Blog: Video Games of November 2016

Civilization VI came out in October, but I was busy for the so I didn't manage to get to play it until November. And then I did play it, quite a bit. At this point I don't remember too much about what else I was focused on for November so I'll let the games speak for themselves.

My top five games (by play time) for November were:

1. Civilization VI - You may have noticed I spent most of 2016 waiting for Civ VI to come out. And then it did. And I was really happy. The game is really well done and is a nice expansion on Civ V, and generally, the ideas they've been developing since Civ III. The unstacked cities makes city building interesting for the first time in a very long time. The improved movement system and ability to link units also solves the problems that unstacking units caused in Civ V. Breaking the research into Science and Cultural trees also makes it much easier to tailor your civ to the style you want to play. The new politics systems is also a really fresh aspect of the game, letting you further tailor your civ to the concerns of *right now*.
   
   
   Civ VI also offers a surprisingly heavy dose of nostalgia. It feels like Civilization (the first one), it feels exciting and clean and fresh and as you play you spend a lot of time dreaming of how the future will work in a way that most of the other entries in the series don't. In Civ V, for example, you have to decide how you would like to win the game before you begin, but in Civ VI its possible to start playing and then see where your situation leads you. That and something about the scale of the world (more plains and rivers?) really touches a feeling of "home" to me.
   The game's not perfect, the AI is weak and while they've tried to spice it up by giving each ruler a "natural" and a "hidden" motive, but while these change the ruler's interactions with you, they don't really change the way they play the game. The game also feels a little bland, I like the visual style, but especially in the late game it feels a bit like everything looks the same. This also creeps into the game play, however exciting and different the early game play as the game goes on you end up trailing into the universal "Civilization Late Game" slightly slanted by the victory you're going for (and I haven't actually tried the Domination victory yet, so I may have no idea what I'm talking about). Generally the game is very good, but definitely has room for improvement and expansion (and probably mods).
   
2. Ogre Battle 64 - If you've followed this blog much you'll know that I have a long, nostalgic and slightly conflicted relationship with Ogre Battle. On the broad level, I love the game, the concept, the game play, the story, the art, the characters and the character design. On the other hand the game is both too easy and too hard (at the same time) and has so many elements that don't actually work (in detail), that as often as not when I finish playing, I end up irritated and disconnected.
   

   

   From GameFAQs user Systematic_Rpg

   The thing is, though. I love this game. It's the game I always think of come winter weather and out of all of my favourite games it's probably the game I think about playing the most often. In addition to the nostalgia it's also (provided I don't think to hard) very relaxing and just a nice stylistic experience.
   So, with the help of a little whiskey to get started, I decided to try to play this year with out thinking too hard. I haven't done as well as I might, but generally it's been a success. I've played each mission pretty much on its own and just trusted my instincts and made the best decisions I can. I might miss out on the "super important" last mission, but overall I'm getting a lot of enjoyment 2 (or 4, did I mention the missions are long?) hours at a time.
   
3. Marvel Puzzle Quest - Having a friend who keeps poking you to get better characters and having a fair amount of time on the bus makes it easy to keep picking up MPQ. The fact that it's still fun, and has a nice mix of easy-to-play and tactically-interesting is also nice.
   
   


4. Super Mario Maker - I haven't spent that much time working on developing my own levels at the moment, but I have been playing a lot of other peoples levels lately and enjoying it. I've also been rating levels for Stephen Georg's Morning Mario, which has helped get me playing interesting levels as well.
   
   


5. Super Mario 3D World - I spent a bit of time going back and forth on whether I felt more like playing Captain Toad or 3D World and ended up wanting to finish 3D World so I could play the extra levels it unlocks in Captain Toad (which I may have had unlocked already, but it was a while ago). I started with a fresh save and replayed the first three world or so. It's interesting because while it is definitely the technically best 3D Mario game I still don't like it as much as I do Galaxy. I think some of it is the refinement of the 4 stage level progression which makes the levels more internally consistent but also seems to make the levels feel disconnected from each other (also the themes of the worlds aren't carried into the levels). I think this disconnection reduces the investment I feel in the game over all, which makes me like this very good game less than I might.
   
   

Special Bonus Game:

• I decided that I'm not going to do a Games of December post (for reasons), and I've played Pikmin 3 in both November and December and I really enjoyed it.
• Pikmin 3 is a stunningly beautiful game. It also is a perfect refinement in gameplay from the first two in the series. It has a few control issues (at least with the standard controls, I had trouble wrapping my head around stylus controls, which are apparently better) but overall it's a joy to pick up and play and always interesting. I like the way puzzles and combat are mixed and I like the way you can put the three captains to work on different jobs at the same time (at least roughly). 

Here's my total play time chart for November:

And here's my total number of times played:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Project 2: The Ogre Manager : Update

You may have noticed that the second project I started, The Ogre Manager, has gone unmentioned for a very long time. There are three main reasons for this, the fact that I fell behind doing everything with the blog is the first, the second is that I didn't give myself a deadline to finish by and the third (and most interesting) is that I don't know that I really want the Ogre Manager in the way I outlined it in the first post.

As I mentioned in the first post is that the origin of the Ogre Manager was a sketch pad which I kept track of all my unit levels on and I did the math using my old high-school Casio calculator. I really enjoyed the "meditative" nature and the hand-made nature of doing it this way. I always felt like I was losing that when I used the spreadsheet and that the Ogre Manager was also going to be a little to "technical".

So, I'm re-organizing the project and introducing The Paper Ogre Manager. 

I decided to make this as nice as possible, so I started by getting a set of large moleskine cahier with ruled squares. I'm going to include 4 graphs which outline the average level for each unit, the average front-attack (or best-attack) power for each unit, the average alignment, and the accumulated experience (or possibly percentage of calculated experience). I will also track these in a table as well.

It's still probably a month or so before it really feels like Ogre Battle time to me (I think I may be a type of reverse plant I can only play Ogre Battle once I'm not getting enough light), but now that I have this set up I'll be ready. I may still tackle the software version at some point, mostly for the programming practice

Project 2 : The Ogre Manager

One of my fondest memories is receiving Ogre Battle 64 for my birthday (a long, long time ago). It's gone on to be both one of my favorite games of all time, and also one of the games I have the strongest associations with. Every year when the days get short and the weather gets cold and snowy, my first thought is to put Ogre Battle in the N64* and spend the afternoon pitting my army against the morally ambiguous other guys.

From GameFAQs - user Count Dackula

One of the things that's a little unusual about Ogre Battle, is that while it may look like your usual 90s RPG with swords and magic, you don't actually get to control anything. You take the role of the organizing general, setting up units out of your soldiers and then deploying them to the battle field with orders to take over a strong point or defend a town. Once the game starts they march where you tell them and fight the enemies according to their own internal mechanics and you just get to sit back and watch.**

Your units (in Blue) fight the "Bad" Guys (in Red). You sit and watch.

From GameFAQs - user Storm Shadow

The fun of Ogre Battle comes in putting together all the different character's available to you (some you train up from recruit soldiers, some are given to you by the story and some you pick up from the wild) into units that fight well together, then level them up. Like many strategic rpgs (and as I understand Ogre Battle shares developers with it's cousin series Tactics Ogre which basically spawned the tactical/strategic rpg) the challenge in the game comes from leveling the right units up at the right time. In particular, you have to be careful that a unit has the correct alignment (lawful, neutral or chaotic) and that your units don't become over leveled.

The game tells you what each character's level is, but doesn't give you the total for the unit. As a result I started to keep track for myself, using a sketch book a pencil and my high school Casio not-quite-graphing calculator.

The stats for a character. Sadly I can't find a screen cap of the unit info.

From GameFAQs - user Storm Shadow

After a while I started to realize that the unit I left to defend my base sometimes wasn't strong enough to hold its ground.*** Realizing that I also needed to keep track how much damage each unit was dealing, so that I could always leave the unit most likely to win its fights at home, I started to keep track of that too.

Around this time the Computer Scientist in me started to think that keeping track of this on paper was maybe not the most efficient way to do things. In addition to my mitigating my ability to add calculation errors and screw up putting the numbers down in the right places, I thought it would be nice to be able to graph my progress and maybe keep track of a bit more information. So I started bringing my laptop to game time and keeping track of the statistics in Excel.

One set of unit data for one of my play-throughs.

So, having upgraded myself technologically, I kept on playing. In addition to being able to keep track of each of the characters in a unit, both their level and their attacking strength, I was able to keep track of their alignment (which I could have done before, but now we have a whole spreadsheet to play with right?). However, I wasn't exactly happy with this set up for two different reasons.

The first reason was technical. While the spread sheet kept track of the unit at any point in time (before each mission) it didn't keep the history of the changes. I started to keep a new spread sheet for each mission, but without doing more work than I was really willing to do it meant that I couldn't really graph my progress. Doing this isn't essential to the game or anything very important, but it's still something that would be fun to track.

The other reason was more artistic. As you can see in the screen-shots I've included, there's a very strong esthetic to the game. Everything is very medieval in style and switching from that to the ... polish ... of excel is rather jarring (as you may have noticed) in a way that keeping my information on paper wasn't.

Enter: Ogre Manager, a program I'm creating to solve these two problems. It's not an essential thing, in fact I'd be nearly as happy to go back to tracking all this on paper, but it also struck me as a good chance to practice a whole bunch of things that I've let languish far too much.

The Notes panel from Ogre Manager. It shows who should defend the base, who needs leveling and which units should be grouped together. (But not into in game Legions, those are a terrible idea.)

In short, the vast majority of the programming I do is command-line style stuff and as such I don't get much practice working on GUIs. Ogre Manager seems like a good chance to practice that, in a situation where there's not a huge penalty for not getting everything right. Secondly it would be nice to be able to make a program with a graphical look and feel that matches the game. Whether this is in the form of a look and feel for Java Swing, or Java FX, or custom environment, it will be an adventure trying to put this together. Thirdly this seems like the kind of program that would make an excellent Android app, which is another area in which I'd like to have more experience.

Right now I have development mapped out into 4 phases. The first phase is to finish a Java-standard look and feel program that keeps track of all the information I want to track, which as the screen shots show, has been started. The second phase is to implement graphs and other visualizations of the data. The third phase is to create the Ogre Battlely look and feel and finally the fourth phase is to create the Android app.

Time to go make something.



* In fact, Ogre Battle doesn't really come out of my N64.

** Or clutch the controller in impotent panic as your unit gets wiped off the face of the earth.

*** One of the mechanics of the game is that after a battle is resolved, the losing unit (the one who dealt the least damage) is pushed back on the battle map. The distance it goes is based on how much damage it received. When your base defense unit gets pushed then the enemy can beat you by just walking right into your base.