It's a-Me, Stereotype-io...

In 1993, one of the very first, and worst, video-game-to-movie adaptations were made. That movie was Super Mario Bros. And boy, was it a pile.

So I should start off that this isn't a Nerdview. My Nerdviews are meant to be exemplars of professional reviews, and a key trait of them is that anyone should be able to read one of my reviews and come to a contrary opinion of the movie. A fair, well-explained and contextualized review should allow for people who have opposing tastes to mine. A review should not tell people whether they should or shouldn't enjoy a movie, but whether they're likely to enjoy it or not. That's an important distinction, as nuanced as it is.

So this is not a review, because I'm going to flat out say it: you should not see this movie, unless you need to cure yourself of optimism for the video-game-to-movie franchise. In that case, Dr. Ben will prescribe 200cc of Super Mario Bros after eating--because it will ruin your appetite.

First of all, the plot of the movie was a mess. Inspired by the cartoony idyllic landscapes of the games, the plot naturally transplants the protagonists in a formless cyberpunk world of super-pollution and made Dennis Hopper King Koopa, the sleazier-than-usual president of a parallel dimension where humans descended from dinosaurs. Mario, played by the awesome Bob Hoskins, is dragged along by his brother Luigi, played by the toothy John Leguizamo, as they chase Luigi's best-girl Daisy across the ick-dimension. Daisy, played by Punisher-wife Samantha Mathis, turns out to be the long-lost princess of the suck-dimension, and for arbitrary reasons that makes her the key to Koopa uniting the dimensions and make him the de-facto ruler of both worlds. There's a lot of cheap fights with the most ridiculous little-headed goons of all time, a devolving-weapon that reduced Daisy's father into a fungus and other political enemies into goombas,  and the super-jump gimmick of the game is a pair of jump-jet boots that elicit some of the worst wire work in the genre.

The awkwardness of this screenshot is seconded only by the film's total fail.

Just reviewing my recollection of the film, I'm asking a dozen why's all over again. Why is Mario the punk of the plot? He's not initiating the action, central to the plot's conceit, or even getting the girl in the end. Why make King Koopa the president of a dystopian bolthole of retarded dino-men? How is that more plausible than a naturalistic fantasy land of colorful critters? And president, really? Way to make the story more accessible to the 7-12 year-old age range you were shooting for with your film. I'm sure they'll appreciate the mock election posters and "environmentalist" message.

See that "elect Koopa" poster? That makes it edgy.
Being edgy distracts from the stink, right?

Probably the biggest travesty of this film is that Bob Hoskins is actually good. As far as the cringe-worthy script and head-poundingly dumb directing lets him go, that is. He pulls off the swaggering of a Brooklyn plumber-turned-reluctant-attache-to-the-hero with his natural aplomb. And with this coming two years after his role as Smee in Hook and five years after starring in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I think he was positioning himself to play more kid-oriented roles. And then this was inflicted on his resume, the poor bastard. The production values around his veteran performance are just staggeringly bad when you bear in mind that this movie came after Terminator 2 championed early computer-generated effects and Aliens showed how effective purely practical effects could be. Not to mention that a little over a year later, Jurassic Park would be coming out and really rubbing our noses in how pathetic this movie's effects were.

The uber-intimidating badguys

Now, at the time, I'm sure every decision to deviate from the source material of the games was made on the assumption that literally depicting the game would be unbelievable to audiences. But in moving away from a surrealistic world that was already completely familiar and plausible to the target audience, the inept filmmakers made something that highlighted its own stupidity and failed to live up to the consistency of a cartoon world.

Yeah, burned.

But you can make something that starts with a familiar, real-world palette and then successively introduce fantastic elements that bring it even closer in line with the source material. And in so doing, you could make a Super Mario Bros movie that is both fairly faithful to the games and yet still accessible to non-gaming audiences.

As an example, and to apologize for dredging up bad memories of Super Marios Bros, I present to you: The Four Players.

I love this video, which depicts Mario as a gruff everyman who sort of goes through a more mundane Mr. Incredible workout routine to become the block-smashing bruiser of the game's stories. Just the label of 'the fixer' evokes many of my favorite hero tropes. Mario isn't just a happy Eye-talian--he's a hard-nosed man you count on to snake your toilets and rescue the princess.

Heshyeah.

Alright, I'm not crazy about Luigi going full pyro at the end there. If he would've stuck with breathing fire, or even just being a nutso pyromaniac loading up a rucksack of flower-powered molotov cocktails, would have felt much more natural to me. That said, I love the juxtaposition of Luigi as the strung-out bad brother who only reluctantly gets his act together when straight-shooter Mario comes a-calling. And who doesn't love the blunt characterization and drama of a well-done support group confession?

I need to watch You Kill Me sometime soon.



So I'll admit, that when Peach started singing, I was ready to roll my eyes. But cutting between the idealized club setting of the song and the 24-worthy torture scenes was genius and by the time the music crescendo'd, I was digging the song both on its own merits and for being so epically moving given this woman's circumstance.

Although regaining the fingers was kind of a cop-out, in my opinion. I like consequences in my story-telling, and I think an eight-fingered Peach would subvert the classic princess trope completely. When flesh-eating piranha eat your fingers off, they stay ate.

(Alright, now I'm getting sissy-weepy re-watching the video…)



Toad here as the soldier, is one of the most game-accurate visions of the character, but at the same time he's totally rocking the Guillermo Del Toro vibe. I could just see him riding a giant frog from beneath that tree in Pan's Labyrinth. Yoshi, anyone? Anyways, I'm a big fan of underpowered characters that get brutalized by their own heroism, so giving him the green mushroom (which gives an extra life in the games) is a great way to characterize the fanatically loyal soldier.

So there you go, cynics. You can make a video game adaptation from a really sparse, cartoony game and actually make something with film-worthy drama and consistency. It just doesn't happen. But at least we have awesome fan trailers to give us hope every once in a while.

Have a good weekend, nerds.

So so so wrong

(Oh, and Luigi should have a mustache. Nerdery out.)

New Mandate Trailer

I've talked about The Mandate a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't wait till the weekend to blog about this latest update on the Romanovs-in-space epic. Perihelion Games has released a cool new trailer for their game, featuring Brit David Bradley doing a kickin' voice-over as Admiral Suvarov for an incredibly enticing trailer for the in-development space epic. Now, I'm not familiar with David Bradley (I'm not a fan of Harry Potter or Doctor Who, and I'm too scared of fleshy bits to watch Game of Thrones), but apparently he's got about six miles of nerd-cred. For me, he sounds a heck of a lot like Adam Nicolson, British author of the book examining Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, Seize The Fire. (I absolutely love that book, and Nicholson's wry English consonants most recently accompanied me on a kind of creepy bus ride from Indianapolis to Chicago last summer.)


In addition to the awesome VO quality that we're going to get for this sci-fi gem, I just love the tone they establish in this game. This is going to be a game where NPCs aren't just faceless meeples that you stat-grind as a parallel leveling mechanic--they're an engaging, dynamic, and fragile element of the game. They're your friends and your resources, and nothing you do can shield them from the risk that entails. Your crew will suffer losses, and the way you manage that loss on a dramatic and tactical level is going to be a central gameplay mechanic. It is very Nelsonian in that way, which grabs me all the right ways. (Seriously, check out Seize The Fire--the author-read audio book at least.)

It also makes me think of how exciting and avant-garde Mass Effect was going to be back in the days leading up to the first game's release. In particular, there was this commercial spot that still resonates with me to this day:


The idea of having mutually exclusive, NPC-destroying, time-based decisions to make is so much fun, and we never quite got the pay off in Mass Effect that the above commercial promised. Each game had very specific set-piece decisions that would very transparently give you a choice to kill person X or Y, but it never made it a heavy, pressed-for-time, combat-based choice like you get from this 48 second commercial. The first Mass Effect came close with the Virmire decision, but that still was a very canned moment. No matter how many times your NPCs got railgunned to the face, they were immune to any real injury until the script suddenly decided they were mortal.

With The Mandate, though, they're repeatedly stressing that every time your ship's hull tears open, you're losing crew, and that loss will not only potentially kill off individual characters, but having to replace or evaluate crew will impact the character of your ship and your character. This dynamic will make it where even the most assured victories will still have weight, as you try to grab as much power as you can without losing critical crew.

Oh, man, if this game doesn't get funded to the moon and back, I will be so disappointed in you, internet.

Kickstart: Rayguns, Space Frontiersmen, and White Russia in Space

Kickstart Your Weekend: A series in which I occasionally spotlight Kickstarter projects that are ending soon and deserve a little nerd love. Also, I'll highlight some past projects as well, as you never know when these enterprises are going to turn up again.

Today we're getting back into regular articles, with a laser-zap back into Kickstart Your Weekend. And these three are a particularly fun selection of games for fans of very different science fiction sub-genres. We've got a miniatures wargame-powered reboot of a classic pulp sci-fi series, a PC management game with a crude frontiersman angle, and finally a space epic computer RPG with a galactic empire inspired by pre-commie Russia.

Yeah, you heard me.

Before we dig into it, though, there were several awesome Kickstarter projects that wrapped in the past few months. And while you can't pledge, I thought I'd name-drop a few of them just in case you wanted to follow their development and release.

There were several interesting movies successfully funded this summer: Bound, a Lego brickfilm with a spiritual theme and made by a brother and sister team; the brickfilm Melting Point also funded successfully, and I can't wait to see this feature's take on the wry humor the creator, Jonathan Vaughan established in his other short films; Man vs. Snake, a quirky documentary based on a man trying to reclaim a video game record from the early days of arcade games, helmed by two editors from Battlestar Galactica; MMPR funded quite well, and so they'll get a shot at making a couple of episodes to snare all the grown-up fans of the original three seasons of Power Rangers. The Devil Walks in Salem looks kind of cheesy, but its remarkable distinction is that it's adapted from an RPG--not from the rules or setting--but from an actual play session between some honest-to-goodness role-players. Even if the end result turns out clumsy, I think it'll be worth a watch for anyone who ever looked around their gaming table during a really gripping session and thought "Why can't they make movies like this?"

(And if you don't know the feeling I'm talking about, watch this episode of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop. You're welcome.)

On the sad-to-see-it fail side of things, Stephan Frost, the creator of the intriguing and beautiful Mortifera graphic novel, failed to get funding to create the animated pitch for Hell Mary--a Weird War One-type setting about a redheaded femme fatale offing Black Hand goons and Kaiser Wilhelm cronies. It could've been great, but conventional animation still proves to be a big hurdle for Kickstarter projects--you have to raise a lot of money for relatively small rewards. Plus, Frost's offered incentive for success and stretch goals were probably too quirky and off-the-wall to serve their purpose--enough funds would have seen him get a second middle name of "Bonertown" and get a tramp stamp of two unicorns in...conjunction. I know I wouldn't want to inflict that on any man or beast, unless it was part of a really weird court sentencing.

And finally, probably the coolest film project I didn't report on this summer was definitely Fire City: Interpreter of Signs. A horror-fantasy story with a noir mystery flavor and really grotesquely interesting practical effects, Fire City feels to me like the sort of film I wanted the director of Pan's Labyrinth to make--rather than a thought-lite smash 'em up full of forgettable robots and monsters and with the only interesting characters thrown into the background while cardboard cut-outs subjugated them with their plot protection. (Oh snap: that dangerously run-on sentence really tore Pacific Rim a new one, huh?) Anyways, Fire City had the advantage of already having a really creepy short that shows off the subtly disturbing characters, and let them raise twenty grand over their one hundred grand campaign goal. That, and the sentimental daughter-focused thematic behind the production really gets to me as a father, and I'm really curious to see how this world of starving demons and dealers turns out. Just make sure the kids are fast asleep before watching it--even the sounds can make your skin crawl. Check out their webpage for more tastes of their unnerving aesthetic and eerie style.

Games, glorious games. Kickstarter is always good for game-nerding-out. The Long Dark, a first-person post-apocalyptic game with an emphasis on Grylls-esque survival, just recently finished a successful campaign. I love gritty survival games that aren't afraid to punish players with hunger, disease, and sleep dynamics, and the promised tension of making meaningful survive-or-social choices is too cool. Golem Arcana, a miniatures wargame powered by a tablet app and specialized stylus for rules and stat reference, squeaked by with full funding after a personal plug from Chris Roberts. Personally I'm not too keen on a wargame with forces composed of nothing but golems, but...Chris Roberts. (Blogger, how the frak do you not have golem in your spell-check dictionary?!) Alien Uprising, a cooperative sci-fi board game where players try to hold off savage alien natives while repairing their wrecked spaceship. I didn't pledge for it, but I'll be keeping an eye out to play it at conventions. Belle of the Ball, a card game with fantastic art and a princess-party-conniving-set-collection-gimmick, almost snared me into its grip, but I was much too masculine for such sissy stuff. That, and the game mechanics didn't seem as entertaining as the card art. Then I turned around and pledged for Marrying Mr. Darcy, a Pride and Prejudice card game produced by a Wisconsin local that has players trying to court the bachelors of the Austen book. My wife didn't even talk me into it.



Whatever. I don't mind your small-mindedness. I was excited for Marrying Mr. Darcy even before they hit the stretch goal that adds undead elements to the game.

Predictably, the music-powered fantasy MMORPG Anythmn failed to meet its funding goal. Which means that for the time being if I want to combine role-playing games and trumpet-playing, I'll have to find a very tolerant LARP group in the midwest. Fairytale Games: The Battle Royale funded with more than $100,000 over their original goal. I pledged for the project and want to play the game but my enthusiasm has been severely muted since they censored Esmerelda (of Hunchback of Notre Dame) to be an alchemical assassin instead of a gypsy assassin for some vague political correctness concerns. I mean, the game is Hunger Games murder fantasy with fairly cheesecake interpretations of many of their characters--and they're afraid of using the word gypsy to describe a character for whom being a gypsy is a plot point?! Gugh, I say. Plus by the end of the campaign the list of miniatures coming my way has gotten so confusing that I'm just trying to forget the project until I actually have everything in front of me. Massive Chalice did well by pulling in a cool half million more than their initial goal, but the controversy over Double Fine's previous game has me grateful that I passed on this campaign. I'll wait and see if they can actually deliver what was promised.

Projects I backed during the past three months

The summer also had a few neat print projects funded through Kickstarter. Men vs Cosplay was a 2014 cosplay calendar that eschewed boobs for biceps. I would've pledged, but I'm a jealous nerd. Also, you may recall I'm a big mammalian fan. Kids, Eh?, a web-comic annual print book, funded with triple it's $2,000CAD goal. The author is a stay-at-home Canuck dad with a one year-old and three year-old always providing comedic fodder for his weekly strip. Check it out. And FUBAR, the zombie alternate history comic series, funded it's most successful installment yet: Mother Russia. It's about a Soviet lady sniper in Stalingrad saving a toddler from uncounted Nazi zombies. I pledged on this one hard, as even my wife wanted to see more of the viscerally violent cutie-pie story.

On the mint-y side of things, there were two projects for nerdy numismatists. First, the Futuristic Metal Coins project from Minion Games brought us a great selection of uniquely sci-fi tokens for use in board games and RPGs. Between having these shiny creds to serve as cashy money and the upcoming Firefly RPG, I think I'll be doing some gaming in the 'verse in the next year. For more fantastic gaming, Conquistador Games funded The Best Damn Metal Gaming Coins Ever! Seriously detailed, high-quality coins, many of these pieces are inspired by historical examples. They're also non-denominational, meaning that they don't have a prescribed value printed on them, so if you want to throw odd pence-shilling-crowns around in your gaming, you can.

And probably one of my favorite projects of the past three months has to be the Hollow Earth Expedition: Revelations of Mars. Hollow Earth Expedition (HEX) is an RPG by Exile Games that I've followed for a while but never got into. Built on a cinematic system based on dice pools, HEX is founded upon Jules Verne and E.R. Burroughs imagery as they populate the center of the 1930s earth with a land full of weird science, dinosaurs, and savages. If you ever watched the Aussie show Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, you're on the right track. Revelations of Mars expands that setting to the red planet, with beautifully bejeweled alien princesses and big bug aliens needing stomping in grand E.R. Burroughs fashion. Since my wife and I enjoyed John Carter (of Mars!) so much, she actually mandated that I pledge on this particular RPG campaign. Well, who am I to look an RPG mount in the mouth? I pledged to receive Revelations of Mars when it releases next year and the preceding HEX books digitally right away. Wow. I'll do an in-depth article on HEX at some point, because I don't think I've had so much fun just reading an RPG sourcebook since the Serenity RPG came out.

So that's it for catch-up, but what's out now and worthy of a nerd's radar?

Mars Attacks

What it is: Mars Attacks began life in 1962 as a trading card series. A somewhat linear series of cards featuring alien invasion, slaughter, and torture before the eventual human counter, Mars Attacks was a violent, gory romp in pulp sci-fi, with rayguns, flying saucers, and swooning women at their mercy on a lot of the cards. Now, hot on the heels of their Kickstarter successes with Kings of War, Dreadball, Loka chess, and Deadzone, Mantic Games is producing a licensed miniatures wargame adaptation of Mars Attacks. The game is a lighter treatment to wargaming than their previous projects, evoking quick violent skirmishes between Martians and human resistance without a ten pound rulebook to slow things down. Even movement and ranges are based on a coarse 3-inch grid to eschew the all-but-ubiquitous measuring tape of other games.

Why it's exciting: This game, based on a well-known classic license by a seasoned producer of wargames products, stands poised to be Mantic Games' greatest hit yet. With three weeks to go, the game is already at $438,000 pledged out of their original goal of $50,000 so there's already dozens of stretch goals, updates, and add-ons unlocked. Being an old-salt and game snob myself, I tend to turn up my nose at rules that don't let me pull out my tape measure and have fewer than five stats per model, but I can't deny that the quality miniatures in this set--and the insanely good deals attached to the campaign's success--are extremely enticing. If nothing else, I might be seduced by the promise of their plastic US soldiers and flatbed truck-turned sci-fi transport/technical.



Rimworld

What it is: Rimworld is a sci-fi colony sim game for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Players must coordinate the survivors of a crashed colony ship on a procedurally-created world rife with natural disaster and other hazards. Colonists can be directed to mine, farm, build free-form buildings and facilities, and defend the colony from raiders. The game has developed a number of dynamic, interesting features that are coordinated by an AI director that can be selected to suit your play-style--whether looking for an exploration-focused game, a life or death struggle, or a relaxing buildup experience. Right now this is a one-man project with a lot of promise, but the campaign seeks to let the creator, Tynan Sylvester, hire a dedicated artist to add nice graphics to his ambitious game.

Why it's exciting: With over $140,000CAD raised of an original goal of twenty grand and two weeks to go, Rimworld is definitely going to be a success. Creator Tynan hasn't set any stretch goals for the game, wanting to work on it organically without imposing artificial goals leading to development bloat. That's a promising, healthy attitude for a small indie game, especially since so many games that succeed on Kickstarter fall victim to development bloat (Double Fine being the flagship example of this pitfall).



Mandate

What it is: Mandate is a sci-fi PC RPG with an epic scope. Set in a galactic empire inspired by 19th century Russia, Mandate is going to place the player in command of a Mandate ship at the outbreak of a civil war, giving the captain tactical control over their crew and boarding parties and maneuvering their ship in battle as well. Apparently, the game's campaign will grow from commanding a single ship to controlling outposts and stations and building up to having a subordinate fleet of their own. It's being developed on Unity engine, which means that not only is the game going to support Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, but they're already releasing preview modules of the game on their website for fans to sample--right now they have a build-a-ship module that allows players to customize and then destroy a flagship of their very own.

Why it's exciting: I have a few different buttons that can easily cinch my support for a Kickstarter. Sci-fi role-playing game with tactile elements? You got me. Cross-platform support planned? Nice. Preview modules of the game? Cool. Dynamic choice-based gameplay? Yes yes. Russian space empress voice-over for the intro video? Easy buddy, you've already made your sale. I'm in for this game, and I haven't been this anxious to see a Kickstarter succeed since Interstellar Marines (mentioned in a previous post here),  which was another cross-platform Unity-based sci-fi game. At $135,000 right now, Mandate has a long ways to go to reach their half million goal, but they also went for a longer campaign and so have well over a month to get there.

Holy moly. Not only did I just touch base on more than twenty Kickstarter projects in one post, but this is also the third article this week, which means that it's knocking off a point from my 31 post deficit.

A Pregnant Pause in the Blog Sprint

Man, I take a week off and quite a lot of things happen. We had CliffyB proving he's the popped collar of the gaming industry, E3, more dismal Xbox One news followed by a surprise reversal, a couple of interesting new Kickstarter projects, and Free RPG Day this past week. Now, since I'm a little behind, I'm going to try to cover all these things briefly in one post, so I won't forget to mention them.

On the running Xbox One debacle, there's some mixed news. Specifically, on the questions of DRM, Xbox had been looking more and more arrogant and defensive. Enter E3 and Angry Joe, from the Angry Joe Show.

If you check out Angry Joe's (remarkably diplomatic with a low cuss-count) interview with Larry Hryb (Xbox's Major Nelson), you get a real good view of the sarcastic, patronizing, and disrespectful way Xbox is handling the concerns of consumers:

"Xbox One is the future. Do you want to come with me to the future?"

"I'm not a lawyer--are you a lawyer?"

"You're not on the development team, are you?"

And so forth in response to Joe's questions on the key concerns of the Xbox One's DRM policies. It's really worrisome, and the fact that convivial Major Nelson is shilling so hard for Xbox that he becomes this abrasive makes it all the more shocking to me. I mean, Angry Joe may be known for curse-filled rants and ripping apart bad games, but I think he's a teddy bear overall, and he's surprisingly forgiving of a lot of video games and their companies (I really think he drank Bioware's Kool-Aid on the Mass Effect 3 "extended ending"), and his interviews are really polite and respectful. Even when he's asking hard questions like he did of Major Nelson. Plus, Joe hasn't even gotten around to the really big implications of the Xbox plan. They are:

1) Microsoft's goal is to price control the console game market through trust-like activity between Xbox and game publishers. If Microsoft can make consumers swallow their DRM pill and anti-ownership assault on consumers, then age will be the only practical factor in determining the cost of a game. As it is, when a AAA game tanks, second-hand retailers get a surplus of returns that drive down not only the cost of used games but the new products as well. If they can cut out that consumer-based check on game quality, then Microsoft and Developers could form a closed loop for pricing their games so that you'd never be able to find a good deal for a game, no matter how bad it is. Heck, if price control wasn't the point of this policy, it'd be pretty silly of Microsoft to invest in developing their own re-vamped digital distribution system when they could've saved a lot of money by porting other services like Desura or Steam to their box. But by keeping it all in their hands, they control the prices of their games, and the only reason to lower prices would be to stay competitive with Sony and Nintendo. Maybe.

2) The daily check-in policy, while trumped up as an anti-piracy measure, is almost certainly a method to farm customer usage information. Let's just think about this for a second--there are a lot of ways to accomplish what Xbox claims to be trying to do: combat piracy through online verification. A daily online check-in is not necessary. Most simply, you could make it where installing a game from the disc itself requires an online handshake that flags that game as the 'active' version of the game, and deactivate any other installs from that game CD. So why have the daily online policy? To upload a cache of your Xbox's activity. Now, I'm not talking about some conspiracy theory where Xbox is interested in stealing your identity or anything, but the Xbox's TV and game-playing activity for millions of users would be tremendously valuable marketing demographics they could easily sell to advertisers, publishers, whoever. And don't bet the farm that Xbox would ever pass those new profits on to consumers through cheaper prices.


Then the heavens lifted and Microsoft's collective voice boomed from their emerald fortress: they would reverse their DRM and online policies, including their region lock, apparently. First of all, let that be a lesson to all you corporate apologists out there: us entitled raging nerds can make a difference. Maybe. Personally, I think it's just as likely that Microsoft backed down through a combination of investor pressure and the dire predictions of lawyers that they were going to get caught with their briefs down.

More importantly, however, look at Larry Hryb's comments, quoted above, just one week before the whole company reversed course. Granted he's a paid cheer-leader for Microsoft, but that kind of arrogance behind the project doesn't just go away. The certainty that these draconian measures are the "future of gaming" doesn't just go away. And the dishonest implication that this would be a difficult policy to reverse hints at a more insidious truth: if Microsoft decides that it's worth it, after the bad PR dies down and the first few waves of Xbox Ones have been purchased, to try to quietly reinstitute these or similar measures on a captive audience, they'll try. The way they're pulling back their vaunted Family Sharing Plan--which was generating some excited buzz--smacks of a bargaining chip to give customers when the other shoe drops.

And if you need anymore reason to retroactively hate Microsoft for what they almost did or might try to do again, here's some chaw in your maw: Cliff Bleszinski, the popped collar of the gaming industry, jumped in to defend Microsoft's plan to prune-squeeze gamers. CliffyB, as the wannabe Situation is known, is the creative "mind" behind the Gears of War franchise, and he recently stepped down from Epic Games to basically not shut up about his stupid cult-of-the-game-developer ideals. Now that Microsoft has about-faced despite his eloquent erroneous defense of their plans, he's sounding off that these developments will be bad for the industry and the consumer, predicting: "More studios WILL close and you'll see more PC and mobile games" Dun-dun-DUN!!! Wow, Cliffy, thanks for that realization, and thanks for trying to pin long-standing consumer patterns on consumers' reactions from last week. Cliff Bleszinski: don't be that guy. Also, don't be on the same issue as him. And if you're in the same region as him, check out the real estate market elsewhere.




Kickstart: Fanciful Bloodsport, Musical Mystics, & Frigid Freaks

Fairytale Games

What it is: Fairytale Games is a character-based card game of survival, exploration, and battles to the death. Set in a world run by the evil trinity of the Dark Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and the Snow Queen, the three tyrants secure their rule by persecuting any upstarts, especially those associated with the Enchanted Forest. Their method of persecution? A public bloodsport set in the wilderness of their kingdoms, pitting all sorts of classic fairytale figures like the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Alice, Pinocchio and 36 more in a Hunger Games sort of scenario.

Why it's exciting: The game promises to be a unique take on a lot of familiar figures, turning Pinocchio, for instance, into a tortured sort of Frankenstein's monster, and making the damsels into hardened survivalists that would make the originators of these violent fairytales proud (because most of the original fairytales are way more violent than Disney's sterilized versions). The mechanics involve laying out cards in a freely expanding grid as you explore the world, recruiting or killing off other survivors, finishing quests, and gaining items. And since it promises to support 1 to 10 players it is a rare game indeed that both features solo play and stabbing up to 9 buddies in the back in the course of one game. Very fun. They're nearly funded, and the stretch goals will potentially unlock a huge number of extra cards for backers--including a zombie version, or miniatures at the very highest stretch goal. I'm not a huge card gamer, but this set looks more like a dynamic battle game than a shuffle-fest, so I'm already in on it.



Anthymn

What it is: Anthymn is a typical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), where players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy land in the midst of turmoil. Except all the players are mages in this game. And all magic is tied to music. So spells are actually uniquely composed tunes, and battles are actually special effects duels of music and fire. Players choose a faction based not only on gameplay style, but on musical play style--picking from classical, electronic, tribal, or other styles that have a specific look, culture, and magical power associated with them.

Why it's exciting: This Kickstarter campaign is not looking healthy. With less than two weeks to go, they are at less than $30,000 of their $600,000 goal. Which is a real shame, as this game shows a lot more imagination and guile than almost any other game being crowdfunded right now--they promise a rich, dynamic, player-created soundscape where players trade and teach others their battle-songs, and the core mechanics of the game sound like they will educate people on the basics of musical theory. Even if you aren't going to back this project, you should really consider spreading the word so they have good exposure and support should the worst happen. But seriously, back this. Where else can you be this frakkin' cool playing a trumpet? (Four years of band camp will tell you: nowhere--unless you count that football game where you finished half-time with the Braveheart speech and a trumpet blast)

Frozen State

What it is: Take a bunch of Russians in a necessarily wintry setting, add in some critters from John Carpenter's The Thing, throw in a global apocalypse and old school Fallout-style gameplay, and you have Frozen State, the best thing to come out of Moscow since Sean Connery. Created by Snow Arc, the computer game features an older style of RPG campaign, where you pick one of three preset characters and run them through an RPG where you battle the elements in addition to hostile survivors and things-with-too-many-mouths/limbs/bumpy-bits. The game will involve a non-linear campaign where seeking out resources and loot in devastated Siberia is a constant lure.

Why it's exciting: I really like the wintry setting, and the fact that survival will be a central element is cool. They're talking about making a meaningful day/night cycle where going out at night is dangerous due to weather and the creatures drawn out by darkness, which sounds atmospheric and crunchy. I haven't pulled the trigger on this one yet, though, as its funding is in British Pounds, and I've yet to back a pounds-based project. But with all the cool goodies they've got and the fact they're shooting for a Windows/Mac/Linux release, this might be the time to do it.



Free RPG Day

Last Saturday was Free RPG Day 2013. An annual observance since 2007, it's a chance for RPG publishers and retailers to team up to give players free demos, supplements, and teasers of their games in an effort to spread awareness of their games and promote the hobby in general. This year Pathfinder, Battletech, Star Wars, Cosmic Patrol, and more all got their free on at your Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS). Make sure to keep an eye out for freebies next year, and support your FLGS. It's a great way to browse other systems and maybe add a few new games to your hit-list.




So what have I been doing while all this stuff was going down?

Getting daddied up.

Again.

Once more my irresistible procrastinator genes have so infected my offspring that my son cruised past his due date. So once more we got to schedule our son's birthday, essentially, by going in to the hospital to get induced. Man, you do not sleep well once your pregnant wife gets to her due date. Throughout the later stages of the pregnancy you start to look at her like a damp, full grocery bag--any sudden movement could tear out her bottom and wreck a whole lot of perishables. But once you hit that final week to deadline and go past it, things take on new severity. Like when Sylvester the Cat drinks the nitroglycerine in the old 1940s cartoon, every movement is sudden death. Needless to say, it's hard to sleep in that kind of environment. (And adding a second boy under 3 years old to our household probably won't help!)

Then, the next day, you go through a weirdly calm morning of getting things ready, shipping the kid off to the grandparents, and then try to have a nice brunch before going in to the hospital for the scheduled horror show. Few things in life are quite so unpleasant as trying to eat with a woman who's pregnant with a child other than their first. Something about that first birth and the 20 or so hospital staff touring her monstrous hoo-hah gives a woman the impression that everyone wants to hear about what's going on with their sensitives forever. For at least one year per kid, everything is mucous, membranes, and fluids, and any time you try to gracefully bow out of the all-access experience, you're instead rewarded with an eye and earful of something you'd rather believe was only the province of R-rated movies. There is no escape.

The build up is kind of mesmerizingly complex, but also tediously long, and you don't really feel like much of what's happening relates to what's about to occur. The little lady is thrown into a flattering hospital ensemble, hooked up to machines, and set on display in the middle of a sci-fi creche. It's like the Disney Alien Encounter, except the lights are on, nothing is sanitary, and the grotesque monstrosity in the middle of the room is the one doing most of the screaming.

And the main event--whew. First, there's a whole lot of doctors and nurses taking the Livingston tour of your baby's den, and then when he comes out, you're suddenly surprised that your huge wife was able to hold, feed, and pass the little Roswell alien. It's like Mary Poppins' hand-bag, except when it starts, everything improbable is going in, and then when something comes out it's totally different--though no less improbable.

So that's been my week. That, and spending the past week fending my two year-old away from the fascinating newborn. On the hospital ride home, he calmly tried to convince us that the new addition would be more comfortable back in mom's belly. But since she nixed that plan, he's stuck with a little brother. Poor guy.

State of Decay...

...Running, Screaming, and Bleeding Through the Motions

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the Nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

I was originally going to save this post for a more polished Nerdview later on, but I figure now is as good a time as any to put my thoughts out there, since I've now spent at least a dozen or so hours playing it within the past week.

Expectations 'Odor': State of Decay is an open-world sandbox game in which the player controls a small community of survivors in a world overrun by zombies. The player directs the survivors in scavenging for supplies and building a base from which they hold the zombie infestation at bay. Gameplay involves stealth, vehicles, and straight up combat with the player collecting scores of found weapons from baseball bats to shotguns to fight the shuffling menace.

I love zombie games. I bought Call of Duty World at War specifically because I heard about an unlockable Nazi zombies mode. Dead Rising was one of the biggest factors in my original decision to get an Xbox 360 in the first place. Left 4 Dead will never be too outdated for me to forsake its twitchy thrill-kill gameplay and epic standoff sequences. And I've also pledged for a Kickstarter project for a game called Dead State, which will be a gritty "true zombie" (slow and no special forms) survival game in which the player takes up turn-based tactical control over his band of survivors as they raid nearby homes and offices in their small Texas town. Hrm...wait a second...

Yeah, it sounds like State of Decay is kind of a ripoff of Dead State at first. That, and the fact that this game had crept under my radar until a mere three days before it was to be released, had actually muted my enthusiasm for this game, fearing it'd be a cash-in on a heavily populated game genre. And that's not the mention the name, which is so similar to Dead State that it might as well be a senile Yoda trying to recite his game library.



Appreciation 'Beef': Boy, was I thrilled with the differences. While superficially similar to the tactical promise of Dead State, State of Decay is a much more stream-lined and light approach to its themes. At its core, State of Decay feels like a focused Rockstar gameplay experience--the animations, controls, and rendering style all draw from that studio's distinct style. I didn't see Rockstar's name anywhere in the credits for this game, but I call straight-up shenanigans on that--especially after playing Undead Redemption, the zombie DLC for Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption. The games are just too tactilely familiar.

The game has that classic Rockstar/Grand Theft Auto action-style gameplay with lite RPG elements thrown in. You level up your skills in Cardio (the first of many Zombieland references in this game), Powerhouse, Fighting, and more through the regular use of the skills, increasing passive benefits regularly and occasionally getting a new ability or move as well. They also track a few keywords about each character's personality traits, as the clash or harmony of characters back at base mean you might come back from a long day of head-smashing to find your teammates at each other's throats. Sigh... Ed, you silly Idol-watching sluggard, I knew I should have dropped you off in that zombie-infested trailer park.

The base-building element of the game gives small, regular benefits that you'll definitely feel, but since the different facilities you'll build are going to be static set-pieces dropped in empty areas of your homebase, they don't necessarily feel as interesting as they are useful. Not to mention that getting the resources to build the base add-ons are a lot more work than you might be prepared for. Expect to spend 20 to 30 minutes gathering resources to build an addition only to have it take another 15 to 30 minutes to build. And that's assuming there isn't a delay due to a shortage of a specific resource.

The open world map is quite spacious. I'd compare it to about the size of one of the states in Red Dead Redemption. The following picture shows about one-fourth of the world map in the game, and it is dense enough with interesting terrain features, lootable buildings and little zombie surprises throughout. It's a well-realized and interesting world, as testified to by how much time I spent in the first town alone before even bothering to explore the second third of the map. I still haven't gotten to the third major region of the map.

This is about one quarter of the total real estate in State of Decay

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': Oh, it's been a while since I've played Red Dead Redemption or LA Noire, which are the games I'd compare most directly to this one in terms of primary gameplay dynamics. The zombies are typical video game undead in that their are several special boss forms and the rank and file zombie is given to running when they want to shake off the eerie shuffle of a true zed-head. Head-shots are the only way to take them down, however, and the rather clunky third-person aiming of the game engine means that dropping a zombie with anything but a shotgun blast takes a little practice and a cool head. And not trying to use the alcoholic accountant as a front-line scavenger.

I love it. The strategy of the game is really just a way to link your self-assigned missions with more narrative and importance, but it works for me. The coolest artifact that carries over from other Rockstar games, though, is the no-save gameplay. The only way to save your status in this game is to exit the game and fall back on your last checkpoint. And death isn't the safety net it is in other games, either. You command a whole party of survivors, or at least the ones willing to friend you in the game's trust meter. And when whatever character you're controlling gets turned into hickburger, your control shifts to whoever is left back at your base. It makes the game persistent and adds tension even when the zombies aren't that threatening. Because one screw up, one overconfident decision to press on to another mission without stocking up on meds, and your fiery assault-rifling Latina will get wishboned by a zombie. And then you'll have to replace her with Ed the American Idol fan.



General Enjoyment 'Cheese': By now you should really know if you'd like this game or not. It's well-crafted and pushes the genre forward in an interesting way, but it also doesn't break the rules or really surprise you, either. Sandbox fan? Get it. Zombie nut? Get it. Enjoy inexpensive games with high replay value? It's a $20 download through Xbox Live, and I find that the combination of base-building choices and character progression gives you a ton of different ways to approach the game. And the brutal way the game makes you lose vital characters and then just press on not only evokes the genre magnificently well, but it also makes you wonder whether it's worth it to restart from the beginning just one more time.

Nerd Citizen

Today's been a fairly lazy day on the Nerdery front. I've been working on several gargantuan blog posts that will take a good deal of work due to either the tremendous writing/editing load necessary or due to editing media I want to attach to the associated blog posts.

In particular, I've been stalled by the release of the addictive State of Decay, which came out on Tuesday on Xbox Live Arcade. I'm currently in the research and evaluation stage of writing a review for it (ie, I'm playing the game as much as my spazzy, tow-headed spawn will let me). That should be forthcoming within the next handful of posts, if all goes well the next few days.

The big news in the Nerdery, though, was a small package I received in the mail. Tearing into it, I dropped my engraved metal Citizen's ID Card, a beautiful little reward for most Star Citizen backers. Featuring my planned character's name, my founder and pledge status, and a really neat engraved circuitry design along the top and bottom, this is a first class bit of totally superfluous game bling. And I love it. I love getting collector's editions of games specifically because of these sorts of baubles. In the Fallout New Vegas collector's edition, for instance, you get a neat case with a starter deck of Caravan cards, a graphic novel, and a handful of poker chips from the casinos featured in the game. The Dragon Age: Origins collector's edition came with a fabric map of Thedas. Which is awesome because I can now say I've literally caressed Ferelden to my cheek. I love you, you hound-loving nation of malcontents.

Now Star Citizen is fast joining those noble ranks of uber-sexy nerd add-ons that make me unjustifiably enthused for the game beyond the promised gameplay experience. Plunking this plate down on my laptop keyboard, I then snapped a few pictures and threw together the following image. Later tonight I'll be reviewing my character's crew contracts, which will totally be used as an in-game charter for anyone wanting to serve aboard my Constellation-class merchant ship. Oh yes, I'm serious. In the coming weeks, I'll probably share my multi-page crew forms at some point in the future, as well as my detailed thoughts on space-mining as a potentially deep gameplay feature for Star Citizen.

In other nerd news, I've been taking baby steps towards cosplay ever since the euphoric epiphany that was the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. I'm still at the point where I'm just testing stuff out as I research options and pick the brains of much more experienced and talented cosplayers. Most of the stuff I'm actually doing right now is helping out some other fine folks with a project of theirs while also using that effort as an opportunity to sponge up their methods and talents as best I can. But, I'm not just working on other people's stuff. You could say I've got some nerdy projects in the works.

I'm hoping to have something relatively wearable ready for my son within the next week, so if that happens as I hope you can bet you'll get some more images of it in the next few days. The idea is to present him with this as a novelty consolation prize for being ousted as the cutest thing in our household once his little brother is born. Of course, I think this makes him even cuter than any merely human son could ever be--he's not just cute now...he's supercute!

Kickstart: Lost Moon Men and Marines in Training

Kickstart Your Weekend: A series in which I occasionally spotlight Kickstarter projects that are ending soon and deserve a little nerd love. Also, I'll highlight some past projects as well, as you never know when these enterprises are going to turn up again.

Tonight I'm plodding along, continuing the blog sprint and vaguely entertaining the idea of keeping it going until post number 150. That's not terribly likely, as my wife is going to evict her 9-month old parasite any day now, but there is a chance I'll be able to keep the momentum going even then.

Speaking of momentum, Deadzone ended up pulling in a grand total of $1,216,482 in pledges this past week. That's nearly 300 grand more than Mantic Games' previous best Kickstarter campaign, and a full 100 grand more than I was predicting they'd pull in. Their final hours pulled in several hard plastic sets for backers to add-on to their pledges, and that probably really helped boost the final results of the campaign. Most Mantic models are resin or a trending new resin-plastic mix. As a model material, resin holds small details sharply and cleanly, but resin can be more difficult to glue and harder to convert due to being a bit more brittle and prone to cleavage. (Not that kind, silly mammal.) By offering a few optional sets of plastic models for the game's core units, Mantic gives players a chance to have more ambitious control in constructing their models. And if there's one thing wargaming armchair generals love--it's ambitious control. That and smack-talking their opponents.

Ryan Sohmer's second children's book, The Bear--A First Time Parent's Continuing Journey finished at a healthy $54,381 out of an original goal of $40,000. It doesn't compare to the success of the first campaign, but I can't fault anything with the second book on that score. I think the more muted success of book two speaks to how cogent and complete the first book was--there's simply not as much demand for something more. Still, the art for these books is beautiful, and I received my book from the first campaign promptly and in great condition, and you can't beat the wry observations and tear-jerk imagery of each and every page. Total dad-bait.

Dino-hunting survival game The Stomping Land ended at $114,060 blowing their 20 grand goal out of the water and securing extra funds for hiring extra part-time designers to expand the game environment. I was on the fence on pledging to this one--the gameplay really excited me, but I was kind of hoping for them to show more interest in Mac support as well as PC. As it is, though, I'm sure I'll get it sometime next year to play on my Star Citizen gaming PC--sitting in my high-tech simpit while running a caveman avatar around in a loincloth. Anachronism, your name is me.

The superhero-vs-mastermind board game Guardians Chronicles is poised to break 60 grand tonight, with a little over a week to go in their campaign. They slowed down a lot in the middle of the campaign, perhaps more so than is usual, but with the fact that they're picking up steam and about to unlock a dice stretch goal, I still think their ultimate stretch goal of $100,000 is within reach. More importantly, until June 13 they have a trivia-based game giveaway contest in which the grand prize is a complimentary $160 pledge level for the Kickstarter campaign. Check that out here. They've also posted full rules for the game and enough art that you can play a small demo of the game with your own miniatures/markers/old Tic-Tac cases as proxies for their characters.

Okay, so that's it for Kickstarter updates. So what's new this week? Well, not a whole lot. So today I'll share another two promising-but-failed Kickstart projects.



Shackleton Crater

What it is: Shackleton Crater wanted to be a near-future strategy computer game where players struggled to manage and create the first colonies on the moon's surface. No cover system, no alien invaders, and no secret uprising. A strategy game without violence, where survival and thriving would be challenging enough to keep players entertained. Building pre-fab modules inspired by real NASA concepts and designs, players would scour the moon's rugged surface for materials, conduct research, and hide from cosmic storms and the like. The game environment was based on the actual surface of the moon, and one of their listed stretch goals proposed that the game feature the entire frakkin' surface of the moon. That's a lot of solitary playground, yo.

What happened: I enjoy a good dose of violence in my entertainment. Most zombie games make me giggle rather than cringe at face-smashing finishing moves and the obligatory chomp-chomp-chomp deaths of helpless characters. But I also enjoy a harmonious game, too, where excellence doesn't have to come at the end of a gun or at someone else's expense. Challenge can go hand in hand with a relaxing experience. And I think that's what appealed to me about Shackleton Crater--I envisioned a game that was smart and well-balanced enough to provide a challenging experience, but while also being totally wholesome. And I suppose it's that last part that made it a tough sell. The game community as a collective doesn't want another Oregon Trail--not unless you make the final stretch of the journey a cannibalism simulator or you give players the option to raid trading outposts instead of, y'know, trading. About halfway through their campaign and at less than ten percent of their base funding goal, creators Joe Got Game cancelled the project, promising that they'd keep moving forward with development. Unfortunately, no news has surfaced for the past two months.




Interstellar Marines

What it is: Interstellar Marines has been in indie development hell for years. A science-fiction first person shooter being developed by Zero Point Software, they apparently started out with a mainstream publisher and partners but got cut off as their realistic, visceral approach to their setting seemed not enough Halo or Call of Duty. Since then, however, they've ingeniously switched their game code over to the versatile and inexpensive Unity Engine, which has allowed them to do something really neat for their game by making portions of the game playable on their website through your browser. It's a fun teaser of what they have envisioned, and it also enables the developers to actively troubleshoot and play balance their game one feature at a time.

What happened: The project had a decent start but quickly slowed down. It crawled along, and I think a lot of potential backers (myself included) were a little gun-shy to jump into such an ambitious game being developed for so long. All gamers have been collectively Duke Nukem Forever'd, and we're all scared of it happening again. But the game itself looks great, and I love that the premise for the prologue to their series was going to put players in the middle of a series of harrowing wargames as futuristic soldiers prepare for first contact with alien species. Which is pretty much never good. Their Kickstarter video was great too--it started off with a droll speech about the first interstellar beacon test, and then cut to the developers talking about their game in a sort of 12 Monkeys stream of hallucinations. Doesn't make sense? Well, it was funny anyways.

Dream Game: Star Citizen

Today's post has been a long time in coming. Like 22 years in coming. Accordingly, it's super long.

A little while ago, I got to cross a big entry off my personal, nerdy bucket list. I got some actual stick time in a Mechwarrior Tesla Pod. Now it may be hard to appreciate why that was such a big life moment for me, so let me rewind things a bit. Say about, oh...two decades ago, more or less. When I was a lowly little five year-old with a whole nerdy life ahead of me.

My mother wanted to move down to Houston, Texas, where my grandfather was "living" at the time. I say "living" because after spending a summer and a half in Houston, I've determined that no one actually lives in Houston. At least not in the summer. Instead, they melt and dip in and out of a constant state of humid, clammy heat stroke while shuffling from one climate-controlled environment to another. Living in Houston in the summer is kind of like living in a state of reverse cryogenic freezing: you're only alive and active when in confined, artificially cooled spaces; the rest of the time you're in a state of quasi-death. And that's forgetting the insane proliferation of cockroaches in the area--huge, impossibly numerous, and insidious. Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout. In any case, my family decided to move down to Houston. Out of ignorance. And my mother and I moved down there in May 1990 to start looking for houses while my brother and father tried to wrap things up in Illinois.

So the two of us moved into a small Houston apartment, and with no friends and only a handful of toys to play with, I immediately fell back on my favored tools of entertainment: pencil and paper. I up-ended a moving box and slid it against a wall in the corner, and then I began plastering images on my large, double-wide pad of drawing paper. The first drawing was a space battle, with X-wings detonating Tie fighters while Star Destroyers looked on helplessly. I taped that to the wall just above the cardboard box. I then sketched out the cockpit controls for an X-wing fighter, which I knew by memory (I vividly recall as a five-year-old considering every visit to the video store a tacit pledge to rent one of the Star Wars trilogy). The controls I taped down to the top of the moving box. Then, sitting in front of the wall, I piloted my hastily improvised space fighter into harrowing dogfights and epic space battles, hands holding an invisible control stick and pounding the scrawled out buttons in quick succession to realign my deflector screens and adjust my targeting computer. I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast. I grew up on Star Wars and old scratchy VHS recordings of Battlestar Galactica, and space battles have always kept me up at night.

"Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout."

Another life support function in Houston was the arcade. In a region where the summer is full of weekly reports of heat stroke deaths, parents are rather less eager to pack their kids into plastic tubes in outdoor playgrounds, apparently. So everywhere we went in Houston we tripped over the most God-blessed bounty of video arcades I have ever known. Places like McDonald's substituted their playgrounds with attached arcades, and shopping malls had elaborate, sprawling video game arenas that compared to nothing else I've seen in my life except the ill-fated Disney Quest ten years later. Yes, Houston may have been the worst region to settle, in my opinion, but once there those Texans accidentally made themselves a nerd haven where you couldn't swing a stick without hitting a video game cabinet.

At the shopping mall my family went to, they had a massive arcade that featured a bank of eight Mechwarrior simulator cockpits that were the precursor to the Tesla Pods I've raved about in the past. They had surround sound, multiple monitors, and banks of sexy working buttons and control surfaces. I was in love. But my ten year-old brother, in a pique of superiority, informed me that it was way too expensive: a five minute match in the simulators would blow half of my arcade allowance. "And besides," he'd tell me in that big brother way, "you wouldn't know what to do with all those buttons and controls. It'd be a waste of money." But for my brother, apparently, it was right up the future pilot's alley, and the fifth-grade schmuck would proceed to hop into matches and whoop and holler and throw his Mad Cat mech into the thick of missile-firing fights and laser-burning bust-ups. He'd even had the audacity to occasionally pull some of my share of the arcade allowance to get in extra matches, and I was stupidly ensorcelled enough by the explosions and sci-fi gratification of watching from afar that I would usually let him.

"I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast."

We didn't move to Houston. My family collectively bailed out on the humidity capital of the country after less than six months. But the glories of the Houston arcade scene and the dream of the simulator cockpit (also known as a simpit) have stuck with me ever since.

Which I'm sure you've guessed by now.

That was also the year that a certain game called Wing Commander came out. A space sim in which the player got to slip into the cockpit of a fighter and partake in interstellar wars, it was the ultimate boon to my fevered brain, letting me fire blasters and pull extravagant maneuvers to shake enemies off my six. The following year, Wing Commander II came out, and we played that one to death, too. And when I say we, I mean I would harangue my brother into booting up the game on our cyclopean* DOS machine and then I'd bumper-car my way through space until he'd get fed up and take over. Which was often necessary, because I could get Angel killed in the easiest of fur-balls. Not to mention I had a knack for blasting through missions by the skin of my teeth and missing all chances for extra objectives and commendations. It was great. And it lasted for just one more year before we converted to a Mac family and my gaming life shifted to real-time strategy games like Warcraft and, eventually, Myth. Even when Wing Commander got ported to Mac, I didn't get as into it. Maybe it was no longer being threatened by my brother for every botched Immelmann turn, or maybe it was that the game lost its mystique when it wasn't hidden behind an inscrutable DOS command line, but I didn't keep up with the rest of the series.

Years passed and I always looked back on Wing Commander fondly. My brother and I got into Mechwarrior 2 and tossed around simpit ideas until he got fed up with my "strategy" of attacking his Atlas-class mechs with gnat-sized Elementals, which often resulted in five to ten minutes of me hovering around him, unable to cause any damage but impossible to hit with the mechanical titan. My brother joined the Air Force and relegated all our nerdy past-times to me while he went off and, y'know, flew actual planes. The Wing Commander movie came out, and I stubbornly still enjoy it no matter what the rest of the world says. Heck, I'm listening to its soundtrack right now. But there's been nothing like those years in the early 90s, when the Mechwarrior simpits and original Wing Commander games were freshly ingrained in my fantasies. Both genres declined--the first reduced itself to more and more shallow action games, and the latter faded away in the midst of game developer takeovers. Playing a worthy simpit game remained fixed on my bucket list, but it was such a dim hope I was barely conscious of it most of the time.

Then I got to play in the Tesla Pods last year, and reality didn't even remotely quench the nerd-fire that burned for simpits. It heightened its roar, and within days of that experience, I started in on ludicrous plans of building my own sci-fi simpit. I could start with a cockpit, and then maybe build off of that into having a simulated bridge for a capital ship--that'd be the ultimate family gaming experience, me barking out orders while managing damage control and ordering my son to launch a fighter and keep the bombers off us. Oh yes, that'd be sweet. I researched games that might fit these lofty ambitions, looking especially for ones that had good mod support so I could conceivably rework everything to fit my vision of space. There were a few that looked promising, but I passed on all of them for one reason or another. And then, most ridiculous of all, I began researching the idea of making my own game. Sure, it would be clunky and ugly as sin, but I could always make it look like a stylized icon system, right? It'd be just like the Command School from Ender's Game.

Not even my boundless enthusiasm could BS me for long, though. That was an insane idea that would never happen. I'd never make my own game, and no one was making the sort of game I wanted. Nothing was going to come along and justify the huge effort of building a simpit, and nothing would be worthy of it if I ever made one anyways. The space simulator genre was dead.

Then last fall brought with it a new dawn. A project popped up on Kickstarter called Star Citizen. It was the first game in ten years that Chris Roberts would be making.

Chris Roberts.

His name had tickled my ears the first time I saw the Star Citizen campaign page, but I didn't realize what I was in for until I watched the KS video and virtually soiled my actual chair:

"They said I was dead. They said console was the future. Now they say mobile and tablets are the future. I say to you, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am a PC game."

Waaah! Glory shot of the Bengal carrier.

"And I am a space sim."

Oh, those first 30 seconds of that video grabbed me by my childhood fantasies and has not let go of me since. I can't watch it without getting excited. Chris Roberts was the creator of the Wing Commander franchise, and he was coming back to the game industry to make something gloriously ambitious. I pledged to the campaign immediately and followed the updates doggedly, as every new addition to the project's goals brought it closer to everything I've wanted from sci-fi gaming:

Sprawling, fully-realized ship interiors. Star Citizen is going to allow the player to explore larger ships, walking down the corridors and into the bridge of carriers and other capital ships. What's more, since the game is going to feature seamless transitions (ie, no load screens) from in-cockpit action to walking around your mother ship, the interiors of the ships are actually going to be consistent with the physical shape of the ship. Unlike the Normandy from Mass Effect, which is depicted as physically smaller and the wrong shape to accommodate the interior spaces you explore in the course of the game.

Out-of-cockpit gameplay. In addition to being able to simply walk around and idly explore in the innards of your big ships, Star Citizen is going to include a shooter-like experience for boarding actions. This integration and mingling of the two genres is going to be inspired, as you know I kept wishing for some space-combat crossover in the Mass Effect series and never got it. Now Star Citizen promises to give capital ship action, fighter brawls, and man-to-man gunfights in tight-packed ship corridors. It's like Chris Roberts has a checklist of my favorite recurring dreams. If there are cute redheaded witches, bottomless tubs full of spiders, and machine zombie hordes, it'll be official--he's ripping off my REM cycle.

A vast forking campaign based on performance and decisions. Long before Bioware ever gave you a non-choice at the end of an epic game, the Wing Commander series had them licked with a campaign that featured meaningfully divergent endings. Endings were based on direct plot choices and mission performance, so just barely clearing your mission objectives as opposed to wiping the board completely might change what your resolution was. They're going to be bringing that legacy back for Star Citizen, and since they've announced 50 missions for the main campaign of Star Citizen (called Squadron 42), I wouldn't be surprised if some of those missions were mutually exclusive based on what path you take your pilot through the plot. Tasty.

Persistent universe. The most exciting and lauded aspect of the game is Star Citizen's ongoing online experience. A variation of an MMO, Star Citizen proposes to let players shape a dynamic economy and play the game the way they want to play it. If that involves mining, trading, and exploring more than direct combat, that's cool with them. And that's very cool with me. I'm always a fan of games that let you go off the rails, even if I find myself not wanting to do so.

Playable capital ships. This was a later stretch goal met in the incredibly successful pledge campaign, and it promises to allow players to potentially gain control of ships as large as their mile-long carrier ships in the final version of the game. This goes hand in hand with cooperative and social play, as even some of their smaller ships are said to be nerfed if you don't have meat in all the crew seats. The 4-man Constellation ship, for instance, will feature two manned turrets and a detachable short-range fighter (a la the Serenity's two shuttles) in addition to the ship's pilot. Beyond that, you'd be looking at dedicated guilds needed just to get the most out of destroyer, cruiser, or carrier-class ship.

Mod support. With how great the core game is shaping up to be, and how visceral and engaging, I feel like this feature is almost perfunctory. But then I think about trying to model a full-scale battlestar in Star Citizen and scramble out in a viper (mk II, of course) to scrap a toaster onslaught. Ooookay...maybe I do still want mod support. And since they're talking about using that as a way to test the feasibility of fan-created additions to the game, I can definitely see me spending a lot of time turning some of my rough designs into something fully realized for this game.

Support for multiple monitors and multi-function displays (MFDs), TrackIR, and advanced controllers. And there it is. Star Citizen is going to support the ultimate simpit gaming rig with this simple promise. You want a three monitor display wrapping in front of you? Okay. How about a dedicated screen for your sensors? Sure. Joysticks, throttles, keyboards, and gamepads? Whoa whoa whoa now--you're a little nuts, aren't ya? That my friends, is a game that isn't simply worthy of the simpit I've been dreaming of these past 22 years--it demands one. Never mind that I'm a more artistic, fine detail sort of builder with minimal wood-working experience. Never mind that I've never wired anything like this before. Never mind that I will building the first PC of my very own from scratch to form the heart of the ultimate gaming rig (that I can afford). It is going to happen. It must happen. So let it be written; so let it be done.



Cloud Imperium Games is collectively working on realizing my dream game and the dream of tens of thousands of gamers all over the world. It's safe to say I'm going to be blogging more about the different aspects of this game in the future. I've already posted at least one article's worth on the subject of space mining in Star Citizen on the website's forums. I'll also be chronicling my progress as I work on my simpit and related projects for this game, so don't worry: I didn't run out of words with this article.

More's the pity, right?



*Seriously, Google spellcheck? You don't know the word 'cyclopean'?!?