Castle Story, or, oh shit did these guys make a Dwarf Fortress with actual graphics!?

You have little guys. In a 3D world of floating islands. Which you can make them dig. And tell them to build castles. They fill up stockpiles with dug up earth and when a block is full it becomes bricks and you can use the bricks to build walls but you must build stairs or they won't be able to climb and also there's explosions and physics and...

Oh my god, I sound like a retarded child. But god fucking dammit, just try watching this without ejaculating forcefully:


It's called Castle Story.

That's the good news. Bad news is, you can't download Castle Story yet. They don't seem keen on releasing a quick alpha. It's a two-man team so maybe with enough demand they will... That would be so glorious! But anyway, their expressed attitude seems to be "we want to make a great game and not release before it's fun" with the implication that bugs and incomplete features != fun. Oh well.

I hope they don't repeat the failures of Minecraft with the same cavalier attitude to discarding planned features. Coming with a proper slicing function to see inside tunnels properly will make loads of difference, as will proper fluids (like dorfort did, cellular automata or bust baby) and sufficiently detailed production chains.

I'm also not asking for DF-level creature diversity, but pulling a Notch and adding like 5 enemies would be... Oh who am I kidding, I would still derive hours of orgasmic pleasure out of it, especially if they were actually unique mechanics-wise like Minecraft's enemies. But still, a few dozens of enemies, maybe some harpies and dragons and burrowing worms... Oh god, I'm getting hard just thinking about it.

Goddammit Sauropod! Release a beta already! I will hunt you down and whip you until you have a playable build!

More XCOM silliness

So the 2K Games have churned out some more apologetic nonsense for their little abomination. What an odd video.



First the backdrop. What's up with all the red scare talk, and the business about minorities and women and what not gaining acceptance? What the hell does communism phobia and the Cuban missile crisis have to do with bloody aliens? Are they planning to have a ridiculous plotline where the Soviet Union decides to help the aliens or the player or something? This is just rich. It's not like they consider for even a second that the aliens might be the Soviet's doing. They want to set this in a cold war atmosphere, and all the characters think like they're from the 2010s!

Then, what's with the silly reference to Turing and that blabbing about discriminated groups? Why are so many of these "underpriviledged" groups in leadership anyway? Not to be racist or misogynist or what have you but of the two XCOM leaders we see one is a woman and one is black. I have nothing against it, but it seems kind of... You know, not realistic for the setting. It's great they want to have diversity and all, but why not just set in a later time period?

Also, homosexuals didn't become accepted anywhere near the time period portrayed. Nice try.

Then the gameplay itself. The "stable" of agents is just 4 people. Probably all pre-set. The "overwhelming" number of choices is picking from 4 missions, again probably pre-determined, and you can probably do them all eventually and it doesn't matter much in what order. Why are these guys even bothering? It's not a bad game, but it's about as far from X-Com as you can get. Why name it that? Why, god why? I just don't get it!

The level shown is kind of ridiculous, too. Checkpoints are, as you can guess from the name, points set up to check people crossing a boundary. How the fuck are you going to be sure everyone has been checked when you can avoid the damn checkpoint by going through a coffee shop RIGHT NEXT TO IT? How can they be so DENSE? Besides that, there's the usual errors of linear, uninteresting design that everyone is too familiar with.

And why are the aliens just like ordinary soldiers with guns, except they have a funky shield thing? I mean, can't they have some unique attack types? Why must it be the exact kind of firefight you could easily have in a game just about humans fighting humans? Because the aliens in X-Com had unique attacks that weren't just shooting at you with guns. Just saying.

And why is the AI so stupid, anyhow? That flank in the video was laughable.

There's plenty of scripted cutscenes, which I think are nice. But it feels like the whole game is just an excuse to show their "so awesome" cutscenes. It reminds me of the DnD DM who will railroad his players, give them no opportunity to affect the plot, and filibuster the game by talking at length about how his awesome DMPCs, like, totally fuck shit up, man. And then there's the unbeatable ghost aliens murdering NPCs in unreachable rooms, but thoughtfully not bothering the player... Why didn't they just make a movie or TV series? It's clearly what they want, the way they shove their imagery in your face. I'd watch the hell out of it, even if it was animated with the game engine. I mean, the game IS pretty.

I guess that's a good plus to hang on to; "At least it looks pretty".

You say X-Com, I say Xcom

So some time ago, there was a bit of a stir when 2K Studios announced, hilariously, that "strategy games are not contemporary". The context is XCOM, that apparent twisted abomination of a game, and things quickly linked up with the already long-growing murmurs of discontent over where that IP was going.

Troy Goodfellow has written a very nice response to the whole thing, one with which I agree in many respects. I'd take the argument a bit further than he did, though.

I think it looks quite certain at this point that XCOM was a poor decision, which backfired in a way the company did not plan on dealing with. The how of it really eludes me: To me it just makes no sense to market a shooter to X-Com fans, and for catering to shooter fans, why bother with the IP? Troy suggests the IP's function is to generate hype, and it seems logical (although also a bit cynical). I think after that plan was set in motion, it turned out that there IS such a thing as bad publicity after all, as everyone and their brother joined the whine bandwagon to complain about how they weren't faithful to the original games, and to (I imagine) the devs' dismay most of them didn't even bother to hype the game very much!

It's really not a good idea to antagonize your future customers, so the inane bit about strategy games was probably a desperate attempt at damage control. It seems that whenever 2K is interviewed about XCOM, when they are asked actual question about the game as opposed to just given free reign to wave hands and spin yarn, their answers are likewise devoid of meaning and completely out of touch with the point of the question. They either have no idea what they're doing, or are desperate to not let anyone find out just how bad their ideas are, or both, and the way things are going, it looks like XCOM is headed right for a 60 on Metacritic. Of course, who knows. The game's not done, there's still lots of time. Maybe all the weak promises they made weren't bullshit, and XCOM will turn out to be great, even if not quite the successor to the franchise. Not that I'm holding my breath or anything.

As for X-Com dying, I don't think a shooter called XCOM will make the games any deader than they are now- I just don't see anyone familiar with X-Com taking it (or rather the game that XCOM is shaping up to be) seriously.