-
Bezdar Weekly #1
As a means to flex my blogging muscles, I started a weekly wrap-up of various things that came to my mind, games I’ve been playing, and random rambling on arbitrary topics. I’ll let the thing flow freely and see if some format will emerge eventually.
-
Why I Love Strategy Games. But Not All Strategy Games.
My dad loved Dune 2, Civilization, and Heroes of Might & Magic, while I preferred point-and-click adventures. It was not enough story for me in strategy games of the time, and I fell in love with the genre only a bit later, when Warcraft 2 found its way to my hard drive—rather, its map editor.…
-
Dawn of War: Not That One.
It’s the second half of the 1990s. Everybody wants to jump on the RTS train, put in motion by the success of Command & Conquer and Warcraft. While the talks about genre oversaturation begin to surface, there’s still a chance: unusual setting, innovative mechanic, or exceptionally wholesome implementation of existing ideas—and you win the ticket…
-
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Souls
It took years for Dark Souls trilogy to finally click with me. I have been enamored with its setting and aesthetic since the very release of Prepare to Die Edition on PC. The port was poor, though, and it scared me away. By the time when modders fixed it, the ‘difficulty discourse’ caught up on…
-
RTS Galore! Episode 4: Spice Must Flow
In this article we’re going to see what happens when RTS games are based on other works of fiction, specifically lengthy books filled with thematic intricacies and ideological complexities. Tough to find a better example for this than Westwood’s Dune series.
-
Mass Alienation and Social Atomization in Bloober Team’s Observer
There are several ways you can summarize the plot of the Bloober Team’s Observer. For example, you can say that this is a game about a futuristic cop, played by Rutger Hauer, who chases after a murderous monster in the cyberpunk dystopian setting. This way, Observer reminds us of Split Second—a 1992 sci-fi action flick—not explicitly smart or insightful…
-
RTS Galore! Episode 3: Mega-Lo-Mania & Populous II
After trying its design philosophy in an entirely atheistic setting, Bullfrog returned to its god-game roots with a sequel to Populous, making the gamification of the ‘holy war’ concept more fun and ideologically safe. A couple of months earlier, another British developer, Sensible Software, also released a game about gods and their bloody conflicts. But Mega-Lo-Mania’s focus was more…
-
RTS Galore! Episode 2: PowerMonger
In the previous episode of RTS Galore! I’ve talked about Populous and its gamification of the conflict between two selfish and cruel deities. In the second episode, I’m going to talk about another game developed by Bullfrog—PowerMonger (1990). This time, we’ll witness the conflict devoid of any divine presence.
-
Neofeud: Pastiche and Critique
Initially, I intended to write a short review of Neofeud and explain how it touched me with its admirable intentions despite several evident flaws in its design. Then I’ve played a bit more and figured that there is something more interesting going on under the covers. Finally, the game’s ending left me with a rather…
-
RTS Galore! Episode 0: Framework
The first episode of my «RTS Galore!» series got some feedback that I wish to address. Commenters on Reddit and Raddle (I’m not registered on the latter and can’t answer directly) pointed out two main problematic aspects in the piece that, if not dealt with, can become systematic in my other writing on the subject.…
Baking Potatoes On the Ashes of Society