Post a Comment On: Digitally Staving Off Boredom

Thanks to an excess of vacation time to spend, I have had four day off weeks for a few weeks now.  But the last couple weeks have been the same thing: the first two days I spent in listless procrastination, and then the last two days largely overthinking myself out of making any semblance of game development progress: terminal writer's block.

Yet, if I just gave up the latter, so also would go one of my most vindicating purposes in life.  Even attempted creative fruition makes life more worthwhile than nothing at all.  So I would rather engage in this mental self-flagellation than give up and just procrastinate for four days straight.  After I get this blog entry out of the way, I plan to grab a bite to eat and do just that.
Monday was largely spent obsessing over Crying Suns.   Much like FTL: Faster Than Light before it, you are progressing from left to right on a series of sector maps, the bad guys nipping at your heels, collecting scrap and other resources, spending them at stations or performing upgrades in the field, making branching choices are some random encounters, with the combat encounters resolved in pausable real time.  The similarities, especially on the outer sector travel layer, are innumerable.

The primary differences between the games is that Crying Suns has a lot more plot and fancier presentation, there are (non-interactive) away missions, and the combat leaves behind ship management to instead provide a hexagonal grid where you are primarily managing the positions of your deployable squadrons between your own warring battleship and that of the opposition.  Combat resolves in a very rock/paper/scissors sort of way: frigates beat fighters, fighters beat drones, drones beat frigates.  Then there's cruisers, which are pretty much brutalized by all three, but have tactical abilities such as long ranged attacks or shielding adjacent units. 
I beat the demo three times.  The demo takes you through the tutorial and 2/3rds the way through the first chapter (each chapter being divided into three sectors, and there are six chapters in the full game).   Each time, things were a little different, owed to the random elements.  Sometimes I was starving for fuel, other times I had plenty to go around, and I had invested fully in fuel foraging regardless.  Some runs I had plentiful units to bolster my combat power, other times I was barely scraping by.  The demo definitely kept things interesting enough for a few repeat runs.  However, despite mustering that much interest, I still could not bring myself to throw down the necessary $30 to graduate to the full experience.

The main reason was because I have a strong inkling as to the kind of game this is, and Crying Suns is not the best example of that kind of experience.  But what is?  FTL: Faster Than Light was made by Subset Games, the same team that would move on to make Into The Breach, one of the most balanced strategy microcosms to ever be made.  To an extent, I could even say that Crying Suns has a lot to do with more distant games such as Slay The Spire in that it is encapsulated as short (1-3 hour) games with forced randomization to mix things up.
You almost can't talk about Crying Suns without bringing up FTL (above), but the games differ significantly outside of the outer layer sector exploration. Apparently there are enough of these games out now that I have developed a sense for that kind of experience, or genre, and judge them accordingly.  Compared to similar experiences, Crying Suns seems less refined, perhaps even frustratingly primitive.  Furthermore, there is not quite the combat depth here that were was in FTL: Faster Than Light nor the same tight balance (which may be found in Slay The Spire).  However, in terms of having an extensive story backed up by fantastic presentation, Crying Suns blows the competition out of the water, nothing from this genre of game comes close.

Crying Suns also has unusually dark undertones, what with you captaining a ship of doomed and manipulated clones through a universe where humanity is on the brink of annihilation due to their over-dependence on machines.  The opening scene is a view of the cloning facility: tanks of babies on the top, panning down through tanks of bodies in various stages of development, and finally a heap of unneeded clone bodies laying discarded and forgotten at the bottom.  That's dark; the universe of Crying Suns is a Luddite nightmare come true on many levels.  That bubble gets popped by frequent humorous interludes between the crew, and personally I am thankful for that, as I think if they had gone fully stark I would have been too depressed to play it.

I likely will want to pick up Crying Suns when it is discounted a bit, because I can't see myself enjoying the frustration of being repeatedly killed by the punishing and somewhat limited combat right now, especially with that well-wrought plot presentation dangling as a denied reward.  If I have an itch for this kind of experience, I might as well stick to games I already own, such as FTL: Faster Than Light and Slay The Spire, or even games I own but never bothered to play, such as Convoy.
[Image] Speaking of Slay The Spire, apparently I was a great big liar when I said I would stop playing.  I have not quite slain the spire as of yet, as the fourth map you unlock is quite hard.  However, I have gone back in for another doomed run so often that I find myself quite apathetic about my chances of success in any given run.

Sometimes, the right cards just don't drop to build a strong synergy, or to even build up the most vital stats of the given character (strength, dexterity, or focus).  In fact, nearly every time I fail a run it feels like a chore of absolute futility due to bad drops.  Am I even relevant?

Why do I keep playing Slay The Spire, then?  Well, it's great game to play on the side.  Just turn the volume off and watch a video or something.  It gives me more to think about than most games, even if it too often leaves me feeling as though I was helpless to win.  (To be fair, my locus of control tends to skew a bit external in life, as well.)  It should also be worth another play when they release the fourth character, as that will give me something else to unlock.

The last strong procrastination I have done so far this weekend was to end up watching longplays of The Colonel's Bequest and The Dagger Of Amon-Ra, the only two "Laura Bow" games that Sierra made during their long reign as king of adventure games.
This longplay of The Colonel's Bequest courtesy of recordedamigagames.org.  A lazy port of the PC version, as the Amiga was certainly capable of better multimedia, as is evident in The Secret Of Monkey Island.
In the The Colonel's Bequest, the titular Colonel's sprawling southern plantation was an island surrounded by crocodiles and with a perpetual thunderstorm going on throughout the night.  You are trapped there on the island with the brooding family, each with extensive characterization.  Having just learned that the Colonel's fortune will be split between them, murder is in the air.  Everyone is on a schedule, and you piece together the clues of the mystery largely by eavesdropping, helpfully facilitated by the rooms being outfitted with spying devices.  These kinds of trappings were vital to put across the sense that this was a scene of an Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery. 

The latter game, The Dagger Of Amon-Ra, goes is a bit further afield (though there are certain deliberate nods to the earlier game, such as the attention to characterization, the role of eavesdropping, and the presence of a excessively promiscuous french woman on the cast).  The game is split into four parts:
There is a huge first part that sets up Laura moving to the big city to become a reporter, and then getting familiar with all of the players in this story through a social gathering at the museum.   The second part of the game locks her in the museum with them, investigating a building string of murders through several acts.  This part is largely identical to the first game, moving time along as major parts of the act are uncovered.   The third part (and the last act) is a sequence involving Laura Bow suddenly needing to escape the murderer (or murderers).  Seemed to come on a bit abruptly in the full walkthrough I watched.  Perhaps some announcing cutscene was left on the cutting room floor? At the very end of the game, the players are quizzed on what they figured out.  Get all the answers right, you get a happy ending.  Get enough of them wrong, and the murderer gets the last laugh. It all comes together in a moderately cohesive manner, but I can't help but think that The Dagger of Amon-Ra is a bit more disjointed than The Colonel's Bequest because it is split into four parts where the first game managed to largely pull off the same with a brief first part and expansive second.
The overall production values of The Dagger Of Amon-Ra were certainly bigger than The Colonel's Bequest, owed to the fact that Sierra had moved their storytelling technology forward by several years between the games (Kings Quest V was a game changer that made all adventure games into proper point and click adventures from then on).  In the first game, the 1920s were implied; in the second game, the 1920s somewhat roared.

Yet, I find myself more enamored with The Colonel's Bequest, as it had stronger presence of the environment.   Though I certainly have much to be impressed with what they attempted to accomplish in The Dagger Of Amon-Ra (as it is much more cinematographic in its methods and presentation) something about the washed-out VGA of Sierra's latter adventure games did not have the same conductive presence for the imagination (though your mileage may vary). 

I am glad I had a chance to see both games.  Laura Bow herself emerges as a strong female protagonist of earlier games, which is something relatively rare to find even today.  However, the main thing that fascinated me about the Laura Bow games is how they create a strong sense of place, of which Laura Bow's strong characterization was just as one cast member of many.  Overall, it is not unlike The Sexy Brutale (which does this idea much better, and hopefully so, since it is about 25 years newer).

Enough blathering, it's time to face down some empty pages.