write a blog about a game, that is
I recently bought a new game. Buying a new game is a Big Issue for me - because I hate, hate, hate being disappointed by a new game. And I tend to stick close to what I know, for that reason. So generally I buy updates to either the Doom or Quake franchises. I have only two reasons for buying a game at all: 1) it's full of blood, carnage, horror, and graphically realised monstrosities (hence my love for Doom and Quake). And 2): it has some quality that I find completely absorbing, aside from those other elements.
More accurately, the game has to provide an imaginative environment in which I feel able to participate; able to take a theme and spin it our; or provide a 'fleshed out' point of view for the POV. That's not a quality that's easy to convey in a pre-launch ad campaign - and generally it's only there to the degree that the games's makers claim 'immersivity'. 'Immersivity' generally includes but isn't limited to the ability to play in real time with others across the net.
Oh yippee. If I wanted to play with other people I'd go to a bar and shoot pool. I have enough of real people every day: occasionally more than enough. I don't want any dealings with them once I'm home. I want something entirely different to the everyday from a game, something alien to it and, if possible, opposed to it.
And a game needn't, necessarily, be full of blood and corpses for it to possess that quality. Ambrosia Software's Escape Velocity Nova possess far more of it than many of its graphically more sophisticated descendants - as did Nova's even more graphically primitive ancestor, Escape Velocity.
My criterion of a good game, a game that will keep me playing for years, as Doom, Quake and EV has, is that it provide a space which my imagination can colonize, irrespective of the limitations imposed by the game format itself.
Which leads us back to my new game. It's entitled 'Genesis Rising' and is of the same general type as Stardock's own 'Galactic Civilisations'. But it has interesting variations: vampire ships, evil humans (for a change), blood-air (the most valuable resource in the known universe). And it's unspeakably pretty - the ships look they were designed by Geiger. Is it my kind of game? I think it probably is - though it requires a large investment of time to achieve significant results.
Is it the kind of game anyone else might like? I've no idea.