Board 8 > Exdeath Plays Every Game in the GotD 2020 Contest

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BetrayedTangy posted...

So I have some advice on dealing with those enemy types if you're interested.

Thanks. I admit that when I first read your advice my response was "Oh, I don't want to use the plasma pistol." There's something about the feeling of that charge shot that I don't really like. Still, I tried it out and I agree that it's the most effective way of taking Elites down. I tend to keep the plasma pistol and assault rifle on the average day. The first appearance of the hunters definitely felt like a difficulty spike. I was pretty confident their back was the weak point but I found it hard to actually get behind them unless I had an ally distracting them.

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I finished the stealth mission and what I guess constitutes about half of the next one. The stealth mission starts you out with a sniper rifle and a lot of ammo, which is pretty nice. It can one-shot some elites with a headshot. I tried to make the ammo last for a while, but I got into the whole cycle of being low and having to just grab whatever I could find later on. You have to protect a group of civilians, who later join up and follow you around. None of them made it to the end, I'm afraid. There's one notable section where a bunch of grunts are fighting a large kind of yeti-like alien native to Reach. I decided to just kind of sneak past that whole kerfuffle. The later sections have some troubling Covenant turrets around. They can be manned by most enemy infantry, so you're encouraged to flank around and try to take them out. In the end Noble Six finds out that the Covenant are preparing from a large-scale invasion, and the next mission is where the war begins proper.

This time you start out with a grenade launcher, which lets you just straight up decimate some of those turrets that were such a pain before. Noble Six's job is mostly to take out Anti-Air guns. You just get inside the towers around them and blow up the generators in the middle. The first one is absolutely swarming with guys. They give you a warthog with some rather mighty guns attached and a regular army guy to help you use it. I decided to drive again. I found it pretty easy to deal with the enemy vehicles, but had a harder time getting rid of the mass of infantry around the building. Eventually I did manage to clear things out in a firefight that saw me lose both my car and my buddy - so I had to hoof it to the next area on foot, which the developers didn't strictly have in mind, I suspect. It took a while, and it also led me into a tricky situation dealing with the Wraith (big alien tank) up ahead, since I had no heavy weapons to bring it down with nor vehicle to match against it. Luckily, there's a sort of stealth takedown against Wraiths where you can sneak up behind them and plant them with a sticky grenade, so that's what I ended up doing.

The second AA gun doesn't have nearly as many guards - its commanding officer must have preferred quality to quantity, because it's staffed with two of our old bionicle-like friends the Hunters. You get a lock-on heavy weapon in the area just before, but I wasted all its ammo inefficiently taking down a wraith. Dealing with two hunters on your own with normal weapons is a bit of a rough time, so I didn't do that. A smaller covenant vehicle called a ghost came into play here. You find a couple waiting unoccupied as you infiltrate some enemy positions. It's a faster vehicle that can strafe, but charged plasma shots cause it to short-circuit for a little while, so my first experience with it was the surge of confidence as I picked up an armored vehicle, only to drive it into a group of enemies, get stopped dead, and then die before I realized what had happened. Once I figured out how maneuverable it was, though, I used it to take down most of the enemies around the AA gun, then lured the hunters away from the inside, drove straight past them to the back entrance, blew the generator up, and then got back on the Ghost and drove away. It took a few tries to pull that off without getting shot dead in the attempt. The game didn't quite let me get away with that chicanery, because it declared a defend objective and made me clear the area, but it also dropped some human soldiers nearby and I found it surprisingly easy to shoot the hunters in the back while they were distracted with those fellows.

After that there's one of those standard FPS coffee-break sections where you gun down some enemies from a helicopter, and then you go into an area of electronic interference near what's called a Spire and the copter goes down. That's not technically the start of a new level, but I did notice that Noble Six had different weapons when he got out of the crash compared to what I was carrying beforehand, so I figured it was a good enough time to take a break.

That last section does take off the training wheels to a certain extent, because it's the first time you can't exploit an unkillable ally character to get through the rough bits. I managed to struggle through on heroic, but I expect to resort to lowering the difficulty sooner or later. I suck badly enough at this game that it's causing me to progress very slowly.


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So I ended up watching a speedrun of Reach instead of playing it and man do I love how many alternate approaches there are to get through the levels. For example before one of the AA guns there's a broken part of highway that you can jump up leading to a Warthog that's lined up perfectly with the AA gun so you can just sit there and destroy it without worrying about enemy encounters.

I feel like this is something Halo has always been great at as not a lot of AAA shooters encourage exploration like that.

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BetrayedTangy posted...

So I ended up watching a speedrun of Reach instead of playing it and man do I love how many alternate approaches there are to get through the levels.

Yeah, that's definitely neat. I think it also shows a kind of open-endedness toward how you play even if you just take the regular path, as demonstrated to a certain extent by my lost warthog misadventure.

Now that you mention how the games reward exploration, I'm reminded of one of the few things I knew about this series before I really played any of them, which are those weird semi-humanoid monkey creatures that are hidden in the corners of the maps in one of the games (was that Halo 3?) I still think those are kind of funny.

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This was one of those nights where I slept in much too late and barely had any time to do the things I need, but I still managed to boot up the game and finish off the spire section of the Tip of the Spear mission. It actually went quite quickly and smoothly, much to my surprise. There isn't a lot of opposition on the Spire itself: it's mainly large waves of Grunts and a few of the Skirmishers. You also start out with the rapid-fire sniper rifle weapon (I forget what it's actually called,) and an assault rifle with a lot of ammo. I was able to get some satisfying headshots on the early waves, and found the sniper rifle pretty effective against the shield guys.

There's also a chance to swap sprint out for a jetpack, which of course I took, but I didn't really end up using it. I had a hard time finding a good time to give it a shot. I got through the whole section without losing any lives except at the very end, where there is an energy sword guy guarded by some grunts who seemed to have some really heavy firepower. The first time I peeked into the room where they were standing I got blown to smithereens in a matter of seconds. I ended up tossing a grenade into the room and then taking out the swordmaster with the old plasma pistol into assault rifle method, and that was the end of the mission.

With Noble Six's mission to disable the spire's shield complete, the army sends a large assault ship after the structure, but it turns out to be a trap: the spire can warp in a massive Covenant mothership that tears the battlecruiser in half like a sheet of paper. The human position on Reach suffers catastrophic losses, and the seemingly lone Noble team have two objectives:

1. Hold out for reinforcements in 48 hours
2. Destroy the mothership using an experimental warp drive in a hidden base, where Noble 6 used to work.

So begins the next mission, Long Night of Solace, which I'll tackle next time I play. Hopefully tomorrow.


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After much too long away, I returned to Reach and took down that Covenant supercarrier. I kind of expected that mission to define the rest of the plot, but it actually just spans one mission. The initial stretch is really easy because you have the full Noble squad alongside you - I think you can just hide behind cover and let your pals do all the fighting for you. Once you arrive at the old research base and pick up the experimental warp drive, there's a section, where Noble 6 shows off the piloting skills that used to earn his paychecks. It took me by surprise a little, but it's actually a gameplay loop I'm more comfortable with since I spent a lot of time with Star Fox 64. You have a similar set of moves in Halo's spaceship level, including the evasive loop-de-loop and a dodge that looks a lot like the barrel roll. I actually did die quite a bit here. I found it hard to get away once I started taking fire and would often get focused down. The enemy fighter jets have regenerating shields that you have to whittle away with machine gun fire before you can blow them up with missiles, so like with Elites on foot it can be frustrating to have to retreat because an enemy receives covering fire after you've overloaded their shields and are about to make the kill.

The big plan is to secretly commander and enemy ship called a corvette, send it to the supercarrier as if it needed to refuel, with the warp drive on board, and then blow the whole thing up. The ship section is about taking out the corvette's engines and accompanying fighter craft, and it gets followed up by Nobles 5 and 6 heading onboard to wipe out the crew. There's nothing too tricky to deal with here - no hunters or energy swords, and no overwhelmingly huge Covenant groups. I mostly used a plasma rifle and the DMR, which is the faster, lower damage sniper rifle I was talking about earlier. I found it pretty good for taking down Elites, sometimes dropping their shields with the plasma rifle and then finishing them up with one or two headshots from the DMR, and the latter weapon's scope was also handy for shooting the hands off of the shield guys.

Once the boys take over the corvette, they activate its refueling sequence with themselves still aboard - they've lost the ride that was intended to bring them back. Noble 5 (aka Jorge) stays on board because the warp drive needs to be activated manually, but he pushes 6 off the ship so he can get back to Reach by surviving atmospheric re-entry in his power armor. See you in Valhalla, Jorge. We hardly knew ye.

The supercarrier is gone but the enemy are still warping in worrying numbers of reinforcements. After that there's a kind of cute sequence showing a slightly wounded Noble 6 stranded with no weapons out in the mountains. He joins a civilian rescue mission, Exodus, starting with only a salvaged pistol and a small number of rounds. But that will be a story for another day.

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I'm glad the piloting section was a nice change of pace for ya! I think it's kinda hit and miss for most people, but it's nice seeing it get some appreciation. The scenery during it is really nice too.

I also think a cool feature of LNoS is when you enter the ship and it goes zero gravity. It really helps keep the gameplay fresh imo.

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Yeah, the whole dogfight section is definitely very pretty. That's an obvious strength of the game in general I would say. In comparison to something like Star Fox 64, I also appreciated how you have a more full freedom of movement in just about all directions.

I can see why it's a little polarizing with players because it is quite different from the rest of the gameplay and doesn't build on the same skills you've been learning up to that point, except that you switch weapons to deal with shields and health, similar to ground battles. I can understand just wanting to go back to the usual gameplay if you're not really a fan of those kind of military flight simulators.

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The early sections of Exodus are a low-tech battle for both sides - Noble 6 with his pistol and a few covenant weapons against mostly suicide bomber grunts. This is the Armor Lock ability's time to shine, since you can bunker down with it and just let the enemy uselessly blow themselves up on you. Later on, there's a jet pack section with a lot of platforms designed around the ability and some disposable AI buddies to fly around with. My experience with these guys was that they died really quickly, and their biggest contribution to the cause was that they each had the good old DMR and I could take it from them. Flying up and shooting enemies at the same time was definitely kind of cool. I exploited it against a melee enemy by standing on a platform below them, flying upward and shooting a few times, and then rinsing and repeating. The new enemy type for this level is the Brute, a big boy who wears a helmet but dies to one headshot from the DMR once it gets knocked off. They generally don't have any regenerating capabilities, which I would say makes them a little easier to deal with than the Elites, but they have their own powered-up golden variant who likes the Gravity Hammer, another 1-hit KO melee weapon. There are a lot of one hit kill attacks on this level, actually. I got a little tilted trying to clear the final section while occasionally getting randomly blown up by the artillery attacks from Wraiths. I ended up finding a rocket launcher and taking the fight to them, and I took out one in particular by shooting its driver with the DMR and then doing the contextual "plant grenade" takedown.

Noble 6 re-establishes contact with the rest of his team and informs them of Jeorge's death. They all react very stoically, and I'm reminded of why I have trouble getting invested in the story of these games. With the crew back together, the evacuation effort will continue on the next mission, New Alexandria.

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Haha yeah, Halo's story has never really been great. I will say though I'm a sucker for the Covenant lore. All the different alien types are really cool and how their different personality types tie into the gameplay.

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Yeah I can tell some effort went into the various Covenant designs, and they're definitely visually distinct in ways that improve the gameplay. I think what's disappointing about the story of Reach specifically is that it has some of the ingredients to be really emotionally impactful. I tend to like stories that deal with the harsh realities of war, and this game in particular has the Noble squad make heroic but futile efforts toward a lost cause, going down one by one until it's just 6 making a hopeless last stand with the player controlling him. It's just that their characterization is so thin that I can't really bring myself to care about them.

New Alexandria was the first mission where I felt like I was clearing it reasonably competently without too many deaths (only three or four, I think.) It's heavily based around piloting a helicopter from area to area and then jumping off and fighting some ground forces. I found the heli controls a bit awkward at first but only died in the air once, when I managed to get myself surrounded by a racket of Banshees. The two new enemy types are some flying raptor boys and a floating bug that gives shields to all the enemies around him (I spent a long time whittling down a big group of shielded grunts before realizing this guy existed,) but the biggest threat, as usual, was the hunters. One of the areas you land in has four of the bastards running around. I never died to them today, but they kept me on my toes with their potentially instant-kill artillery blast and they just take so long to drop. Like before, I found luring them away and booking it for the objective to be the best approach, and only killed two of them before shutting down the nearby signal jammer and leaving. Brutes were still the major enemy type, but there weren't any appearances of the gravity hammer, which was quite a frequent sight on the last mission.

Once Noble 6 completes all his piloting objectives, he returns to the tower base where the rest of the squad talk strategy until the building gets blown away by an enemy airstrike. They get assigned to go back to Sword Base from mission 2 and torch it so the Covenant can't get the research there, but on the way Noble 2, aka Kat, gets shot mid-sentence by a sniper. RIP. Unfortunately she won't show up in Valhalla, because girls aren't allowed there. It's up to the remaining Nobles to deliver The Package for their next mission.

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I've finished the first mission on Char, in which we take the fight to the Zerg and fail horribly. I'm impressed with how much the missions in this game can feel different from each other - the previous mission with the battlecruisers was ploddingly slow destroying generators one by one, while this mission was super fast running all over the map killing masses of Zerg. Next time around I'll take out the Zerg air support and finish the game.

As for Halo, that was a surprisingly non-noble death for poor Kat. I haven't gotten much out of watching this game, but I do like the soundtrack. I knew about the series' use of chorus but I'd never heard it in action, and it works to make things feel epic even when they're not.

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Gall posted...

As for Halo, that was a surprisingly non-noble death for poor Kat. I haven't gotten much out of watching this game, but I do like the soundtrack. I knew about the series' use of chorus but I'd never heard it in action, and it works to make things feel epic even when they're not.

lol yeah, I can't play this game without thinking of Yahtzee's joke that the cast are engaged in a "who can have the noblest death" competition, and I agree that Kat has the weakest entry so far. Agreed on the music - before I ever played any of these games, I loved the Halo main theme. I would definitely describe this as a gameplay oriented game and I imagine just watching it would be pretty lame, though that said it's one of my least-favorite games of the project so far even with the gameplay.

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The package is a mission that gives you lots of nice things. After the very first shootout, which is only grunts although they have turrets and vehicles, you find a "Scorpion" tank lying around, and the next long segment of the level is a joyride where you blow up everything in sight with its mighty cannon. It's an easy but simultaneously unforgiving section, because there's no way to repair the Scorpion and if you fail, it will be just as damaged when you reload from a checkpoint as it was when you saved. The covenant deploy some heavier weapons that can break down its armor, so it is possible to screw up a bit in one section and leave yourself driving a burning tank only held together by crossed fingers. It's possible to leave the tank and walk, but the level is definitely designed around it and fighting your way past all the vehicles and armored, long-range turrets on foot would be a royal pain. I died quite a few times on the last stretch of this section, because my tank had so little health going in. I basically had to memorize the positions of all the threats and blow them up three seconds before I could see them.

Once you get back to Sword base you have to ditch the Scorpion to fit through the doors, but the game gives you something else as replacement: your boys. Having four invincible NPCs by your side does a lot to simplify the coming battles. The highlight of the map is the big battle at the end where you defend Jorge's hard-assed... loved one while she does some science. There are four turrets around the map that you can periodically reactivate and you have access to a large arsenal of human weapons with a lot of ammo for each, which makes the fight about as open-ended as it can be with this game's mechanics. I personally stuck with the Assault Rifle and DMR, which has become my preferred weapon loadout for just about any situation. Shooting the shield guys in the hands to stun them and following up with a quick headshot is more efficient than overloading their shields, and repeated headshots do enough for the elites, and I just like the Assault Rifle as a nice general purpose weapon. The trickiest part of this large battle is dealing with the enemy Ghosts, since you don't really have the firepower to take out vehicles, and there are so many enemies around that it's hard to get close enough to chuck grenades at them.

The whole mission to destroy Sword Base turned out to be a false pretense just to get the Nobles there - we're picking up, not dropping off. It turns out that the dig team was researching buried technology from an ancient alien civilization, and now the Noble team is tasked with transporting the results of that research - Cortana - away from this doomed planet. As a matter of fact, she takes a liking to Noble Six specifically (I guess she has a thing for video game protagonists,) and he gets to carry her around on his lower back for the rest of the game. Everyone takes off to find the nearest way off-planet, but the sniper Jun splits from the squad to escort the scientist lady and the commander sacrifices himself to pull away some Covenant airships that attack the team in transit (the ship crashes and burns with him in it, making for the fastest possible trip to Valhalla,) leaving Noble six alone with Emile, better known as the guy with the skull helmet. This dynamic duo are the only hope of getting Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn.


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Aside from being an exercise in male bonding for Nobles 4 and 6, Pillar of Autumn gave me a lot of trouble, mostly concentrated in a few particular areas. There's one arena early on where the enemy are mostly weaker troops but with a Wraith far in the back being very annoying. I died a ton of times to that damn thing, first by getting blown up by it when I was trying to deal with the nearby infantry, and then taking an embarrassing number of attempts to run around everyone else and blow it up with grenades. After finishing that one up and then going through a cave filled with the bug guys, and a cutscene where Carter returns in his burning ship to kamikaze strike and big Covenant walker mech so the other two boys can pass by, there's an area where you fight a ton of elites. I had to temporarily drop my assault rifle to go through that part with plasma pistol + DMR, which lets you instantly blow up shields with the pistol's charge shot and then secure kills with a single headshot from the DMR. There was one particular yellow Elite with a sort of plasma rocket launcher who kept blowing me to kingdom come.

The most brutal section of the whole level is the final skirmish where you're securing a landing pad for the Pillar of Autumn, or at least it was for me. You deal with multiple waves of enemies, but I managed to get all the NPC fighters killed off and most of the best resources used up before the final brute wave even started. This was another appearance of what I like to call the Ornstein and Smaugh of Halo - the buffed-up brute pair with the gravity hammer and a heavy projectile weapon, both of which 1HKO Noble 6. I ended up clearing the last wave mainly using the grenade launcher, which I had ignored up to that point because I had trouble hitting with it. Against the larger brutes, it's not so hard to aim correctly and can take them down much faster than most other weapons. During this whole section, Emile is operating a big anti-air gun, so he's too busy to help you fight. Right as the Pillar finally arrives, the poor bastard gets impaled by an energy sword Elite, forcing Noble 6 to stay behind and take his place on the gun. Emile made it look easy, though, because the second 6 climbs into it every covenant air vehicle within a 10-mile radius sets its sights on him. You have to shoot down a bunch of smaller guys to survive long enough to take your shoot on the priority cruiser that's about to blast Cortana out of the sky. She gets away, but Noble 6 is left without a ride on the surface of the now-doomed Reach.

There's an Epilogue level where your goal is "survive" but you inevitably die in the end. I practically got a speedrun time on that one. It's a cool narrative device, actually, and oddly kind of a common one for 2010, since both Starcraft II and RDR did something similar. I just wish I cared at all about Noble 6.

That's the end of the game, in any case. The Noble Team are all goners except possibly Jun, and as Noble 6's helmet lies lost in the dirt, we hear a monologue about what his sacrifice meant to humanity.

Final Thoughts on Reach in the afternoon.

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Final Analysis: Halo: Reach
What I thought of Reach: Underwhelming
Would I play it again? Probably not
Did it deserve to make Round 2? No IMO

Halo: Combat Evolved was a landmark title, not just for the FPS genre but for gaming as a whole. It deserves a major share in the credit for the original XBOX's success and the rise of online for consoles, to say nothing of how it modernized its own genre.

But I can't shake the feeling that the series has kind of stagnated since then. The launch of Halo 2 was a big cultural event, as far as those things go, but it didn't bring the kind of genre-shaking innovation of the first game - the series was already starting to seem iterative. Playing Reach, there weren't really any jaw-dropping moments that made me think "This could never have happened in Halo 1."

Reach is the best shooter I've played for this project so far. It benefits a lot from more dynamic enemy A.I. in comparison to something like Mass Effect 2 or Red Dead. In either of those games, the enemy sit behind their cover and occasionally pop up and down like targets at a shooting gallery. The enemies in Halo will dodge grenades, retreat when their shields drop or their allies die, run around to get the drop on you, and strafe to avoid shots. Instead of sticking yourself to cover all day long you run and jump to make yourself a harder target while simultaneously aiming precise shots. It's still not quite Doom: sometimes you have to hide behind a rock until your health regenerates, but it was fun enough to write about. I found it easy to pick out highlights from any given level. It was also rewarding to learn my way around the game. I felt a certain satisfaction easily taking down Elites in the late levels when they had given me such pause early on. My main criticism of the gameplay is that the ammo management can be a bit of a pain, mainly because I don't like most of the weapons. The way the Covenant guns sound and feel doesn't sit right with me and it was rare to find great uses for options like the pistol and shotgun.

What let me down was the story. Like I said earlier, I think this game had a good opportunity to tell a gripping, emotionally powerful story. The slow death of the Noble Team as Reach gets overrun has that kind of potential, it's just that none of the characters get much development. They have minimal screentime and don't really show emotions - they can watch their friends die and then just kind of shrug and soldier on. I find that boring! It certainly makes it difficult to care about what happens to them.

Of course, not all video games need to tell a great story. You won't see me criticizing Mario for lacking a complex plot (unless I'm trying to justify my nostalgia for Galaxy 1,) because I'm happy to let games just be games, as it were. Reach isn't trying to do that, though. It dedicates plenty of time and effort to cutscenes, lore, dialog writing, and voice acting. All that dedication ends up mostly wasted on such a fundamentally dull narrative.

Looking back on them both, I wouldn't hesitate to say I prefer Mass Effect 2 over Reach. Maybe that says more about my taste than the two games. I think, more than anything else, I'm interested in video games as a young medium for telling stories, and although Reach's epilogue does make use of the form, it's definitely not the sort of thing I'm looking for.

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Yeah you hit Reach's main issue right on the head. The Fall of Reach was supposed to be this dramatic, emotional event about a whole planet getting wiped out, but it just comes off as a typical action movie.

As far as Reach's innovation goes, just about all of it is sadly confined to the multiplayer. It took everything Halo 3 did well and amped it up to 11. The Forge mode alone was insane. Not only did it lead to a bunch of cool custom maps, but what was essentially new game modes too. There we minigames, platforming challenges and even things like escape rooms, all using the map editor it was some really cool stuff given the time of release.

I also really want to take this time to talk about Halo 3 ODST. It did what Reach attempted to do, but a year earlier. If puts the player in the shoes of the ODST soldiers who are pretty much just humans. Not only does it do a great job of making you feel weaker as a Non-Spartan, but it also has a much more interesting story told in a nonlinear fashion and through the atmosphere and setting. It does still play it pretty safe overall as it's nothing crazy, but it's a great change of pace for the franchise. I highly recommend it, if you ever feel like looking into the franchise again.

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Oh yes, that forge mode sounds cool. That's a little reminiscent of Warcraft III's custom map builder, which turned out to be the most important part of that game's legacy. Thanks for the recommendation on ODST. I rarely ever hear that one talked about so I doubt I would've thought to go back to it without you.

I've also heard some praise for the Halo supplementary material. Apparently the Fall of Reach novel does a better job with that subject, and oddly enough I've also heard that some of the segments for the Halo Legends anime are actually really good and kind of fall more in line with the type of tragic military stories I tend to like.

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Okay, onto the next game:

God of War (2005)
I Will be Playing On: Playstation 2
Previous Experience With GoW: Watched a couple youtube videos
Expectations for GoW: Maximum violence, minimum aherence to Greek mythology

You see, I couldn't cast aside my perception that Kratos was the bad guy. Whenever I saw him in action he was tearing someone's eyeballs out and then shoving his Blades of Chaos down their throat. From the perspective of someone watching Kratos rather than controlling him, I would always be rooting for whoever he was up against. Kratos seemed like the type of person who needed to be stopped at all costs. I couldn't bring myself to play games about him. I would've felt too guilty.

Time goes on and people change. I wonder if the 2018 God of War wasn't designed with such an idea in mind. A kid who had fun with the over-the-top combat of the first game could easily have been grown up with kids of his own by the time the new one released 13 years later, and if so he might find the new caretaker Kratos a little more appealing, and the old killer Kratos a bit more off-putting. As for me, I think my disdain for GoW came from its own brand of immature prudery, and today I'm ready to give the game a shot.

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Haha anytime, I try to never miss an opportunity to recommend ODST, it's so underrated.

Yeah I heard the books were pretty good as well, I really should try checking some of them out eventually.

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God of War takes something of an in medias res approach to storytelling. It begins using the same technique that starts out the 2020 Sonic film, where it shows an intriguing event from later in the story and then cuts back (in this case Kratos committing suicide and a cut back three weeks earlier when he's fighting some zombies on a ship,) and then it cuts back even further to explain that he has a traumatic past involving his family dying and is seeking absolution from the Gods to help himself cope with the flashbacks.

This game is essentially a hack and slash akin to Bayonetta. Kratos has light and heavy attacks and can chain them together for different combos. Instead of shooting with the remaining face button he has a grab, and although he has a dodge roll he favors blocking instead (it's more masculine after all.) Out of everything I've played so far, the hardest part was actually the very first combat encounter with a bunch of bottom-tier mooks. Most other fights spawn health pickups but that one never does. I'm playing on the Spartan difficulty, which is the hard setting (it felt appropriate after the last game I played,) but I died enough times on that battle that the game asked me if I wouldn't prefer playing on easy! I got it together eventually though. It seems like the essence of this game is using your attacks in such a way as to stun-lock as many enemies as possible. You can grab the basic enemies right away and one-shot them by doing so, but against most stronger creatures you have to weaken them first and then do a little quick time event to finish them off. This is a core mechanic of the game and is even integrated into the boss fights.

I think the core combat is alright, but any time the game does something else it's really lame. There's a puzzle early on where you have to push a crate to a far wall so you can jump on it, with archers firing at you all the while. They can break your crate and force you to go back to its spawn point and start over. That was pretty annoying. There are also sections where you have to climb up masts and fight enemies at the same time, which are almost comical. There are no combos while you're climbing, just a basic light and heavy attack, so you just sit there poking enemies over and over until they fall off. Or just grab them because it's faster.

The first level is on a fleet of sinking ships and is defined by a battle against a Hydra. There's none of that cut off one head and two more will take its place business from mythology, it's just a three-headed sea serpent to serve as the first boss. You fight a couple of its heads non-conclusively in the earlier sections, and then there's a big final confrontation with it later on. You can block all the attacks of the smaller heads except one, but that one actually helps you rather than the Hydra because you can break out with an easy QTE which does a lot of damage to the beast and stuns it for a while. If anything, you want to get hit with that one! Then you climb up onto a tall mast to fight its biggest head. Its attacks are too powerful to block and you have to use your dodge roll, though sometimes you can just walk out of the way or even stand still as the Hydra attacks in the opposite direction. It took me a really long time to finish off this phase, because it typically stands just out of reach for a lot of Kratos' attacks and only comes closer to chomp down on him. It's sort of broken into multiple phases where you get it to break the mast into a sharp point and then impale its head on that. Then you go into its belly and find a ship's captain, but Kratos just takes a key off him and dumps him down the Hydra's belly for no good reason. Nice to know that he's a total dick from the starting point of his character.

After all that's over, the Gods tell Kratos that they'll forgive his past sins if only he kills Ares, who himself has a strong tendency toward dickery. They send him off to Athens to get this job done and give him a lightning spell and Medusa's head. Both of those are super-moves that use a magic meter. You kind of just press them to get yourself out of a jam or quickly kill an enemy you can't be bothered with. You also get orbs after every fight that can be allocated into either upgrading your weapon or these spells. I've been putting all my points into the weapon so far, since it gets much more consistent use.

Before he leaves his boat, we see two bare-breasted women urging Kratos to come back to bed with them, which made me laugh and think "this game is for 12 year olds." I stopped partway through the next level.

I have a friend who absolutely loathes this series because of the way it adapts Greek mythology. I'm not an expert on Greek mythology personally - I learned a few of the stories in high school and some details about the rest online - but I don't really mind the apparent lack of fidelity to those old stories. But for the sake of completeness I would say so far that its approach is just to use Greek mythology as a grab bag of monster ideas without much consideration for context. Both Medusa and the Minotaur show up as generic enemies completely divorced of their original stories and settings. The same goes for the Hydra. The game would definitely make for an easy way to annoy your history teacher.

So far, I'd say my biggest impression of the game is this: "I probably should've played this one before Bayonetta."

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I still enjoy the trilogy today. Can still enjoy Devil May Cry too. They haven't aged perfectly, but the combat holds up just fine and that's most of it.

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I liked what I played of God of War 1 but I got stuck somewhere late in the game and I never returned.

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So I actually decided to start up Civ 5 early due to my lack of experience with the franchise. I'm wondering what is the specification you're going with for 'beating' it.

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ctesjbuvf posted...

I still enjoy the trilogy today. Can still enjoy Devil May Cry too. They haven't aged perfectly, but the combat holds up just fine and that's most of it.

Yeah, I might have been overstating the comparison with Bayonetta. I agree that the combat's still good enough and the game remains playable. It's the camera and the character models that show their age for the most part. I probably would've been more impressed with this game if I played it first of the two, though, that's for sure.

BetrayedTangy posted...

So I actually decided to start up Civ 5 early due to my lack of experience with the franchise. I'm wondering what is the specification you're going with for 'beating' it.

In theory, winning any game of Civ V counts as beating it, but at the start of this topic I decided that I will play games without a traditional ending for two weeks and that's probably what I'll do with Civ, partially because I already like it and would prefer to play it for more than one campaign.

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I completed the Athens section of God of War and started my way down the road away from town. For the most part, the combat and the mechanics didn't really see any shakeups - most of the stuff I did today was just different groups of the same enemies I had already fought. I think the two new enemy groups were a giant whose attacks you have to roll around and a sneaky, shadowy, assassin type enemy. When the giants first show up, you're in an arena with a lot of Athenian citizens running around. Both Kratos and the monsters can kill them, and they don't have much in the way of self-preservation instincts. Sometimes they'll run right into your attacks. At first I tried to avoid killing them, but then I found out they drop health. Worryingly enough, that was all the incentive I needed to start massacring them. I guess that as a citizen of Sparta Kratos wouldn't hold the lives of Athens men in very high regard. There was one kind of annoying part where Harpies keep spawning and harassing you until you slowly push statues in front of two holes in a wall. I also got a new spell from Zeus that lets you chuck lightning bolts. It seems kind of situational. So far I've only used it to take down distant archers that I couldn't reach with my weapons. Gorgon Eyes serve a similar purpose to pieces of heart from Zelda, except in this case you have to gather six to get a health upgrade. I managed to get my first full health upgrade and a few portions of the second.

For me, the coolest part of this whole level was the appearance of Ares as a colossus in the far background, fighting several armies at once. He's so massive that you see him a couple of times from completely different vantage points. It's a nice detail that helps give the character a sense of presence.

Kratos' job in Athens is essentially to find the Oracle of Athens (which I don't think was a thing in classical antiquity, but again, I'll let that slide,) so that she can give him some advice. First she reads his mind and gives the player a little more of his backstory, which was that he used to be a brutal Spartan general so feared that only his wife would stand up to him, and then she tells him to seek Pandora's Box in the desert because it's the only thing that can allow him to kill a god. I left him shortly after that point, fighting a few battles in a sewer area beforehand.

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I hope you've got these write-ups preserved somewhere for when the topic hits 500 and inevitably purges.

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Evillordexdeath posted...

In theory, winning any game of Civ V counts as beating it, but at the start of this topic I decided that I will play games without a traditional ending for two weeks and that's probably what I'll do with Civ, partially because I already like it and would prefer to play it for more than one campaign.

Oh thank god. So my only experience with Civ before was Revolution and to 'beat it' I won games with every civ. I was thinking about doing the same thing here, then I saw the full list. I do think I'm going to give myself a list of requirements though. I'm thinking

- Win 10 Games Overall
- Gain Each Type of Victory
- Win on Every Difficulty Level

Might add or change stuff as I go. The biggest hurdle is probably gonna be Deity though, but we'll see what happens.

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Evillordexdeath posted...

Yeah, I might have been overstating the comparison with Bayonetta. I agree that the combat's still good enough and the game remains playable. It's the camera and the character models that show their age for the most part. I probably would've been more impressed with this game if I played it first of the two, though, that's for sure.

It's mostly in platforming or climbing sections that bother me (I last played the trilogy in 2017, before the new one came). I think the camera is mostly fine though when it's not, it's awful.

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azuarc posted...

I hope you've got these write-ups preserved somewhere for when the topic hits 500 and inevitably purges.

That gets done automatically, as I understand it. I could put them up on Wordpress or something if people really want to go back and find that easier though.

BetrayedTangy posted...

Oh thank god. So my only experience with Civ before was Revolution and to 'beat it' I won games with every civ. I was thinking about doing the same thing here, then I saw the full list.

Winning with every single civ would be a big project on its own, yeah. I definitely wouldn't be willing to put in that much time when I still have another 117 games ahead of me. Beating Deity can be a tall order - I've never done it myself. I do plan to at least attempt it when I play the game for this project, but if I can't manage it I'll move on eventually.

ctesjbuvf posted...

It's mostly in platforming or climbing sections that bother me (I last played the trilogy in 2017, before the new one came). I think the camera is mostly fine though when it's not, it's awful.

The climbing is definitely an issue for me, particularly the climbing combat. I also don't like the parts where they make you balance on thin platforms.

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In God of War's mythology, Pandora's Box is in a temple which has been chained to the back of Cronus, the last of the Titans. Cronus is a pretty important figure in Greek Mythology. He's Zeus' dad. He killed his father by castrating him with a sickle. So far in the game he's just a big bald guy who crawls around on all fours looking like a turtle. I wonder if the idea behind him carrying the temple was inspired by the story about Atlas, another titan who had to carry the Earth on his back. Apparently that guy does show up later on in the series.

It's not a long walk from Athens to the temple, really - they are mostly separated by a short desert section. There's a wide open area where you have to find and defeat three Sirens to pass through. Their singing is the audio queue you're supposed to use to track them down. They make pretty slippery opponents, dodging around enough that they're hard to get good combos on. I found the most reliable way to deal good damage to them was just to use Poseidon's Wrath. It has enough area of effect and hit-stun that they can't really dodge out of it. After you beat the three scattered Sirens, there's a big battle arena where you have to fight three sirens at once, with new ones spawning to replace them. So many Sirens spawn in that for a moment I thought there was some kind of puzzle I was missing and they would come infinitely until I figured it out, but really there's just a lot of them and they keep to three at a time.

Once that's out of the way you get to the temple. I wanted to finish this whole section in one go but it's quite long and I eventually felt too tired to keep going. There's still a lot of combat in this area but there's a greater emphasis on puzzles and avoiding traps. There's one room with buzzsaws running up and down the floor where you need to pull two levers to open a door and then run through it before the door closes again. When I arrived in this room I had so little health that even one of the saws hitting me would finish me off,, which made it quite a pain to manage.

I'm only barely managing to squeak by on the Spartan difficulty at this point. A lot of fights are pretty easy but then I'll hit a barrier that's tough to break through. There were multiple points when the game asked me if I wanted to go down to easy mode - one was against a room full of powered-up Gorgons, which I eventually got through by spamming Poseidon's Rage and executing them for magic, and another was an arena fight against a Cerberus-like dog and a bunch of puppy versions of it. That one turns out to be much easier if you focus down the smaller dogs and move in a way that prevents them from surrounding you. I unlocked a second weapon option, the Blade of Artemis. It's a two handed sword with closer ranged attacks and a third attack button instead of the grab. I haven't really used it much, partially because I had the Blades of Chaos upgraded to level 4 by the time it showed up and partially because losing out on the grab means you don't get the contextual executions against enemies, which are usually pretty valuable. Most of the Temple is dedicated to finding two keys to unlock a door near the beginning. I have the two keys but stopped shortly after getting my hands on the second. There's a little more backstory for Kratos where we find out that he offered his life to Ares in exchange for winning a battle, and for a moment he expresses guilt which I did find to be a nice change of pace. Also, we learn that the chief architect of the temple lost his son during the construction and dedicated part of the place to his memory, but then he also designed the temple in such a way that anyone who was trying to get Pandora's Box would have to disturb his son's remains and rip the head off his body to use as a key, so that's kind of odd.

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It was definitely optimistic to think I could beat the Temple section last time I played, because it turns out to be an extremely long area. I think that something like half of the first God of War game takes place in this single location. I had been under the impression that the two muse keys unlocked the door to Pandora's Box, but it turns out they're actually entirely optional and only gain you access to some health and magic powerups.

I was saved right outside of the Poseidon section of the temple, whose first challenge is to sacrifice a man to the Gods. They have a whole bunch conveniently reserved in cages just for this purpose. You find the corpse of another adventurer who killed himself rather than committing such an act, but Kratos naturally doesn't bat an eye at burning the poor sucker alive. You have to push him up a long ramp and into the fire while infinitely-spawning enemies try to interrupt you. I think it would've been a good idea to take out the enemies in this section to allow the player to focus on what's happening in the story, since it's a moment that should give you some doubt as to the justice of what you're doing, but instead it's quite an annoying section and by the time I finished it I was too frustrated to pay attention to such ethical issues. The enemy type that hounds you while you push your living payload is a pretty tough soldier type who can block attacks, so it's really hard to take them down fast enough to avoid getting bogged down. On my successful attempt I used Rage of the Gods and kind of rushed the actual pushing. Up ahead, you gain the power to breathe infinitely underwater and dodge around some traps in a swimming section.

The next section after that is themed around Hades, and it has a lot of harder sections. A new enemy type is introduced in the Centaur, and in your first encounter you have to kill them within a very small circle to progress. It can be kind of annoying because the Centaurs have a decent amount of health, and it's not hard to accidentally kill one just outside the circle since your attacks push them around, in which case you have to start from scratch with a full-health enemy that spawns in to replace it. Further in, the game forces you to master those dumb mechanics where you balance on a narrow beam with a section where you traverse such while mechanical rotating axes try to cut you to pieces. Kratos' animation for climbing back up when he loses his balance is long enough that doing so usually results in a death. It's especially hard at one point where you have to jump over the axes as they approach. It's pretty easy to lose alignment with the beam as you jump and wind up just falling to your death. Hades also makes you go around a maze killing everything before you can progress, with one particularly troublesome little hidden cranny that you have to squeeze into during the brief moment before being crushed by the giant pounding pillar that normally covers it, which can kill you and force you to redo the whole maze.

I stopped immediately after taking down the game's second boss, a giant armored minotaur. This guy killed me an absurd number of times. It's a four-stage boss fight where you slowly chip away his armor to reveal the cow meat underneath, so it can be quite exhausting to get to the last stage only to die and have to start all over. He can kill you pretty quickly too, particularly during his final phase when his attacks do extra damage, he uses more dangerous moves, and he stops dropping health and magic orbs.

There are a few little tricks to this boss fight. First of all, you're encouraged to throw a lot of lightning bolts to get a little bit of safe ranged damage, since he drops quite a lot of mana in the early stages of the fight. If you're ever behind him, he'll jump a long way backwards, even interrupting an attack he's in the middle of performing to do so. Every time he breathes fire, you can roll in toward him once you've dodged it, which will cause him to roar at you thus giving you a good opportunity to get a lot of hits in. You finish off the first two phases of the fight by hitting him enough that he's stunned, at which point he drops health, and then doing some QTEs, at which point he drops more health and magic. You can actually deliberately fail the QTEs to farm more health and mana.

I had the most trouble with a four-hit ground pound attack which he follows with a head bash. It's not too hard to dodge and gives you a good chance to punish him, but if you do get nailed by the first hit it combos into the rest and can take out nearly half your health at once. He also has an attack where he hits the ground causing three projectiles to burst out from under you. It took me a long time to figure out how to dodge that one because the interval between the projectiles is shorter than the ending animation to Kratos' roll. It turns out that you can press R1 to do a little shoulder check move at the end of your roll and move even further. I haven't found any other use for this move for the whole game so far, but it does seem to be the only way to consistently dodge this particular attack.

Overall I do think it's a fun boss and definitely one of the game's highlights so far. I probably would've preferred if it were slightly shorter.

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Didn't play too long today, still on the quest for Pandora's Box. After the minotaur you tear the head off another son corpse to stuff in a wall and then you spend a good while just turning a crank to move the circular walls of several chambers so the doors all align and you can shine a light through to complete a puzzle, whereupon after some cutscenes you go to the "Cliffs of Madness" section of the temple. I found an unfortunate glitch after falling off a cliff at the entrance where you'll respawn stuck next to a book with no functional controls except the ability to read its flavor text, which I couldn't find any solution to except to restart the game, forcing me to do the elaborate wall-turning process and watch all the cutscenes a second time.

What we learn from the cutscenes is that after pledging his allegiance to Ares in exchange for a victory in battle, Kratos spent some time ruthlessly slaughtering people for him until he went into a temple for Athena as part of his job and accidentally killed his wife and daughter inside due to some trickery on Ares' part, after which he swore revenge. Hercules made the same mistake in the real Greek mythology, which was probably a source of inspiration for that plot point.

I encountered a new enemy type that wields a purple cane. I don't know what mythological creature it's based on, but it's probably the strongest regular enemy thus far, with the ability to block attacks, break out of combos, and dish out chained hits of its own. Apart from these guys, most of the combat in this section is against the weakest possible enemies, which I've gotten pretty good at dealing with. The main task on the cliffs is to find two necklaces for statues of the Godesses. The first one you find by doing a 10 picarat block arranging puzzle from Professor Layton except you have to have Kratos slowly push the blocks around and rotate them with a mechanical device. The second one was a timed challenge where you have to quickly push a box to jump off it before spikes come up and kill you. I actually found that one really tough, between the time limit being pretty tight and Kratos' charge kick move that you use to expedite the pushing being a little awkward. I stopped shortly after finishing up the Cliffs section and moving into the Architect's Tomb, where I completed my torn off head collection.

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When I last saved, Kratos was standing just outside of the room where he'd finally get his hands on Pandora's Box. The only remaining obstacle was a surprisingly difficult room full of harpies and archers. Those are two of the weakest enemy types in the game, but their attacks still cause Kratos to go into his flinching animation, which makes him susceptible to the room's real enemies: a conveyor belt floor and grinding wheels on the walls. Getting knocked into these takes out a substantial amount of health, and because there are so many enemies with ranged attacks it's not a hard thing to see happen. I had squeaked through the previous battle with about a quarter of my health, which meant going into that room on low hp because the game remembers how much you had even when you restart from a save point or checkpoint. I couldn't beat the room with so little health and wound up having to backtrack across the entire cliffs of madness section to find a health box I hadn't opened yet.

Once that was out of the way, Kratos finally retrieved the box, but Ares sensed it happening back in Athens and threw a giant pillar all the way to the temple where it fatally impaled what I will generously call our hero. This sent Kratos to the Underworld where he would have to fight his way back to the land of the living.

I doubt it would be controversial to say that the underworld is easily the worst part of the game. It's mostly composed of annoying 3D platforming sections where you're constantly in danger of falling to an instant death. The most obnoxious part is when you have to climb a tall pillar covered in rotating blades, and getting hit at any point will cause Kratos to lose his grip and fall all the way back to the bottom. There were no new enemies in this section, just infernal versions of the ones I'd fought before.

When Kratos claws his way out of Tartarus, he's in Athens, where the mysterious gravedigger he met last time he was there has just finished digging the hole for him to climb through. I stopped shortly after that, but I spent a little bit of time in Athens fighting the old weaker enemies that had been there last time. The intention behind this might be to give the player that feeling of having grown throughout his journey that metroidvanias can kind of emphasize - I was surprised how quickly I took down the enemies with the fully upgraded Blades of Chaos.

I should be in a good position to wrap this game up over the weekend.

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I finished God of War. I was actually saved right outside of the final boss when I picked it back up, unbeknownst to me. Kratos finds the Oracle of Athens bleeding out and she tells him that he's too late because the city has already fallen. It turns out that Ares' central motivation was daddy issues - he's attacking Athena's city because he feels that Zeus prefers her. Kratos manages to snatch away Pandora's Box while he's distracted, and it turns out that it just contains the Giant's Mask from Majora's Mask. He grows to a giant version of himself with identical controls and fights it out with Ares. It sort of functions as a "rival battle" similar to the fights with Jeanne in Bayonetta. It's a much faster battle compared to the Minotaur fight - it doesn't take too long to drain Ares' single health bar but on Spartan his attacks can drain half your health at once. He drops a lot of health and mana, so you can use the Army of Hades (the most powerful spell) against him quite a lot. It's pretty tricky to get a hit in on him normally - he has a lot of poise, he attacks all the time, and some of his moves make him essentially untargetable, for example a large flame burst attack that zones you away from him and another where he flies into the air and throws meteors.

It's a three-phase final boss, though. The second phase isn't against Ares, but illusions created by him. He makes Kratos relive the night when he murdered his own wife and daughter, but in this case he's defending them against hordes of clones of himself. It's the last example of what I consider one of the game's bad design habits, where it will just throw one enemy type at you in large numbers and make them respawn every time you kill one for a really long time. Your family have a separate health bar and you get a game over if they die. You can hug them to transfer your health into them. I found that the best strategy was to stand aside and do the light -> light -> heavy attack combo over and over again, aimed at Kratos' family. It's the fastest way to get out an attack that will knock down all the Kratos clones. I'd use Rage of the Gods or Poseidon's Wrath if I got surrounded. I found it really difficult, though. It was easy to get surrounded and then immediately get surrounded again after I had used my resources to escape, the section was pretty long, and because there were so many enemies around at any given time it could be tough to find a great opportunity to attack. The controls got in my way a little too. Circle is the button for grab, hug, and to use spells, so sometimes I would need to bail myself out with Poseidon's Wrath but Kratos would keep throwing single enemies instead.

For a lot of the later sections of this game I felt that I should have chosen to play on Normal, but it was this section that finally made me give up and take the game's offer to reduce the difficulty to easy. I had failed it a lot of times and was starting to get way too tilted. On easy mode, Ares' attacks that would have taken away half my health previously would barely tickle, and I beat the illusion section on the first try.

The final phase is essentially the same as the first, but Ares takes away all of Kratos' powers and you have to fight him with a giant sword from a statue, which has essentially the same moveset as the Blade of Artemis. There's kind of a tug-of-war mechanic going on with the health, where each time you hit Ares you heal a little and vice versa. It's harder since you don't have the Army of Hades, but since I was on easy mode by that time I could pretty much just mash square and win.

Ares realizes that he's beaten and tries to get Kratos to spare him by saying that he made him kill his family to try and make him into a great warrior, and Kratos quips "you succeeded" before impaling him through the chest. The Gods say that they forgive him for his sins but can't take away his nightmares, and then Kratos throws himself off a cliff in the scene we saw at the very beginning. I guess he didn't take into account how if he died he'd still probably have nightmares down in Tartarus. The gods decide to bring him back and make him into Ares' replacement, though, and the first game ends before they can start to regret it.

Final Thoughts on God of War coming later.

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Final Analysis: God of War (2005)
What I thought of GoW: Fun at points, annoying at others
Would I play it again? Probably not
Did it deserve to make Round 3 (In GotD 1?) Still salty it took down ToS tbh

One of the purposes of games is that they can simulate experiences that you wouldn't want to go through for real. You can lie and backstab your friends in a strategy game without the betrayal tearing your social groups apart. Video games almost always do that with violence. Real world combat would be traumatic, but you can extract some of the thrill of battle without having to go through anything like that. Maybe that's part of the reason why almost all video games have combat. All my favorite games have combat, but I notice that I'm not a big fan of games that are almost exclusively about violence.

God of War, of course, is one such game. It's not really about anything except watching a big buff angry dude kill things in flashy ways. That will never be my biggest interest in life, so I could only ever have been so fond of God of War - about as fond as I was of Bayonetta, maybe. I can put aside quibbles like how the story's really bad and how not much care went into building a compelling or cohesive setting around Greek mythology, but I think the game has flaws that prevent it from really achieving its goals as a fun, flashy hack and slash game. It can be rough how you respawn from checkpoints with some of your health missing, because it can mean going through a tough fight with a minimum of resources. A lot of the encounters feel long and overly enemy dense. There are times when you're just fighting endless respawning clones of a single enemy type, which feels pretty repetitive. The climbing and platforming sections tend to be a pain. I don't like rolling with the analog stick and the circle button has more tasks than it can handle. Even the game's character progression system has the flaw that it discourages trying different options.

It still has solid core mechanics underneath all that, and there are definitely some highlights that I'll look back upon fondly, but I have trouble understanding why God of War was such a big name franchise. It was a common Game of the Year choice back in 2005, which I don't really think it deserved. Maybe it had to do with the technology involved, because one of its other major strengths is the impressive sense of scope it's capable of portraying.

For me, God of War needs a few things before it can be a part of that kind of conversation:

1. More enemy variety. I think the biggest thing that lets the moment to moment gameplay down is that there aren't quite enough enemy types. It can be a while between the introductions of new baddies and the ones that are around often have to pull double or triple duty to make up for that. It's common to see palette swaps of older enemies as powered up versions and there are a lot of battles against single enemy types. For such a combat-oriented game, I think having a few more types and mixing them up more would help keep the gameplay fresh.
2. More boss fights. The two boss fights against giant monsters are definitely the highlights of this game for me. They're challenging in a fun way and make good use of the game's theatrical violence. I get how much work they must have been to create, but I did think it was a little disappointing that there were only two in the whole game.
3. A better main character. I didn't find much to like about Kratos. He's one-note, uncharismatic, and pointlessly cruel. He doesn't think much of killing people who have done nothing particularly wrong and whom he doesn't need to kill to achieve his goals. I think this series is going for a sort of dark storytelling where the protagonist is deliberately a bad person, but I don't think he has the kind of depth that makes such a thing interesting. Even for a gameplay-focused game like this one, having a compelling main character can make things a lot more enjoyable and a lot more memorable.
4. Penises. Ancient Greece was famously one of the most homo-erotic cultures in human history. Men competed naked at the original Olympics and women weren't allowed to watch. That was reflected in a lot of their art, which was a huge influence on the rest of European culture. God of War isn't a Greek game though, it's an American game with some Greek influences, and America has an exceptionally puritan culture. Its devs had to limit their mature content to more socially acceptable things like watching people get disemboweled. It's not completely taboo to video games though. There are nude statues in Symphony of the Night, God of War's "rip-off" Dante's Inferno had a boss with a giant swinging dong, and even Animal Crossing includes David's best feature in its digital reproduction of Michelangelo's statue. I find it kind of funny that the M-Rated ultra-dark God of War is the game to chicken out and cover the walls of its temples with awkward neuter figures that the Greeks would be disgusted with. Of all the changes the game makes to Greek mythology, this is clearly the most egregious.

God of War wasn't everything I hoped for, but it didn't discourage me from trying out the second game. Of my four main criticisms, I dare to believe it can assuage 1 and 2.

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Anyway, let's move right along to the next game:

Sid Meier's Civilization V
Release Date: September 21, 2010
Previous Experience with Civ V: 687 hours on Steam
Expectations for Civ V: The same game I know so well

In the Starcraft II write up I talked about the first laptop I ever had to myself. That old thing could never have ran Civ V, but the game was out when I still had it. It was another of those strategy games that I coveted when I didn't know about pre-paid credit cards and didn't have to dough to buy a PC that could play it. Back then I had to settle for the original Civilization through Dosbox. Old civ games are kind of fun, but the combat is mindless and abysmal, so that whatever advantages they might have they're automatically worse than V or VI.

This game was a big part of the reason why I bought my second computer - I picked up a disc copy of the game alongside my new machine. It's the only PC game I've ever owned on disc to this day, but that packaged game was worth buying as the most cost-efficient way to get the DLC. I've still yet to play Civ V without its two expansions, but I know second hand that it felt a little content light on its initial release back then.

I wouldn't play it for 700 hours if I thought it was a bad game. Even after Civ VI has been out for a long time (the game I bought my third and current computer to play, incidentally,) I still prefer its predecessor.

Grand strategy is a genre that fascinates me. Civ V is only my second-most played game on Steam behind Europa Universalis IV. I think it's partially because, unlike real time strategy, it allows for cooperative and diplomatic strategies. In Starcraft II, you're the Zerg's enemy and that's that. You can't trade with them, you can't make peace treaties with them, and you can't really temporarily band together to take down the Protoss. All of that stuff is completely possible in Civ V. What's especially interesting is how even though you work together, only one of you can win - and that gives an incentive for a well-timed betrayal.

If the goal of this project is to find out how I feel about every game in the contest, then I could've skipped Civ V and still achieved that goal, but the thing is that after all this time I still want to play it, I want to talk about playing it, and I've even decided to go when step further: I will be streaming Civilization V, starting tomorrow at 6PM EST. My Twitch channel is here: https://www.twitch.tv/peopleranimals2

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Good pace with God of War. I do believe they become better as we go. Several of the issues you mention become much less of a problem.

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Civ4 is way better than 5 IMO.

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Okay, I'm starting up the stream in a few minutes. If you're interested, the link is at the end of my last post. And if you're interested in this game in general, I recommend you check out another ambitious project from this board, Emeraldegg's civ V topic:https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/78740195

ctesjbuvf posted...

Good pace with God of War. I do believe they become better as we go. Several of the issues you mention become much less of a problem.

Thanks. Yeah, a few friends of mine also told me that the next two games are a noticeable improvement, with a little bit of argument as to whether God of War 2 or 3 was better. I know 3 has loads of boss fights, so I'm looking forward to that aspect of it.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

Civ4 is way better than 5 IMO.

I can understand why you'd think that. It was a pretty common point of view when Civ V first game out. I don't know how V's two expansions have changed that. For me though, the combat in the pre-V civ games is just so unbearable that I can hardly stand to play them, while I think V's is fine for the most part.

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I might be able to tune in a bit later.

Which Civ are you playing as?

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The stream stopped around 9 if I recall right, and I'll be running another one every day at the same time for the next two weeks.

Of course, this project is still forum based first and foremost. The Vod is up on Twitch if anyone wants to watch it, but if you'd rather just read, here's a summary of my first Civ V session

Game 1
Civilization: Carthage
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 6 (Emperor)

I thought it would be nice to start on the most standard map mode and the difficulty I'm most comfortable with, which is two steps above the normal difficulty. I picked Carthage, the historical short-term rival of the Roman Republic, whose special abilities include being able to cross mountains, getting free harbors on coastal cities, and two unique units: the Quinqureme and the African War Elephant, of which the former is really lacklustre and the latter not a lot better. This is considered a bottom-tier civ, and I played my game while mostly ignoring its special benefits, even building my second and third cities inland and thus forgoing the free harbors.

Not having a personality, I tried to devote the stream to explaining the game, both in terms of the general basics and some of the optimal meta-game decisions. Some of the stuff I focused on included:

- That it is better to spend turns moving your first city if it's preferable
- How production is the best city resource and you should optimize around it (because it can be converted into anything else needed.)
- Tradition is the best first cultural policy but liberty is good too
- The first thing you build should be a worker
- You can declare war on a city state, steal one of their workers, and then immediately make peace
- The best use of trade routes is to transfer food and production between your cities (except on the highest difficulties where trading with other civs becomes important for science)
- It's hard to get the early game wonders on high difficulties, but you can easily get the later ones.
- 4 cities is usually optimal
- You should balance your writer's guild, artist's guild, and musician's guilds between three different cities

And following these rules the game went quite well! Carthage spawned on the northern coast of one continent, close to Sweden, Austria, and Brazil. I was sandwiched between Sweden and Austria specifically, which encouraged me to expand as soon as I could into the contested land to my south. Between myself and Austria, Sweden had such little pick of good land left that it wound up with only a single city, rendering itself irrelevant from an early point in the game. Austria, meanwhile, expanded quickly but neglected military development, allowing me to breathe easy and focus on my economy, while eyeing Austria's capital with a covetous feeling in my heart. Tradition was my first policy and Aesthetics was my second. I picked it because I did not want to fall too far behind in culture, and in fact I wound up being the most culturally advanced civilization in the game! I did not get any of the early game wonders, but managed to build the Sistine Chapel, Porcelain Tower, Taj Mahal, Globe Theater, and Uffizi in one heavily production-focused city as well as Machu Picchu in one mountain-adjacent city. I founded Zoroastrianism but had a lot of difficulty keeping the Austrians' Catholicism out of my cities.

Continents tends to lead to two major landmasses with about half the civilizations on each. In this game, the other continent contained the Zulus, the Greeks, the Moroccans, and one other civilization that was wiped out by the Zulus before I could meet it. Greece turned out to be the real threat of the group, and has seized a dominating control of the various city-states around the map and the world congress along with it. Austria eventually attacked Sweden and conquered its only city, but I declared war on them shortly afterward, bringing a huge army of cannons and musketmen and quickly taking their capital city of Vienna, then liberating the Swedes. Austria also conceded their major city of Graz in the peace deal, leaving them and Sweden both weakened to the point of irrelevance. I gained two more wonders from the conquest of Vienna and sent an Inquisitor to Vienna to remove the Catholic Holy City, and therefore leave that religion without much standing in the world. Greece, meanwhile, declared war on the Zulus but didn't seem to make a lot of progress. I could only find 3 coal in my entire empire, preventing me from building the all-important 4 factories that grant the player a choice of Ideology.

As of 250 turns into the game, I'm in a pretty comfortable position to win in almost any victory type. I just have to watch out for Greece, which is the world leader both in science and diplomacy. My goal is to finish up the game during today's stream.

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Civ4 is still way better than 5 even with the latter's expansion packs factored in.

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God of War was a revelation when it came out but nowadays is effectively a tech demo for old tech. 2 is much better, and 3 is better to play these days (and the PS4 game blows them all out of the water). At the time it was not only impressive for its scope and visuals (it was punching well above its weight for the weakest system that gen) but also the combat system and quick time events. Nowadays that doesn't really play as well.

If it makes you feel better, not only did ToS beat it in a 2009 shocker it would have won the rematch if it was a full 24 hours.

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

Civ4 is still way better than 5 even with the latter's expansion packs factored in.

I have to admit I don't know a lot about Civ IV, except that it has roughly the same combat mechanics as the previous games. What do you think are its major advantages in comparison to V?

Lightning Strikes posted...

God of War was a revelation when it came out but nowadays is effectively a tech demo for old tech. 2 is much better, and 3 is better to play these days (and the PS4 game blows them all out of the water). At the time it was not only impressive for its scope and visuals (it was punching well above its weight for the weakest system that gen) but also the combat system and quick time events. Nowadays that doesn't really play as well.

If it makes you feel better, not only did ToS beat it in a 2009 shocker it would have won the rematch if it was a full 24 hours.

I've heard that the PS4 game is a lot better from others, but it does seem to be a significant change of direction both in terms of the general game design and the story. I do think the game has aged to a certain extent and that's kind of evident in the reception. I think a lot of outlets like IGN gave it the game of the year nod in 2005, but I also know IGN eventually dubbed Shadow of the Colossus, which also came out that year, the best game for PS2 with GoW dragging a little further behind in comparison.

Oh yeah, I remember reading about ToS' performance in the 4-ways but I had forgotten that God of War was involved in that. I remember Oblivion being one of the games in that match, but not GoW or the fourth contestant.

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Alright, I finished up my Carthage game with a scientific victory, in just under 400 turns. I picked the Freedom ideology to rush for its Treaty Organization policy, which generates influence with city states as long as you have a trade route to them. After orienting my economy toward gold and setting up those trade routes, I was able to take away almost half of Greece's control over the world congress, easily delaying their diplomatic victory until I could win through science. I got ahead in research by setting my cities to have science specialists and pumping out as many great scientists and I could, and also by rushing the all-important Hubble Space Telescope wonder, which is essential for a science victory. If I hadn't been defeatist about my chances of getting it all game long, I think a cultural victory might possibly have been open to me too.

Greece became an ultra-militarist civilization, including picking Autocracy as its ideology. It destroyed the Zulus utterly and reduced Morocco to one far away city on a small island. There were times when I could have gone to war with them and slowed this snowball, but I was too lazy to go about it. Although Greece united their entire continent, they never made an effort to come to mine. Brazil, meanwhile, tore apart the remains of Austria, who wound up so weakened that their last city fell to the revived Sweden. The civ that was eliminated before I could ever meet them turned out to be Venice.

I made a lot of mistakes playing this game. I think an obvious one was that I didn't set any troops to explore the world for a long time. The extra information would have been useful to me. Either way, it was mostly a cruise to victory that was never in much doubt - there was a little bit of tension as Greece wiped out its neighbors but I was still confident I'd win. On the whole, I think I had a lucky starting location since I found the rather useful copper and silver resources in my second and third cities.

Difficulty 7 is a major step up, and I still don't feel comfortable enough to attempt it, so next time I play I'll be trying the same difficulty with another low-tier civ: The Iroquois.

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Civ4 just has far more interesting strategic decisions to make compared to 5, to me. The complaint about combat in the older Civ games seems a bit strange to me since the Civ games are not about combat - that's merely one facet of the games and not the whole package. Then again lots of people probably do play the Civ games mostly to fight so what do I know?

Honestly I don't even think Civ5's combat is a whole lot better than 4's. I don't even necessarily know if it's better in the first place. You can read some of Sullla's writings on the subject if you want to know more, but being honest, I don't think Civ5 is a bad game. I'd say it's like a 6-7/10 while 4 is an 8-9/10 one. Also I haven't played Civ4 in a while (though I'm watching Sullla streaming the game every Friday), but most of the time I try to play Civ5 I get bored pretty quickly.

I'm mostly just trying to back up my own statement though, not shaming you for liking Civ5! At least I hope that's what gets across.

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LinkMarioSamus posted...

I'm mostly just trying to back up my own statement though, not shaming you for liking Civ5! At least I hope that's what gets across.

Of course, we're all adults here. I feel like you haven't fully succeeded in explaining your opinion on the two games, though. It would help if you elaborated more on which mechanics Civ IV has that lead to more interesting strategic decisions, though. Civ V is a game with a heavy meta so a lot of the game does come down to knowing the strongest options/priorities, I'll admit to that.

In my opinion, it's not only clear that Civ V's combat is better than the older Civ games, but that it's a great deal better. IV's combat might be a little better than the previous 3, I haven't spent enough time with it to say for certain. I agree with you that combat shouldn't be a huge, game-defining area of focus for a game like Civ, but sometimes single badly-designed elements can end up having a huge amount of influence on the overall experience of a game, and the combat of the older games is an example of that for me, to the point of being a dealbreaker. I would opt for more peaceful strategies if I played those games again, but between barbarians and declarations of war from the AI there's no avoiding it entirely, and between its too-influential RNG (it's pretty common for the starting Phalanx unit to beat Bombers in Civ 1) and the generally mindless stat-check nature of combat encounters I consider it the worst combat system I've ever encountered in a grand strategy game. In contrast, I think the new combat system is fine. It adds a lot of things: differentiated unit types, the ability to use chokepoints, and city locations being relevant to combat being the most important ones.

I hadn't heard of Sullla before but after googling his site, I might check out some of those articles later.

Game 2
Civilization: Iroquois
Map Type: Pangea
Difficulty: 6 (Emperor)

Game 1
Civilization: Carthage
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 6 (Emperor)

I've still been playing the past few days, but I had a hard time summoning the will to write about it. First, let's talk about the Iroquois' unique abilities

The Great Warpath - Units move through forest and jungle tiles in friendly territory as if they were roads, and these tiles can be used to establish city connections after researching The Wheel

Keep in mind that this only applies to tiles inside your borders. It's quite difficult to use this to reduce your need for roads by much. The formula that determines where your borders expand doesn't take it into account at all, so you will usually have to buy those tiles if you want to save yourself road maintenance, which makes the economic value pretty minimal. I recommend building your roads as normal and skipping the few forest tiles along the way that happen to get added to your borders naturally. During this game, it has been handy once or twice for defending my territory, but I would definitely evaluate it as an under-powered ability. The Iroquois also have a forest spawning bias to help make use of this, which caused my city to spawn almost entirely surrounded by forest and reduced its early game value considerably.

Unique Unit: Mohawk Warrior: Swordsman with 33% combat bonus in forest and jungle which does not take iron. The combat bonus is a little bit situational, so the better part of this unit is that it doesn't require iron. I had a lot of iron in my territory anyway, but I just sold it to France for some extra gold every turn until I upgraded to longswordsmen.

Unique Building: Longhouse: Workshop, but replaces its 15% production bonus with +1 production to forest tiles. This is the reason the Iroquois are seen as particularly bad, since it can easily be worse than the regular workshop provided you don't have enough forests around you.

On the whole, the Iroquois have a weak ability and special building and an okay but unspectacular unique unit, making them one of the weaker civs in the game. I don't mind running a slightly weaker civ on difficulty 6 though.

Pangaea tends to be a violent map due to every civ spawning within reach of one another at the very start of the game. I appeared in the center-west of the world, with Aztec, Zulu, and Egypt all too close for comfort. I had the good luck of finding the natural wonder Fountain of Youth north of my first city, and claimed it with my second for +10 happiness. I founded my third city of Grand River right along the Zulu border, which prompted them to attack alongside the Aztec. I had made a terrible mistake by leaving zero units to defend this new city and it fell almost immediately, but I was able to recapture it shortly afterward in part because the Aztec sent no troops toward me. After that, I made peace with both nations.

I managed to get the Stonehenge and Notre Dame wonders, which let me start a religion and fueled enough happiness to make me think a domination victory would be possible. I met Greece, France, the Mongols, and Portugal. France didn't waste much time in wiping Mongolia off the map and turning its eyes on Greece, which had already taken the fight to the Zulu and captured two of their cities. This prompted Portugal and Aztec to pounce and try wiping the Zulu out entirely. The Aztec had to move through my territory to wage such a war, and once their army was caught in between two of my cities, I attacked them, encircled their entire army and wiped it out, and then took both of their cities in short order, allowing me to found another on the coast far to the east. Alongside France, I also marched on the Greek capital, but its walls were too strong for my Trebuchets to breach and I decided to step back until I had cannons.

Once I had upgraded my siege units, I decided to conquer the Zulu next. Egypt's border town was almost impossible to take from the east because it had a formidable mountain range in front of it, so I decided to go around through Zulu and Portugal and strike their capital directly. The Zulu fell quickly but Portugal always had a crucial technological edge over me that made taking them down really hard. They beat me to the Riflemen making their melee units too resilient to easily take down and they beat me to Great War Bombers giving them powerful, difficult-to-answer attacks on my backline. Meanwhile, Egypt made multiple futile attempts to take my cities and France gobbled up Greece and then attacked me next. As such, I could never really focus my troops on a single front and progress was extremely slow. The AI also ganged up on me via the world congress, taking several of my luxury resources away from me. Since I had to focus on troops to fend off three different nations at once, I fell behind enough on culture that France could force me to flip from the military-focused Autocracy ideology to the more balanced Order, but after around 300 exhausting turns of constant warfare I matched Portugal's bomber with Triplanes and took two major cities away from them. I brokered a 10 turn truce, and will reinforce that invasion force so I can finish them off the moment it ends. Any non-domination victory type will be tough for me to manage now.

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I ended up resigning from my game as the Iroquois. I made more progress through Portugal and had their capital city down to 0 health, but I blundered away my melee units trying to move them in to take the city and they rallied with some Infantry that were threatening my remaining artillery. I still could've taken the city, but it was delayed by several turns, and in the meanwhile France was growing into an unstoppable empire that was beating me in every measure. the only way I could've beaten them was through a really long military campaign exploiting the AI's inability to play tactically, but that would have been such a slow and tedious process that I decided just to take the L and start a new game.

Game 3
Civ: Venice
Map Type: Archipelago
Difficulty: 6

Venice is another civ that's considered low-tier, but they're one of my personal favorites to play as and I advocate for them being a little under-rated.

Ability: Serenissima Cannot gain settlers nor annex cities, double the normal amount of trade routes available, gain a free Merchant of Venice after researching optics, can purchase in puppeted cities

Unique Unit: Merchant of Venice replaces Great Merchant, same abilities, but can also purchase a city state, causing Venice to instantly puppet it and take control of its military

Unique Unit: Great Galleass like the name implies, a Galleass with higher stats.

You can probably already see why Venice isn't considered that great. Losing out on the ability to create new cities is a pretty massive downside, and they're consequently locked into a pretty narrow playstyle that can definitely be exploited in multiplayer games. Unlike Carthage or the Iroquois, where I'd suggest ignoring their special bonuses and playing as if they are a blank civ, Venice inherently changes what you can do too much for that approach.

The way I go about it is to build a worker and then spam buildings in the early game, saving time by building neither a settler nor troops. Then once I get Optics I recover the lost value of those two things to a certain extent by purchasing my first city state. I pick the tradition culture tree for the bonuses to capital growth and happiness, and I even have my trade routes transfer food and production to my capital to help turn it into a giant metropolis. I also rush the Hanging Gardens, but unfortunately on this playthrough an AI civ beats me to it by 2 turns.

Aside from the extra trade routes, Venice can also get national wonders really easily, and I quickly build the National College, Ironworks, Oxford University, East India Company, and others. Even without the Hanging Gardens, I succeed in making Venice the world's largest city by a wide margin, and its production and specialist capacity keep me competitive with every other civ in all measures. I found the Sikh religion and spread it to the Polish despite some opposition from Ethiopia and their religion of Eastern Orthodoxy.

At one point, Poland declares war on me to try and take out my puppet city-state of Brussels, but the army that came with that city repels them with no losses except a few boats and all my trade routes. After the war concludes, I rebuild with no trouble, and Poland never bothers me again.

The Archipelago map basically consists of a lot of small islands and tons of water. Venice starts on its own isolated island and never has to deal with barbarians or threats from other civs, and Poland shares a larger island with Brussels and then hops over to a separate continent in the east. The game is much more peaceful than the last game, with only a few stalemated wars between America and Austria, which serves Venice's purposes nicely as I'm free to build 10 trade routes and make over 200 extra gold per turn, which I will use when I resume the game later today to control the world congress.

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Oh yeah I should probably update my progress as well

Game 1: America
Difficulty: Settler
Map: Continents
Victory Type: Technology

This was my test game. I knew America was usually a pretty solid civ. Plus Technology victories were always the easiest back when I played Revolution. So I mostly wanted to see how different the games were and wow! While the core of both are very similar Revolution was insanely broken. It was insanely simple and easily exploitable. So this game was mostly spent realizing the same tactics wouldn't work. Thankfully it was on Settler, so it ended with me winning fairly easily once I got to the late game.

Game 2: France
Difficulty: Chieftan
Map Type: Continents
Victory Type: Cultural

This was probably my best game by far. With combat being really expensive I decided to just focus on building up my cities and thanks to the low difficulty and being surrounded my city-states I largely went unopposed.

Game 3: Japan
Difficulty: Warlord
Map Type: Archipelago
Victory Type: Time

So this game was the first real difficulty spike for me. I was initially aiming for an Economic Victory which was an option in Revolution, before realizing that wasn't option here, except for Time. I would've switched to Domination, but it was far too late and the map type + my spawn didn't help either so I just kinda played around with the combat more. Yeah it's definitely different. I managed to wipe out the Greece and eventually unlocked nukes and bombed the shit out of Gandhi, but I was running out of time and the Aztecs had been building their army from the get go. So I just took the easy victory. I am really looking forward to a Domination game however.

Game 4: Greece
Difficulty: Prince
Map Type: Earth
Victory Type: TBD

So I started this one last night and I'm doing pretty well for the most part. The Barbarians were a colossal annoyance and I was in debt for a decent chunk of the game. But upon learning the real value of building roads I started to make a comeback and am by far the most technologically advanced Civ. I also got really lucky with my resources, with plenty of Oil and Uranium. I could go for another easy Technology victory, but part of me also wants to look into either a Diplomacy or maybe even Domination victory. I guess we'll see.

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Ooh also some of the games for this contest are on sale for Nintendo Switch including

Bastion
The Talos Principle
Dragon's Dogma
Sonic Mania
Borderlands 2 (in a collection)
BioShock Infinite
Xenoblade Chronicles 2

A few others as well I think

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I'm mostly just not a fan of 1-unit-per-tile or city states.

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BetrayedTangy posted...
Ooh also some of the games for this contest are on sale for Nintendo Switch

Thanks! I picked up a few games through the current Steam Sale, including Dragon's Dogma which seems to be at a slightly lower price there than on Switch. I have almost all of the games for 2010-2013 now, but I'm still putting off buying later ones like Xenoblade 2 because there's a good chance they'll go down in price, or at least have a better sale discount, between now and when I get to them.

I've never actually played Civ V on any difficulty below Prince but I can see it being kind of interesting to see if you could get away with very low military strategies on those. You're advancing at a good pace so far but you'll probably find the difficulty a little more restrictive moving forward. I remember struggling a lot when I first moved up to 5 and 6 and I still find 7 quite tough.

LinkMarioSamus posted...

I'm mostly just not a fan of 1-unit-per-tile or city states.

I can understand one unit per tile being kind of annoying but I do think it's a necessary mechanic to make terrain meaningful and allow certain strategies, but I won't really argue in defense of city states.

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The Venice game finished without much drama. Austria eventually did fall to a combined offensive from America and Morocco, and I found out that both Denmark and Russia had conquered city states, which would delay my Diplomatic Victory. My relations with most Civs were fine until around the point when I picked the Freedom ideology. I wound up being the only one to pick that out of everyone in the game, which made all the others angry with me. I actually had the world's largest military for the latter portion of the game though due to Venice being such a massive city and my tech being ahead of most. I liberated Hong Kong from Denmark to get a couple extra votes and managed to force through both world religion: Sikhism (with Russia and Poland helping since I had converted them) and World Ideology: Freedom (By putting all my votes into it while the other countries split between that and one other policy.) I won in just under 400 turns, like the first game, in a victory that was never in much doubt.

Game 4
Civ: Babylon
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 7

I decided to up the difficulty and switch to a much more powerful country. Babylon is considered to be a top-tier civ in this game and is one of the most commonly used options for winning on the highest difficulty. Their special ability is Ingenuity, which grants a free Great Scientist upon researching Writing and increases the rate at which subsequent Great Scientists are earned by 50%. In a multiplayer game, rushing writing and creating an early academy will get you so far ahead in tech that the other players won't stand a chance of catching up, but on the top 2 difficulties it merely brings you almost up to par with the AI civs and their extremely powerful bonuses.

The AI is savage on 7, and will almost always attack you really early on if they spawn anywhere close. In this particular game, my spawn location was not the luckiest, with Babylon being stuck in a Tundra area near the north end of one continent, right on the border with Spain to the south, two city states in the west, and Denmark beyond those. I had to resort to founding my third city on a snow tile where it tried to make something of itself with a few resource-enhanced tundras and some water tiles, and my fourth city as an outpost between the city states and Denmark.

Spain was stuck in the south and couldn't really expand without attacking me, which caused an early and exhaustingly long war. I saw this coming enough to defend myself with the Babylonian Bowmen and Walls of Babylon, which are just slightly-stronger versions of the Archer and Walls. I even managed to capture two Spanish settlers and steal several tiles from their second city with a Great General that I earned fighting the war. My cities grew really slowly on the Tundra tiles and I had to produce so many troops to fight off Spain that I couldn't really keep up in science or culture. When the war finally ended, Denmark immediately pounced and captured my ill-defended outpost city in about five turns, at which point I resigned the game.

Game 5
Civ: Babylon
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: 7

So I re-rolled and started over, which is a pretty common occurence on the top difficulties. A lot of Deity players will recommend just starting over right away if your start location is less than ideal. This time around I was much more fortunate, landing on Grasslands with enough room to create a tightly-packed four city Empire without angering any neighbors. I had Venice to my immediate west which let me expand toward them without any trouble and also shared a continent with Portugal, Ethiopia, and Poland. None of these civs were close or expansionist enough to really threaten me, and I got by with a small military force and a lot of buildings. Although I've spent just about the entire game nearly in last place in all metrics, I eventually managed to emerge as the clear leader in science and even build a few wonders (Sistine Chapel, Eiffel Tower, Porcelain Tower, Broadway) because I was the first to reach the necessary tech. I put a lot of effort into trying to keep a decent culture so I wouldn't get dissidents trying to change my ideology later on, but despite all that I'm facing a -7 happiness penalty because Venice has become influential enough to make my civilians prefer Freedom to my chosen Order. Poland, meanwhile, has taken firm control of the World Congress and used it to start banning my resources. I also have a pathetically small army compared to every other country in the world and my cities have lackluster production exacerbated by the fact that I didn't get a single source of coal in my entire empire. I tried to ally with the city state of Milan to build factories, but Venice took them away from me before I could finish a single one. I'll have to try and solve all of these issues while leveraging my one advantage of strong science to a victory next time I play.

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Game 4: Greece Cont...
Difficulty: Prince
Map Type: Earth
Victory Type: Domination

While I did try to look into the Diplomacy victory, it seemed a tad complicated so I turned to the tried and true strategy of Domination and I won pretty easily. All of the other nations were entirely outclassed in terms of technology. I think I really lucked out too, because I had the entirety of North America to myself and all I had to do was march a bunch of Mechanized Infantry across Alaska into Northern Asia where I found France. Upon taking and annexing their capital, I found Egypt to the south as well as Songhai controlled Japan to the West. So I just began purchasing giant death robots that I used to take both capitals. Songhai and Sulemain's capitals were also nearby and easily taken, especially thanks to a nuke.

I'm really interested to see how the higher difficulties go, because so far the optimal strategy is focusing on Science and Production while remaining peaceful with cities that are all relatively close.

Also I can't stand City-States they feel like filler that just gets in the way half the time. I might try to turn them off in the next game and see how it goes.

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Play The Henry Stickmin Collection.

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