Blog Archives
The Alters
I recently completed The Alters after about 24 hours of gameplay via Xbox Game Pass. Overall, I found the experience to be unexpectedly poignant and also refreshing.
The general premise of the game is that you are Jan Dolski, sole survivor of a crash landing on a hostile planet. Getting your bearings, you discover that while the mobile expedition base is intact, there is no realistic way you can manage all of its components by yourself and still escape a scorching sun just over the horizon. In the midst of despair, you find Rapidium, the MacGuffin mineral that precipitated the expedition in the first place. With Rapidium’s special properties – plus a Quantum Computer and Mind Records – you are able to clone yourself and selectively modify the clone’s memories such that they made different choices at pivotal moments in your past, thereby specializing in different fields (such as Scientist, Refiner, Doctor, etc). You must then balance exploration for resources, base management, and keeping your surly other selves happy long enough to (all?) get rescued.
The first kind of obstacle I encountered with the game… was its very premise. I actually felt like the various Jans getting physically pulled from other dimensions would have been more believable. After all, you do actually encounter numerous “anomalies” as enemies to fight or flee from on the alien world you are stranded on. But the game does a good job of exploring multiple facets of its own seemingly-shaky premise, so if that is a potential hang-up, well, please dial again.
The only other sort of criticism I have with the game is the sort of stark shift in gameplay that happens within each Act. At the beginning of each section, you are typically left dangerously low on supplies in the midst of an unknown landscape, knowing that the game-ending sun with be coming up behind you after an unknown amount of days. This part feels exciting and strategic, as you attempt to balance securing resource locations with longer scouting trips. Once the map has been filled out though, you wind up ending yours days within 5 minutes by holding down a button at a mining drill (which fast-forwards time) before clocking out. At one point, I started to avoid leaving a specific Act so I could “farm” research unlocks and add the maximum number of sections to my mobile base. The difference between that and how I felt immediately after getting to the next Act was enormous. I just wish the ebbs and flows were more uniform, ya know?
Of course, I would be remiss to not mention the Alters themselves. While you are out and about (or even farming resources), the Alters will get into certain moods and come to you with requests that might require the diversion of resources. It is during these times that you learn more about your alternative paths and what could have been. This sort of thing could easily have devolved into some on-the-nose proselytizing, but… it doesn’t. None of your other selves really have fairy tale lives, and in spite of diverging several possibly ways, all end up choosing to participate in Project Dolly in the end. Was that narrative convenience? The constraints of the Quantum Computer in altering the Mind Records of the clones? Or is it a broader commentary on the choices you make in life and how you must seek meaning in them even if you end up in the same place?
Overall, I would consider The Alters to be a top-tier Game Pass game. There is technically some replayability as you cannot choose all of the available Alters within a single play-through. Additionally, there are higher difficulties that probably make the second half of each Act more exciting from a resource juggling perspective. Regardless, hats off to the devs for making an engaging game, and also releasing it for $35 MSRP.
The Early Starfield Reviews Are In
To be clear, I have not played Starfield – the Game Pass version is not out yet. However, there is a Reddit megathread with many of the top review sites linked. Verdict? Mostly good. Ish. A fewer big outlets like GameSpot, PC Gamer, and IGN have given it 7/10 scores though.
One common complaint about the game is the disjointedness of fast travel. There are 1,000 planets to land on in the game, but the actual landing bit is a cut-scene and/or menu prompt.
At first, this seemed like a silly complaint to me, especially when people compared it to No Man’s Sky. Yes, there is an element of fidelity to the simulation in NMS when you fly towards a planet, break through the atmosphere, and then choose to land literally wherever. But that is something they have to incorporate because the fundamental gameplay is so repetitive and shallow. If you could just instantly warp to a Point of Interest, you would “consume” everything it had to offer within 30 seconds and then be done with all the, e.g. language unlocks in an afternoon. Heading back out into space feels good, yes, but its function is padding.
The criticism harder to shake off is when the reviewers point out how segmented exploration gets vis-a-vis fast travel. You may have seen this Skyrim meme before:
That is absolutely something that happened to me while playing Skyrim. Or the times you are just wandering around and stumble across a faction fight, or bandit camp, or whatever else. There are bandit camps in Starfield, and (presumably) faction fights, and other similar events. But the nature of the game would appear to make these things less organic. They just appear on the planet menu. And so I can see how that could become an issue with some people, and possibly myself.
That said… we’ll see. I have always been a proponent of flying in MMOs despite that encouraging the exact behavior I was describing, e.g. drop in and drop out gameplay. I don’t necessarily feel the need for the NMS flying around if the destinations and Points of Interest are themselves are a worthy goal. And if planet exploration is just the equivalent of driving around with the Mako in Mass Effect, we can… just not do that.
Again, time will tell. I have been looking forward to Starfield for a long time and I love sci-fi as a setting and Bethesda games in general. I’m not quite sure why they felt the need to add 1000 planets though.
Questionable Space Battles
Sometimes I find myself inexplicably drawn to building spaceships and watching them explode. With Steam having a 75% sale on the Gratuitous Space Battles DLC this past weekend, it seemed as good a time as any to try and get that fix.
The problem is that I am having a hard time convincing myself that the game isn’t complete bullshit.
You can read my original review here, but suffice it to say, GSB is essentially a game about building spaceships and nothing else. I think one of the DLCs or patches gave you the ability to change orders mid-battle at the cost of high score tracking or whatever, but under normal circumstances you design ships, give general orders, and let’em go. I mentioned in the review that I quickly came across a strategy that essentially wins 100% of the time – basically missile spam with occasional target painter that makes missile 100% accurate – but it seems clear to me now that it has been nerfed to oblivion. Anti-missile tech existed in the vanilla game already, e.g. guidance scramblers and Point Defense batteries, although it seems much, much stronger than it ever was so many months ago.
It is fine having counters to things, whatever. When I was looking at alternatives to missile spam though, I kept running into problems with the ship building aspects. As you might imagine in these sort of games, you have to juggle each component’s energy usage, crew requirements, weight, and so on. Except… all roads lead to the same max-level components and heavy mixing of weapons. It feels… banal. If I want an all-beam ship, let me build an all-beam ship without gimping on shields or armor. The weakness of specialization is supposed to be being vulnerable to counters, not it being nigh-impossible to actually specialize.
Or maybe I’m just all sour grapes because this happened:
Was totally wiped out, killing zero enemy ships. They all had ~20% HP or less.
I will continue plugging along with Gratuitous Space Battles for a while longer, but in the meantime, if you have any suggestions for spaceship designing/battle games, let me know in the comments below. I was obsessed with an ancient game called Stars! back in the day, and spent 40+ hours most recently on Space, Pirates and Zombies; dunno if FTL really counts, but I spent a lot of time with that one too. It can be a 4-X game, it can be FPS, it can be whatever it is, as long as it has a ship-designing component. And, preferably, no bullshit.
It just can’t be EVE. I have little interest in experimenting resulting in the destruction of weeks of game time.
Review: FTL: Faster Than Light
Game: FTL: Faster Than Light
Recommended price: $9.99 (full) / Bundle
Metacritic Score: 83
Completion Time: ~2.5 (or 25) hours
Buy If You Like: Harsh roguelikes, micromanaging space ships, indie games
This happened during the FIRST BATTLE in one of my playthroughs.
FTL is absolutely one of those games which, had I not forced myself to dig beneath the brutal, unforgiving crust, I would have written off as awful after the first four hours of playing. While this may have been par for the course for roguelikes, I had hitherto been spoiled by The Binding of Isaac, which not only had a more generous feeling of incremental progression, but a more direct correlation between skill and outcome. With Isaac, awesome twitch-skills is nearly enough by itself to propel you to success. With FTL, success is largely determined by how many coin-flips you win early on.
At least, it seemed that way at first.
…actually, no, coin-flips are still pretty important.
The basic premise is that you are a Federation ship with secret knowledge trying to outrun the advancing Rebel army. Each “turn” you move to an unknown point on the star map and either encounter an enemy ship, a text scenario of some sort, a Store, or possibly nothing at all. Combat takes place in real-time, although you can pause as much as you like. When attacking, you can choose specific ship systems like Weapons or Shields to disable them, or perhaps continually attack their O2 rooms to suffocate the enemy crew. Meanwhile, the enemy is doing their best to repair your damage and blow you up in turn. Some encounters can take place with environment hazards like asteroid fields, solar flares, or ion storms. Defeating enemies randomly gains you Fuel, Missiles, Drones, Scrap, or even ship components. While combat is pretty nuanced and skill-heavy, the text scenarios are the coin-flips where you either win needed materials, or lose big, without much room inbetween.
Once I realized that the game is meant to be played on Easy instead of Normal though, FTL blossomed like an origami flower. Getting more Scrap (upgrade currency) and less ridiculously-armed enemy ships granted the breathing room necessary to learn about juggling power supply, the importance of simultaneous weapon fire to pierce shields, which weapons can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and so on.
I also was able to get a handle on which events were riskier than others, and how many of them can be mitigated with certain ship upgrades or items. Since failing (i.e. losing the coin flip) events typically results in losing a crew member, I began to understand that outside the beginning few levels (where restarting is less painful), it just wasn’t worth the risk. But it was that precise lesson in risk management that eventually started turning every Easy run into a full clear, and then doing the same in Normal.
Blue options are always better.
At the time of this writing, I have 45 hours logged in FTL. Part of what keeps me coming back is the cohesion of the overall package, from the 16-bit graphics to 16-bit sound. A bigger part is the very randomness I despised originally. When you start the game, you have access to just a single ship. Getting 2 out of 3 ship-specific achievements will unlock a different configuration of that ship type; these alternate ships not only have different room layouts, but also different starting crew races and weapon loadouts. Entirely new ship types, each with their own alternate layouts, are further unlocked via gameplay. There are a total of 9 different ships, which means 18 different configurations.
What all of this combines into is an extremely slick, subconscious form of progression. Your games with the Engi’s drone-focused ship are going to be much different than your Rockmen’s missile-focused ship. While most ships are going to look basically the same upgrade-wise by the time you get to the final encounter – the ridiculousness of the flagship sees to that – the getting there becomes a game unto itself.
That is sort of the whole point of roguelikes, of course.
Will I make it? Spoiler Alert: Yes, because I’m awesome like that.
Ultimately, I am recommending this game at full price or Bundle price because it comes down to how much early frustration you are able to handle before giving up. You have no idea how close I was to uninstalling after I died in the screenshot at the top of the review, for example. If scenarios like that make you leery, I suggest waiting for FTL to hit Humble Bundle or Indie Royale as it inevitably will.
If, however, you are the type of person willing and able to muscle through rough first impressions to get at the delicious marrow in the bones of your enemies, buy FTL right now. Not only will you be getting a pretty ridiculous hour-per-dollar gameplay ratio (get 240 hours from a $60 game lately?), but you will be supporting one of the first indie game Kickstarter successes.
In An Age 
eBooks
Jan 24
Posted by Azuriel
I’m not much of a reader. I actually enjoy books quite a bit and have read a lot of them, but I have found that it takes a specific set of circumstances for it to occur. Back when I was stuck in an office doing menial data entry tasks 15 years ago? Conducive. If I’m sitting in my gaming chair in front of my $2500 gaming PC setup? Not conducive. I’m also allergic to cluttering up my house further with physical one-and-done objects; the subtle guilt that arises from even thinking of disposing of books is also something I can live without. So, the rise of eBooks and eReaders has helped the situation somewhat.
…aside from the friction that comes from buying a PDF of words. Who does that?
I have heard a lot of good things about the Three-Body Problem series. I’m a fan of sci-fi and philosophical musings – I really enjoyed the entire Foundation series, Ender’s Game series, and so on. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time though, you understand the problem: parsimony as fuck. So, it looks like the trilogy is $28.78 at basically every online vendor, including Amazon. However, Amazon is selling the first book for $11.99 and the 2nd and 3rd for $5.99 apiece. Shit like that really starts to make you question the subjective value of particular arrangement of words.
So, I then start looking up local libraries in my area. As it turns out, a lot of libraries will loan you eBooks for free, and you can even sign up for a library card without stepping foot in the physical space. Top-tier Millennial innovations, let me tell you. Of course, predictably, this means that the two electronic versions of the books are already checked out and behind a 200+ waitlist of people who probably subsequently went directly to Pirate Bay.
That actually was my Go-To move in past, but I’ve been out of the skull-and-crossbones game too long and the scene moved on without me. I mean, I can figure out VPNs and Plex servers and Usenet groups… but I just don’t want to. No longer do I have near-infinite time with near-zero responsibility. Clearly, all that time is better spent doing an absurd amount of shopping to save a number dollars no longer enough to purchase lunch.
The end result was this: nothing. I gave up and read nothing.
Great story, right? If you could Paypal me $11.99, I’ll be right on my way.
Actually, what will probably occur is that I go to Google Play and spend the $10ish and change I have earned doing random surveys to purchase the first book, then buy the two $6 sequels from Amazon, and then hope they all work on my Kindle Paperwhite. Where they will likely stay dormant until/unless I find myself away from the house and any parental or driving responsibility for a substantial amount of time. Then, I might actually get to reading something again.
It’s a tough life I lead, I know, full of adversity.
[Fake Edit] Don’t worry, after browsing some older folders, I apparently already “acquired” the Three-Body Problem series back in 2021. Now, to read them. Some day.
Posted in Commentary
9 Comments
Tags: eBook, First World Pirate Problems, Sci-Fi, Three-Body Problem, Too Busy For Words