here. You may never escape if you visit the home page.)

This video - self-effacing announcement post here, 261Mb high-definition version here - features pretty much all of the new units in the current version of Supreme Commander, which is pretty neat by itself, especially in the HD version.

But it also rips off the Megadeth Duke Nukem theme, recently featured in an incredibly moronic Duke Nukem trailer. Which, for those out of the loop, was just a clip-art slideshow from older Duke Nukem games.

But it had pretty great music.

So here that music is, along with something far better to look at.

How can you not love a game that’s called “Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars“?

OK, they’re not actually all that “supersonic”, as far as I can see. The game actually looks as if it’s got something of an “R/C cars” feel to it, but there is of course nothing wrong with that. And c’mon, they’re playing soccer!

(Here’s a page where you can download the high-definition version of the above trailer.)

Now that I know that Stephen Fry owns a pink Nintendo DS, I cannot help but visualise him playing Animal Crossing: Wild World and writing exceedingly genteel letters of apology to teddy bears.

While wearing reading glasses.

(Actually, I think it’d be funnier if he were running around pwning n00bs in Halo 3.
m3g4d3aTh: “Fag!”
JeevesMelchett: “I really don’t think that’s relevant.”)

I found Breaking the Tower via Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It’s an interesting little game, and wonderfully nostalgic (big chunky pixels, and sprites that always face you as you rotate the playfield…).

If you’re a gamer, you’ll immediately peg Breaking the Tower as a bonsai version of The Settlers - you don’t directly control the little dudes wandering around on the map, but instead just plonk down buildings for the little dudes to interact with.

If you’re not a gamer then this’ll all be new to you, but I strongly suggest you give Breaking the Tower a try anyway. It also strikes me as a very good game to point your non-gaming loved ones at, to give them an easily-digested first step into “proper” games, instead of the little Flash “casual” games which Breaking the Tower initially resembles.

Breaking the Tower has enough depth to be interesting, but not enough to be overwhelming, thanks to a variety of extreme simplifications of the usual dynamics of a game of this type. The little dudes, for instance, only consume food when they’re created in a “Dwelling”; you need five food per dude, but after they appear they can live forever without taking another bite.

And there are no baroquely complex interrelationships to memorise. Gamers are used to taking a long and painful time to figure out that they need exactly three Baby Skinners per Novelty Shower-Curtain Maker, and that you don’t need to build any Shin Guards if you haven’t also researched Coffee-Table Technology. The few elements in Breaking the Tower, in contrast, are all right there in front of you all of the time.

So you still get the fun of figuring out how the parts of the game fit together, but you don’t have to look up a FAQ to find out why your Peasants keep chopping the heads off all of your Nobles right after you add a Cakeworks to your Palace.

And despite its simplicity, Breaking the Tower still has the very soul of a good strategy game: Every time you think you’ve found something unbalanced that lets you just Build Lots of X to Win (Tons of warriors! No warriors, but giant population! Sweep the leg!), you’ll find that strategy screws something else up. So you have to go for a more balanced approach.

Breaking the Tower is also very slow-paced. It’s quite hard to finish a game - win or lose - in less than half an hour, and it’s easy to take well over an hour to win. But you don’t actually have to do a great deal in that time.

This is surprisingly great. It lets experienced gamers put a strategy into motion and then minimise the browser window and come back after ten minutes to see what’s happened. And it lets complete newbies take all the time they need, without some awkward pause-the-game-and-issue-orders system.

(And yes, it also lets you keep on playing after you win, so you can do that other nostalgic staple, leaving a game running overnight to see what ghastly fate has befallen the little computer people by morning.)

Check it out.