Postage Due (and it's Been an Age, Too): Catching Up (Part II)

What’s that they say about time slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future? Yep, it does that. So anyway, in my last already-ancient post, I covered the games I finished during my Long Silence. Here, then, a couple of words about the ones I didn’t finish. Next time I’ll start catching up to where I am now.

Ongoers:

After Life - Story of a Father

68 minutes playtime

no achievements
Alex Hunter - Lord of the Mind

6 hours playtime

no achievements
Galactic Civilizations I: Ultimate Edition

21 hours playtime

no achievements

After Life - Story of a Father (2016, ABC Challenge, Steamgifts win) is a one-man indie that hasn’t clicked with me so far, which is why it remains unfinished. We play the disembodied soul of an Irish gent returning to a few pastoral locations to awaken his memories of love, life, marriage, disappointment. It’s a floating simulator, if you will, which is fine - I like walking simulators, though I loathe the name, and I’m patient with games that rebuild narratives from fractured pieces. The voice work here put me off, which is a big problem when the voicing is about all that happens in the game. I found it vague and precious. The first lakeside setting was all right, but the second, which had me floating around a nighttime home and yard, was disorienting and hard to control, and I had trouble finding the story bits so I could move on to the next chapter. Probably I should try again.

Alex Hunter - Lord of the Mind (2013) bugged me as well. Maybe I was just in a dark mood over our long winter. I was derailed playing this one by a new computer - I had six hours sunk in it, which felt like too much time to drop and start over, but I didn’t get around to getting all of my saves off the old disk (still need to get on that). At this point I honestly barely remember what it was about, but I know I thought it was long and too fiddly, with mini-games that made me sigh. That really might be the winter talking. Glancing at some screenshots, though, I am remembering that this one goes back and forth and forth and back and maybe it was all a bit much at the time.

Galactic Civilizations I: Ultimate Edition (2003). Time was people would stick with OS/2 as an operating system just because Galactic Civilzations was only available in that limited forum. (They call that time “The Nineties” - GC came out in 1993.) Eventually, to general relief, Stardock remade it for the Windows PC. It is, more or less, a resetting of the Firaxis Civilization games in galactic space - thus the name. As such, it’s automatically awesome, at least in some degree. I was very late to the Galactic Civilizations party, and it’s hard to jump that far back what with fancy new 4x games tempting me from all sides.

I’ve played this game for a few years, lightly, without success but with frustration. There aren’t a lot of solid tutorials around, and my play inevitably progresses something like this:

Begin game, with optimism. Chuckle at the early menus. Well done, Stardock! Lots of character!
Explore and research some stuff. Note that really cool things require ships that I won’t be building for quite some time.
How am I already surrounded?
Sudden and inevitable appearance of the Space Shark, which immediately destroys whatever fledgling ship or station I may have built.
Wreckage and despair.
Turn on HBO.

It’s pretty much like playing Civ and starting next to a hyperactive barbarian spawning point. Except EVERY. DAMN. TIME.

Suddenly, this winter, I got a game without a space shark. I kind of get where it’s all coming from, so I won’t play much more; at least I’ve got a colony or two built. The starter game is all sandbox - which is how I usually play Civ - but given the creaky old mechanics, I’m ready to move on as soon as I’ve seen a little of the middle-game. Altarian Prophecy, the expansion, has a campaign. If it seems fun, I’ll dip in there for a bit someday, before I eventually move on to Galactic Civilizations II.