Sliding block puzzles suck. Jeff and Dan voiced that opinion in the Tomorrow Children QL and after reading over gkhan's Foolproof Guide to Solving Them, I agreed. That got me thinking about what puzzles in games I did like, and in the course of considering it, my thoughts eventually drifted to my 3rd favorite MMO of all time: Puzzle Pirates.

My best summary of the game's premise is a family-friendly version of EVE Online where your skill is determined by how well you can solve a variety of puzzles. Set on a pirate-inhabited chain of islands, the game boasts PvE raids, PvP blockades, player-controlled islands and economies, and 22 different types of puzzles that determine your skill at everything from rearming cannons to brewing ale. It is one of the last MMOs released before the World of Warcraft entered the scene and changed the landscape forever; it came out just a half-year after EVE Online did, and it shares EVE's vision of an MMO as a player-controlled gameworld rather than a giant amusement park. It is quickly approaching 13 years of age, and it still has a respectable population of 500 players online during American evening hours; not enough to encourage active developer support, but still enough to keep the servers running.

Exactly when I played it has faded into the mists of my personal history; I vaguely recall playing it as an alternative to World of Warcraft after my raiding guild broke up and I burnt out on the Burning Crusade. I subscribed to Puzzle Pirates for about 3 months and played in a small-but-active crew called the Cookie Pirates. I participated in a few PvP blockades and even won a sloop painted in the colors of the American flag from a 4th-of-July raffle. While I didn't play it for years like I did WoW, I still have fond memories of my time with the game and just how unique it was; in comparison, I view most of my time spent playing WoW and EVE Online as ultimately wasted. Why?

Replacing level/equipment-based progression with puzzling skill stuck out the most to me. This game completely abandoned standard RPG level-progression and minimized the effects of equipment to just 3 fighting puzzles. There was nothing stopping a complete novice from becoming one of the best gunners in the archipelago except for skill and practice. It was a pure form of the capitalist dream of going from rags to riches solely through hard work and perseverance.

It didn't hurt the puzzles were varied and interesting enough to keep your attention for the 15-45 minutes most pillaging runs took. The full gamut of them resembles a grab bag from every puzzle game in gaming history: Bilging is a Match-3 puzzler, Sailing uses Dr. Mario mechanics, Swordfighting resembles Puyo Puyo, Brawling imitates Bust-a-Move, and so forth. Every ship required different stations to be manned to stay in tiptop shape, which meant on most trips you could play anywhere from 3-8 different types of puzzles.

All of these puzzles were tied into a higher metagame of "how well is the ship doing?" Each crewmate's puzzling contribution either repaired damage to the ship, kept it going at full speed and turning quickly, or reloaded cannons to fire at opponents. The entire enterprise was led by the ship captain, who directly controlled the ship and ordered crewmates to change stations depending on what he needed most at the time. The ship captain had his own unique puzzle: a turn-based grid wargame where you tried to predict your enemy's movements and unload a couple broadsides into their hull before boarding their ship. Once the boarding commenced, the two crews duked it out in what can best be described as Puyo Puyo or Bust-a-Move Vs mode applied to mass combat. Players ganged up on the biggest threats, playing aggressively when no one was targeting them and stalling for time when the enemy turned their eye towards them. This most basic of activities, the pillaging run, required a group to succeed and encouraged interacting with other players.

Puzzle Pirates encouraged these interactions at every turn. When you were out pillaging, you were cooperating with crewmates against enemy crews. When you were relaxing at the Inn, you were gambling with crewmates (or anyone who happened to pass by) on games of skill. The solo crafting puzzles were tied into player shop owners paying for labor, and thus were tied into the player economy as a whole. Nearly all of the rewards were either cosmetic items or furniture for your house, with the implication you would be showing them off to your mates in-game. Not even EVE Online encouraged this much interaction in every aspect of the game; Puzzle Pirates put importance on the Massively Multiplayer part of MMOs.

But would that still hold up 12 years after its release, when the server population had dwindled to a few hundred people at any given time?

My Return

I logged into my old account and looked at my now-ragged character. I made him before the free-to-play oceans (servers) were opened, back when you had to subscribe to buy any items above the basic outfit. As much as I would like to play him and pilot my Star-Spangled Sloop into hostile waters again, the subscription ocean only had about 50 players online at any given time; I would need to recruit over 10% of the server pop just to fully crew my vessel. I sighed and instead turned my eye towards the F2P oceans, which had 350 players online. While I couldn't transfer my pirate or his ship over, I could make a new character and soon do just as well as I did in the old days.

Within minutes of logging in on my new character, I stumbled upon two dozen players idly waiting at the docks for jobs. A few showed signs of life, occasionally moving or grouping with nearby players for private conversations. I checked the Notice Board: there were 3 pillaging runs going on. I chose one, and within minutes I was matching Sailing patterns and Swordfighting just like old times. My puzzle skills were quite rusty, but I still managed to hold my own and came away from the job with enough booty to buy a new sword and some more clothes.

While the player economy runs entirely on Pieces of Eight, nearly every item delivered has a Doubloon surcharge as well. Doubloons are the real-money currency of Puzzle Pirates, although it lets players trade them for in-game Pieces of Eight, similar to EVE's PLEX and WoW's sellable monthly subscriptions. I paid for $10 worth of Doubloons via Paypal, getting 42 Doubloons in the process- more than enough to buy my sword, clothes, and a 30-Day Labor Badge that let me make money crafting items for a month.

After choosing an archipelago to live on and hitching a ride there (the game provides instant warping between islands in the same archipelago, but to travel to a new archipelago you have take the long route by ship), I checked into the various shops to see if they had anything for me to work on. I was disappointed to see none of the shops on my island had orders waiting to be made.

I took the ferry to one of the larger islands in the archipelago. It was crammed with dozens upon dozens of shops, but only a few of them still had anything left to sell or were taking orders. The rest had the air of a commercial ghost town filled with abandoned shops which remained "open" as long as coffers had enough money to pay the rent. The few shops that were open filled my needs well; I bought everything I was looking for and even put in some labor at one of them for a bit of extra coin.

The next day, I logged back into the game to see a Job Posting for a Flotilla. I joined in, not quite knowing what I was getting myself into. What followed was a 2-hour long multi-ship battle between one of the larger active guilds and a Brigand King, Puzzle Pirates' equivalent of a raid. Neophytes like myself rubbed shoulders with players who had been active in the game for 5 years straight, all contributing to helping our ship take out brigand after brigand. While that aspect of contributing to an endgame raid after just 2 days of playing was nice, this was where Puzzle Pirates's gameplay model broke down for me: 2 hours of playing the same 5 puzzles over and over again just got boring, and by the time we were finished I had my fill of Puzzle Pirates for the day. However, I had also earned 20k pieces o' eight from the flotilla, which was over 5x my haul for my first day back. I could have bought another sloop with that money, perhaps painted it to look just like my Star-Spangled Sloop on the subscription ocean, but instead I used it to buy actual furniture for my personal shack instead of the straw-riddled cot I started with. I don't know yet if I'm invested enough in this game again to start piloting a ship on an ocean of just a few hundred pirates, but even a decade after I first played it, I'm glad to see there's still something appealing about this game.

Three Rings Design, the creators of Puzzle Pirates, is now a subsidiary of Sega, while Puzzle Pirates is now owned by Gray Havens, a company dedicated to keeping Puzzle Pirates (and other previous Three Rings games) operational as long as they can. I have to wonder, do they have any plans to make a sequel to their first (and flagship) product? The puzzle-based gameplay seems like a perfect fit for today's phones, and it would be nice to start anew on a fresh ocean, alongside thousands of people discovering it for the first time. Or is this game destined to slowly sink below the waves of history, host to a dwindling population smaller than a rural village? I don't know yet.

I certainly don't regret my time with the game, though. If you have any interest in multiplayer puzzling, or just seeing one of the stranger MMO ideas developed before WoW crushed the competition, I would suggest checking Puzzle Pirates out. It's still available at this site and on Steam for free.

Previously on RimWorld:

Season 1: Spring

Season 2: Summer

It's a bad season when a hostile AI driving your colonists insane with psychic waves is the least of your worries.

It was the first thing that happened, though.

When you start attacking a crashed psychic ship, it spawns robots to kill you. However, it only spawns them once you attack it. I build cover along the northern shore (the only dry land within range I can build on) in preparation for my assault on it.

Aside from Tiffy having a major mental break and wandering around ripping her clothes off in a psychotic daze for a day, we build our fortifications and launch an assault before anything really bad happens.

These robotic caterpillars are equipped with automatic energy blasts and inferno cannons, but I manage to take them out with minimal injuries thanks to being behind cover in darkness. I haul back their scrapped bodies and an AI Core salvaged from the ship, which will be vital for the spaceship I'll build to escape the planet later.

I return to base just before another manhunting pack of elephants arrives.

Our Earthman prisoner Jess chooses this moment to attempt a jailbreak, escaping through our back entrance and outrunning both my colonists and the killer elephant pack.

I figure he earned that escape.

Shortly after the elephants leave, I get a distress call from a 65-yr old recruiter asking for help against the pirates chasing him. Given they're chasing someone who probably has a bad back and has never done any physical labor in his life, I'm surprised they haven't caught him already. I turn off the radio; I've had enough of saving slow-moving people from raiders.

Meanwhile, Tiffy heads out to start taming the local wildlife. Her first success is a roaming timber wolf.

Unlike the pack of yorkshire terriers clogging up my base, timber wolves are large enough to haul materials once they've had enough training and help fight raiders. If I can replace my dozen terriers with a few wolves, I'll be happy.

The near-useless terriers have already eaten through my entire supply of kibble are beginning to starve to death; much as I'd like to let them, I'm still hoping to sell them later, so I send my colonists out on some emergency hunts to refill the meat stores.

A few days later, I finally have a merchant arrive... right on the heels of a pirate raid. I quickly drive off the raiders before my colonists get stuck in a crossfire between the merchants and the raiders. (I don't trust merchants' bodyguards ever since they headshotted one of their own guys trying to kill a rabid squirrel.)

I quickly sell all of my extra yorkshire terriers to them.

Apparently the pirates weren't happy with how I kept repelling their assaults, as they decided to besiege my base.

I despise sieges. They have powerful weaponry, they construct mortars that lob explosive shells into your colony, and they also build their own sandbags to provide cover against you if you try to assault them...

But assault them I did, mainly because the alternative was to see how much stuff their mortar volleys would destroy. Thanks to my salvaged weapons and several wolves & huskies I've managed to tame, I drive them off without any losses, although 3 of my colonists are severely injured. I leave 2 surviving pirates to die in the cold while I steal their food & carry my own men back; I later strip their corpses and loot their clothing.

Even after looting a few dozen packaged survival meals from them, I'm getting low on food for my colonists and my wolf pack. I'm not sure there's enough animals to hunt to last me through the winter... I'll have to build an indoor hydroponic farm.

Winter: Fire & Ice

Overcooked is a great game... if you have other people to play it with. The 1-player compromise where you swap from one chef to the other? Boring. I played it once on the PC and decided to wait until I visited my brother to player it co-op.

Then last week Overcooked got a patch that added keyboard co-op to the game. Each player used WASD or the arrow keys, plus 2 buttons for actions. The controls were simple enough that each player only needed one hand.

Or one player would need both hands.

I started up a new "co-op" campaign, put both hands on the keyboard, and tried to run 2 cooks at once. Afterwards it felt like my brain had twisted itself into a knot. I could move one cook at a time, but moving both at once was the video game equivalent of walking and chewing gum. Half the time when I tried to pickup/drop something, I hit the button for the wrong cook, or both cooks. It was manageable if my left hand controlled the left cook and my right hand controlled the right cook, but if they swapped positions in the kitchen my hands thought they were controlling the wrong cooks. I had to train myself to constantly associate my right hand with the cat cook. I lost many early stages because the cat was walking into a wall while my brain tried to tell the correct hand to move it away.

Fine control was nearly impossible. The cook I wasn't focusing on constantly ran into counters or dropped ingredients in the wrong spot. Rather than focusing solely on a single cook, I had to learn to switch focus for a split-second to confirm the other cook was highlighting the proper spot for ingredients. I had to hesitate to go faster overall. I had to take my time when I wanted to rush.

Once I started getting used to it, 2 out of 3 stars was easy to get. The good 3-star rating felt nigh-impossible. I had to play each stage a half-dozen times, slowly formulating a plan I could act on with hamfisted reflexes. I was overjoyed when I finally got 3 stars on the Pirate Ship.

Then my right hand started cramping up from carpal tunnel. I took a few days off Overcooked, and after a futile attempt to hack its config files to switch keyboard assignments around, I decided to finally bite the bullet and buy an Xbox controller for my computer; I had considered it before, but this was the first game I really couldn't play well with just a keyboard. The difference was apparent the first stage I tried it with. On the keyboard, I used my right hand's middle finger through pinky for the arrow keys and my pointer for action buttons, while my left hand used the pinky for action buttons and my other fingers for WASD. On the controller, I used the same fingers on each hand for the same actions; that cleared up a lot of the confusion my brain had keeping them straightened out. I also only had to use my thumbs to move, and I could even dash by clicking in the joysticks. I quickly beat several levels that had confounded me before.

I'm still working on becoming an expert on this type of play, and it's a slow process occasionally resulting in awkward hijinks. As a sample of what it looks like playing it, I've included this educational video:

It's been... an interesting challenge. Probably the hardest workout the reflex part of my brain has gotten in a long time.

Previously on RimWorld:

Season 1: Spring

Day 1: Preparation

After surviving the initial frozen spring, it is now summer and the colony is starting the short growing season of the year. Most of our food for the other 3 seasons of the year will be grown now... and none of my colonists have a Growing skill above 5.

First, I double-check and tweak their work priorities. I want every colonist with a decent Growing skill focusing on planting and harvesting crops, shunting most of the other jobs to my other colonists.

The growing is slow for the first few days, punctuated by a pack of Alphabeavers who threaten to eat every tree in the region, plus a solar flare that shuts down every electrical device for a day.

Once the solar flare dies off and the fog lifts, I go beaver hunting with all of my colonists (occasionally the whole beaver pack enrages, which can quickly kill lone hunters) and bring back a ton of meat and enough beaver hide for some pants.

While hunting them, I notice another herd of boars on the map; as tempting as it is to hunt them, I need to focus on growing crops for the summer.

Shortly after, I finally manage to recruit my first prisoner: Sammy, a soldier with high Melee and Ranged skills, but not much for other skills. Still, she can haul and clean (two jobs which are always needed), and she has the Green Thumb trait, which means she gets a mood boost if she's planting crops. I can find a use for her. I tweak my job priorities to account for the new colonist.

Sammy starts out her first days in the colony by having a minor mental break from not having an impressive bedroom... by hiding in her bedroom for nearly the whole day, starving and exhausting herself in the process.

Day 6: Pachydermophobia

Then the maneating elephants arrive.

Last time I tangled with elephants in RimWorld, one of my colonists lost both his hands and another one lost her leg. I have no desire to repeat that; I restrict all my colonists to a zone behind my walls and decide to hole up for a few days until they leave. The elephants wander around just outside my gates, waiting for some hapless fool to step outside.

Given how slowly my colonists are growing crops, I'm not sure if I'll have enough food to survive the winter with just that. I decide to change my research to something that can help with that:

As if maneating elephants wasn't enough, a bug infestation also pops up in some tunnels I was mining out.

Fortunately, pulling the giant bugs one-by-one with gunshots and letting my melee combatants finish them off destroys the hive with minimal injuries and nets me plenty of Insect Meat. While colonists don't like eating insect meat, it's great for making dog kibble.

Once the elephants finally leave 3 days later, I send out my colonists to harvest the crops outside and start building wind turbines. My wood-fueled generators won't be able to handle the colony's electrical needs for much longer, especially if I set up a Hydroponics Farm.

As if I haven't had enough animal visitors, a pack of yorkshire terriers wanders into the colony and settles in.

I initially thought about slaughtering most of them, but I have more than enough kibble from the insect meat and I could make quite a bit of silver if I can sell them to a merchant, so for now I decide to adopt them and hope for the best. If a merchant doesn't buy them within a season or two, I can always slaughter and eat them. (They might even have good leather.)

Day 12: More Unwanted Visitors

I was initially tempted to refuse his plea for help, but my colonists are well-outfitted and healthy, so I decide to take a risk and offer him safety.

The raiders chasing after him have Charge Rifles (one of the best guns in the game) and armor; this could be a tough fight. Fortunately, they charge right into my cleared-out killzone and take heavy losses before fleeing.

I manage to capture a prisoner and loot a Charge Rifle from this raid. My new colonist, Dyer, has a high Shooting skill, is Cold Tolerant, and is a Fast Walker, which would make him perfect for hauling stuff... except he's incapable of Dumb Labor like hauling. Still, he has decent Animals and Growing skills, so I set him to tame animals and plant crops.

With this many colonists, the bedrooms are beginning to get cramped; I can't even fit in any more beds, so they have to sleep on the floor. I prioritize digging out some new bedrooms.

A few days later, another pirate raid with charge rifles hits. This time, half of them attack my defenses while the other half heads toward a newly-dug tunnel to the outside I forgot I had dug. Fortunately, once I kill the half attacking my defenses, the others flee before they can get too deep into my base.

I capture another prisoner, a colonist from Earth that will be hard to recruit, but I decide to keep him around instead of executing him because this is the first time I've seen a colonist from Earth.

By the time summer ends, I've made good progress on building my wind farm and new bedrooms, I'm getting ready to harvest my last batch of crops, and I've recruited one of the other raiders I took prisoner.

Things are looking good... now I just need to survive the fall, winter, and spring until the next summer rolls around.

Season 3: Autumn

Over a month ago, I wrote RimWorld off as a "poor man's sci-fi Dwarf Fortress". Shortly after writing that, the game finally clicked with me, and 250 hours of gameplay later, it's one of my favorite games of the year. I've had trouble explaining its appeal since the systems are so densely layered on top of each other, so I finally decided to just play through a single game of it and detail things as I go along. This is my attempt to document the entire lifetime of a RimWorld colony, one season daily.

Starting Out

I randomly chose to play a game on Cassandra (the standard storyteller) on the 2nd-hardest difficulty. Cassandra likes to slowly ratchet up the threat against your colony, eventually throwing 2 or even 3 simultaneous disasters/raids at you in waves, and this is the first time I've played above Medium difficulty, so I'm... cautious about my chances of success. (Did I mention I've only won once in over 250 hours of play?)

Once that was done and the map was created, I chose a random spot & season to start out in: a mountainous boreal forest during springtime. The combination of forests and mountains ensures I won't run out of wood and minerals anytime soon, but with a growing period less than a season long, I'll be hard-pressed to plant enough crops to feed my colony for the year. I may have to resort to indoor planting to survive if there isn't enough wildlife to hunt, but first I have to survive a spring with temperatures below freezing.

As for my unlucky starting colonists, I have:

• Euterpre, an elderly female Night Owl that's a crackshot with a rifle and Interested in (gains a bonus to learning) several skills, including Cooking. She'll be my main hunter and moonlight as a cook, but she takes a mood penalty if she's up during the daytime.
• Yukiko, a middle-aged female with high Medicine and Mining skills. She'll let me quickly carve out a niche in the mountains, but her Too Smart trait combines an increased learning rate with a higher chance of mentally snapping, and her Chemical Fascination means she'll binge on any hard drugs I have in stock.
• Sparkles, a young female with insanely high Crafting and Artistic skills, but she likes to insult fellow colonists (Abrasive) and isn't fond of the cold (Heat Lover), which is troublesome on this map.

Luckily the RNG didn't give me any really useless colonists for my starting three, so I have high hopes I can manage a decent start.

Spring, Day 1: Landfall

The day starts with my 3 colonists climbing out of their escape pods (along with a pet yorkshire terrier) and promptly puking their guts out from cryosleep sickness. As they arm themselves with the supplied weapons (a knife, a pistol, and a rifle), I take a look around the map: there's a large mountain range to the north, and in one of the cubbies along it is two abandoned buildings perfect for holing up in during my first night. First order of business is to make a few beds, then turn on Manual Priorities and set up who does what tasks when.

Proper task priorities continues to be a finicky point for me. Priority 1 tasks are done first from left to right in the priority queue, then Priority 2 tasks, and so forth. For example, with this setup, Yukiko would do Doctoring jobs first, then Hauling & Cleaning, then stay in bed as a Patient (if she has life-threatening injuries) before Mining. (In this case, I probably should've set Hauling and Cleaning to Priority 2 instead.)

To start, I have Sparkles focus on Construction and Tailoring while the other two focus on Hauling materials, because I need beds and clothes ASAP. (If you look across the status icons on the top of the screen, you'll notice two of my colonists are nearly naked; not good for a tundra map.) I quickly build a Campfire inside for them to warm up around before hypothermia sets up, but I quickly replace that with a wood-fueled generator & electrical heater.

By Day 2, I have a basic base setup:

I start hunting the muffalo herd on my doorstep for meat & leather, hoping to add some elk leather from another nearby herd, but once I've hunted all the muffalo I look over and notice the elk herd has wandered off the map. As-is, I only have enough leather to make a single shirt.

I get desperate enough for leather I start hunting everything else on the map. During one of these hunts, the Name Your Colony dialog box pops up:

Since we landed in a boreal forest of a world named Old Hyadum, I decide to name my colony New Anchorage. After a few days, my colony already has some rudimentary defenses (a barricade on the only entrance into this nook) and an electric tailoring bench. Now I just need some more leather...

Spring, Day 5: A New Arrival

On Day 5, in midst of Yukiko pigging out on food (she suffered a minor mental break due to a lack of clothes and sleeping with 2 other colonists in a cramped room), I get a notice that a Wanderer decided to join our colony:

A young female teenager with decent skills in Shooting, Medicine, and Research. Once I build my Research Bench, she'll basically be assigned to it every waking hour, and another colonist good at shooting & medicating is always a plus. When I zoom in on her to check her stats, I notice a cougar roaming the wilderness nearby; I quickly send out a hunting party to kill it and takes its precious leathers.

The next day, I get hit with my first raid: a single raider armed with a shiv. I easily do enough damage to her to drop her into shock from the pain; I can now capture her and try to convince her to join my colony... once I quickly construct a new bed and stuff it into the tailoring room as a makeshift jail cell. And strip off all her clothing to outfit my naked colonists.

She doesn't seem too eager to join a colony that locked her naked in a sewing room, but talking to her was raising my colonists' Social skill and I didn't have enough leather to sew anything, so I let her be.

That's when I noticed a herd of boars had wandered onto the map.

Spring, Day 8: The Great Boar Hunt

Early the next morning, I drafted and equipped every colonist who was decent in combat and headed for the southwest corner of the map, shooting every boar that crossed my line of sight. By the time I was done, my colonists were hauling back enough boar hides to make a full outfit from them.

Having a sudden need for a tailoring room, I execute my prisoner on the spot and haul out her corpse just in time to sew some pants.

Spring, Day 12: More Guests

A few days later, I get a distress call from a woman trying to escape some raiders. She offers to join my colony if I protect her from her pursuers. I accept.

When she appears on the map, I notice she not only has 2 scars on her legs that reduce her running speed, but she's also stark naked.

I'm not sure whether she'll get caught by the raiders before she succumbs to hypothermia, but I decide to give her a shot and move to intercept the raiders before they catch up with her.

She's being pursued by 3 raiders with melee weapons and personal shields (which block most ranged attacks against them). Luckily they're chasing her one by one; I give all 4 of my colonists melee weapons and send them out to swarm the raiders one at a time. I take two of them down with minor wounds on my side; the last one quickly flees as I strip off their clothes and take an unconscious raider prisoner.

By the time summer rolls around and planting season has begun (although it was warm enough to start planting crops a few days beforehand), I've set up a nice cozy with some minimalist bedrooms. A traveling merchant stopped by and bought the (expensive) silver mace I looted off the raiders, giving me plenty of silver for future purchases, and I've tailored/looted enough clothes to keep my colonists relatively warm.

Now that summer's rolled around, I have a limited amount of time to grow enough food for an entire year and excavate a freezer large enough to store it all... and my colonists have some of the lowest Growing skills possible.

Next Summer: Growing Pains

Today I arrived home to learn everything I had enjoyed in Orcs Must Die! Unchained (currently in open beta) had been ripped out and tossed aside: the Siege mode (a weird hybrid of tower/trap defense and MOBA) has been removed to focus solely on the cooperative Survival mode. The official blog post states it's because Siege mode "isn’t building a healthy long-term community around itself". I've invested over 300 hours in OMDU myself, so I definitely have a stake in what's happening... and a rather strong opinion about why it happened. But let's start with how we ended up here:

The History

The original Orcs Must Die! is a third-person over-the-shoulder "tower defense" game... although "trap defense" would be a more fitting term. Waves of orcs and other monsters streamed in from various doors and tried to enter a magical rift in the center of the map; it was your job to set up traps to slice, skewer, and incinerate them before they could reach it, picking off any survivors with your trusty rapid-fire crossbow. It stood out from its competition by having a cartoonish style and pacing that wouldn't look out-of-place next to a Warner Bros. cartoon; a protagonist clearly based off Bruce Campbell didn't hurt, either). I played it when it came out, beat it, and enjoyed it; it wasn't one of my favorite games of the year, but I considered it $15 well-spent.

Orcs Must Die! 2 was released about a year after the original and was very similar to the first one, with the big addition being a 2nd protagonist and 2-player cooperative play. I also played it, but without any interest in the cooperative play, I dropped it after several hours of gametime and never finished it.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained has subsequently been in development (and closed alpha/beta) for several years since OMD2 was released; it was finally released on Steam as a free-to-play open beta this spring. That's when I got back into it; I still had fond memories of the original OMD and wanted to see what they did with the competitive mode, which I had heard was a MOBA...

Siege Mode

OMDU Siege mode was, frankly, the weirdest MOBAlike game mode I've ever played. It had enough fundamental differences that, when the developers later told us "it initially wasn't a MOBA, it just... kind of evolved into that", I believed them. For instance, instead of minions crashing into minions on each lane, it's minions against a variety of killboxes and traps you set up. Each lane is distinctly Offense (your minions) or Defense (their minions), with players primarily focusing on a single role/lane instead of constantly swapping between defense and offense. As the game progressed and both sides earned Minion Experience, the waves grew stronger and you needed larger (and deadlier) killboxes to keep them from reaching your rift. If you were on defense, your goal wasn't winning your lane so much as "losing it slower than them", which led to several nail-biting games where you were trying to hold off their attackers long enough for yours to make the final push into their rift.

There were also no items to buy in-match; you chose a loadout of traps & minions before you started the match and you used the coin you earned in-match to buy and place them. Rather than buying a half-dozen items for stat upgrades, you placed a few dozen traps for everyone to see. Defense was not just a finely-tuned killing machine, it was an artistic statement where players could put their own spin on the killbox. (I personally preferred a No-Barricade All-Fire Traps loadout that was surprisingly effective despite ignoring the general consensus that every good killbox needed Barricades.)

It had a slew of problems, of course (open beta, after all), but it did things differently enough I sunk a few hundred hours into it regardless and followed its development fervently.

The Problems

The biggest problem was it was hard to understand. Siege mode looked like a MOBA, but it played so differently novices were tripped up by the mechanics. Players on offense didn't realize they had to escort their minions to protect them from the enemy's traps and would instead default to the gameplay they expected from a trap defense game, namely setting traps to defend. Unfortunately, this tended to interfere with the actual defenders' killboxes; between the limpwristed offensive push and the crippled defenses, the enemy team had an easy time breaking through and winning.

This wouldn't be a problem if the community was larger, but with only a few dozen playing Siege at most times, newbies were regularly paired with (and against) top-ranking OMDU players. It only got worse when premade groups were put into the same queue as non-premade groups; by creating a 5-man premade (enough to fill up an entire team), veterans could shunt all of the solo queue and newbie players onto the opposite team, pretty much guaranteeing a steamroll victory. The steamrolled newbies would quit Siege mode never to play again, and it got so bad a lot of solo queue veterans like myself ended up either joining a premade ourselves or just not playing whenever one of the full-man premades was online.

The veterans didn't help matters much, either. There was no bug, quirk, or broken hero they wouldn't exploit for all it was worth, even if it completely broke the game, and the devs took months to patch the exploits and imbalances (way too long for a competitive online game). Afterwards, several of those veterans took to the forums gloating about how successful their premades were, or how many newbies they chewed up and spat out. The community divided itself into players to get more newbies in and players trying to exploit said newbies, and in the process got so toxic I nearly quit participating entirely.

So my theory? The game probably could've recovered from the low player base and steep learning curve, but the game's own community strangled it and the devs didn't move fast enough to stop it. More testimony for the theory an online game's greatest threat is its own players.

RimWorld currently has several issues that make it feel like a poor man's sci-fi Dwarf Fortress. Gaining new colonists is rare, it's easy to lose them, and limited growing seasons make it very hard to do anything other than survive by the skin of your teeth for several seasons. Still, it's in v.14 Alpha, so I'm hoping it'll improve by leaps & bounds over the next year or so.

Hitman is a game I can enjoy even at 6 FPS, eschewing combat & shooting completely in favor of sneaky bastardry. There's nothing quite like it on the market; I don't know what to add to it that Brad & Dan haven't already.

Helldivers is the full realization of Magicka's friendly-fire co-op play. Your need to unload constant firepower is balanced by the risk of slaughtering your teammates in the process, the enemies are different (and difficult) enough to force you to use different tactics, and the tacked-on satire fits perfectly for the slaughter on both sides.

Starbound has a lot of potential gameplay, yes, but a lot of it feels... the same. Towns feel similar (even those of different species), combat feels the same no matter what you're fighting, and planets of the same biome feel eerily similar, down to the same creatures on each. While it might have more things to do than No Man's Sky, I think it missed the mark on the exploration aspect.

Stellaris is more Master of Orion than Crusader Kings 2, which is a same because there's already plenty of games like Master of Orion on the market. The problem is Master of Orion-style games demand you conquer nearly the whole galaxy, which contradicts the notion that the galaxy is huge and makes for a boring endgame that inevitably ends with all-out wars and rivals getting eliminated one-by-one. Crusader Kings 2, by contrast, considered successfully running a small kingdom just as much of a victory. Stellaris is not well-suited (nor well-balanced) for games where you only try to survive controlling 10% of the galaxy, and that kills a lot of my enthusiasm about the game.

Punch Club is repetitive and lasts about 50% longer than your interest in playing the game. I should've just stuck with the Quick Look instead of buying the game proper; it really doesn't add much.

Factorio is a mind-boggling puzzle of how to fit increasingly larger & more intricate production lines onto whatever limited amount of land you cordoned off as "your base". (Hint: it's never enough.) I usually lose steam in a game around the time I start incorporating oil production and drone deliveries into the mix. The default settings seem too easy, and I've recently begun setting the Starting Area size to Very Small for a challenge. My biggest issue with it right now, though, is that 90% of your factory's production is geared towards different varieties of Research Beakers. Almost everything else feels like it can be manually crafted quickly enough to make automated production a moot point. However, it's also currently in alpha, too, so I hope it will improve in the future.

Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen feels like a slower version of Monster Hunter. I've put it on hold indefinitely to play Monster Hunter.

Orcs Must Die! Unchained was pretty interesting in the open beta before players started exploiting the game imbalance. It's technically related to MOBAs, but there are fixed Defend and Attack lanes (instead of every lane being Attack/Defend) and most of your defenses consist of placed traps, making it a MOBA with numerous building elements. I enjoyed its cartoony nature and fast-paced action, but lost interest as the community dwindled and I kept getting matched up against the same people over and over who often exploited crowd-control spells because Beta. I suppose I'll return to it eventually to see if it's improved, but for now I think I've had my feel. (Granted, that was after 300+ hours of play.)

It's been months since I've played Path of Exile; when I did, I randomly chose to play the Templar class, the only character in a group of ruffians and criminals who actually acts like a good soul. While every other PC is mainly interested in self-preservation, glory, or revenge, the Templar sees being branded a heretic and exiled by his own Church as "the will of God" and believes he is meant to bring light to the dark land of Wraeclast. And throughout the game, he manages to do just that, not only killing several ancient evils but the corrupt heads of his Church trying to exploit their power and even, it is implied, the dark god who is responsible for the world's creation. This is a common enough plot within video games, but Path of Exile puts a twist on it:

There is no evidence his God actually exists.

There is no evidence of a good God or even holy angels throughout the game to balance the darkness and demons it constantly throws at you. Even the Templar's powers come from the discarded gems created by the dark god. The game hammers this home by constantly having characters remark the Templar is a madman, crusading into deadly nightmares at the behest of a nonexistent God. But as he succeeds at dispelling those nightmares of flesh and returning triumphantly, those same characters remark the Templar's "madness" may be a blessing in disguise. At the end of the game, once you've defeated the final boss and basically vanquished an eldritch abomination from the world, one dialogue in particular stands out:

"You're going to tell me that you didn't kill the Beast, that it was simply your God acting through you. Please don't say it. I fear I might be ill upon your self-righteous toes. No, Templar. You did this. The oh-so-ordinary man that is you. That's where Malachai had it wrong, you see. He considered greatness to be a birthright, the possession of but a gifted few. You, Templar, have but one gift: Belief. You believed that God chose you to free Wraeclast from its nightmare and you've done everything in your power to prove that belief to be true. It's a lie, of course, but what a beautiful and powerful deceit! Please, continue to lie to yourself, Templar. It brings out the best in you."

While much has been written in games of the dangers of blind faith, this is one of the few examples of firm belief being a force for good. A world where faith in a nonexistent god can bring about the destruction of ancient evils and make a better world in the process. It reminds me of another story that expounds upon humanity's need for faith and belief in something: Terry Pratchett's The Hogfather. It is a parody of Christmas stories in which the incarnation of Death treats the sudden mass disbelief in the equivalent of Santa Claus as a threat to humanity's very existence. At the very end, he explains why:

Death: Yes. As practice. You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.

Susan: So we can believe the big ones?

Death: Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.

Susan: They're not the same at all!

Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet- And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

...

Susan: You make us sound mad.

Death: No. You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?

What initially struck me as overpowered abilities got me thinking about how Overwatch encourages you to spread out, flank, and not cluster together.

Several of Overwatch's ultimate abilities can kill every enemy in a large radius: Mei's Blizzard, Junkrat's RIP-Tire, and Hanzo's Dragonstrike can slaughter everyone clustered around a payload in a matter of seconds. At first, I thought these abilities were overpowered. Then I realized you reach maximum Payload Speed / Capture Rate with just 3 out of 6 people on a point. Blizzard made their AoE ultimates powerful on purpose to encourage players to spread out & flank. They serve a similar role to Unreal Tournament's Redeemer: a limited-use weapon that occasionally reminds players they shouldn't group so close together.

At first, you just spread out, staying a distance away from the control point so you won't get caught in any AoE Ultimates (and thus have a chance to retaliate), but once you start looking for alternate routes, you find them. Nearly every map in Overwatch is linear, but nearly every part of that path has 3-4 different routes you can take: a wide-open central route flanked by up to 2 side routes that offer height advantages, interior cover, or both. A long underground tunnel can let you flank their Bastion turret and kill it before it realizes you're there. A catwalk gives some characters a much-needed height advantage. I naturally began covering the payload from the side, clearing enemies out of the side tunnels and using my location to punish foes who ran towards us to ult. I wouldn't have begun doing this if Overwatch didn't discourage clustering together so much.

I get twitchy when I'm idle for too long, so I try to have a game to play during the long livestreams. With a whopping 30+ hours of livestreaming to get through this week, I went through several games, mainly Age of Wonders 3 and Factorio.

Age of Wonders 3 is a fantasy strategy game in the vein of Heroes of Might & Magic: you send out heroes leading armies to loot ruins, found new cities, and eventually conquer your opponents. The biggest difference is that where Heroes of M&M only limited the types of units in your army, not the quantity (making the best strategy cramming thousands of units into a single army), Age of Wonders limits each army to just 6 troops. Between that, letting multiple armies participate in a battle (provided there's enough space on the map for them to be adjacent), and flanking providing some hefty bonuses on the battlefield, I certainly had to think more about the fights, which I enjoyed. My first mission in the Introductory campaign went well.

The second one... not so much.

The second map of the introductory campaign throws you right into the deep end with two enemy factions simultaneously declaring war on you. Both of them start with moderately-upgraded cities and a decent army defending each one; you start with 1 fledgling city. Most of that mission was a desperate attempt to build up enough units to start capturing enemy cities and even the odds, but both times I attempted it, I met the same end: one of the enemies attacked my cities with several armies of endgame units and wiped out one of the heroes I had to keep alive, instantly failing the mission. (Funnily enough, your leader respawns if he's killed, which means you can risk him, but not his subordinates.) The endgame units seem overwhelmingly powerful compared to the gradual power curve of the Tier 1/2 units you use for most of the game, so it feels like whoever gets them first wins, but the player is struggling to build them in time compared to the enemy's already-established power base. (The enemy AI is also cunning enough it doesn't need the headstart to put up a fight.) Trying to outmaneuver them is also difficult: cities' vision radius is much lower than the distance armies can travel in a turn, which means you can end a turn all-clear and have 3 armies attacking a city before your next turn. Units also can't flee a battle they're defending against, so any heroes caught off-guard are screwed. (The speed these armies can take out a fortified, defended city really makes me appreciate how Endless Legend handled sieges: you had to spend turns sieging it to whittle down the defenders' bonus HP, giving the defenders time to send reinforcements.)

After two 12-hour attempts to finish the 2nd map of the introductory campaign, I gave up. The difficulty curve was too steep, and the gamelength too long, to spend another dozen hours realizing I lost in the first six. So I played Factorio instead.

I got into Factorio after the GBEast coverage, and while I put a few dozen hours into it, the passive gameplay eventually grew boring. The main goal of every game is to produce as much Science as possible, which is researched from 3 different items. 90% of your factory's production goes into those 3 Research items all the time; it makes for very little variety in a factory's products. Between that and the ease of fighting off most attacks, most regular sessions of Factorio bored me quickly. So this time, I decided to try starting with a Very Small Starting Location.

The result was spread-out resources sandwiched between several small alien lairs that has, so far, made for a tenser early-game. I had to be careful not to build too close to them, or produce too much pollution, until I researched enough Military Tech to build turrets and walls. I'm only 2 hours in and I've had to deal with them destroying buildings and start clearing out the smaller nests to expand, which is quite a difference from previous sessions where I could build for 15 hours without losing buildings or assaulting nests. I'll probably play like this from now on.

(Also, I just realized how weird the way Factorio handles shotgun pellets is: shotguns barely do any damage to swarms of aliens, but rip apart alien hives in no time flat.)