Category: Genre

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How’d It Age #6 – Pharaoh / Pharaoh: A New Era

More Info from DotEmu

  • Genre: City Builder
  • Platform: PC

So I suppose this is a bit of a look at how an old game aged, and a bit of a look at how a remake both did and didn’t change a game. Pharaoh is a game that I played when it first came out, and is something that I’ve continued to come back to on and off throughout the years since. This is really the first city builder that hooked me. I’d played some SimCity on SNES, SimCity 2000 on PC, and dabbled a bit in Caesar 3, but none of them really got their hooks in me like this one. However, it had some distinct issues that have never really gone away for me as I play through it, and for better or worse a lot of that is maintained in the remake, though it does come with a few nice tweaks.

I think this screenshot is a good place to start, because it really shows the main thing that drew me to playing the remake over the original. They added a global worker pool mechanic that later games like Zeus started playing with. In the original game, your places of work had to be close enough to housing to allow recruiters to find people for the jobs. What this meant at least for me was that instead of designing cities I was haphazardly putting together pods of industries where they needed to be with pods of housing connected to them, but not too close so their desirability wouldn’t be affected. It always felt like a weird restriction to me in terms of how I wanted to go about designing my layouts. The global worker pool fixes that.

Now, I simply need to have enough people in the city to fill the jobs. What this means for me is that I can design my cities with distinct regions. I can have industrial regions, where resources and production buildings are grouped in ways that make sense for efficient creation, storage, and ultimately trade purposes. I can then have housing in areas where it will best allow it to both have access to everything it needs, as well as room for the buildings to expand in later levels to high-level 3×3+ housing. It makes the entire city creation process about designing rather than fitting to specific mechanical needs.

There’s also an additional sub-option that changes the underlying worker availability from being age-based to just being a flat percentage, and this is unfortunately a good option covering up a mechanic that I feel still doesn’t work right. The underlying default worker pool is anyone in your town from age 20-49. This works great as your city grows and workers move in. However, once your housing capacity is reached it becomes a long term problem. There seems to be an underlying mechanical issue where people just do not have children at a replacement rate so your city ends up ultimately aging out. To keep the worker pool up, you end up just constantly chasing a growing population or doing mechanical cheesing, such as deleting an entire neighborhood and rebuilding it to get new immigrants.

At the time of the game’s release it felt like potentially a systemic limitation that was just annoying. However, it feels like something that should just be fixed. The flat percentage worker pool is an alright solution, and honestly gets me my goal of having a city that I can grow to a predictable size. However, I’d have liked a more elegant solution where roughly stable populations also have roughly stable birth rates, and I can plan around that. Yes, I expect that cities with full health care coverage would have more older citizens that age out of the worker pool, but it’s so aggressive in both the original and remake that it feels broken.

That isn’t the only thing that I kind of wished had more elegant solutions. In the original release as well as the remake I end up hitting a point in the middle kingdom period where mechanically the game just becomes something I don’t want out of a city builder. You reach a point where you’ve kind of seen everything so the game becomes less about city building and more about speed running. You start getting into levels that expect you to have a lot of industry up and running extremely early, and if you don’t do things just right you start suffering consequences such as the pharaoh invading your city. It ultimately is not how I want to play a city builder. I find it more interesting to be chasing layouts and efficiency within that rather than hitting mechanical bullet points, and the later levels just feel like you should build in precise locations at precise times and learn that via being defeated. It’s at that point where I tend to fall into just doing mission editor free play on cool spots.

The game also really did nothing to alleviate boredom around the god mechanic. The tl;dr is you need to keep gods happy or suffer negative consequences. If you keep them happy you have positive consequences. Unfortunately, the practical way to do this is to just routinely hold festivals in their honor. It’s so robotic of a mechanic that I’d almost rather neither positive or negative consequences existed, and the whole thing just went away. Long wait periods while monuments are being built just turn into clicking the festival button every couple months and doing that in repetition for long periods of time. It felt unnecessary 25 years ago and feels unnecessary now.

All that being said, I’m glad this remake is out and is still seemingly being worked on. This offers me a hugely easier way to do my semi-regular hop into the game. It gives me modern perks like ultrawide support and cloud saves. It modernizes a few mechanics and gives me hope that they’re going to be willing to do more to create an ultimately better experience. And I suppose what it really gives me is hope that city builders are still a popular enough thing to exist within some niche on Steam. I would say that since this game came out I’ve leaned more heavily into open-ended builders like Timberborn, but I think there’s still a place to explore more history-focused task-oriented builders like Pharaoh, though I do want to see more of a push to fix what wasn’t liked about the originals if the studio behind this does end up going into later titles.

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Game Ramblings #179 – Spider-Man 2

More Info from Insomniac Games

  • Genre: Action
  • Platform: PS5

I’m going to be real here. You could read my ramblings on Spider-Man and know where I landed on this one. My thoughts on swinging through the city are the same. My thoughts on combat – and particularly the power curve – are exactly the same. What I’m going to focus on instead is where a few points of polish really stood out to me as huge improvements to the experience. As an iterative experience, this is a standout example of making tweaks where there’s opportunities while keeping the rest of the game solid.

The first thing that really stands out to me is the web line ability. It looks like they were probably experimenting with this for the original game but I’m glad this made the cut for the sequel. What this does is lets you put a line between two points that can be used for all the normal abilities (grabbing, ledge takedowns, etc). This is a game changer for stealth segments. Rather than being limited to existing ledges and poles, you now make your own platforms. What this ended up doing for me was making any sort of base encounter feel a lot more free form than in the past. Instead of hopping from point to point finding angles that work, I was observing enemy movement patterns and setting up lines above them to do takedowns.

I get where some people may find that this trivializes stealth, and frankly it does make staying in stealth a lot easier than the original game. However, rather than being annoyed by it I found that it fit the power dynamic of the character. What I see as the comic book ideal for Spider-man is someone who uses their powers to trivially take out the hordes of stupid minions while focusing their fighting power on the current big bad, and this fits it perfectly. I could use the web line power to quickly take out dozens of enemies, then swing in to finish off whatever the boss-type thing was for the section. It allowed me to focus my combat capabilities on where I felt combat really continues to shine – in one-on-one combat. This is a game that still has some issues with multi-person combat encounters in terms of just too much going on at once, so having improved stealth was a huge personal boon.

The second piece I want to point out is the wing suit. The original game was one in which traversal around the city was so fun that I just did not want to fast travel. The sequel is absolutely the same, despite the fact that fast travel in the sequel is extraordinarily fast loading wizardry. A lot of why I enjoy the traversal so much is down to the inclusion of the wing suit.

The first game really shone in the tall buildings of Manhattan, but getting towards the water or to the north of the city with smaller buildings was a bit less fun. There was simply less places to grab with webs, so you could hit the ground a lot easier. The wing suit solves so many of those problems. Now if you’re in one of those spots, you turn on the wing suit and glide between vertical drafts or air currents that propel you forward. It keeps your momentum going at all times, and frankly is probably the one thing that allowed them to open up the city to more boroughs. Now that smaller housing areas of queens aren’t a travel headache. Going through Central Park is an easier option. Heading across the East River from downtown Manhattan towards Coney Island is entirely doable. These are all things that only exist in a fun way because of the inclusion of the wing suit and its ability to give you extended fast traversal options without web slinging.

The final thing is that this game continues to be an absolute tech standout on the platform. The video above shows what is clearly Insomniac bringing in the portal tech they made for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart into this title, but it’s just as impressive as ever in its second use. I mentioned not using the fast travel system earlier, but it’s also impressive as hell. You go into the map, hold a button as more of a UX confirmation, and you’re immediately at where you intend to be, including an impressive as hell seamless transition animation from the map view into the world view. This is all backed by a visual option for a full time 60 FPS that I used throughout my play through. It’s a standout AAA experience on the level of things like God of War: Ragnarok or the city visuals in Cyberpunk 2077. It’s just one of those rare games that finally feel next-gen to me, despite the fact that the gameplay is often not that different from the previous game.

This is just a fun, impressive game. It takes a game that I liked, tweaks some things in ways that make sense within the context of the series progressing. It’s an easy game to fall into and just enjoy. It also does something that I hope to see more of – be simple. They pulled away some of the extraneous activities in the open world. They pulled away some extraneous gadgets from the original game. What it all results in is an open-world experience that somehow feels tight and efficient. It’s a mix that really just works.

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Game Ramblings #178 – Super Mario Bros Wonder

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

It’s not that I thought the New Super Mario Bros series were bad, but they were incredibly safe. The platforming was fun and solid, but it wasn’t necessarily anything new and interesting. NSMB and NSMB Wii were clearly outclassed by the two Galaxy games. NSMB2 and NSMBU were clearly outclassed the also safe 3D Land and 3D World. It wasn’t really a bad thing that the series then went on effective hiatus while Mario Maker took over and Odyssey wowed the world. Wonder finally feels like the 2D series’ Odyssey moment.

If I was just going to sit here and talk about how Mario feels to run and jump and whatever, it’s basically NSMB for me again. The core physics still feels a bit slower than I’d prefer, at least to a point. There is a couple noticeable small changes that really help this feel snappier than the older titles, and they both have to do with stopping.

One of my biggest problems with NSMB physics is how slow stopping is. If I’m trying to hit a tight platform it was usually safer to jump when I landed in order to reset using air movement, because if I was to just let go of the stick I would generally fall off. Wonder has drastically faster stopping allowing me to usually just land. It’s a small change but makes the game feel incredibly better in precise spots. Reversing direction is similar. In NSMB reversing from a sprint would slide you for a while, then you’d reverse direction and accelerate normally. Wonder combines the quicker stopping with what I can only describe as a speed boost to make sure that if you’re reversing direction you are quickly reversing direction. It makes things like vertical segments hopping between platforms incredibly better.

However, the thing about Wonder isn’t so much that it ultimately feels all that different, but it embraces fun for the sake of fun. The key around all of that is the Wonder Flower system they’ve setup. What it basically is is a system that changes the level for a short period of time – typically 30 seconds or less. The media I’m posting in this rambling are all examples of that. Sometimes it’s just turning the level into a musical number for the sake of it. Sometimes you have fundamental shifts in the mechanics of the level, like the long Mario above. At some points you’ll take over the bodies of an enemy in segments very reminiscent of Mario Odyssey, such as taking over a Goomba who can’t jump but can hide behind foliage in the background layer. The thing about all of these changes is that they aren’t fundamentally changing the game away from being a platformer, but they’re providing a fun change of pace in a way that is entirely unique to the level. You never really know what you’re going to get into when you activate one of the Wonder Flowers, but what you do know is it’s going to be entertaining.

The other part of all this that is incredibly impressive is how much variety there is in this system, and that extends across the whole game. Besides the core platforming mechanics, most levels have unique mechanics that you might only see two or three times in the entire game. One flower that sticks out in my head is a segment in which you’re thrown into a box sublevel that rotates periodically, forcing you to keep up with the rotation as walls become floors and ceilings. The screenshot above transforms the entire game into a near direct copy of the SNES title Smart Ball and is only used in maybe three levels. There are segments where you’re floating in the sky avoiding lightning and enemies. There’s a spot where Mario literally becomes a walking piece of a platform that can bounce things away. There are a couple sections where you’re platforming around on a flying dragon. There are a couple levels where there is specifically an enemy that will eat things like powerups if you don’t get to them in time.

The list here can go on and on because there’s a ton of variety in the roughly 70 main levels you run across. However, the point I guess is that across that you might be seeing 30 or 40 mechanics that are used two or three times and seem like they were created simply because they thematically fit with the level they belonged in. It’s such a rarity for any game to have mechanics simply for the sake of it enhancing the rest of the surrounding experience. It’s even more rare for there to be such a wide array of low-use mechanics and still have them be both fun and quick to learn on the fly. Mario Wonder manages to pull that off to an amazing level of quality that just isn’t seen by most other studios.

That attention to detail extends to the visuals as well, and that’s hugely important coming off of NSMB. Visually I could only describe those games as being at best sufficient. They were generally overly safe and overly boring. Everything served a functional purpose, but it didn’t really feel alive. Animation was kind of stiff, the backgrounds were pretty static, and overall it felt kind of lazy,

Super Mario Wonder is so much the polar opposite that I can’t believe we didn’t see any of this before. It’s easy to look at Mario’s core animations and be impressed with the level of quality given to him. A lot of this is thanks to them switching from a pure side view to more of a three-quarter view, giving him a ton of facial detail that they use. However, it’s the little things that really caught my attention. There’s fun little moments everywhere, such as Goombas being asleep (with the requisite snot bubble) if they come in from off screen. There’s stuff like enemies emoting panic if they fall off a ledge or if a nearby enemy gets hit by a fire flower. There’s entire scenes like the first video where the entire world is singing and dancing. It all has just a ton of life that was missing from 2D Mario. And that’s all to say nothing of the backgrounds, which are full of color and full of a ton of depth. This feels like a modern gaming experience now, rather than the pretty safe and boring NSMB levels.

I really didn’t think that this game was going to be as good as it turned out. Early trailers gave me some hope that it would be fun, but it’s still surprising to me that this game isn’t just a much better visual treatment of NSMB‘s core gameplay. This feels like a studio that was given an incredible amount of time to deliver something fun, and really took that to heart to give players a game that is just packed to the brim with things serving that core goal.