Blog Archives
Space-Cast! #48. Compiling
Computers! They’re always doing pesky things like falling in love. For today’s episode, we’re joined by Michael Yang to discuss Compile, his hit lane-battler that sees two rival programs compete to expand their nascent sentience. Along the way we discuss the game’s inception during the pandemic, the joys of nailing that first pitch, and the heartbreak of having your publisher dissolved by venture capital.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
There Can Only Be 0001
My favorite thing about artificial intelligence is that it’s always eating itself. I’m serious — called model autophagy disorder, it’s what happens when AIs gobble up what other AIs have produced, resulting in an incomprehensible grayscale. Enjoy the buffet, robots!
Swap out the plagiarism engines for actual artificial intelligence and that’s the basis of Compile, Michael Yang’s lane battler and derivation of Jon Perry’s exemplar of the genre, Air, Land, & Sea. Two general intelligences are waking up. Because there can only be one, Highlander style, they have immediately set to the task of compiling their protocols and deleting the other out of existence. Nice. Now if only ChatGPT and Midjourney would hurry up with that.
Island in the Sun
Spirit Island. What a game. R. Eric Reuss’s masterpiece has been around long enough that it’s become a staple of the discourse, a counterpoint to all those colonial settings that dominate game store shelves. Seven years ago I called it the anti-Catan. It’s still that and more besides. Nowadays I think of it less as a subaltern revenge fantasy (although it qualifies) or a deified avatar of conservationism (it’s that too) and more as a lament. If only there were gods, it cries. Even if they were gods that didn’t think much of us and might trample over us in their enthusiasm to preserve their creation, there would be comfort in knowing that some power, any power, cared enough about the trees and the beaches to keep them around a little longer.
Reuss’s latest iteration of the game, Horizons of Spirit Island, is a downscaled version that swaps plastic for cardboard and lowers both the player count and the complexity. It’s Spirit Island for book stores and Target, in other words. Even in a reduced format, it’s fantastic.
Fate of the Public Domain Monsters
When it comes to board game settings, I’m about as energized by the appearance of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu as by anything featuring zombies — as in, yeah, they’re overdone, but at least they’re easy to design around. Just as zombies provide baked-in behavior (walk and bite, walk and bite), the presence of Cthulhu & Co. means you know what you’re getting yourself into. Hooded cultists, the coastal hamlets of New England, encroaching madness, and the Arkham that isn’t associated with Batman. It’s thematic shorthand for “watch your health and sanity meters.”
It might be possible to say that Fate of the Elder Gods does the setting a service by letting you don the robes of the cultists themselves as you strive to summon your chosen mind-flaying monster, but it’s hardly the first to do so. Instead, we’ll have to settle for celebrating the fact that it’s a surprisingly good screw-your-buddies affair.
The Anti-Catan
At first blush, Spirit Island looks achingly familiar. A tropical island lush with multiple colorful regions, ranging across jungles and mountains and wetlands and deserts. Why, that’s nearly as many as in The Settlers of Catan! What’s more, here are some lily-white explorers, a few towns, even the occasional city. Every so often a crude grass hut interrupts the landscape. The only things missing are some roads and sheep cards. Throw in an economic engine and some bleating about chivalry and, baby, you’ve got a Euro going.
That’s where Spirit Island turns a hard left. Turns out you aren’t the settlers at all. Rather, you’re the indigenous spirits trying to shake off their white-man burden before you can say “smallpox.” Whether that means scaring them silly or burning all those cities to the ground, whatever gets the job done.
But that’s the window dressing. Spirit Island is more than some mildly socially-aware theming. It’s also el banana grande.
Lazer Pooperz
Now that Stranger Things and Ready Player One are all the rage, it seems the ’80s are finally having their heyday. Take Lazer Ryderz, for example. Here’s a game that’s basically the light cycles from Tron.
That’s it. Were you expecting me to say more about it?
Choo Choo Island
Bad little boys are laid on the tracks,
— lashed in place with rusted old chains —
locomotives splitting clean as an axe,
when sent by grandma to the isle of trains.
That’s what old gran used to sing to me as a young child. Ever since, I’ve had a peculiar paranoia of islands packed with trains. Who put these evil trains on an island? Why are they so mean to lost children? Were these the little engines that couldn’t? I used to stay up nights pondering the answers to these questions. So when the card game version of Isle of Trains fell into my hands, it was a good four months before I got up the courage to play it. Turns out, it’s a perfectly pleasant hand-management game. Huh!
Sentinel Comics #135: Hero… to Zero!
Absolute Zero is decimated by Baron Blade’s first attack.
LAST TIME (SC #134) (you should read this before continuing), Absolute Zero of the Freedom Five was joined by the solar-powered Ra and the mysterious Haka to find and destroy Baron Blade’s Terralunar Impulsion Beam. The good Baron had the decency to establish his base camp amidst the ruins of Atlantis, off the coast of Madagascar, which made for pretty easy pickings for our unlikely squad of heroes. Unfortunately, the moment the Beam was deactivated (and the world saved, incidentally), Baron Blade himself showed up with one heck of a grudge. Already weakened by their attack on the Baron’s camp, our heroes sure are in dire straits, in…
Sentinel Comics #135: Hero… to Zero!
Sentinel Comics #134: The Blade of Atlantis
The Sentinels continue their fight against the enemies of the Multiverse!
LAST TIME (SC #133) Legacy had led the Freedom Five to finally uncover Baron Blade’s plot to use lost Atlantean technology to power his Terralunar Impulsion Beam. Unfortunately, this left four of the Freedom Five halfway around the world and unable to make it to Atlantis before the dastardly beam’s activation (loyal readers will recall that Tachyon’s super-speed had been temporarily lost along with her memories back in SC #124). With Visionary and the Inhuman Tempest lost in space and time thanks to Grand Warlord Voss (SC #130), and with Fanatic trapped in an alternate reality of Omnitron’s creation (SC #125), the task has fallen to Absolute Zero to lead a team of unlikely allies to save the world in…
Sentinel Comics #134: The Blade of Atlantis!
SPACE-BIFF! 