I like this trailer. I am very much looking forward to Aliens: Colonial Marines because I consider Aliens to be one of my top three most favorite movies of all time. I used to watch the VHS tape of it every single day, for months straight, when I was in high school. It was both a horror story, and a story about a bunch of bad-asses who’s asses weren’t as bad as they thought they were.

The switch from swagger to stagger was itself part of the horror effect of the movie. Here we had specially trained, heavily armed marines who were so sure of their ass-kicking ability that they dismissed their mission as “routine” (“Is this going to be a stand-up fight or another bug hunt?”), but eventually panicked as they were picked off one by one (“Pull your shit together, Hudson, we need you.”). Part of the power of the film is that not only do the good guys lose, but we see them go from an overly confident unit who pays the price for letting down their guard.

A lot of games based on popular IPs serve two masters: fan service, and attempts to carve their own niche in the canonical universe. Naturally, fan service is important. When you have an IP as big as, say Star Trek, Star Wars or the Alien universe, devs want to capture the essence of what makes the IP representatives so popular. For ACM, that’s the second movie in the series, Aliens, which is a natural focal point for a video game, with the guns and the action and claustrophobia and the marines and the aliens. It’s the most action-packed (and the last non-lame entry) of the series, and ACM seeks to invoke the same excitement and terror that made the movie so popular.

But sometimes fan service goes too far, often times into eye-roll territory. It’s now become “hip” and the norm to include “wink wink” content – either as a reference or outright – that lets the fans know that the developers “are fans too!” by adding things that fans will recognize. Names, places, references to situations, styles, memes, and even the occasional sly and not so obvious references (remember the “xenomorph skull” in the background of Predator 2? That kind of thing). It’s gotten to the point where devs don’t even bother to smooth it out, instead just dropping it into the game en toto as is, basically whacking the player over the head with how clever they are in tying their product back to the much-loved IP.

So I cringe at the thought that ACM is going to be about you, and your wisecracking, overly confident marine squad who’s sent out to find the original squad. You’ll be exposed to a lot of bro-fisting moments, a lot of swearing (naturally, because I shouldn’t be allowed to play these games when my daughter is in the room. Thanks for that, devs), a lot of one-liners delivered in an attempt to formulate some memorable quotes (“Hey Vasquez. You ever been mistaken for a man?”  “No. Have you?”), and a lot of recycled tropes (“Stop your grinnin’ and drop your linen”).

Normally, it’d be quite refreshing to have this kind of situation if the game were the first entry into the IP, but according to the current description about that game that I have found, it takes place between Aliens and Alien 3 where you and your squad are sent out to locate the missing team who went to LV-426. I assume the impetus is that the expedition hasn’t been heard from (since Ripley, Hicks and Newt basically drifted off in a different direction without notifying anyone at the end of Aliens). What I do not want to see is an Aliens clone, with the same wise-assery, pound-for-pound, the same bravado, the same jokes or mannerisms. I don’t want my team to be a “let’s brush off any threat that may be responsible for chewing up the first team, because we’re so badass, at least until we see how badly we are also getting pwnd!” party. That would be a huge let-down because the writers really wouldn’t have had to do anything aside from taking the Aliens personalities and pasting them onto video game avatars of a second and totally unrelated squad. We’ve already seen and enjoyed it – when it was Aliens – and could now use something fresh that strips away the fraternity atmosphere and builds off of what I’d hope would be an atmosphere of “We lost the first time. Something very, very, very bad must have happened if one of our elite teams suddenly vanished. Stow the attitude”…and ramp up the tension and horror. Because WE know what’s waiting on LV-426, so wisecracking is going to be totally out of place while we move our squad into this interstellar killing field.

Top Spot: PC

The PC is my longest-running gaming platform. I started out on the Timex Sinclare, which was the American version of the British ZX Spectrum, I believe. Then the Commodore 64. Then the Amiga. Then to the Intel-based PC, and it was off to the races after that.

I pick the PC as my go-to platform because I can find something to do whether I have 30 minutes or 4 or more hours. There’s also digital downloads. And it’s an all-in-one device: IM, web browsing for info, VoIP, and the game all operate on the same box without breaking a sweat. Plus, my PC is mine.

First Runner Up: Consoles

I have all of the major consoles (2 Xbox, even) because in my eyes, a true “gamer” is platform agnostic. They don’t play favorites; they play anything, anywhere. If there’s a game on console X, they will get the console for that game, partisan bitching be damned. I can’t sit idly by and not have experienced Halo, Uncharted, or the latest Super Mario game.

Consoles are difficult for me, though. Unlike the PC (which is always on), consoles require a “process” to get started: Turn on the TV, switch the input, power on the console (wait for the logos, and the dashboard to fire up), log in (waiting…), insert disk, sit down on the couch…and not move for several hours. Although the whole process takes a matter of minutes, it is  a process, and in my mind, I need to be able to devote at least two hours of time to whatever I’m doing on the console. Add to that the fact that TV time is at a premium in my house, with a wife and daughter, that when it comes time to monopolize one of them, I have to hold on to it for dear life.

Second Runner Up: Handheld

Handhelds are still squarely in the domain of Japanese imports and translations, at least in my mind, and that’s OK. Their content runs the gamut from action-y to puzzle-y to RPG-y to strategy-y, making it a pretty close second to the PC when it comes to variety. But everything is still locked into cartridges, at least until we get the Vita, and Nintendo broadens it’s digital download opportunities for the 3DS.

Handhelds are good for anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour of gaming at a time. For me, they don’t generally have longevity of session. What they do have it portability, naturally. If I don’t feel like sitting in the computer chair (like I do all day) or can’t get the TV scheduled for consoles, I can sit in the living room with the 3DS and play. I played Harvest Moon last night, in bed, before falling asleep. They are also starting to really play up the mobility aspect, with 3DS’s Streetpass, and the Vita’s mechanism of the same ilk (who’s name escapes me now), making it worthwhile to bring your device with you everywhere so it can sniff the butts of other people’s devices. You’re welcome.

Dead Last: Mobile

I can’t really even consider mobile gaming to be on this list, but for completion’s sake, I’ll add it here.

To be fair, some mobile gaming is OK. Word games are tolerable, but the idea that mobile will kill handhelds just because developers and publishers are filling a low-barrier-to-entry vacuum of this relatively new market is laughable. It’s nothing but a land-rush, and a bubble of the kind we’ve seen in other markets, so don’t be surprised when we see a similar outcome.

Mobile gaming is for plebeians because everyone has a cellphone, and more and more people are trading up the inexpensive smartphones. It makes sense that devs and pubs are waking up with dollar signs in their eyes as they look out across this pristine plain filled with nothing but fat, simple-minded cattle ready for a good, hearty milking.

But that grossly unfair metaphor aside, mobile gaming is disposable. For me, it’s good for maybe less then 30 minutes, tops, and that would only be and option if I forgot to bring my handheld system with me (thanks to the inclusion of perks for taking the handheld with you everywhere, though, that’s a rare occurrence). I have yet to meet a mobile game that not only makes me want to download it, but to spend time with it when I have three vastly more preferential and diverse platforms available to me.

One trend that’s not uncommon is this idea of self loathing, or seeing a come to Jesus moment on Twiiter, or hearing someone had an epiphany, that once they’ve come to that sudden realization that they have wasted a good portion of his or her life playing video games – or generally, a single game in particular – he or she feels compelled to tell everyone that he or she is clean and sober, and have taken it upon themselves to save everyone else from the grip of [Insert Game Title Here].

Holy shit, this annoys me.

I don’t have any quotes on hand, but let’s paraphrase, because I’m sure you’ve seen the same ones I have, or ones very much like these:

“Just canceled my [Game Name Here] account. Best. Decision. Ever.”

“I can’t believe I wasted X years of my life playing [Game Name Here].”

“I spent so much time playing [Game Name Here] that I forgot what the sun looked like.”

…and other variations on the theme. Some people even go so far as to feel that they are so born again that they sink all their money (presumably saved now that they don’t have a monthly fee to send to [Insert Company Here]) into an actual film about how piss-poor their lives were while they were in the grip of such an unholy vice.

Before we go any further, I want to put the breaks on the sarcasm and admit that addiction is a Real Thing. Some addictions are easier to understand than others (like cocaine compared to serial reality TV viewing), but any interest or compulsion need not be chemically introduced in order to trigger an addiction. Addiction in any form can ruin lives, and kudos of the highest order to those who realize that they are addicted, and who manage to break the cycle and reset their lives.

Most of the quotes I’ve seen, and the ones I want to take to task, where people are making statements as if they just left their last support group session are from people who are not addicted. These people are being sarcastic and even insulting. I used the term “born again” above because it’s extremely apt: the generally accepted thrust of the term “born again” is that a person is overzealous about their new-found “religion” (whether it’s actual religion or not) to the point where they overcompensate in the opposite direction. What they loved is now hated with equal passion. If they were a cheerleader for it, they now revile it with no minced words.

To be honest, I don’t know who these people are trying to convince: the people around them, or themselves. I’d prefer it if people make their decisions without fanfare. If you are happy that you’re no longer spending 40 hours a week raiding, then write a book, knit a sweater, volunteer at a soup kitchen, or rescue kittens, but please, spare us your self-congratulatory victory lap. Our memories aren’t so short that we have forgotten how you vehemently defended [Game Name Here] against all comers just last week/month/year. We’ve all quit games, so your accomplishment is not as Herculean to us as it is to your S.O. who’s been nagging you to spend some offline time with them, or to your GPA which has been languishing in the low decimals because it was so important that “SexehKiteh” and “Be4stMastah26” not be let down when they pinged you to take that role in the raid Monday through Sunday.

Although I’m not a psychologist, I get that people like validation, and these people will certainly get some attaboys from the peanut gallery, from others who have gone through the traumatic experience of clicking that “Cancel Account” button themselves. But we can’t delude ourselves into thinking that we didn’t enjoy it. We like playing these games, because we belly up to the bar again and again for the same potential for punishment that we’re so proud of kicking this time around. Leaving the game isn’t the real moment of pride; realizing that maybe we let things get out of hand should be the real take home message, but that would require that we admit to people that we are weak, and that we decided it was easier to shirk our real life responsibilities in favor of a virtual world and the approval of people we only know by alias. No one, especially those seeped in geek culture, ever want to appear weak, so the game becomes the demon that we’ve overcome, not our own wills.

So if you want to really get respect for breaking free, admit that you fucked up. Say “I have a problem; I see it; And now I intend to fix it”. You may not get the snarky high-fives, but it’s amazing how sometimes articulating the problem can be a more powerful force towards solving it than pushing the blame onto an inanimate object in a public forum for some short-lived slaps on the back.

Well, for a while there, Wurm Online was persona non grata.

If you recall from my last post, my small deed was the object of attention from a nearby resident who was miffed that I had built on his preferred hunting spot. Since that post, things went from “meh” to worse. First, said resident took the passive-aggressive step of putting a sign on my front lawn stating “Protect the forest! – Signed, Forest Preservation Society”. I thought that was pretty douchy, since the resident never actually bothered to really talk to me about his concerns. Later, I logged in and saw the system tab tell me that I was KoS (kill on sight) in the nearby deed of Deliverance Harbor! Again, no one directly confronted me; they just decided to be a total dick about it.

I’m not one to stay where I’m not wanted, so I cancelled my deed and destroyed my hut-in-progress (and lost the money I had invested, so fuck you, former neighbors. I hope you choke on your corn flakes) and headed back to Darkpaw Bay for some respite while I considered my options. I didn’t have much to carry with me; just my original tools and some crafted materials. Thanks to the kindness of Stargrace, Arkenor, MMOYeti, Moxiedoodle, and other Wurmians on Twitter, I felt that abandoning the game because of one jerk wasn’t really a viable option. Stargrace made me a citizen of her deed, Les Reveur, on the south-western coast, and last night we boated there from a nearby peninsula.

My current plan is to use the mountain passage to the north and evaluate the land in the dangerous woods on the other side. Last night were were attacked by two wolves and a mountain cat near there, and I came as close to dying as I ever want to get. I need some trees to be able to re-build my shed with (hopefully this time, an actual house), and building in the shadow of a mountain means I’ll have access to metals. I think that this spot is superior to the previous location anyway, because it’s more open, less crowded, and has closer amenities.

Who doesn’t love a good show? Trailers give us a window into the world of a game before we have the game in our hands. Companies use them to drum up excitement in their product, and sometimes (rarely) to show us actual gameplay.

More often than not, though, trailers are a PR thing. They’re like little movies that are used to set the scene. Since they’re not giving us actual information on how the game plays, trailers are used for emotional punch. Remember the Gears of War “Mad World” trailer?

How about the Star Wars: The Old Republic’s “Hope” trailer:

But let’s face it: so many games rely on adjectives like “gritty” or “visceral” to describe their gameplay, and since a picture is worth a thousand words, that’s a lot of the same adjectives shared between the two trailers above, and amongst a lot of other similar games available today. These trailers are trying to impart feelings to potential players: you’re alone. The odds are stacked against you. You’re fighting for the Future of All Humanity (or whatever race you’re a member of). You’re warding off extinction. The weight is on your shoulders, grunt. Get out there and give em hell.

Then we have Wildstar.

And, as I discovered today, Wakfu

These last two are quite different from the trailers we usually see. They’re funny! They’re stylish! A lot of production value went into these trailers…which isn’t to say that the others were created on a half-assed shoe-string budget over the course of a weekend, but for me, the last two trailers really make me want to play those games. Maybe it’s because we’re so inundated with these wartime games like Gears of War, Assassin’s Creed or Call of Battlefield Infinity that the trailers rarely register as anything other than an appraisal of their production values. I appreciate the humor of both the Wildstar and Wakfu trailers because they didn’t just go with gameplay and a guitar-grinding soundtrack, or a bunch of flying text and the sounds of slamming metal. They were fun to watch, which — true or not — makes me associate those games with “fun”.

Sadly, I don’t think a game like Gears of War could field a trailer based on humor, but then again we have Red vs. Blue which managed to turn Halo into a comedy show (if you appreciate that brand of lowbrow humor, I suppose), so it’s not impossible. But I also think that the Wildstar and Wakfu trailers didn’t take that frat house humor route.

The last item on Steam’s banner rotation was Evochron Mercenary, a space flight/combat/trading/mining/kitchen sink sim. I took it as a portent, since just the other day one of my friends had mentioned the need for another Freelancer. After looking over the feature set to EM, I downloaded the demo and took it for a spin.

The first thing that was set spinning was my head. As I may have mentioned here or in other places, I’m drawn to complex, in-depth strategy and simulation games, but I rarely have the time or patience to sit down and learn or to play them. EM was an exception. I stuck around through 75% of the continuous tutorial (it can be had in pieces as well) before I shut it down and figured the best learning experience is in dying on my own.

EM is a free-form sandbox space sim. You can pick up missions from the station to earn money, or you can trade goods from port to port, or mine, or tackle pirates, or customize your ship, or build space stations, or land on planets, or find hidden areas of the universe, or just drive yourself insane trying to keep all of this straight in the face of a control scheme that would make the space shuttle interface look like an iPhone. Really, to start, you just need to know how to move, how to jump, and how not to crash into things like stations…or planets. Everything else can be had in time, as time allows.

The thing that might really sell me is the multiplayer aspect. We played a heck of a lot of Freelancer back in the day, running a local server 24/7 just for our local group, getting together to run missions and goof around. There was no driving impetus pushing us forward, except to blow up pirates and make a lot of cash. But we had fun, and a certain kind of fun that we haven’t been able to find in this “advanced” age of massive multiplayer servers or tea-bagging spawn campers. EM may allow us to have that kind of fun once more, but with the feature-horsepower that a lag of several years can provide. While EM offers much of the same types of gameplay that Freelancer offered, it seems to move things along by providing Newtonian physics-based movement, ship customization, and even the ability to reap benefits from controlling a star system or building a space station.

I’m not convinced that this is the kind of game that can be enjoyed for an extended period of time alone, since it doesn’t seem to have much of a central narrative outside of “go out and do stuff”. The server is limited to 35 players (the server is downloadable and you can run a personal edition for you and your community) which is gated by the horsepower of the machine it runs on, so we’re not talking MMO-scale here, or even a greater community. You won’t be playing with strangers, unless you plan on operating a server farm on some 24/7 high end hardware. That means that the potential long term enjoyment of this game may lie in the throwback intimacy of the early days when we had to run our own servers that were limited in access and were only fun when everyone (all handful of them) were online at the same time.

That’s not a slam on EM, because this kind of private universe is just what we’ve been asking for. The real shocker is that the developer is a one man shop. This dude must be some kind of world-crushing super genius in order to keep pumping out games in this series, alone, and each with increasing depth. I think that fact alone means that EM is one indie game I can get behind, because I enjoy it, it’s my cup of tea, the price is comfortable ($25), and an update on the EM site hints at upcoming improvements that sound even better than what we have now: better visuals, the ability to move around on the planet surface, and more.

There’s a demo available on the EM site, although not through Steam, so if you have any interest in sandbox space sims, give it a shot. The demo allows you access to everything the universe has to offer for 90 minutes, which was long enough to let me blow myself up a few times, tackle several missions, upgrade my ship, and learn some of the finer points of interstellar navigation.

A forest of maple trees. Tall grass, swaying in the wind. The sound of boats in the distance, bumping against their moorings while the surf laps at the dock. The moon overhead seems almost green, and OH MY FKING GAWD THERE’S A MASSIVESPIDERBITINGMEANDNOWTHERESAWOLFAND…wait…is that…OHMYGAWDABEAR!!!!1!

I managed to find a plot of un-owned land in Wurm Online. It’s situated on the western coast, a bit inland but still within walking distance of the ocean. There’s a lot of abandoned property nearby, so understood because when you right click on the tile or object and choose examine, it doesn’t tell you that it’s within a named property, and tells you that the damage is in the high percent – meaning someone isn’t keeping up with repairs. That’s not really of interest to me; I could have waited for it to all topple down and then deeded the place myself to get closer to the coast, but I set up shop at the edge of the forest. Having trees is probably the first major resource one can benefit from, because the wood you gather from them is used to create things like some tools, and of course, a house.

Housing is a multi-step process, and it takes a while to construct. I found out that while you don’t need a deed to build a house, having one means that no one can mess with your stuff, plus you get exclusive access to the materials within your plot. Cutting down trees allows you to create logs, which allows you to create planks in conjunction with your saw. You also need to create a mallet using your carving knife, a shaft, and a mallet head, from a log. Using the mallet, you place a plan for the building, and once you work and finalize the plan, you need 20 planks per wall of the building to make an effective structure. One thing I didn’t pay attention to is that each wall you construct can either be a wall, a door or a window, and you need to select which one you want to make as the first step in erecting the side of the building. I thought I’d be able to put in a door or window once the wall was up, for some reason, but that’s not the case, so one wall that would have had a great view now has a solid wall instead. At least I managed to get the door in place so I can actually, you know, use the building.

I’ve only got two walls up so far, and two piles of stuff, which is a less formal aggregation of items than one would find in a chest: it’s basically…a pile of dropped stuff. Most of it is wood shavings that were the result of failed attempts at creating planks. That’s all getting turned into kindling so I can take it over to the abandoned fortress and make my casseroles in the oven that’s located there.

Both hooray and boo, the forest at my back is a prime hunting spot, as I was informed by a local who seemed concerned that I’d mess it up with my building. The good news is that this local has nothing to fear. It’s like a zoo full of predatory animals burst open and spilled it’s residents throughout the forest. The bad news is that last night, I was run down by two bears, a spider, a rat, a wolf, and a wild cat. I ran in circles so many times while trying to get away, all I could hear in my head was “Yakkity Sax”, Benny Hill style until I managed to get to safety. Sadly, I’m not deft enough with a blade to be able to take down this unruly mob, and since my small shed isn’t a very effective shelter with only two walls, I was forced to collapse in heap and cry myself to the logout screen in the hopes that next time I’ll be able to continue working unbothered by every single fumoggin creature in Wurm.

But it’s all part of the attraction, all the potential death and inconvenience. Wurm is really the kind of experience that is the antithesis of the Big Name MMOs out there. I’d even say that it’s in a portion of the spectrum that’s beyond traditional sandbox games. It’s the ubersandbox because there’s nothing universally exciting about it on paper. There’s no massive explosions. There’s no working one’s way up to Level Badass. There’s a lot of running from what would be considered to be level 1 trash mobs in pretty much every MMO. There’s housing, but you have to work your ass off to get it. You can buy stuff from player vendors, but in a game which gives you the opportunity to craft the exact same items and raise your skills in doing so, what’s the point? This is Settlement Frontier Online, and for those whose national histories contain such mythology, you get a much better appreciation of how simply staying alive with a full belly is far more badass then earning high level loot from whatever raid you ran.

Ideally, it would be a sandbox cyberpunk title, because I believe in the sandbox model, and I love old-school cyberpunk. I’ve written about some of the ideas here before, but what got me thinking today was whether or not it was even worthwhile to do an urban sandbox title in the age of Skyrim.

Grand Theft Auto would say “yes”. It was considered to be THE sandbox standard for many gamers and for quite some time. You could jack cars, drive around the city unfettered, mug people, steal stuff, kill people and…I think that’s pretty much it. I’m sure there are achievements to be had for locating certain things in the world, but as far as honest to goodness exploration goes, GTA really pales in comparison to Skyrim.

In Skyrim, you’re dropped into the uncharted wilds and are pointed in an initial direction. After that, it’s hands off. As you go about it, you find those paths into the woods, or even just ground that’s apparently uncluttered by undergrowth, which instantly sets off the endorphins for exploration because you know that the path into the mountains can end with a cave, or ruins, or a temple. After a few hours, you forgot what the heck you were setting out to do in the first place. And that never stops! So many people have lost countless hours of well-intentioned completion in Skyrim, not because they were sighseeing, but because they started out sightseeing, and then got sucked into a totally unrelated series of side-quests based entirely on what they found on the other side of the mountain they had no good reason to climb.

I haven’t played a lot of GTA (the combat annoyed me, and I suck at the driving), but I tried to mentally apply the Skyrim theory to an urban sandbox design, and came up short. We live in the same reality that GTA inhabits (though only to a degree. I may drive like a maniac, but I don’t pick up or kill hookers). We know what it’s like to move through a city, where people travel in vehicles more often than they do on foot and move at higher speeds along smooth streets designed specifically to bring people from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. In between these pathways we have obstacles like buildings or infrastructure or natural formations like coastlines or rocky outcroppings. Even if we get off the streets and head down alleys or break into people’s apartments in GTA, how much variation could we expect? Each apartment has a couch, a TV, a microwave oven, and in a singular building each apartment design is just like the others in that building. I just don’t think that urban sandboxes provide the same kind of fuel for exploration that Skyrim had.

Although sandboxing is far more then the environment, the reality of the urban environment is a limitation that the realistic setting imposes. Consider Fallout 3. While not fantasy, it could be considered fantastical, a bridge between the reality of an urban environment and the make-believe world of high-fantasy. Fallout 3 and Skyrim can design their worlds without having to faithfully replicate our every day experiences, which aren’t really all that exciting venues for spontaneous exploration. The artistic license that the fantasy setting affords allows the environment to play a more central role for exploration in Skyrim then it ever could in GTA.

Since then, though, time has become more and more of a premium for the factors one would expect when one becomes a Responsible Adult™. Although gaming is still my primary hobby, and I do devote most of my personal time to it, I have no where near as much time now as I did back then. However, my mind apparently believes that I do, because it keeps pushing me to buy, and to want to play, strategy games.

I’ve bought quite a few in the past few years: Sengoku, Hearts of Iron III, Sword of the Stars, King Arthur: The Roleplaying Game, and probably more I can’t remember. Most of the time, I get through the tutorial and then realize that I have no friggin idea what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. It’s daunting to see a map with tiny indicators dotting the surface, with spreadsheets and numbers and cryptic designations that only career military personnel can appreciate. We don’t get those massive manuals anymore; now we get click-click-click tutorials that we’re expected to memorize at the end of some 30-odd hours of eye-bleeding study. Even when we do have something to reference, like a wiki or an integrated help system, the explanation is so dense that I get worn out just on the reading alone.

The sad realization, then, is that I just don’t have the time to sit down and tackle these things in any form. I want to, for those times when I do have a few hours to myself, when the family is out shopping or when I have a day off from work. I envision myself sitting at the computer, feet up on the desk with the keyboard on my lap, carefully mulling over production decisions and troop strengths along various warfronts. I like to think that given enough time, I can decipher what the grids are telling me, or that I can memorize which province is producing what unit, how many, and how long it’ll take to move them where they’re needed. The reality is that even when I do have the time, I turn into a catatonic idiot when faced with the first map of my tiny, starting kingdom. I have no idea what to do, where to start, where to go, or how to go about it. In the absence of any direction, I usually end up shutting down and uninstalling the game. At least for a few months, until I decide to give it another go.

I suppose that if I only played in this genre than it wouldn’t be so difficult for me to stick with it. There’s tropes in the strategy genre, just like there are tropes in the MMO genre (that are generally railed against), and immersing myself in those standards would reduce the ramp-up time for each successive title. But it’s the initial hump, the “learning wall” instead of the “learning curve” that is part of the actual attraction of the genre – the deep, boundless depth – that is the biggest barrier responsible for my consistent defeat.

In all seriousness, Wurm is possibly one of the top hardest of the hardcore games out there, and by that I mean it’s a game that refuses to hold your hand in any way. It’s a sandbox of the highest caliber that starts you off with a lengthy tutorial which teaches you how to move, how to use tools, how to harvest trees, forage for food, mine, combine items to make better items, how to walk up hills, and how to create roads. Basically, it covers how to do everything but fight. Fighting is pretty much the low hanging fruit of the game development world, and I guess the Wurm devs figure that you already know how to swing a sword, but you really have absolutely no clue how to actually survive in the wilderness.

And survival is the name of the game! You’re given a lot of tools to start out with, but no food or water. It’s up to you to apply what you learned in the tutorial (you were paying attention, right?) to find something to eat and something to drink. Although you won’t die of starvation, everything works off your stamina, and in order to replenish your stamina, you need a full belly. So you can forage in the grass for berries. You can try and kill some animals and while you’re working on that, you can also learn how to die because the creatures in Wurm aren’t trash mobs; they’re bad-ass killing machines. Remember the initial advice Neo got in The Matrix about how to handle an Agent? That’s right; you run.

The graphics blow. But before you thoughtfully push in your chair on your way out of this post, let me explain. Wurm isn’t about the graphics. It’s barely even a game, really. It’s more of a simulator, like a street-level High Fantasy meets SimCity. The purpose of the game, so far as I can tell, is to put you to work. There’s no empty accomplishments here, no achievements that pop up when you kill something, or make armor, or tie your shoe, or just log in like in other MMOs. The success is the achievement. It’s in the survival and the progression from tree to plank to wall to house. You spend a lot of time doing what may seem like menial work – cutting down trees, making logs, making planks, and failing frequently – so when you finally get enough materials to put it all together, your hard work is meaningful. It’s something that you’ve focused on, spent time learning how to do, and actually has a use in the game. For many people (myself included), this is the ultimate progression game: tangibles, not meaningless and arbitrary numbers that are raised with each successive expansion.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game is how it’s set up to encourage – for lack of a better term – settlement. Players can buy deeds which allows them to claim land. Once a player claims land, he or she has control over that plot and can dictate who can build, who can harvest, who can plant, and who can take. Several deeds together make a village, and players can become citizens with rights to act in that village. Roads can be built to facilitate transport, and gates and fences and walls can be constructed to make real, honest-to-goodness towns. This is both a good and bad thing, though. It’s good, because people who pay for the membership (a paltry $6.50ish USD per month) to support the game have a piece of the world all to themselves. It’s bad because new players have a hell of a time finding an unclaimed place that allows them to harvest anything unless they know other people who are kind enough to let them have a tree to work on to get started with.

Remember when I said the graphics blow? That might have been a bit harsh, because to be honest, I was quite taken with much of the visuals. On my way to Darkpaw Bay (home of several Twitter Luminaries), I passed down a road that was hemmed in by several buildings, and which was over-hung by willow tree branches. It was very cozy and secluded. Later, I entered a “forest”. I put that in quotes because many in-game forests are just sparse trees here and there. This forest had a canopy so dense that I felt like I had just gone indoors. The landscape is fully deformable, so there’s hills and valleys, and gardens, orchards, mountains, animal pens…all kinds of things to see on your trek throughout the land, many of which change over time due to players making the world their own.

What I decided, then, was that Wurm Online reminded me of my fond memories of Ultima Online. Both dropped you into the world with little instruction, both gave you tools to make what you wanted, both had that element of danger even on the outskirts of an otherwise safe village. You can walk for quite some time and never see another moving object (player or creature) so that when you do see something or someone, you just have to stop for a second and evaluate your options: keep going? Fight? Backtrack? Flee? Everything we normally wade into with bravado in other MMOs requires calculation in Wurm, be it combat or crafting.

I can’t “recommend” Wurm, because it’s not something that you just download and try when you’re bored of whatever game you’re currently playing. You need to really want to try it, because you need to be honest in your attempt to make a go of it. The first time I tried it, it didn’t go well because I was overwhelmed with the options, and the lack of direction. Thanks to the help of Arkenor, Stargrace, and Petterm, I’ve had a much better time my second time around, and that foot in the door is really what is needed to see how the game can grab you (if you’re interested in being grabbed in this manner).