The week is over! Tomorrow I fly off to meet my homeys, and once again venture into a world of pure imagination to face dragons, fiendish creatures, and -possibly- shag a few robots here and there. And then, as if the Mega Session weren’t enough, I get to go down to Bloomington to see my girls! I don’t know how my poor, weakened heart can take the excitement. I’m afraid it might just burst from my oversized chest spilling hot, red blood all over the seat in front of me on board the plane.

Down sides? I’ve still got a few commitments to the law school I need to keep, and I need to edit a few things for them. So I shall need pry myself away for an hour or two to do homework.

But fret not. That shalt not get me down!

“Like I always say, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team.’ There’s a ‘me,’ though, if you jumble it up.”
-House

Just updating to say I’ve got no updates. Except to say: No Contracts today! Woo! Or tomorrow! Double woo!

And D&D week next week! Woo!

At least it’s a holiday and I don’t have to go into class. But, at the same time, I went to bed at 2 in the morning only to be awakened by a fire alarm at 5 in the morning. It was unknown what the cause of the alarm was, but it was more than enough of an interruption for me to loose any semblance of sleep. So I tossed and turned in my bed for an hour and a half, for some reason playing out an imaginary conversation with Joss Whedon in my head. The hour and a half having passed, my stomach began to growl and rumble, and I decided breakfast was upon me. I decided to have said breakfast whilst watching Serenity, with Joss Whedon’s commentary turned on, fittingly.

On a side note, I think Whedon is one of the best commentators I’ve heard… ever, really. He’s typically funny and charming and offers a ton of information for cinephiles. He’s the only person whom hearing the commentary is almost as good as watching the movie (now when he pairs up with someone else, someone who’s equally funny – say Nathan Fillion or Tim Minear [I'm thinking the Firefly DVDs here] – hearing the commentary is as good as watching the other thing. I love the commentary to the pilot episode of Firefly.)

Luckily, I felt the pangs of sleep upon me at about the halfway point of the movie, so I went to bed. And from then it was a constant backslide into sleep, wake up for something good, backslide to sleep, wake up for something good, until the credits rolled. Which I funnily did not sleep through, as I love the music in the movie.

And then I slept for half an hour.

Which puts me at a running total of about four very non-consecutive hours. And the headache is starting to come on. That stupid “too tired to work right” headache you get right on the top of your frontal lobe? Yeah, that’s the one. Insomniacs will back me on this, they live with it constantly. It’s the headache of weariness. God I hate that. And I was planning on being productive today.

The latest VGCats.

Game: Star Wars: Empire at War
Genre: Real Time Strategy

Something really strange is going on at Lucasarts. The last few Star Wars games have been, contrary to historical precedent, really good. I gave my review of Battlefront 2 a couple of months ago, and overall it was a good game, delivering fully on what it promised to deliver: Good shoot-em-up action in the Star Wars universe. Empire at War promises to deliver an RTS experience in the Star Wars universe.

And it fails in that regard. Which isnt’ to say that it’s a bad thing. In fact, I’d have to say that as far as failures go, this has to be one of the greatest ones in gaming history. It’s unfair to call the game a conquest/empire building game like Civilization. The game’s elements fall surprisingly flat at delivering this. Yet, it’s far better to call it an empire building game than it is to call it a real time strategy game. In fact, the best thing you can call it is a real time empire building game.

Thankfully, while the end result may not have been as advertised, it is surprisingly good fun. It has some bads – namely the graphical department and the difficulty/learning curve. But overall, it is really really good.

The Dark Side
First the bads. The graphics are reminiscent of Masters of Orion 3. Which doesn’t mean they’re bad. It means they’re old – about three or four years old. In effect, the graphics are mediocre. Which, in a game with so much eye-candy as Star Wars tends to have, it means a lot is lost in the translation. Again, not to imply the graphics are bad, they simply could have been better.

The game might have required a Cray supercomputer to run, but it could have looked better.

The learning curve is also something of a pain in the ass. The tutorial is there and it helps quite a bit. But it leaves you only with the basics, and there’s very little growth in the unit interactions. Most RTSes take you by stages – first you learn your infantry, fighting other infantry positions, then you move up to armored units, then heavier armors, then specialty units, etc. People who’ve played Star Craft or any RTS by Westwood know what I’m talking about. In EAW, you’re sort of thrown into the mix with a small series of light infantry and light armor, and are kind of expected to learn on your own what the best combination of each is. (Which is actually very easy to learn as the Rebels – they have the typical “one infantry’s great against infantry the other’s great against armor” and “one light armor’s good against armor the other against infantry.” But the Empire is a fucking pissjob at it. The only infantry unit they have is the Stormtrooper, which from what I’ve seen really and truly sucks against both infantry and armor.)

Space combat suffers the same learning curve disability, though it is surprisingly easier. Mostly because it’s easy to tell which ships are most effective against others (big ships = good against big ships/stations, small ships/fighters = good against small ships/fighters, bombers = good against big ships.)

A New Hope
However, the game overall is fun, once you get over the initial “How the fuck did a bunch of pirates kill four stormtrooper brigades?!” reaction. You learn to manage your numbers. (I’ve learned that the Empire works best under the Veer’s Doctrine: Victory through Overwhelming AT-ATs, whereas enough Rebel infantry in proper ratios can kill anything but your biggest challenges.) You learn not to assault planets without at least three capital ships and a bunch of fighters. You learn to separate your bombers and interceptors to get the best advantages. It takes some getting used to, but you get there.

The game plays like… well, in truth, it plays like Risk – the board game. You build units, and then you use those units to take over other territories, which increases your resources… etc. There are a few other special things (hero units that let you do special missions) but overall it feels a lot like Risk. Which, I liked Risk, so it’s a plus for me. It’s not an empire-building game because resource gathering and building works a lot like it would in an RTS. It’s not an RTS because unit building/deployment works exactly like it does in an empire-building game.

The overall result is a game that cuts through the boring bullshit of the empire building game, and through the brainless “build 100 units of X type and smash your enemy” of the typical RTS. It’s a game where you have to manage your available resources well. In order to conquer a planet, you first have to clear the space around it by use of space fleets. Once that’s done, you can then initiate a planetary assault and fight the ground battle. The catch is, you can only bring to the ground battle the units available in your fleet. If you have surviving bombers in your fleet above the planet, you can call bombing runs while on ground assault.

You can also bring your hero units into the ground battles. Boba Fett has an awesome flame-thrower attack that simply devastates infantry units.

What could have been better
Aside the graphics, there is one thing that could have been better. And I blame Star Wars: Rebellion entirely for this thought: Diplomacy. It somehow feels wrong for the Rebellion to simply subjugate the local population of a planet (and in the beginning of the game, you’ll likely be dealing with local pirates and smugglers, as opposed to Imperial forces) into submission. That’s the Empire’s Modus Operandi.

More heroes would have been fun, too. Again, I blame Rebellion entirely for this.

Another thing I thought – if they somehow managed to blend EAW with Battlegrounds. That would’ve been awesome. A difficult project, and I doubt it’d have too much appeal, but I think it would have been awesome.

Score: 4 out of 5.