Dan

It’s happening again, I can see it: The GAP. Days go by, no blog posts get written… I’ve been working on this one in fits and starts, and you will see why.

Imagine something like lycanthropy, but with video games. That’s right, people: I have a disease.

I’ve been into computer games since about the time our family bought our first computer, roughly 1994. It had an Intel 486 CPU at 33 MHz, four megs of RAM, and a 240-meg hard drive whose capacity we doubled with the DOS Doublespace tool, rendering disk access on that machine atrociously slow.

It didn’t really help, either, because pretty soon there was less than a floppy disk’s-worth free space on the drive, and I had to find a game to delete for every new one I wanted to install. For further context, I remember when Syndicate Wars came out, its install size (if you didn’t want to use the CD) was 240 MB - the size of my entire hard drive! I couldn’t fathom that.

The computer I’m writing this on could hold over fourteen-hundred copies of that game. I’ll come back to that some other time, though.

Part of the reason I loved the games being released for MS-DOS back in the mid-nineties was I had friends who loved them too, and that meant we could sit around the library in the ninth grade trading fictional war stories instead of working on our Language Arts assignments. Chris and I both have the same fond memories, since we usually played side-by-side at his (far superior) computer: of games like the original Command & Conquer, getting stuck in the infuriating Space Quest 6, experiencing a commando raid in one of the earliest CG-rendered cutscenes in U.S.S. Ticonderoga, overheating in Mechwarrior 2 because we couldn’t resist firing an alpha strike with six linked particle-projection cannons… and racing to see who could reach the end of Betrayal at Krondor first, earning that game the top spot on the list of video games we’ll discuss in exacting detail no less than fifteen years later.

Back then, as now, I had the bad habit of buying any game that seemed interesting, whether I’d end up playing it or not. So their CD-ROMs gathered dust for a long time before I broke into Ultima VIII: Pagan, Syndicate Plus, Master of Orion, and X-COM: UFO Defense. A lot of those games were too difficult for the young and impatient gamer that I was in grade school, and at times I wish I could go back and give them another try.

Thanks to software emulation, this is one wretched bloodthirst that I can indulge.

DOSBox is my go-to emulator when I feel the need to bust out a game that’s half as old as I am, and Boxer - available only for the Mac, sorry - is hands-down the best implementation of a DOSBox frontend I’ve ever seen or, indeed, can even imagine.

So when I began to idly remember X-Com: UFO Defense the other day, a complex, squad-based tactical strategy game that I could never get anywhere in when I first acquired it, I looked up a walkthrough and had my appetite whetted for a little classic time-wasting.

I’ve been hypothalamus-deep in base building, UFO-intercepting, plasma-weapon-researching, and sending fragile commandos to their untimely deaths at the hands of extraterrestrial murderers ever since.

This forks a couple of other discussions: about “obsolete” technology, and about (though the connection may not be obvious) ideas vs. their execution. I’ll get started on those posts ASAP…

Right after this turn.

Here’s a tip for playing Twilight Imperium:

Start at noon. Especially if you’re playing with seven people.

As I will reveal in subsequent posts, I love fabulously-complex strategy board games. I have a small group of friends in which we collect them - I’m not talking about Snakes & Ladders or Monopoly, I’m talking about the kind of games you’ll find on boardgamegeek.com.

We tend to fit games into tiers, based on complexity. Settlers of Catan is on a lower tier, being simple enough that you could teach it to the average (non-complex-systems-devouring-geek) person pretty quickly. Twilight Imperium, on the other hand, is at the top of the list: I have yet to encounter a more-complicated game, both in terms of pieces and information to track, and the number of concepts involved.

This is space conquest with diplomacy, trade, warfare, and objectives - both public and secret - that move you closer to victory. Basically like playing Master of Orion on a table.

Let me put this in perspective:

We began at four-thirty this afternoon. We called the game at midnight. That’s about 7.5 hours. The game ends when a player earns ten victory points, and when we quit the lead player had five. So the game could have gone to 10-12 hours, easily.

Hence why I say start at noon. I was eager to keep the game going, but even I was done once the clock struck midnight.

It didn’t help that I wasn’t in a position to win, either (unless perhaps we did have another five hours to go). I was playing a militaristic race, and making peace with my neighbors turned out to be a mistake - I should have slaughtered them right away, because by the time I had the military force to strike further across the board, I was too far behind for it to win me the game.

But enough about me. Here’s one thing I’ve noticed while playing these complex games:

The difficult part of playing a complicated game with five or more people, one of those games where a lot of thought, choice, and strategy go into each player’s turn, is that the period between each of your turns is so long that all but the most-focused players’ minds wander. You end up with half the players chattering while one person is cogitating, and those people end up uncertain about how the game’s state has changed, and as a result the game takes even longer.

I encounter this in Dungeons & Dragons, too. Especially when battles wear into an hour or longer, people stop paying attention to turns other than their own, and it makes team cohesion pretty difficult. I’m not sure what the answer is, but we did note one interesting exception:

Arkham Horror. This is a rare game that’s completely co-operative: it’s every player together versus the game itself, and either we all win, or we all lose (and are devoured, along with the city of Arkham, by sanity-shattering horrors from beyond space and time). In Arkham, everybody advises each other on what to do on their turn, and strategies are devised as a group. To put it another way, every player’s turn is, to some extent, your turn also - it’s hard to stop paying attention. This means that, even though the game can run up to six hours, it doesn’t seem to drag as much (or at least not as quickly) as games where you’re waiting fifteen minutes for a chance to act.

More on games later. Probably on Good Friday, when I get to take off my Dungeon Master hat and roll some twenties….