MART590e - Sins of a Solar Empire

Let's just go ahead and start this by saying that it should have won an award simply for its interface. Sins of a Solar Empire, developed by Ironclad Studios, bears a striking resemblance to its developers' Homeworld roots. It certainly looks and feels like Homeworld at a glance; however, it is not Homeworld. Sins of a Solar Empire is essentially a real-time 4X game.

Sins plays out in a full galaxy (or multiple galxies), drawing closer comparisons to games like Master of Orion. There are 3 races, each pegged with their own theme, boiling down to either diplomacy/colonization (Advent), economy/military (TEC), or technology/travel (Vasari). Unfortunately, there's no single-player campaign, but the game does support single-player skirmishes. The real focus is Ironclad's free online service where up to 8 players can go at it. There are probably more than 50 different game-types, some with objectives, others with the age-old prospect of beat-the-other-guy-first.

There is an alliance system similar to Master of Orion, but given the game's simple economy, I think it falls a little short. Where Homeworld had us constantly mining asteroids, Sins has a system where you build a mine on a resource and it acts like another structure in your empire, becoming upgradeable with specific research. In the game, there is metal and crystal, and a fluctuating public market where players can put their resources up for a price. This works much better in multiplayer than single-player, but also factoring in are pirates.

Pirates have a stronghold in the center of each galaxy, and are deployed throughout as bounty-hunters. Players can place bounties on one another, and the pirates take the highest bid, setting out on their mission at certain intervals. Pirates announce when they begin taking bribes, and when the bidding ends. At this point, the person with the highest bounty quickly shouts, "Oh, fuck," and does everything they can to prepare for the oncoming wave of annoying bee-like (apologies for that link) pirate fleets.

Fleets are all combat-centric. You won't find any salvage corvettes or dockable motherships in Sins. Certain ships have non-combat abilities like colonization, but this is more of a formality, as the game puts it onto both the small scout ship and a powerful capital ship. I mean, it has to be in there somewhere, right?

One of the most interesting parts of the game is that each race gets a mega-weapon. Advent get a propaganda cannon, which when fired at a specific planet, adjusts its loyalty (plus or minus depending on if it's a friendly or hostile planet). Vasari have a portal which warps in ships from around the universe. TEC have the coolest mega-weapon, though. The Novalith Cannon. It fires a destructive beam across the entire fucking universe, capable of hitting absolutely any planet.

The game has a lot going for it, but its design is not terribly deep. In fact, you may find yourself at the end of the tech tree, wondering, "That's it?" The genius behind it is in how well everything opposes one another. The game isn't rock-paper-scissors, it isn't how fast someone can build something, and it isn't about how many asteroids you can snatch up from the get-go. There's a crafty way around any obstacle, and according checks and balances.

All in all: Pirates will fuck your shit up, big time.

MART 590e - Raw Danger!

So I'm taking this Media Arts class where one of our assignments is to play a video game every week and then write about it. Might as well use this blog since it already exists, so yeah.

This week: Raw Danger!, a PS2 budget title from Agetec.



I first heard about this game on the Something Awful forums, and what I'm writing here simply echoes much of what's already been said.

Raw Danger! is actually the sequel to 2003's Disaster Report, a game where players had to escape a city hit by an earthquake. This time around, however, it's all about escaping the safest and most advanced city in the world as it faces a flood disaster. In order to survive, players have to avoid water and keep their body temperature up while climbing, jumping, and crawling their way to safety, all while keeping an ear out for emergency broadcasts and crossing paths with other flood victims. Sound familiar? Oh, right.

First of all, Raw Danger! does more things right than it does wrong, and that's what makes it special™.

You can play as 6 different characters whose paths all cross, and where the decisions you make affect the lives of each character. Do you help your coworker or do you leave her to drown because she has an annoying voice? The choices can actually be much deeper than that, but they don't have to be. The sheer amount of options is impressive. The game can be the ultimate be-a-dick simulator or white-knight story, and while certain games never escape these two extremes, Raw Danger! allows for a lot of grey area simply due to the overlapping stories. One character may leave someone to die, but as you play the next character, she may find the co-worker from another perspective, and have to make a decision based on some other character's choices. It doesn't necessarily play out as if you have to continually outsmart yourself the entire game, but it does flirt with the concept a bit.

The most interesting aspect of the game? None of it involves combat. You explore the city, talk to people, drive vehicles, create makeshift survival tools from items you scavenge throughout the game, solve puzzles to reach safety, and (oh, no) collect fragments of your memory to rebuild your identity. Okay, so that's one strike against the game.

Mechanically, though, there isn't much to argue about. The biggest complaint is the lack of polish and production value. Oh, and the localization is kind of funny:




In the future, everyone in America is blonde. Call me a temporal conformist.

Anyway, Mass Effect can go to hell. Raw Danger! is the deepest game I've played this year. You want character interaction and choices with consequences? You want branching paths and multiple endings for EACH character in the game? Then hop to, and drop $10 on Raw Danger!

Also, I didn't really mean that about Mass Effect. I'm sorry, baby.