Tea Leaves

A few years back one of the first things I wrote and “published” online was a thought piece on the state of digital cameras at the time. I had just started using the things heavily, and being pegged as a photo dork, people kept asking me for shopping advice. Recently I rolled the page out to my dad when he asked me some questions and it occured to me that in these modern times of short product cycles one must constantly update and reorganize this sort of thing. So here is an updated version for 2007.

The Big Picture

The old article is basically correct. It all depends on what you need.

General Details

If you spend any time looking at information on digital cameras, you will note that there are basically two kinds of cameras that are interesting:

• Small point and shoot type cameras.
• Digital SLRs

All of these devices work in basically the same way. There is a box with a lens on the front and a some kind of light sensing device on the back. This sensor is made up of millions of light gathering sites. The sites capture brightness information for one part of a scene and convert this information into a single digital value that is usually 12 bits long. So, the sensor looks at what you pointed the camera at and converts it into a large collection of numbers between 0 and 4096. The camera then takes the image data and processes it to reconstruct things like color information and whatnot.

The nominal “resolution” of the camera is usually quoted as the number of pixels in the final image. This number is also usually fairly close to the number of sensors in the chip that the camera uses to do capture. Each sensor corresponds to one “pixel” in the final image. Except, this is sort of a lie. Each sensor in the array can only capture black and white information. The most common way to get a color image from such a device is to overlay a color filter array over the sensor. The filter is usually a single piece that sits over the sensor. It puts a single color filter passing Red, Green or Blue over each pixel in a particular pattern. Each light gathering site now captures a single number that indicates how much Red, Green, or Blue light hit it. The image processing hardware and software then read this data and construct an image file with three numbers, one for each color, at each pixel. So, somehow we’ve gone from one color value at each pixel to three. Where did all that new color data come from? The simplistic answer is that the the software guessed. The more complicated answer is that there are algorithms that can reconstruct the color data very accurately under most circumstances. Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are simple cases where these algorithms fail.

With this background, we can cover the two main kinds of available cameras.

Point and Shoot

Point and shoot cameras cover a lot of ground in the digital world. They range in price from around $100 to around $1000, and they range in resolution from 1 to upwards of 10 megapixels. However, all point and shoot cameras have basically the same characteristics, which can be summed up as follows:

A small sensor.

Regardless of the resolution of the camera, most point and shoot cameras use a sensor that is something like 1/4″ to 1/2″ on its long side. The sensors are referred to using a weird and confusing naming scheme that has more to do with aspect ratio than actual size. Most of these sensors are made by Sony, although Fuji appears to make their own as well.

The small sensor is significant because it limits the camera in two ways: performance in low light, and performance related to noise in the picture. Small sensors need a lot of light, and small sensors are noisy. I don’t really want to get into why this is the case. But in general it is.

A bad viewfinder.

Bad viewfinders. Point and shoot cameras generally have either a reverse telescopic viewfinder or an electronic viewfinder like a camcorder. Both of these suck. Of course, film point and shoot cameras suck the same way. Luckily, with digital point and shoots, you can use the LCD on the back. It doesn’t tell you a whole lot about things like focus, but it’s better than nothing. And, the swively ones can be handy for waist level shooting. LCDs don’t work well in full sunlight.

A slow image pipeline

Do the following experiment. Pick up a point and shoot digital camera. Point it at a second hand and hit the shutter button. Then bang on the button until it takes another picture. What you’ll find is that the delay between the two pictures will usually be somewhere between a little more than a second to several seconds. The most common value is about a second or two.

Note that I am not talking about shutter delay here. Most point and shoot cameras have shutter delay, but it can be minimized by prefocussing or whatnot. What I am talking about is how fast the imaging pipeline resets itself so you can take another picture. In general, the imaging systems in point and shoot cameras are simple and slow. They do not allow the camera to snap another shot while still chewing on a picture. You have to wait until everything is done before the camera lets you shoot again. This makes taking pictures of things that are moving or otherwise changing quickly sort of frustrating. More on this later.

A small battery

You tend to get a hundred to a couple of hundred shots out of a battery. You can’t really hope for more. There are exceptions, mostly in point and shoots that are larger.

That about sums it up. If you plow through all the camera review pages, you will find that all the specs basically add up to the same thing.

Taking pictures with a point and shoot is all about working around the limitations of the machine. Since the viewfinder sucks, just don’t use it. I find it easier to compose roughly in the LCD screen than to try and use the viewfinder for anything. Since the AF is slow, pre-focus the camera ahead of time by holding the shutter button down halfway (almost all cameras let you do this). Finally, since the frame to frame speed is usually too slow to capture a changing situation, leave the camera in “continuous drive” mode all the time, and when just the right situation happens in front of your pre-focussed lens, jam the shutter button down and take a bunch of frames. This gives you several chances to catch a good picture that you’d lose if you waited for the camera to cycle through its focus, set exposure, write picture to card routine after every shot.

The importance of this can’t be understated. Most point and shoots can fire off two or three frames per second for a second or two if they don’t have to reset focus and exposure after every shot. You should take advantage of this. Many wanky photography buffs will look down their noses at you for shooting this way with inferior equipment. You can laugh at them when they don’t have the energy to haul their 10 pounds of gear to their kid’s next birthday party and therefore end up with zero pictures rather than what you manage to get.

My final piece of advice for point and shoot work is to never use the flash except under extreme duress. It will slow you down and drain the batteries. Speaking of batteries: always have spare charged batteries. There is nothing more humiliating than getting to a great photo situation and not having batteries.

Digital SLR

Digital SLRs trade size and cost for performance (although the new Canon Digital Rebel is nearly the same size as some point and shoot cameras). Comparing the SLR to the point and shoot you will find that:

The viewfinder is a lot better.

Look through my point and shoot and then look at the same scene through a Nikon D70. The P&S shows you what is sort of in the top half of the scene, with a lot of junk that isn’t really in the shot. And, you can’t tell what is in focus and not in the viewfinder or even in the LCD. Also, you can’t see the LCD in sunlight. The D70 will show you what is in the shot with proper framing and a pretty good indication of what is in focus and not. For an even better experience, look through an FM3A film camera.

The sensor is a lot bigger.

The sensor in the average digital SLR is usually around 1″ long on the long side, which means that it is much much larger than the sensor in the average point and shoot. This means that pixel for pixel, pictures look better. If you take an identical shot using a Nikon D70 and my Canon point and shoot, both of which capture about 6 megapixels, you will find that the Nikon always does a better job. At equivalent settings, there will be better color, less noise, and maybe even more detail in the shot from the Nikon. I can shoot at ISO 400 with the D70 and get barely any noise at all. At ISO 400, the Canon makes images that are barely usable.

Everything is faster.

I can turn on my Nikon D70 and take a shot in less time than it took you to read this sentence up to the word “shot”. At the same point in time, my point and shoot will still be turning on. Also, the image processing pipeline in the D70 is much smarter and faster. Assuming there is enough memory left, it will overlap processing images with further shooting, so I don’t have to wait for the camera until I fill the shot buffer, even if I’m not shooting continuous frames. The D70 only has room for 4-6 pictures, but newer cameras can shoot 10 or even up to 40 pictures before giving up.

Using the D70 is pretty much just like using a film camera, except the viewfinder isn’t quite as nice. What you pay to get all this luxury is about $500 to $1000 extra dollars, and a lot of size and weight. I don’t have a workarounds section here, because you don’t need any. The thing just works like every camera you’ve ever owned, except there are no film costs. Anyone can get good pictures with one of these things if they just follow a few simple rules

Shopping Advice

Aside from the general principles above, I don’t really have much shopping wisdom here. My general rule has been to buy Canon point and shoot cameras, because I think Canon knows more about getting decent JPEG files out of crappy sensor than anyone else. Also, I think the Canons represent the best overall features/price/performance tradeoffs.

I use Nikon SLRs, but that’s just because I already have Nikon lenses. If you have something else, buy something else. All of the major lines make good cameras.

My only other rule is to never buy a Sony camera because of the evil memory stick.

Parting Thoughts

There isn’t too much more to say than this. Both my P&S and my D70 are a couple of years old now, and have been replaced by bigger, faster and shinier cameras. But I think the market split still holds. Even the new quicker point and shoots are still clunky compared to even a first generation DSLR.

You should figure out a good overall image management workflow. You should get tools that support that flow. They don’t have to be powerful or complicated, they just have to work well for what you want to do. I’m not going to make any recommendations here because my tools are always changing around because I’m a tool geek. Set up a system and stick to it.

Finally, for god’s sake, back up the pictures. Digital files are fragile and ephemeral. Make sure you have at least three copies of everything. Hmm, I wonder when I’ll have time to burn 2006 to DVD.

This is the fourth in a series of articles about 4X space games. Read the introduction here and the previous article here.

Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II is a great game. I can’t stand it.

It appeals to a lot of players, has simple game mechanics, an acceptable UI, and a very high degree of polish. There are many people whose opinions I respect who enjoy it immensely, and you might be one of them.

I am not one of the people that enjoy Galactic Civilizations. It bores me. It bores me to tears.

I suspect I’m not the only person who has a list of games they think they should like, but don’t. If I simply didn’t like GalCiv I would have played it once and ignored it. But instead, every so often I forget that I don’t like it. It’s simple to learn, hard to master! It’s polished! It’s shiny! I’ll play it again, and maybe this time I’ll like it!

The original GalCiv had a little cachet as, more or less, the only game ever developed for IBM’s OS/2 since the beginning of time. The game has what I think of as a fairly low-level nature: it’s a 4X game that owes more to Civilization II than to Spaceward Ho!. Some of the similarities include a tech tree that is broad, deep, and involves making tradeoffs, a map where you move your pieces slo-o-o-o-o-w-l-y across the universe, one “space” at a time, and cities that you develop by building structures.

Not Actually The Author

I was talking to my friend Nat the other day, trying to encapsulate what it is that I hate about GalCiv. I explained it like this: “First I spend an hour hitting ‘end turn’ excited to see what happened next. Then I spend an hour hitting ‘end turn’ wondering why I’m bothering, because this is getting sort of boring. Then I realize that I have spent two hours in a trance, compulsively hitting a button hoping for a piece of cheese.” It’s a bit like waking up in a strange hotel room, naked, in a bathtub full of cheesy poofs: you might have enjoyed it at the time, but afterwards you just feel sort of disgusted and ashamed.

In terms of presentation, GalCiv shares similarities with the original Master of Orion. The game has, simultaneously, more polish and less flavor. Perhaps it’s because MoO had more cartoony, less representational graphics, but I found all of their alien races more memorable and elemental, whereas GalCiv’s array of Arcaeans, Altarians, and so on seem much more interchangeable to me. The technology discovery screens, which are meant to sound jaunty and irreverent, instead sound somehow cynical and dialed-in to me, as if halfway through the project someone got bored of writing color text. That the robot delivering the text looks like Joan Rivers in Spaceballs doesn’t help matters.

Building a ship

GalCiv has lots of management. You decide what structures to build on colonies. You design ships (including a mode where you can construct and paint lovingly-rendered 3D models of said ships). You move those ships through the universe, one square at a time. All of this management — which I acknowledge is done through a simple and clear UI — puts on upper limit on the size of empire that I, with my tiny simian brain, can actually handle. I am running the most powerful galactic empire ever created: can’t I afford an administrative assistant who can figure some of these things out for me?

(Actually, you can turn on such assistants; ships can be set to “auto-survey” mode, and planets can be assigned “governors”, but by the time you think to turn these on, the damage is done: things that are fun when building your first two planets are not fun when building your twentieth.)

One aspect of GalCiv that I do like, unambiguously, is the ability to build space stations. The galaxy is sprinkled with interstellar resources that can be mined. Once built, space stations can be upgraded (at great cost) by sending constructor ships to them. This gives players the ability to project power into their enemies spheres of control even when there are no colonizable planets left. The scramble for space stations and resources is probably the most interesting part of the mid-game, to me.

The game also periodically presents you with moral dilemmas. Typically, you can resolve these by being “good” (for a small penalty), “neutral” (for a small bonus), or “evil” (for a large bonus). Over time, the choices you make will influence your empire’s reputation and the technological paths available to you. While they break up the monotony a bit, I didn’t find these to be life-changing.

The game’s AI is devilishly aggressive, which is a welcome change from most games of this sort. Furthermore, GalCiv does have a lot of flexibility — you can win by fulfilling any one of a number of victory conditions, as in Civilization, and unlike most games in the genre you’re not forced to commit genocide to keep playing. It’s perfectly possible to play a conservative and defensive game in GalCiv and still have a chance at victory.

It’s hard to explain why I don’t like GalCiv II, and that’s why I want to emphasize how polished the game it. The graphics are attractive. The UI is nice. The music is great. It’s endlessly configurable. It gives you a wealth of strategic options. But at the end of the day, I find even the most challenging of GalCiv games to be soporific. My only theory for this is that I simply don’t like the scale of the game. When playing Advance Wars, a game with theoretically much less at stake, I often find myself, quite literally, on the edge of my seat. I have a sense, playing that game, that every move matters, and if I screw up, I’m going to find out in short order. In GalCiv I might make a mistake and not discover it until 45 minutes later, after endless animations of my survey ship creeping across the Galaxy. For all the flexibility built in to the game, it just doesn’t feel dynamic to me. When I finish playing GalCiv, it is as if I am waking up from a deep slumber. I feel that I have squandered time. And no matter how polished the presentation or how thoughtful the game design, I can’t ignore that feeling.

Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition, by Stardock, is available for purchase on their website. $44.95. According to the publisher, a demo of the game will be available soon.

Back in the ancient times (you know, 2001), there was an entertainment company that owned the video game universe. Their lock was so tight that even people who were not originally impressed with the technical prowess of their hardware or the aesthetics of their games were still compelled through sheer force of will to buy the system.

This is a story about how a company can own the universe and give it away. I speak, of course, of Sony and the Playstation 2.

I should note at the beginning that Sony is a long way from having literally given up ownership of the video game market. One might argue that the PS2 is as strong as ever. There are 100,000,000 units out there, and they’re not going into the dustbin anytime soon.

That being said, the ruling position of the Playstation 2 has never really been in question since the beginning of its lifetime. It started strong, it crushed everyone, and it continues to crush everyone. Microsoft and Nintendo made a good show of competing, but there wasn’t really any competition there. Consider that within one year after the American launch of the system, the following games appeared:

- Final Fantasy X
- Metal Gear Solid 2
- Jak and Daxter
- Grand Theft Auto 3
- Devil May Cry
- Silent Hill 2
- Gran Turismo 3 (hi Pete!)
- Ico

And on and on. These are not all my favorite games. These might not be all your favorite games. But they are all someone’s favorite games. Just about a year after launch, the machine already had a game lineup that crushed all comers when it came to sheer breadth, even if the absolute quality of every title was not world beating.

The PS2 was arguably a conservative hardware design. The only thing edgy about it at the time was the inclusion of a DVD drive, but even there, the format was mature and hardware readily available. Sony could crank them out and sell to all comers, and there were so many customers that there were still shortages anyway. The PS2 also incorporated a fairly radical approach to backward compatibility, which gave you something to do in that first year before the games came out.

The contrast with the PS3 is startling. From the beginning the PS3 appeared to be the place where every questionable emerging technology that Sony wanted to foist on an unsuspecting world had rented an apartment and set up housekeeping. The front-runners in this race of technical stupidity are the Cell and the Blu-Ray drive.

The great thing about the Cell is that Sony has to figure out how to make enough of them and teach people to program them at the same time. This, along with the other realities of higher resolution game development means that games come out more slowly after the launch of the machine. Microsoft had this problem to a certain extent with the 360. There is still a relative shortage of really good original titles on the 360 more than a year after launch, and there is certainly nothing to go up against that list above from the PS2.

The great thing about Blu-Ray is that it drives the price of the machine up and no one gives a shit about it. As a bonus, since the technology is not yet mature, Sony can’t make enough of them yet. You can see how this is a winning bet on all fronts. It makes the machine more expensive and it provides no functionality that anyone really wants. Both of these things make people want to buy your hardware.

Because of these two technology gambles, the status of the PS3 was pretty risky to begin with. Even so, a well-managed launch with a few good games and no major mistakes would have locked Sony’s position in the marketplace. This is not what happened. There were supply problems, a truly anemic lineup of games at launch, people beating each other up so they can flip the box on Ebay, embarrassing bugs with the video processing and upscaling, and on and on. Gamers With Jobs has a long running thread with devastatingly comprehensive coverage of the “haterade”.

In its latest gaffe, Sony has announced that it will be crippling the previously much vaunted hardware backward compatibility in order to “save on manufacturing costs.” Given that the only thing you might want to do with a PS3 right now is play Final Fantasy XII this seems like a strange decision. Backward compatibility has traditionally been one of Sony’s strongest selling points. Why take an already marginal machine and cripple it even more?

Watching all of this fills you with a sense of awe. Sony’s previous launches, through the glasses of hindsight and nostalgia were controlled and precise, with very few mistakes. They lined up the hardware, the games, and the developers into neat rows and then just marched over Nintendo and Sega on their way to world domination. It makes you wonder how they could get it so wrong this time around.

I think this is the second system effect writ large, even though this is the third time around for the Playstation. The first two Playstations were, to some extent, built by a small subgroup of the company working under constrained conditions. The PS3 was essentially built by all of Sony to be the foundation of future revenue and earnings in several different parts of the company. When you look at the hardware, you can almost see the drool from the engineers who got to participate in this groundbreaking from-the-ground-up redesign of the gaming console. They were told that they would conquer the world and with it be the salvation of the company, and they were given free reign and infinite resources with which to do this. The predictable result is an expensive elephant of a machine with features no one wants and technologies that no one cares about. Rather than studying what they did well in the last two rounds of the console “wars”, Sony seems to have assumed that they are geniuses, and proceeded from that position of hubris to screw the pooch.

Of course, they haven’t lost yet. They probably won’t even lose in this generation. We’ll know how bad things are next Christmas. If the exclusives and third party developers are on board and shipping, the PS3 will be just fine. But I think that chances are good that Sony has lost some of that critical support. The launch screwups, the risky hardware, and the relatively low sales will have people writing games for the PS2, the Wii, or god forbid, the Xbox 360. In any case, it should be an interesting year for those of us who are dorky enough to think this stuff is interesting. Hey, it beats watching politics.

This is the third in a series of articles about 4X games. Read the introduction here and the previous article here.

Perhaps the most well-known of the early era 4X games was Master of Orion. Master of Orion was developed by Simtex, who engendered a cult following with their overrated game Master of Magic. Orion was published by Microprose in 1993. This meant that it had real marketing muscle—Microprose was one of the giants in its day.

I’m going to talk (briefly) about all three games in the series, which might be a bit unfair, since for the most part the three games have nothing to do with one another. Life is tough sometimes. Let’s start with the first one.

Master of Orion is a very playable game. It can fairly be described as Spaceward Ho With Stuff. But the Stuff it adds is not trivial stuff, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

MoO strategic map

The basic mechanics of exploration, shipbuilding, and colonization are similar. Instead of Spaceward Ho’s straightforward “fuel unit” limitation on range, Master of Orion lets you explore any system within so many parsecs of any colonized world, which frees you up from having to micromanage your travel. This is good, because I hates micromanagement. I hates it, I hates it, I hates it forever.

The game brings a lot of color to the genre. Each team in the game is a different species, and each species has certain advantages or disadvantages. For example, the dog-like Bulrathi are more effective at ground combat, while the Psilons are superior at researching new technologies, and the bunny-lizard Sakkra hump a lot breed faster.

As in Ho!, the qualities of a world are unknown to you until you visit, but you can glean a little information from the color of the star. There are no guarantees, but certain star colors are more likely to have habitable or interesting worlds. That adds a nice bit of flavor to the exploration. In addition to suitability for colonization, worlds may provide you with a technology, economic, or other bonus.

You can spend your money in many ways. You can develop the industry on the worlds you have colonized, or their defense, or invest in technology, or build ships, or spend money on espionage. Technology and ship production are both done on a per-planet basis, which makes juggling the money a bit of a chore, comparatively. I tried collecting all of my money into a big pile and jumping into it naked, but it scared my advisors and, to be honest, it sort of chafed.

Researching technology

Technology research is both interesting and ponderous; the research tree branches in several places, and no given species can research all available technologies. Making certain decisions early on can foreclose other options later. When you do succeed in discovering a new technology, you get a very satisfying little splash screen where a species-appropriate scientist looks smug and explains the implications of the new find. Technologies have a somewhat rock-paper-scissors relationship to each other, so it’s entirely possible to spend many centuries chasing a certain technological thread only to find you’ve tied yourself up in knots and spent tons of resources on something useless. That’s not so fun when it happens.

Master of Orion has a much richer diplomatic game than many others. You can trade worlds, money, or technology with other species, once you’ve established diplomatic relations with them. You can bribe other races, which is a satisfyingly effective way to stave off an impending attack. You can also begin spying on them, spending part of your GDP on espionage. Once you have spies in place, you can use them to steal technology, perform sabotage, or engage in counter-espionage activities. A well-placed spy can tip the balance of a close game.

There are a few differences that make Master of Orion a bit easier, strategically. In many 4X games, you need to conquer an enemy world before you can colonize it. In MoO, if you conquer a world with ground troops, the “excess” ground troops become the planet’s native population after the victory. Thus, after the early part of the game you’ll almost never build a colony ship: bomb them from orbit, send in a huge troop transport, and you have a fully-functioning and profitable colony. Worlds can fall like dominoes in this part of the game. Especially if you’re playing as the Bulrathi.

The one part of Master of Orion that doesn’t work is the ship-to-ship combat. It’s a turn-based move-your-mice-roll-your-dice sort of affair that gives the illusion of tactical choice. In reality, there is almost no situation in which the moves you make in tactical combat make any difference whatsoever. In other words, the whole tactical combat screen is nothing more than a humiliating sham that wastes your time. There is an “auto resolve” button where you can have the computer make the moves for both sides. I suggest you press that button the first time you get to the combat screen, and forget that any other option even exists. You’ll like the game more for doing this.

So zooming back up to a high level, I view Master of Orion as a game that lifts most of the good ideas from Spaceward Ho!, and then adds a ton and a half of mise-en-scène to them. The game is an unqualified success, and is probably more attractive to those who seek this sort of game for the setting more than the game itself. If the play is a little less crisp than its immediate predecessor, we can forgive it because it has so much style.

Insert sophomoric caption here.

Hoping to capitalize on the name, Simtex released Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares in 1996. A much weaker game, MoO2 was, from my perspective, an attempt to graft the MoO mise-en-scène onto their earlier game, Master of Magic. The city-building parts of that earlier effort were shoehorned into MoO2, and it works about as well as putting a sausage inside a piece of strawberry shortcake: you might want to eat both of them, but, for the love of God, not at the same time.

The reason this doesn’t work, I think, is that there’s a fundamental difference in scope, conceptually, between running a feudal serfdom and a galactic empire. At some point, after the eighth time you’ve told some new planet to build some farms or, y’know, goddamned houses for their citizens, it stops being fun and starts being irritating. “Why am I doing this?” you wonder. “Why am I doing this for these idiots? They don’t deserve my leadership. I should just let them starve to death. Schmucks.” In fairness, there is a “governor” option, but as in most cases, it doesn’t work for me: once the game asks me to make the decision, it has asked me to care. And I can never get those neurons back.

In 2003, Infogrames published Master of Orion 3, a game so stunningly bad that it’s not even worth playing for free. I won’t go into detail here because it’s too depressing to write about. I just wanted to confirm, publically, that it really is about as bad as you heard it was. It’s actually worse. The word “unplayable” doesn’t even come close to describing it: it’s the worst game I’ve played that didn’t actually cause my computer to explode.

The original Master of Orion is clearly the best of the three: it’s fun to learn, pretty to look at, and if you don’t get bogged down in the pointless tactical combat, quick moving. It can even still be bought new at Amazon. It runs very well in DOSBox on both Windows and Macintosh.

The next article in this series is about Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II.

This is the second in a series of articles about 4X games. Read the introduction, here.

“Keep It Simple, Stupid.” It’s a principle that, in games, is more honored in the breach than in the observance. I’ve written before about how user interface is critical to a game’s playability. But beyond UI is a principle that many developers don’t seem to be able to grasp:

Have me make decisions about things that are important. Don’t bother me with things that aren’t important.

Spaceward Ho! is a 4X game that is entirely designed according to this principle. When it was released, it was the best game in its class. In my opinion, it’s still the best today.

What Spaceward Ho! does so well is abstract away complexity while still managing to maintain character. The game is simple, almost sparse. The object of the game is to take over the galaxy.

Spaceward Ho! (click to enlarge)

The galaxy in the Ho! is a simple place. It consists of a number of named stars. You can choose for a galaxy to have a specific arrangement, such as a cluster, or spiral, or have the stars spread randomly. Each star has one planet. Every planet is inhabitable, although some are more or less hospitable to your race, which is expressed in terms of gravity and temperature: your people like planets close to 1.0g and 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

You begin the game with one planet. Each turn, you accrue money based on the number of people on a given planet (planets with few citizens provide no income, and in fact cost money to maintain). Money can be spent in exactly four ways: you can spend it on building ships, you can invest in your planets (terraforming them to be closer to your ideal temperature, or mining metal for use in building ships), you can invest in technology, or you can save the money for another turn. Each turn you decide how much money to spend on each activity. Money is a renewable resource.

Metal is a nonrenewable resource: it is mined from planets, and used to build spaceships. When you run out of metal, you can’t build any more ships. You can scavenge metal by scrapping old ships, or by destroying enemies in battles at planets you control, but generally speaking, once you run out of metal, you’re screwed. The mid to late game of most Spaceward Ho! games tend to be fierce battles over metal.

Technology research can be split among six areas: weapons, shields, speed, range, minaturization, and “Radical”. The first five areas allow you access to marginal improvements in their respective areas, while “Radical” techs may be useless or game-changing. Technologies have a variety of whimsical names (”You now have Topping Off the Tanks range technology.”). When you go to design ships, newer technologies are displayed on the image of the ship being built (for example, a faster ship might have more engines. A ship with higher weapons tech might have ominous looking missiles dangling from it. Or a big boxing glove.)

There are a few basic ship platforms. Fighters are the standard ship type, existing at your “official” technology level. Scouts can fly farther than your other ships, but are weaker. Colony ships can conquer new worlds, but are hideously expensive in terms of both dollars and metal. Tankers can refuel fleets even away from your colony. Satellites cannot move, but can attack and defend enemy ships. And Dreadnoughts are, essentially, ridiculously powerful (and expensive) fighters. There are also a few odd variants, such as decoy or biological ships, that add flavor to the mix.

What separates the Ho! from other games in the genre, I think, is that it is a fast game. Even in a huge game, the decisions you have to make are crisp and clear: decide where to spend your money, decide how many ships to buy, and decide where to send them. That’s really all there is to it.

Of course, saying “That’s really all there is to it” is deceptive in a game whose playing field is an undirected graph. The other thing that sets Spaceward Ho! apart from the field is its excellent AI. Perhaps it is a consequence of the simplicity of the game, but the computer opponents here are no pushovers. Lower difficulty levels provide a great diversion for the gamer who is just looking to noodle around. At the highest difficulty level the game will challenge even the most jaded tactical genius: the AI fights hard, reacts quickly, and has a knack for leapfrogging your defenses.

Battles are resolved automatically whenever two hostile ships are at the same star. There’s a brief animation that plays to show you how the combat played out, but it’s easily skipped. Both technology and overwhelming numbers can make a difference in any particular battle. Higher tech ships are massively powerful, but also tend to be massively expensive. Furthermore, monetary investments in technology tend to give diminishing returns after a certain point. Lastly, prototype ships are extremely expensive compared to production ships. This means that the first ship you build with any technological change will drain your treasury. Thus, there’s an incentive to not rush new technology out to the front lines immediately, but to wait “just one more turn” to see if you can save on prototype expenditures. This tension between spending your money to develop more powerful ships and saving money to buy more powerful ships drives the late game.

The game’s simple UI lends itself to quick play: it is, quite simply, the Advance Wars of 4X games. You won’t need a manual. You don’t have to stare at on-screen icons wondering if that thing over there is a button or a depiction of an alien ballet dancer intended to increase your “immersion”. There is no full-motion video. Most UI actions are accompanied by audio confirmations. These also are whimsical: move a ship to another planet, and you’ll hear a cowboy shouting “Hyaaaah!” Status messages come with a brief but satisfying “click” to let you know they’ve registered.

The game supports internet multiplayer, as well, but I find that the Ho!’s quick-playing nature lends itself to solo gaming sessions.

People play 4X games for different reasons. I have no doubt that truly hardcore science-fiction fans might be put off by Spaceward Ho’s whimsy, by its iconic rather than representational graphics, and by its focus on gameplay rather than on the Very Serious Business of Intergalactic Political Relations. But from a pure gaming — or, dare I say it, ludological — perspective, Spaceward Ho! is the gold standard against which all other 4X games should be judged. If I could only take one 4X game with me to a desert island, this would be the one.

Spaceward Ho! for Windows (version 4, $24.95), Macintosh (version 5, $39.95), or Palm OS ($19.95) is available from Delta Tao.

The next article in this series is about the classic 4X game Master of Orion.

This week, I’ll be surveying a number of space strategy games, from old classics to recent entries in the field. Often known as “3X” or “4X” games (for “Explore, Expand, Exploit”, and sometimes “Exterminate”), this is a genre that has been around for years, and has remained popular.

Up for consideration this week are Delta Tao’s Spaceward Ho!, various iterations of Master of Orion, Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations 2, Reach For the Stars! from SSG and Matrix Games, and Space Empires V from Malfador Machinations and Strategy First. I’ll be covering each of these in their own articles.

There are a few strategic elements that are common to most of these games that distinguish them from other types of wargames. Most of them derive, in some sense, from the truly ancient Brøderbund game Galactic Empire.

As you might expect from games marketed towards people who think that outer space is nifty, all games in this genre deliver massive amounts of technological pornography. Giving money to scientists, in these games, always results in spaceships that are faster, fly farther, shoot bigger bullets, take more damage, are cheaper to build, and never result in the scientists scheduling lots of boondoggle conferences in Honolulu while their grad students decide which model PC will be best-suited to playing 3D Tetris. I guess that’s why they call it “science fiction.” In any event, it’s a truism that in addition to spending money on your fleet, you’ll be spending money on weapons research.

Every empire needs a good logo

Secondly, 4X games have a hopelessly colonial model of government. You send hapless citizen-slaves off to distant hostile planets and whip them with taser-rods until they start making money for you. Since games are often won or lost on the basis of resource acquisition, choosing not to emulate this model is, essentially, the same as choosing to lose the game. Some of the games model colonization in an abstract way (”This colony will lose money for 130 years, and then will become more and more profitable over time,”) whereas others get down to a level of detail requiring the player to decide what buildings are constructed. This, more than almost any other aspect of the games, controls the amount of micromanagement the player will be doing.

Thirdly, most of these games involve space combat. This is often the place where the games distinguish themselves from each other. Some of the games resolve combat automatically, some have the player move pieces around a board, and others choose a middle path and have the player make operational fleet decisions in between combat rounds. Some of the games model diplomacy, which is the question of whether you and an opposing civilization will be killing each other today, or tomorrow.

With that introduction, I think the stage is set, and we are ready to talk about which of these games will provide the most satisfying simulation of brutally murdering your way across an entire galaxy. See you tomorrow.

Read next article in this series, 4X: Spaceward Ho!

Pete used his Gamefly account to get me a copy of F.E.A.R. for the 360. This is a shooter of relatively high reputation, mostly on the strength of its special rendering effects and yet another implementation of “bullet time” slow-motion massacre technology.

Unfortunately, I am not feeling very motivated to continue with the game after my first impression. I know this is shallow of me, but I have a lot of games and little time, so if a game is not good immediately, there is little point in going on.

Here’s how the first 20 minutes of F.E.A.R. played out.

1. One minute of various logo sreens.

2. Press start.

3. Five minutes of opening cut scene with a spooky little girl, name credits, and some more logos.

4. Second opening cut scene to set up first mission.

5. Arrive by car at a building with many gray hallways. Run around in the hallways for about five minutes. Shoot one rat, woohoo!. Meet up with your partner. Spooky out of body experience. Run around a bit more.

6. Partner tells you to go look around. Run around to the roof of the building for about five minutes. Some guy jumps you, setting up another expository cut scene with a lot of dialog you can’t quite make out. You can’t make it out because you have to play after the kid is in bed with the sound turned low and the game has no subtitles. Therefore, you have no idea what the exposition was about. No matter. It was probably stupid anyway.

7. Helicopter ride to the next mission. 2 minutes.

8. Play “find the switch” game for 2 more minutes.

9. Spooky cut scene, run into another old building with gray walls. WHOAH! Drone soldiers! Finally the shooting starts.

Let’s summarize. In the first 20 minutes of the game, I shot a rat. 20 minutes into Resident Evil 4 I had already been mauled by a mob of flesh eating zombie people. 20 minutes into Halo I was on a ship being attacked by aliens who were on fire. No wait, the ship was on fire. 20 minutes into Half-Life 2 I was running for my life on the roof of a building. You get the idea. 20 minutes is a long time in a game like this. You have to have something set up by then or I will put your game down and never pick it up again. We who want to shoot things in the head are not patient.

I realize that the developers were attempting to set up a compelling atmosphere and plot. What they succeeded in doing is making the first 20 minutes of their game really boring and tedious. F.E.A.R. did not help its cause by not really improving once the action began. The NPC dialog is all the same. The heavily hyped A.I. is sluggish and not very fun to fight against. The environments are all the same gray buidings filled with metal barrels and wooden crates. I expect the game to become even more repetitive and tedious as time goes on. I might try to tough it out for another hour, but so far I think that my first impressions of this game will be my last.

Good shooters seem rare these days. I wonder if the genre has lost something or if I’ve just become too jaded to deal with its conventions. It’s probably some of both. Maybe playing too much Final Fantasy makes it impossible for you to enjoy a shooter. Maybe Halo 3 will fix everything. Here’s hoping it starts out better than this.

Tonight a few recent discoveries, none all that long, but each very pleasing.

The Vacuum Insulated Thermos

These have changed the nature of our domestic hot drink management. After the initial purchase we went on to obtain three more of various different sizes. Combined with a nice electric pot for boiling water, these things will keep you in hot tea and coffee all day without a lot of sweat and bother. Highly recommended. Note: eventually we settled on the 16oz/.5 liter bottle as the best size.

Goulash

When I was at Dartmouth, there was a guy there named Rudy who sold bratwurst and kraut sandwiches at the local farmer’s market. He cooked his kraut for like 48 hours before market day. Those were really good sandwiches. Rudy also made goulash. He would reduce the liquid in it to almost nothing and then freeze it and sell the blocks, telling you to add a bit of water to bring back the right consistency. He didn’t want to sell you the water.

Since then, I’ve tried to make goulash once in a while and always failed. Then Karen found a recipe on the net. If you read the page, the guy is so sure that he’s right you just have to try the recipe because it’ll either be great or completely awful. Either way you will have learned something. In this case, the recipe was top notch.

But, learn from our mistake. You might be buying paprika at the spice store and notice that there is something called Half Sharp paprika. You might wonder what that means. You might use some in your goulash. Be very careful. This stuff is like a hot chili powder, but with more kick. It makes great goulash, but you must be aware of your limits.

Pressure Cooker Chickpeas

A pressure cooker is one of those appliances I try to avod because it only really does one thing. But, when we got ours we reasoned that maybe we’d learn how to do those Indian lentil dishes in it like we saw my friend’s mom in DC do. This never happened. There is actually only one dish we do in the pressure cooker, which means every time I make it I have to remember how to use the device. Here is the outline. You take this stuff:

1. 2-3 sweet potatoes, cubed.
2. 1 small can of tomatoes.
3. 2 cans of coconut milk (remember to shake before opening).
4. Cayenne pepper.
5. Curry powder. I use a weird mix of stuff.
6. Salt and pepper.
7. 1 1/2 cups dried chick peas, soaked overnight.

Put it all in the cooker and mix. Put the cooker on heat. Cook at pressure for 15-20min. Open up the cooker and throw in chopped cilantro and test to see if you need salt and pepper and more hot sauce. Stir it around and mash up the potatoes.

Serve over rice. My friend Jim told me how to do this. Jim got the recipe from this book. Thanks Jim.

I want to go on record saying, publically, that season 9, episode 3 of Top Gear might be the finest thing ever shown on television since the medium was invented.

And not just because of this segment.

Well, OK. Mostly because of that segment. But the political commentary about New Orleans is spot on as well.

I’m sure many of my urban liberal friends will think “This is unfair. It’s Alabama.” But the truth is that I can drive 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh and find towns which would have given the Top Gear boys the exact same reception.

The good folks at Gametap comped me an account for a short while, and I’ve spent a few days playing with it. It’s…interesting.

First off, despite my self-professed love for direct-to-drive systems, the very proliferation of them is somewhat astounding. On one machine I have Stardock’s totalgaming.net, Steam, and now Gametap. I’m waiting for them to start playing Corewars on my machine, each trying to sabotage the others.

The value proposition underlying Gametap is a subscription model. For about $10/month, you gain access to their library of games, which spans a good variety of titles from a number of platforms, from the Atari 2600 up through Windows. Presumably, if you stop paying them their $10/month, you lose the ability to play those games — just like Xbox Live.

When Gametap first launched, they placed a strong emphasis on their back library of retrogames. This, oddly, had the effect of repelling me from their system. After all, I already owned most of those games, and wasn’t paying anyone for the privilege of playing them. Over time, their library of modern and semi-modern Windows games has grown substantially. At this point, they have a significant enough library of Windows games that for some people it’s probably worth signing up just to get access to them.

Really, though, I think the Gametap marketing manages to completely misrepresent their product. There are some critically great things about the system that they manage to not explain well. Fortunately, for them, I am here to explain why it’s worth it to pay a subscription for access to these games, instead of just doing it for yourself a la carte.

1. No Stupid Installers

All the games in Gametap seem to run from within the Gametap application, which operates as a simple shell. Consequently, every game is installed in exactly the same way: click a button to get the game.

2. No CDs to lose.

Amusingly, earlier on the very day I installed Gametap, I had installed Jagged Alliance 2 from CD. And, of course, the game won’t run without the CD in the drive, because apparently, computer game publishers are gibbering morons who are intent on pissing away one of the few advantages their dying platform has. Gametap saves these publishers from themselves. All of the copy protection is rolled into their authentication scheme. When I installed Gametap later that evening, I saw they had Jagged Alliance 2 Gold and immediately trashed my CD-based version.

3. Nice visual browser

Sure, it’s whooshy and pointless, but I like the visual overview of the game library.

4. Sam & Max, Freelance Police

Gametap is helping sponsor the new Sam & Max games. So if you were going to buy them anyway — and you should — a Gametap subscription is arguably the cheapest way to get them. Sure, you won’t be able to play it once your subscription runs out but c’mon. When was the last time you replayed Grim Fandango, anyway? Be honest: never.

5. Seamless Emulation of Old Platforms

Yes, I have a Genesis emulator, a Nintendo emulator, and so on. I have games for the various emulators. But you know what? It’s sort of irritating to set up, and I have to keep everything organized just so for each emulator, and either remember the different keys they use or reconfigure them, so the end result is I don’t actually play any of those games because the psychic cost of entry is too high. Gametap lowers that psychic cost of entry, in return for cash.

There are a few disadvantages that are worth mentioning.

1. Video Commercials For Games With Slutty Chicks That Play When Your 5 Year Old Niece Is In The Room And There’s No (Obvious) Goddamn Pause Button

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.

2. It’s Diskariffic!

If you’re playing on a machine without that much disk space, you may as well kiss your free space goodbye. Since games don’t tell you how much space they require, this can be troublesome. Probably not a serious problem for people playing on desktop systems.

3. Windows only

In my fantasy world, I could be playing Jagged Alliance 2 Gold on my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X. While riding my flying pony.

These drawbacks, it seems to me, are not serious enough to harm the value proposition. If you can live with the idea of “renting” access to a game rather than owning shiny pieces of plastic, then I think it’s a sensible and worthwhile system.