Been trying to play some SC2 tonight but its laggy as hell! It sucks but 2 clearly superior opponents timed out before I did giving me the win in each game. Small victory for team p3t3!

I’m still having lots of trouble vs Zerg. I’ve yet to win a single match against them as Protoss and I’m usually getting murdered in the first 5 minutes. Practice is the only way I’m going to get better, but I’ve yet to find an even slightly workable strategy against them.

Tips gladly accepted.

Premise: The Robot Council has decided to relocate you to the beautiful planet of Chiron Beta Prime in an effort to provide you with more comfortable living away from the cold metallic, robot dominated life of your homeworld. You will be provided with a homestead and a means to provide for yourself. The Robot Council wishes you good luck in your future endeavors!

Upon arriving at Chiron Beta Prime you discover that the planet has suffered a devastating catastrophe, and while the surviving half of the planet is indeed beautiful, the side you were assigned to has been blasted into thousands of city sized asteroids which are now slowly beginning to orbit the planet. Cheerfully ignoring your protest your robot pilot (piloting a robot spacecraft) drops you off at your assigned chunk of land assuring you that it its perfectly safe and healthy for a human to live on a rock in space. He explains that in return for this generous grant of land you will be expected to fill a storage container with various trivial things such as ore which will be picked up once a week. Admitting that this plot of land is in somewhat of a worse condition than when it was assigned to you by the Robot Commission on H.A.I.R. (Human Affairs and Interstellar Relocation), and wishing to make your new home as comfortable as possible he leaves you with an extra month of air and departs with a whistle.

Gameplay: The player works and develops various mine shafts throughout his assigned asteroid drilling out various exotic substances such as ‘Photon Salt’ and ‘EM Broccoli’ (so named for its crystalline structure resembling terrestrial broccoli). Each substance takes different amounts of time to harvest. The collected material is then placed in the storage unit for weekly pickup.

The Robot overlords protectors set a production quota every month and if this quota is met the player is awarded with additional life support such as air for the air tank, or batteries for the radiation shielding. If the quotas are exceeded the player is rewarded with a selection of items from robot-themed holiday decorations to fun improvements to his/her asteroid (such as a new soylent green processor) and even more efficient mining equipment. The items available would never be anything a human would be happy to receive under normal circumstances but will be presented as if the player should be ecstatic to have the opportunity to have them.

The player must check on his mine shafts to insure that there are no jams or other delays. Unlike farmville, a shaft (finding its equivalent in the farm plot) constantly produces ore at a fixed rate. This rate drops over time or can temporarily halt altogether until input from the player restores it back to 100%. There are other things that can be done to get people hooked on clicking, but since this isn’t a formal game proposal and I’m late for my drawing class I’m not going to hash them all out here. Maybe I’ll edit this post later with more.

Edit: Holy crap I forgot to mention that this was inspired by the insanely awesome Jonathan Coulton song of the same name.

Its interesting that the author has a genuine problem with this game/genre and lots of comments are of the black and white, take it or quit variety.  I think its valid to ask why a certain genre is having problems and whether the problems are with the games themselves or the players personal perception of them.

Personally I feel like the wheels have come off the JRPG train and heres why.  Early Japanese RPGs were strongly influenced by an American game called Wizardry which was released in the 80s.  Its popularity in Japan is such that while the franchise ended in America years ago Japan kept making new games under the Wizardry label.  Anyone who has played Etrian Odyssey on DS has experienced a Japanese direct descendant of the Wizardry formula.

One of the hallmarks of the Wizardry (and really all American RPGs,) style is a streamlined story that usually boils down to something like ‘you’re good, hes bad, get the item, save the world’.  This is true for even recent RPGs such as Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. Starting with FF7, JRPGs took the off-ramp into their own territory with stories with ambiguous antagonists, convoluted plots and taciturn or outright whiny protagonists.  In a short period I went from having an in game avatar that let me be a badass saving the world to taking a 3rd person view of someone I wasn’t sure I even liked who was on a quest to um… well I’m not sure exactly?  Something about my dad being a jerk when I was little?

As technology progressed it gave designers a much broader canvas and more media with which to tell a story and developers felt compelled to use their new toys to expand their projects into new territory, almost completely abandoning the lineage that got them there to begin with.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it creates a large divide in the styles of JRPG before and after FF7.

I cut my RPG teeth on the D&D ‘gold box’ games, the original FF, Dragon Warrior and Phantasy Star, all of which follow the Wizardry formula closely (particularly Phantasy Star).  Those who grew up in the post FF7 world will have a vastly different opinion of what makes a good JRPG I’m sure.

But lets be honest here.  You’ll never produce a cutting edge hardware platform again.  This is fine for the hordes of party games that have currently sprung up around your console.  They’re raking in the cash for you in licensing fees and have become the bread and butter of the Wii platform.  The problem is that you’ve corraled 3 of the best gaming franchises in the industry to the least powerful hardware, tethered to a platform that can never truly let them shine.  I’m speaking here of Super Mario Bros. Zelda and Metroid.  Because of this I will never see a Samus Aran with more polygons in her character model than in an entire level in Metroid Prime melt my television with an HD Charge Beam.
Look.  I know you want to keep these games to yourself, who wouldn’t, they’re awesome games and you’ve spent a lot of time and money making them that way.  But face it, you don’t need them to sell consoles anymore.  Hell your consoles practically sell themselves!  Isn’t it time to let Zelda and Metroid off the leash to become the industry giants they once were?  Theres nothing to be gained by chaining Samus and Link to underpowered (but yet still totally awesome!) hardware.  Develop them for the PS3 or 360, slap your big ol’ NINTENDO logo on the startup screen, and let your fans have the mind-blowing Zelda and Metroid experience they’ve been craving since the days when the SNES was king!  Go ahead and keep SMB Wii only.  Its your oldest baby and no-one will begrudge you that.  I promise I’ll keep buying Nintendo hardware as long as you keep making SMB games for it.  But please PLEASE let Metroid and Zelda run free, free to become the triple A titles they deserve to be!

If you search your soul you’ll know I’m right, but if you can’t find the strength to do what needs to be done, sell me the franchise.  I promise I’ll take as good care of it as you do.  I’ll even let you come visit any time you like.

I thought this was a neat direction to take it, after all as a race we’ve been looking at horizontal ships for thousands of years, but then I started thinking about the realities of building a starship this way.  In the real world large office buildings have many high capacity, high speed elevators to get people from floor to floor.  This is because people are very good at walking around on a flat surface, but not so good at climbing up or down.  If we were we’d have ladders everywhere instead of escalators and elevators.  Ships in space would be no different.
Real space has no gravity making movement in one direction as easy (or as difficult) as movement in any other.  But science fiction has neatly side-stepped the no-gravity issue with one explanation or another in nearly every movie book or game on the subject, so this post assumes that ships have on-board gravity.  Given this scenario, horizontally oriented ships would be the most efficient, in terms of personnel mobility as well as maintenance.  All those elevator shafts would be full of moving parts that would need constant upkeep to function properly.  There is an exception to this though, if we move into the realm of Star Trek and use matter transmitters for intra-ship travel, rather than just extra-ship travel we bypass the mobility problem but still might drive up our maintenance costs.  After all, we wouldn’t want Yeoman Johnson to come out the other end with his spleen where his nuts used to be.

If we take an Imperial Star Destroyer from Star Wars as an example, we find that its weapons are mostly mounted on top, and along the left and right edges.  The left and right edges are a problem because guns mounted here have huge blind spots and because of the diamond shape the top mounted guns also have a restricted field of fire.  The underside has almost no weapons at all, and no bridge to direct their fire.   This shape is great for ‘intensifying forward firepower’ but sucks for any other firing arc and is especially bad for shooting anything directly behind the ship.  If we kept the same shape a simple solution would to be to slice the top off, copy it, flip it upside down and attach it to the bottom.  If we’re in the realm of gravity generators it should then be a simple matter of installing 2 sets with opposite polarity so that no matter which side of the ship someone was on they were always ‘right side up’.  Because of the diamond wedge shape this doesn’t get rid of the massive blind spot at the back, but at least it helps provide useful firing arcs for the rest of the ship.

Another option would be to have the ship fly in vertical position but align the artificial gravity generators so that to walk ‘forward’ would actually be walking down the spine of the ship, while ‘back’ would be up.  This is essentially keeping the same configuration as in the previous example and just rotating the ship 90 degrees down in relation to its direction of travel.  The crew would get that reassuring planetary gravity alignment they crave and allow the ship design to break out of the horizontal orientation box.

“Congratulations — you are ideally suited to be a Virgle Pioneer; so ideally so, in fact, that one wonders why you aren’t already living on a remote South Pacific island, serving as a biosphere test subject, washing dishes at a North Pole research station during the depths of winter or writing a highly intelligent, articulate political blog. At any rate, we want you for one of our upcoming Virgle launches. You’ll love it — the pay is great, the view from the spaceport should be spectacular, and we’re told that algae and spirulina actually start to taste good after the hundredth consecutive day.”

So long, suckers! Have fun killing each other, I’ll be playing backgammon on the way to Mars.

And death shall have no dominion… Really.