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Perimeter (2004) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AupJmfznA9s It is an absolute tragedy that the ideas of Perimeter have never fully been realized. It is the gaming equivalent of the antikythera mechanism, lost at sea decades ahead of its time. The story is the best kind of bonkers: going through a chain of tiny worlds shaped by psychic emanations from earth on gigantic floating cities called 'frames'. It's an RTS game where you flatten and extract energy from the land itself, fight off other frames with squads of units that can transmute themselves into other units instantly. There's a slew of issues and I go into them in the video, but overall, there will always be a special place in my heart for it. It tried, drat it!
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Jan 27, 2021 19:35
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 06:40 |
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So I uh, made a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poHX5edGkVM I promise you it's a better watch than a read, but here's the script to those who prefer: A Nuclear Take about DEFCON NUCLEAR WAR Nuclear War. An unimaginably horrific scenario that is so devastating that one could be forgiven for wishing games featuring it had never been made so as not to even hint at normalizing it or psychically willing it into being somehow. Such thinking is deeply unmaterial of course, even with dangerous lunatics gaining control of nuclear armed nations, such a war would be deeply unprofitable to those who currently monopolize political power. Though the chance for a nuclear exchange to be triggered accidentally remains terrifyingly real, as it has nearly happened multiple times before. Nuclear War occupies a strange place in our culture. For prior generations who lived through the cold war memories of Duck and Cover still linger. David Lynch made the nuke the ultimate originator of evil in the Twin Peaks mythos for good reason, painting it as a stain on the very soul of humanity. For games and movies, the aftermath of nuclear war is a common, almost trite setting at this point, yet the act is almost always offscreen, too horrible to be seen directly, unless going for some kind of shock value. Rarely is the idea of conducting the nuclear war itself explored. The reason for this is fairly straightforward of course as the consensus of mutually assured destruction rings every bit as true now as it did during the cold war. Nuclear exchanges between superpowers are definitionally not winnable. The more likely situation of a rogue nation launching a single nuke or a much more limited exchange are much better narrative fodder in most cases. Yet it is precisely this ultimate, civilization-ending clash of superpowers that DEFCON deals in. DEFCON does not ignore this contradiction. The tagline for the game, ‘everybody dies’ is not an exaggeration. It does however flatten the world in interesting ways to achieve balance and introduces a variety of scoring methods to determine a victor, but more on that later. The presentation of Nuclear War in DEFCON similarly does not beat around the bush. With each population center hit, the death toll immediately appears. In truth, the gap between the gamified joy of racking up a ton of points for hitting Sao Paulo or Cairo before anyone else does and the raw horror implied by the act, might be the widest gulf of its kind in terrestrial gaming. It is a perverse satisfaction, to be sure. And when the nukes land, you feel it. Even without the death tolls, the excellent sound design lets you hear the impact, the terrible low rumble of the explosion. The expanding green glow of the radiation. If you’re the one being nuked, your interface darkens as the greys that make up the continents fade to black as the unrelenting torrents of nukes rain down. If my ears don’t deceive me, the music even changes pitch as you lose population, layering yet another element to the nuclear devastation. And the music itself, well, as you’ve no doubt been hearing, the music is a dirge for humanity. Slow, ambient, yet positively skin crawling in its potency. It is, in a word, perfect for setting the tone of the game. Occasionally you will hear a woman’s cough mixed in, briefly tying the sound of inflicted human misery to the otherwise somber soundscape. All that said, the discourse I’ve seen about DEFCON usually starts and ends with WHAT it is. I feel this does the game a tremendous disservice. There is so, so much more to be said in the ‘how’ of how the game works. It is a game that if played optimally, will make you a complete bastard even among your fellow world-ending players. I would almost go so far as to call DEFCON the Among Us of its day. This is a direct result of the gameplay mechanics as intended too, not in spite of them. To properly appreciate these emergent properties please allow me to explain how the game actually works first. CORE MECHANICS Core to the gameplay of DEFCON is managing the Nuclear Triad. To best explain the triad, let’s listen to an expert on it: <clip of trump making an rear end of himself https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2015/12/17/what-is-nuclear-triad-debate-sot.cnn > In all seriousness though, the ‘Triad’ refers to the delivery mechanisms of nuclear weapons: Intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBMs, Submarines capable of launching nuclear missiles, and nuclear armed bombers. In DEFCON you utilize the nuclear triad of a given territory. The playable territories are: Russia, Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America. All given equal footing. This bears hilariously little resemblance to the real world of course, in terms of both the internal geopolitical unity of the territories and nuclear arsenal levels, but hey, can’t have a game without it. There are only 5 commendable unit types in the game, three navy vessels and two kinds of aircraft. In most game modes, everyone gets the same amount of each. One would think this would render the combat rather predictable and limit the amount of tactical possibilities but this could actually not be further from the truth. Most of the units, and the nuclear silos themselves have alternate operating modes that take a nontrivial amount of time to enter and exit, allowing them to perform other roles. For example, while the bombers are a platform for launching short range nuclear strikes, carrying one nuke each, they also have a naval combat mode that makes them extremely effective at picking off navy vessels from a distance. Fighters meanwhile only have one mode of operation, that of direct combat, but even they have multiple uses. Their primary role is interception of enemy bombers, but their speed makes them very adept at scouting enemy territory, critical in finding enemy buildings to destroy with nuclear ordnance. Tragically, fighters have a very limited fuel supply, so many, perhaps most even, never make it back to the ‘relative’ safety of their airbases and carriers. Fighters also have the distinction of being the only unit that regenerates over the course of the game, adding to their expendability. Now moving on to the naval units, Carriers come with both fighters and bombers, but can only launch one type at a time. They also carry four nukes which bombers who have spent their ordinance can reload with. Carriers also have a dedicated anti-submarine mode which allows them to destroy submerged enemy submarines, though they cannot launch any aircraft while it is active. Submarines are the most challenging unit to effectively manage, but also the most rewarding. In their passive sonar mode, they can only be detected by enemy submarines in active sonar mode, or the aforementioned carriers in anti-sub mode. They can be useful in direct combat if you can keep them safe enough, but they really shine in their role as a firehose of medium range nukes, a whopping 5 per sub. Launching these safely can be tricky, as the sub surfaces in the launch mode, rendering it vulnerable to anything that shoots. All it takes is even so much as a single lucky bomber in naval attack mode to clear a whole squad of them in short order. Again though, if used properly, they are decisive, particularly against unsuspecting opponents. Finally, battleships. A bit apocryphal to think about them in the context of modern conflicts, but here they are what you would expect them to be, they shred any ship or aircraft who dares to stray too close, but are absolutely clowned on at range by bombers in naval combat mode Or submerged submarines for that matter. Now aside from all these commendable units, there are buildings that you can place pretty much anywhere you want within your territory. Again, a set amount of each on the standard modes. These installations are hidden unless seen by the enemy. Radar installations, as one might expect, provide a sizable vision range. Revealing units and buildings within range. They are fragile however, needing only a single nuke to destroy. Airfields hold a sizable contingent of bombers, as well as a sizable contingent of fighters, which slowly regenerate. It can only launch one kind of aircraft at a time, and takes two nukes to destroy, though being nuked once is enough to destroy a considerable amount of what it contains. Now silos, silos are inarguably the most critical building in the game by a wide margin because in their air defense mode, they are literally the only thing that can destroy nukes in flight. Although if you played long enough ago you may have seen some bugged out fighters trying desperately. This makes silo placement critical to defending your population centers. Of course, in addition to this powerful defense, silos contain nukes, 10 of them each. Which can be fired anywhere on the globe, arcing beautifully against the interface. Firing these nukes is a risky maneuver as they reveal the location of the silo, and silos in firing mode cannot shoot down enemy nukes. It is perhaps the most important mode trade off to consider in the game, and it takes considerable time to re-enter air defense mode so launching is not a decision to be taken lightly. It takes a whole three nukes to silence a silo, though each hit halves the remaining nukes it contains. Now aside from all this player deployed stuff there are cities, where all the people live. Players do not get to pick where cities are spawned. In most games the cities are in standardized places, but there are modes where the population distribution is randomized, though all territories always have the same population. Each nuke that hits a city halves its population. Interestingly, if a nuke is shot down near a city, it counts as a glancing blow, knocking a percentage off. In all modes, cities are where games are won or lost. Annnd that’s the full catalogue of in game objects. Let’s talk about the actual flow of the game. I’d be remiss if I didn’t start with the titular DEFCON mechanic. For those unfamiliar, DEFCON is a portmanteau of defence condition, with levels ranging from 1 to 5. Somewhat counterintuitively, the lower the number is, the higher the threat level is. As a result, in rare cases you may have heard somebody say something like ‘Things are wild over here, It’s DEFCON 5’, not knowing that defcon 5 is actually the least dangerous level. Not a mistake anyone who ever played DEFCON would make to be sure. I’d like to real quickly call out that the exercise term for DEFCON 1 is ‘Cocked Pistol’ which might be simultaneously the most American, and Horrifying term for imminent nuclear war possible. Anyway, you start the game in DEFCON 5. The focus here is placing your ships and buildings. Nothing can shoot yet, and you can’t even deploy fighters. There is no radar vision yet either. After some time passes, you enter DEFCON 4, your radar system engage and you can start to see enemy units and buildings within radar range. You also have to place any remaining buildings or ships here or they will be lost. DEFCON 3 is where the fun begins. Your units can begin attacking enemies within range. You can deploy aircraft. A lot of naval battles occur at this stage. DEFCON 2, surprisingly doesn’t actually have any gameplay consequences other than being a reminder to get your stuff in position for DEFCON 1. And finally, you hit DEFCON 1. Nuclear ordinance begins to fly. The game begins in earnest. In strategy game terms DEFCON is purely a game about micro. Which is to say the management of units, rather than macro, managing an economy and resource collection. There is no production to manage here, only execution. With the big focus here being keeping your units alive and in the correct modes and timing and concentrating your nuclear strikes so as to waste as few nukes as possible against the air defenses of enemy silos. Critically, there are no ways to mass-command groups of units at once, other than ships that were already placed in formation, which you can change their mode all at once by holding shift. This isn’t actually a mechanic that the game tells you about that I can recall either, I played a great many games before I learned about it. Needless to say, this makes the game a touch click intensive. Not that I’m not complaining though because nearly every click matters. A player that maintains a high actions per minute, or APM, can be devastating. Though there is more to the game than merely clicking quickly, of course. A side effect of this is that some players will force the game’s speed to its lowest setting, real time, to do all their micro. By comparison, the game is normally played at 5x speed, with higher available speeds being 10x and 20x. Under default settings the game will always be the lowest speed requested, though other settings let you put in a speed floor or just fix the speed to a constant rate. This period of realtime micro can be a pretty huge tell, as you can see who is requesting what speed up top. You can generally expect a wave of bombers or sub launches coming from that player in short order. Or it would be short order if it wasn’t so painfully slow in realtime. Even if this gives you significant time to react, it can be frustrating if you hadn’t planned on spending the entire afternoon in a single game. Amusingly I recall the community actually came up with a solution for this, where certain dedicated servers would allow a budget of realtime that each player would be able to use, letting them use it for a limited time without slowing down the game agonizingly. Now, even with all this said, there’s yet another twist to the gameplay I haven’t mentioned yet that elevates DEFCON at a very basic level. Every shot has only a % based chance to work. For example, a shot from a silo in air defense mode only has a 25% chance to stop the nuke. Different % chances for each unit firing and receiving the shot too. No units have hit points other than battleships and carriers which require 3 successful shots each to down. How does this elevate the gameplay you ask? Well, unlike, say, Company of Heroes 2 where a single missed anti tank round can have you shouting at your screen. The effect of this aggregated randomness heightens the importance of positioning units to maximize the chances for a kill, while also benefiting the player who can keep large numbers of units well positioned and attacking the correct targets. As I mentioned earlier, timing is also critical. Particularly the timing of one’s usage of nukes. In most game modes, you want to quickly move to nuke undefended cities before anybody else does to secure the score. For example, say you are Europe or Russia, you want to be the first to snipe Cairo to give you a sizable chunk of free points off the bat. Any Africa worth their salt knows to place their silos in interior africa far away from where they might be seen by radar installations. So it’s essentially free, not likely to be defensed by silos, only requiring a few nukes at most to secure the points. If you live in LA or San Francisco you’re likely dead in the game for similar reasons too. Nuking a city that has been thoroughly depopulated gets you next to nothing in terms of points, so you don’t want to be late. It is in literal terms, a nuclear race in most modes. That said, patience is an important virtue too. The ultimate period of vulnerability to look out for is when a player begins launching from their silos. This definitionally means their silos are not in air defense mode anymore, and any shots you make will be guaranteed to land, if you can get close enough with bombers and subs. Most pressingly this means that you can destroy the silos themselves and both prevent nukes being launched at you and leave the target defenseless. One can destroy silos in air defense mode mind you, especially if they are scattered badly, but to do so generally requires a lot of ordnance. Eventually after all but a fraction of nukes have been detonated or destroyed, the victory timer will start, giving players a final chance to make some moves before the final scores are tabulated. After the victory timer completes, a winner is chosen. Not a team, not first second or third place finishes, only ever the one victor, based on their score. This, needless to say, incentivized a lot of interesting behavior, but more on that in a minute. Now there are a few different scoring modes a game can use. The default mode has you get 2 points for every 1 million killed, and -1 point for every 1 million lost. Which generally leads to a nice balance of offensive and defense play. Genocide mode, as the charming name might imply, removes the penalty for losing population, granting you a point for every million killed. On the other end, there is survivor mode, which scores you purely by how much of your population you save. As one might expect the scoring modes can have a rather extreme effect on the gameplay. Beyond the score modes there are also a handful of game modes other than the default and custom settings, though most are not particularly noteworthy. There is however, one mode that stands out, head and shoulders above the rest. Diplomacy. It is this mode where the emergent properties of DEFCON I alluded to shine through the strongest. It is by a wide margin the most interesting game mode if you’re playing it with active enough people who ‘get’ it. It is a mode where the entire world starts as one team, with the survivor scoring mode active. Needless to say, this harmony does not last, and what happens next may or may not surprise you. <we’ll be right back + music> BETRAYAL or you can’t spell DEFECTION without DEFCON Around the turn of the millennium there was an interesting phenomenon in the online multiplayer of the popular strategy game Starcraft. Because of how the game displayed your win/loss counts whenever you joined a game’s lobby there was significant social pressure to keep that win counter up, even if one mostly just played the plethora of ‘Use Map Settings’ custom games which didn’t count. It was still literally a black mark on your record that everyone saw when you joined to have more losses than wins. Fortunately, the community had a solution. Now for a game to count as a win, it had to be of the ‘melee’ type, which just meant starting out with the basics the same as everyone else. This however did not mean that it had to be a ‘fair’ or ‘even’ fight. Thus, the 7 vs 1 comp stomp was born. The objective was simple. The 7 players would work together to destroy the single computer opponent in short order, and everyone would receive a nice shiny win for their statistics. That is, unless somebody had deliberately unchecked the ‘allied victory’ tick in the diplomacy menu. At which point, an entirely different game began. The players were all but locked into the game, not wanting to tarnish their records with another disconnect or loss, but they had no way short of hacks to know who had unchecked their ‘allied victory’ box. It became, for all intents and purposes, a game of werewolf. Paranoia ran rampant, players built up armies to defend themselves while hurling accusations at each other. Coalitions formed and broke as player after player was eliminated, the remaining players trying desperately to eliminate the player or even players who had allied victory turned off, so the game could end with a win. It was a great way to kill an afternoon back in the day, especially with a friend. But what does this have to do with DEFCON you might ask? Well, put simply, the kind of emergent betrayal based gameplay that Starcraft had accidentally created, DEFCON fully embraced as a core gameplay mechanic, especially in the diplomacy game mode. DEFCON expresses this mechanic in a number of different ways. For example, In other multiplayer strategy games, if you can even change your team mid-game, the game makes it very clear to everyone immediately, and your options for doing free damage are limited to forcing your units to attack allied units manually while you’re still allied. DEFCON, on the other hand, allows you to ostensibly remain allied and go weapons free on an ally, with a single uncheck of the ‘ceasefire’ checkbox. All units will begin to auto-attack that player. If that’s too loud, and you’d prefer to, say attack a few select units you can do that too with a little micro. If your opponent fails the perception check and doesn't notice your units attacking them, you can devastate their navy units. If that’s not enough, you can also nuke allied buildings with no penalty whatsoever. So long as those buildings do not lie on cities. The only penalty is incurred if you nuke an allied city. A fun little twist of this is that it encourages players in Diplomacy to put structures on cities to discourage such behavior, whereas in the default mode you would definitely want to keep the buildings away from cities, so as not to be hit by nukes seeking the population centers. In practice, this kind of building destruction betrayal can take a lot of forms, but often comes from bombers passing through an allies territory - ‘Just passing through, I swear!’ - then in a split second launching from very close range. Three nukes a silo. If they still have you set to ceasefire, the air defenses won’t even trigger, as the nukes find their purchase unopposed. Now, let me just play a scenario out for you to examine how this works, for, say, a game of diplomacy. Say everybody loads into the game and stays on the same team through defcon 3. This isn’t always the case mind you, some people like to leave the main alliance and form a new one with their neighbors right off the bat, so nobody but their new allies see where they placed their buildings, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that didn’t happen here. Let’s say that Africa begins using bombers to snipe at nearby ships from South America. People notice, what oh what is the international community to do? Well that’s a question which is gonna have a lot of different answers. Right off the bat, you can go ahead and assume South America started a vote to kick Africa from the alliance. This vote may not be as bulletproof as you’d think. After all, Africa is very much within striking distance of Russia, Europe, and a big chunk of Asia. Those territories may not want to run the risk of fighting Africa, which would put their populations in danger. Quite the contrary, it’s fairly explicitly in their best interests to see South America removed instead. Particularly with an Africa bold enough and familiar enough with the game to strike while allied. So they may hop on to a vote that kicks South America instead, even if they were the victim of Africa’s aggression. Sidenote here on voting: if there’s a vote going to kick you from the alliance, you don’t get a notification. Your notification comes after the vote ends in success and consists of your units changing color and the delightful text blurb at the bottom of the screen. Anyway, South America gets kicked. North America leaves and joins South America. Russia, perhaps a little new, targets North America with their silos, finally seeing a target. Asia seizes on this moment and bombs Russia’s buildings while still allied. Europe flips out because they were counting on having Russia’s silos covering them from behind. Russia isn’t sure what happened. Europe is trying desperately to convince Africa and Russia to vote to kick Asia, which Africa doesn’t want to do because it would mean a huge naval battle near the horn, and they are busy with South America. In frustration, Europe leaves the alliance and uses the subs they had been saving to betray Russia with in the endgame immediately. And so on and so forth. All this is to say Diplomacy mode in DEFCON is a game of tricking people into fighting each other while protecting yourself at all costs. For a game where there’s really only one ‘map’ there are a truly surprising number of ways each game can go down, as players clamor to both protect themselves and knock out the person with the most survivors. Betrayal is a large part of standard mode games too I should say. Even more of an incentive to attack a vulnerable territory if you get points for it after all, dropping your alliance before the first nuke hits a city. You really have to go out of your way and specifically change the game settings to force people to not be able to change teams. Betrayal is baked into the game to a truly beautiful degree. DEFCON breaks free of the modern dichotomy of crewmates and imposters, and lets people play both roles within the same game, defending their allies as their allies defend them, then turning on them to secure a victory at the last moment, or even just taking them down with them to spitefully stop them from winning. The mechanical brilliance of the underlying systems gave rise to these amazingly emotional moments between players. These moments were just so raw and real, conniving and cunning. You would not expect such pathos in a game as ostensibly sterile as DEFCON, but I saw it many a time. Unfortunately, there may have been a cost to all the treachery. For while it’s brilliant, cool, and good, some may say it wasn’t what they were expecting of DEFCON. They came expecting a devastating nuclear war, yes, but being betrayed right before their assumed moment of victory may have proved a line too far. The simulated nuclear extinction of humanity, no match for a wounded ego. Perhaps the game would have had more longevity with fixed teams as a default, or even just team victories. It’s hard to say, 17 years after the fact. No game multiplayer community lasts forever, but I do fear I myself may have soured many people on the game. Because I played a lot, and I played to win. WINNING THE UNWINNABLE GAME Now in literal terms I’m not exactly sure how much I’ve played, as the bulk of my time playing the game was prior to March 2009, when Steam began tracking people’s time spent in games. I’ll note It also wasn’t until much, much later that DEFCON added steam community features tracking your stats, which I always thought was pretty nifty. What I am sure of is that I made a lot of memories playing DEFCON. Pulling victory from the jaws of defeat with well placed final strikes, unloading a full stack of subs on unsuspecting targets, and of course, betrayal after betrayal. One time I made a guy so mad when I beat him he changed his name to mine and then rudely pretended to be me, trying to make everyone still playing the game hate me. Hats off to you, man. It was as simple as typing slash name then your desired name to escape any meaningful notoriety. Many of the more well-known players did this. Towards the end of the community’s activity, there was a pretty good chance that the people rocking the default ‘newplayer’ name were veterans not wanting to scare anybody away, rather than an actual new player. It really was deception all the down in DEFCON. And for a game of it’s relative mechanical simplicity there were a wealth of secrets that could give you that needed edge over your opponents. There was the basic stuff like correctly grouping your silos and placing them to maximize their coverage of your population, while also keeping them hidden. Or properly cycling your bombers back to carriers and airbases so they could load up on more nukes, rather than letting them go to waste. But there were also some pretty arcane strategies, like using your nuclear ordinance on enemy (or allied) ships. Ships in motion could prove a challenge, but if properly employed at a close enough range you could get guaranteed kills without having to deal with the randomness of projectile combat. Also on the subject of ships, I think a lot of people never realized how fleets moved. The larger the fleet, the easier it is to manage en mass, sure, but the harder it is for it to maneuver close to land. Smaller fleets had much more options in where they traveled. A skillful player could sneak groups of three subs around Indonesia. Whereas players who assigned the maximum number of ships to each fleet couldn’t even navigate there. Making it an ideal launch location. Moreover, grouping carriers in fleets of two, one in bomber launch mode, and one in sub defense mode was basically the best defense against submarines you could do, if you could tolerate the micro. There was also the proper treatment of AI allies. Oftentimes for whatever reason people left a game early (though they had the option of reconnecting), leaving an AI player managing their territory. AI is a very interesting feature in DEFCON (as one might expect). The AI is fairly adept at concentrating their nuclear strikes, though absolutely garbage at fleet management and building placement. Launched from silos at a consistent time, and most importantly, AI would never betray you. Leaving them very much so a solved, predictable element of the game to be exploited, either for the easy kills, a useful ally in airspace defense, or most commonly both. AI would never even vote. Leaving the optimal path in some diplomacy games to try to force others to leave the green donut to use the AI for a shield as long as possible. CONCLUSION All in all, DEFCON was an amazing, if misunderstood game. Perhaps I shouldn’t use the past tense as it’s still around, its servers still beeping down in the bunker. Interestingly enough Introversion even cut a modern ad for it somewhat recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDVhWoNuR5I I think it’s pretty clear though that the game’s best years are behind it, barring any sort of meme zoomer invasion. It’s a bittersweet feeling, remembering how it was to play a multiplayer game in its prime, knowing that it will never be that same way again, the experiences, the moments, gone for all but memories like nukes in the rain. And here, still, I feel the tinge of regret that I myself may have hastened the game’s demise in my teenage years. Perhaps the winning move really would have been to not play at all.
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Apr 7, 2021 02:57
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Few things on Alpha Centauri - First, anyone who's interested in the wealth of lore in the game should check out the Paean to SMAC which goes into great depth on basically every shred of it in the game. Moreover, Brian Reynolds himself posted some commentary on some of the pages, for example: "Industrial Base Page posted:“Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill.” Brian Reynold's comment posted:Two little thoughts I can’t resist leaving here: Second, the game's music is generated entirely procedurally. You probably figured this out pretty quick by the music livening up when a base facility is constructed, or otherwise navigating to a city. It's a little disappointing that there's no 'official' soundtrack given the strength of the opening theme/menu music, but some combinations of the generated ambience are on youtube. Third, and admittedly I can't find any solid backing for this so it may just be a rumor, but I've heard that the AI for each faction is customized to a significant degree. Much more than modern games where everything basically has the same AI, but with different modifiers governing the algorithm. This would kind of make sense with how different some of the factions wind up playing. Overall 10/10, definitely a game with actually something to say ideologically and frightfully ahead of its time in ways I don't think we've come to appreciate yet. Sardonik fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Jun 21, 2021 |
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Jun 18, 2021 06:58
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theshim posted:beam cannons Adding to this, the beam weaponry is iconic, like, one of the greatest sound effects in gaming, and especially great with the graphics mods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMa3LXe6oVc&t=53s The mod community even has a very impressive launcher that makes wrangling everything together insanely easy. Definitely worth the money on GOG. Pity the rights to a sequel must be tied up somewhere.
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Jul 6, 2021 04:21
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This took way longer than it should have but I finally finished my video on AquaNox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlYK84fCVoY It's a real weird aquatic space sim kind of game with a funky setting, some wild characters and some 'unique' voice acting, which you can sample in the video.
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Jun 9, 2022 05:01
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Made a new longform video on the story of Transistor. Transistor is a strange one because the game hides much of the nature of the world from the player. Regardless, I still think there are some interesting elements that make me think of the fall of many previous online communities, and how we ourselves on SA almost fell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vMEvf6MxGQ Sardonik fucked around with this message at 09:13 on Mar 4, 2023 |
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Mar 4, 2023 09:11
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