So, I was playing my old game of colonization on XP, with no sound, when it crashed, and I thought to myself--ahhh, that's why I quit playing it; because it was crashing without reason. Some improvements, I started to think, to Colonization would be (1) making it so it didn't crash (2) getting the sound to work in XP (3) a large number of game related quirks should be fixed.
So I moseyed around and did a few chores, vacuuming, taking out the trash, etc, and thought about angband, and how it was surely a much improved game because of its open-source nature, and how all of the problems of Colonization would be fixed by diligent fans, if only they made the colonization game open source. Surely this game has a following of really smart people that could make it better.
Eventually, I remembered that last time I had played Colonization, I had used a boot disk, which had fixed problem number one, so it didn't crash. (I never did get the sound-card to work right, with the boot disk though, so it didn't help with problem 2). I was just about to reboot my computer, but I decided to see what sort of comments I could find online about the game.
Very shortly thereafter, I found that indeed, someone HAS put out a free open source version of colonization, called FreeCol! I downloaded it, and started playing. At first I was really excited, because the opening movie, and then the ambient sound as I started my game were very impressive. Then all that sound went away, and everything was completely silent, which was kind of a let-down. I was further disappointed by the movement of the units--instead of sliding across, they teleport from one square to the next. Then, I could find no way to adjust the difficulty setting, and then every time I hit the Enter key to open up the city screen to load up a ship, it ended my turn!
Okay, so my first few minutes weren't so great, but then little improvements started becoming apparent. (1) Instead of having to write down on a piece of paper what each individual Indian village was trading, and what kind of specialty profession it trained, all of this was easily accessible by right-clicking on the Indian village. This is a huge improvement. (2) The go-to functionality, and path-finding has been greatly improved, showing not only the path the unit will take, but the number of turns to get there. (3) Goods can be set to report when they are LOW, instead of just when they are OUT; likewise, I think it will report when your stores are ALMOST full. (4) Whereas in colonization, after a building is completed, you have to go make a decision about what will be built next, in FreeCol, you may set up a building queue, and all at once state the next several buildings will be. (5) A minor but nice improvement is that when Indians tell you tales of nearby lands, they go ahead and tell you when those lands are adjacent to an ocean. Thereby, you don't send a scout all the way over to investigate one patch of unmapped territory, only to find that the whole thing is an inland lake.
Later, I went back to my colonization game from earlier that day and I was really surprised at how blocky the graphics seemed. The graphics, while perhaps not the ideal color palette, are much more detailed; being for a modern monitor, rather than the old 256 color VGA.
Finally, the game has a nice online community set up, and the program is being actively upgraded by its open-source coders. I hope to soon see additional tilesets, music and sound effects incorporated. There will probably also be better computer AI, but I'm not sure I'm an experienced enough player to notice that sort of thing. Otherwise, probably not too much because they are trying to stay true in most gameplay details to the original game, but they are also apparently working on a FreeCol II, which will not have the limitation of staying true to the original.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
I just keep playing Angband
Well, today I'm not making my trip to Astoria for my games with Bo and Kevin, due to a weather advisory.
Angband
So this morning I've been playing this video game, Angband. A really primitive ASCII graphics adventure game, but one with an enormous amount of effort put into the design. This is because it was published Open Source, so something like dozens of coders have taken part in making improvements, tweaking this and that, making the levels balanced, etc.
The default setting is IronMan mode, so if your character dies, it records the high score and erases the file. This can, at times be upsetting. Right now I'm running my highest level character yet, and I'm being very cautious. I am a 28th level mage, and I haven't descended below the 18th floor of the dungeon. When I first started playing with a mage, I found that I died very very quickly. Finally I decided that I would try to have my mage's level around THREE TIMES the floor of the dungeon. I was fifth level before I went to floor 2, and about 8th level before I went to floor 3, and about 11th level before I went to floor 4, etc. Time consuming, but I *survived*.
Obviously I've broken this pattern, to be on floor 18, I'd need to be 53rd level. Instead, I am going down another floor whenever I feel like the floor I'm on is *easy*.
If this game sounds fun to you, you can read more about it and download it here.
Game Night at the Library
Last night from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, as planned, I went to the Western Illinois University Library and packed up my duffel bag with a good number of my newer games. I had printed up 10 flyers about the Open Gaming in Astoria on Feb. 20, and I laid them on the table next to the guest list.
When I arrived, I saw many of the regulars there. Q had some wargame partially set up, but he was ready to go play the LAN game. He gave me a few pointers on painting miniatures, and asked me if I'd brought Settlers of Catan. (No, but I will next time!)
In the computer room of the library, they were playing a Local Area Network (LAN) game with ALL of the computers in the lab. Sorry, I forgot what the LAN game they were playing is called--but everybody plays a WWII soldier and picks a gun, and then they run around trying to shoot each other and play war-games like capture-the-flag, or sabotage the enemy guns, etc.
They also had two Nintendo Wii's hooked up together and were playing some kind of four-player Wii game on a pair of big-screen projection TV's. And, they had Rock Band playing in another corner, with all the instruments, and a crooning soloist. Finally a big table full of games from the library, all laid out. Monopoly, Apples to Apples, Pachisi, Clue, Chess--(Not just Chess, but Pirate's of the Caribbean Chess!)
I saw somebody set up a game of Puerto Rico. I think of Puerto Rico as a very short game, but he was explaining it to four new players, and I remembered, it is a much longer game if nobody knows what they are doing.
I played a game of chess, then, with a person that looked as though he spent a great deal of time mastering the game. I decided to play quickly, not worrying too much about winning, and he didn't seem interested in playing another game against me--probably because it was such a complete lack of a challenge. So then I sat down to Kibbitz the Puerto Rico game, as the owner was explaining the rules, and wander around seeing what everyone was playing.
Finally someone invited me to start a game of Pachisi with them; I guess it's the predecessor to Parcheesi. Similar to Sorry in that if you land on your opponents' pieces you send them back to the beginning. The rules were all printed on the inside of the box top, but on the once-over, we missed a few, and we were learning rules as we went. Finally we had them all down, and realized, the game was awfully boring. This gave me the opportunity to finally introduce one of the games I had brought (Carcassone) which it was generally agreed, was a much funner game.
When we finished Carcassone, a couple of guys were asking about the games that I had brought, and I had the opportunity to tell them about the Open Gaming in Astoria, on Feb. 20. One of them pulled the flyer out of his pocket about the Open Gaming... so it seems likely that at least one of the two will try to make it.
I had a really good time at the Game Night, and I look forward to it again next month.
Last Friday
When I went to Astoria last Friday, Bo never showed up, so Kevin and I spent the time having a look at a couple of computer games. Some time ago, I had given Kevin a copy of Colonization. But he had tried to play it and couldn't really get anywhere. So we spent about an hour or two with me just giving him advice about how to take each turn and how to get all of the fiddly little functions to work. It was so long ago that I learned to play it, that I can't even remember what I did to learn all of it. Kevin also showed me Might and Magic VI. How to make up the characters, and how to fight goblins. It looked fun. And finally we did play one game of Race For the Galaxy. I commented that we had no idea what each other had done for the entire game, and suggested that maybe we should get out a big shared piece of paper and draw a picture of the galaxy as we explored and developed it. Not sure if that would be an improvement or not--but just an idea.
Angband
So this morning I've been playing this video game, Angband. A really primitive ASCII graphics adventure game, but one with an enormous amount of effort put into the design. This is because it was published Open Source, so something like dozens of coders have taken part in making improvements, tweaking this and that, making the levels balanced, etc.
The default setting is IronMan mode, so if your character dies, it records the high score and erases the file. This can, at times be upsetting. Right now I'm running my highest level character yet, and I'm being very cautious. I am a 28th level mage, and I haven't descended below the 18th floor of the dungeon. When I first started playing with a mage, I found that I died very very quickly. Finally I decided that I would try to have my mage's level around THREE TIMES the floor of the dungeon. I was fifth level before I went to floor 2, and about 8th level before I went to floor 3, and about 11th level before I went to floor 4, etc. Time consuming, but I *survived*.
Obviously I've broken this pattern, to be on floor 18, I'd need to be 53rd level. Instead, I am going down another floor whenever I feel like the floor I'm on is *easy*.
If this game sounds fun to you, you can read more about it and download it here.
Game Night at the Library
Last night from 7:00 to 10:00 PM, as planned, I went to the Western Illinois University Library and packed up my duffel bag with a good number of my newer games. I had printed up 10 flyers about the Open Gaming in Astoria on Feb. 20, and I laid them on the table next to the guest list.
When I arrived, I saw many of the regulars there. Q had some wargame partially set up, but he was ready to go play the LAN game. He gave me a few pointers on painting miniatures, and asked me if I'd brought Settlers of Catan. (No, but I will next time!)
In the computer room of the library, they were playing a Local Area Network (LAN) game with ALL of the computers in the lab. Sorry, I forgot what the LAN game they were playing is called--but everybody plays a WWII soldier and picks a gun, and then they run around trying to shoot each other and play war-games like capture-the-flag, or sabotage the enemy guns, etc.
They also had two Nintendo Wii's hooked up together and were playing some kind of four-player Wii game on a pair of big-screen projection TV's. And, they had Rock Band playing in another corner, with all the instruments, and a crooning soloist. Finally a big table full of games from the library, all laid out. Monopoly, Apples to Apples, Pachisi, Clue, Chess--(Not just Chess, but Pirate's of the Caribbean Chess!)
I saw somebody set up a game of Puerto Rico. I think of Puerto Rico as a very short game, but he was explaining it to four new players, and I remembered, it is a much longer game if nobody knows what they are doing.
I played a game of chess, then, with a person that looked as though he spent a great deal of time mastering the game. I decided to play quickly, not worrying too much about winning, and he didn't seem interested in playing another game against me--probably because it was such a complete lack of a challenge. So then I sat down to Kibbitz the Puerto Rico game, as the owner was explaining the rules, and wander around seeing what everyone was playing.
Finally someone invited me to start a game of Pachisi with them; I guess it's the predecessor to Parcheesi. Similar to Sorry in that if you land on your opponents' pieces you send them back to the beginning. The rules were all printed on the inside of the box top, but on the once-over, we missed a few, and we were learning rules as we went. Finally we had them all down, and realized, the game was awfully boring. This gave me the opportunity to finally introduce one of the games I had brought (Carcassone) which it was generally agreed, was a much funner game.
When we finished Carcassone, a couple of guys were asking about the games that I had brought, and I had the opportunity to tell them about the Open Gaming in Astoria, on Feb. 20. One of them pulled the flyer out of his pocket about the Open Gaming... so it seems likely that at least one of the two will try to make it.
I had a really good time at the Game Night, and I look forward to it again next month.
Last Friday
When I went to Astoria last Friday, Bo never showed up, so Kevin and I spent the time having a look at a couple of computer games. Some time ago, I had given Kevin a copy of Colonization. But he had tried to play it and couldn't really get anywhere. So we spent about an hour or two with me just giving him advice about how to take each turn and how to get all of the fiddly little functions to work. It was so long ago that I learned to play it, that I can't even remember what I did to learn all of it. Kevin also showed me Might and Magic VI. How to make up the characters, and how to fight goblins. It looked fun. And finally we did play one game of Race For the Galaxy. I commented that we had no idea what each other had done for the entire game, and suggested that maybe we should get out a big shared piece of paper and draw a picture of the galaxy as we explored and developed it. Not sure if that would be an improvement or not--but just an idea.
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