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Democracy 3 Review

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Everybody Wants to Rule the World, according to a well-known song from a band hailing from my home town. Well now you can experience ruling a small part of it, at least, with Democracy 3.

The new game screen gives you a choice of western nations to choose from, but it’s deceptive: your pick has very little impact on the game. Curiously for a game with this title, the actual different models of democracy like first past the post and proportional representation aren’t modeled at all. Rather, this is a game about the act of governance itself, of raising and spending revenue for the good (or otherwise) of your citizens.

Naturally, a realistic simulation of such a thing would be impossible, and even coming close would require a gargantuan quantity of inter-relating factors to influence and track. This is what Democracy does, and it could easy have been totally overwhelming were it not for a lot of clever interface design.

Most of the game takes place on a screen of circles, each with a colour and an icon describing what it is: blue for statistics (like GDP), red for serious problems (like an asthma epidemic) but mostly white for policies that you put in place (like maternity leave). However over one and arrows will magically appear showing what other things influence it, positively or negatively and how strongly.

It is overwhelming at first, but it very quickly becomes second nature to hover over a problem spot, pick out the most important related policies and tweak them to your liking.

Of course you’re not limited to simply changing spending levels for things already on the mind-map, you can add your own too from an impressive palette of policy from the mundane, like a mansion tax, to the blue-sky such as a new space program. The selection is expanded considerably by a new DLC pack called Social Engineering, which gives you a whole new raft of ideas to play with.

For those masochists who want to engage with the hard numbers instead of this super-whizzy graphical interface then there’s a staggering array of bar charts, pie graphs, numeric breakdowns and the like to keep you happy. You can even delve into the murky world of political focus groups and voting intentions if you want, although most of us can make do with the vague voting intention percentage you get each turn.

Even with the benefits of such a well designed overlay, this remains a colossal exercise in number crunching and could quite easily have been an awful, boring snoozefest. Thankfully, it isn’t.

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It must be understood that, like the SimCity games of yore, this isn’t really a game with a goal. You can aim to bring peace and happiness to your population and get voted in over and over again. But it’s not actually that difficult: build the basis of a strong economy without putting too many noises out of joint and your approval ratings will quickly go through the roof. But happiness is overrated. The appeal of popularity quickly wears thin.

Rather, the draw of the experience is simply to experiment, and this is where the game reveals its depth.

Whatever your political sympathies, Democracy 3 quickly demonstrates how high-flying ideology is rapidly pinned to the earth by the tedious tethers of reality. Raise excessive taxes on the rich and your economy will become hugely noncompetitive, leaving you with a soaring deficit and vicious interest repayments. Slash welfare to the bone and you’ll find crime and civil unrest running rampant, with similarly disastrous economic results.

The fun in the game, for me, was working it as close to the bone as possible, tinkering with the engines of government to deliberately create oddball or extreme mix of policies to see what situations develop in the country and still try and keep things on the rails enough to keep you in office. The game conspired with me in my efforts to create democratically acceptable socialist paradise by throwing curveballs in the shape of various random events like terrorist attacks to deal with. When my policies forced disgruntled capitalists into trying to bomb me out of Downing Street, I knew I was pursuing the right policies.

You see, one of the most striking, and true to life things about the game is that there are things voters care about more than the cost of living. You can succeed in improving life by almost every conceivable statistic and still get voted out because you ignored voters’ ingrained moral and political beliefs. So long as you keep various core demographics happy enough to keep voting for you, you can run things close to the edge and still return a majority at election time.

Democracy 3 might not be a particularly accurate simulation of a modern nation state but it is a fascinating experiment in sandbox gaming, an open world for you to explore shorn of its geography and culture and reduced almost entirely to numbers, yet enthralling for all that.

Wish Fulfilled: A Week with FTL

Saavik: So you’ve never faced that situation? Faced death?
Kirk: I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.
—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn

Is there any sci-fi geek of my generation (anyone born in the 70s) who hasn’t wanted a video game to bring the infamous Kobayahsi Maru scenario to video games? Various games have tried. There have been actual Star Trek games that have tried. None that I’ve played have ever quite captured that spirit of crewing and powering and surviving aboard a starship like FTL: Faster Than Light. This rogue-like in space that stumbled into $200,543 in Kickstarter funding, while petitioning for a mere $10,000, is the game I’ve been looking for ever since I first heard Kirk tell Sulu to lock phasers on Reliant and “await my command.”

It’s been a long wait…

Before I descend to full on hyperbole, let’s dispense with the notion that the game is perfect. It’s not a beauty. It’s limited in scope. What plot there is, is best not looked at too closely (or at all). Because you can’t play a crew past the end-scenario or play with custom ship builds, it doesn’t go quite far enough to offer a lasting experience. It screams for an iOS or Android iteration. And it still needs a certain something, even if I can’t quite put my finger on what that something is.

It’s also the $10 product of a two-man operation – Sunset Games’ Matthew Davis (programming/design) and Justin Ma (art/design). I wouldn’t know these two gents if they walked up to me and signed my belly, but it’s obvious that what started off as a flight of fancy, as a “I bet we can do this” project, has turned into something neither could possibly have anticipated. Given that, it’s understandable that the game doesn’t present like something that was funded at 2,000% of its goal. At the same time, what these two accomplished would be amazing to me if they were funded at $2,000,000. (That, if you were wondering, is the beginning of a chorus line of Hyperbole.)

In FTL you are given a starship and an initial crew that’s usually comprised of three our four people that can come from a variety of races, each of which has the usual array of strengths and weaknesses. All ships –there are something like eight, each with a variant model– have a few core systems: Life Support, cockpit, engine room, medical bay, shield control, etc. There are additional systems found on some ship variants by default but that must be installed on others, like cloaking, transporters (for boarding actions), and drone control. All of these systems have some kind of upgrade potential that increases their performance or adds capability. You assign your crew to these positions as you like, which both increases that system’s effectiveness and, as they gain in experience, that crewman’s ability to man it. For example, manning shields incrementally increases its recharge rate.

The goal is clear: You are part of a crumbling Federation, under siege from oncoming Rebel forces. You have information vital to the Federation’s survival and must safely reach your fleet at Sector 8. Each sector is composed of a number of jump points and you jump from point to point and sector to sector. Every stop along the way has some kind of encounter that ranges from exchanging goods with merchants to being attacked by rebels or pirates to helping the locals fight off a spider infestation. (Why must it always be spiders?) Although survival is possible, the game really isn’t so much about survival as it is about seeing how long you can survive. It’s the Kobayashi Maru. That is the challenge and the fun.

I’ve manned the captain’s chair of no less than a dozen starships and only one has both reached the promised land and then survived the final encounter (at which point the game ends). That one successful foray was played on the game’s Easy mode (there are only two difficulty settings). Most of my other attempts have ended in destruction before so much as reaching Sector 5. But then, in the realm of legendary starship captains, I probably rank alongside Jason Nesmith.

Backwash!

What separates FTL from other attempts to crack this impenetrable genre is balance. It doesn’t overplay its hand or try to take on more than its core design can handle. Its UI is simple enough that you can pick it up and understand how to play within minutes. You don’t need a rulebook filled with turn ratios, consumption curves, and hull thickness specifications. You don’t have to learn how to fly the ship because there is no flight control. You don’t have to line up cross hairs or do anything else remotely twitchy. Really, all you do is issue orders, balance power usage, and upgrade your ship. You are The Captain. The Decider. Trust me when I tell you all that keeps you plenty busy.

Power and scrap, the latter of which functions as currency, are everything in this game. Although there are ship systems you can find or purchase, all upgrades require scrap and power. Upgraded engines that improve your dodge chance and speed the time it takes to activate your ship’s Jump capability require you to feed them more power to take advantage of those benefits. Did you add a new ion cannon? I hope you have the scrap parts needed to both enhance the weapons control’s power capacity and your ship’s ability to feed it the power it craves. What’s taken me a dozen hours of play to learn is that trying to fully power every system at once, or even most of them, is folly. You’ll spend all your scrap just upgrading your ship’s power capacity while not being able to afford the actual upgrades needed to survive the range of scenarios you’ll face, not to mention keep your ship maintained (fuel, missiles, drone parts, and armor are all expendable resources you must replenish).

Survival demands knowing when you need a system and when you don’t. It’s easy to turn off a med-bay when the crew is at full health or risk shutting down life support for a few minutes in the name of activating a second weapon or drone, but that kind of thinking will only get you so far. If a pirate is coming after you with a single fire laser and a pair of hull-breaching missile systems, having upgraded and fully powered shields but only stock engines isn’t going to mean much. No, the laser isn’t getting through, but missiles ignore shields and, if you can’t dodge them, wreck both hull and systems alike. This is the moment where you’ll wish you skipped a bigger battery in favor of engine upgrades to which you could’ve diverted power away from your shields. Of course, next time around you’ll encounter a rebel ship that does its damage by sending over a boarding party . If only you had upgraded to security doors when you had the chance, maybe you could’ve slowed the invaders from taking out your ship’s sensors or life support.

Then there is the pain and delight of managing your crew. Having your Rockman put out a fire in the security room or sending your robotic Engi crew member to repair a damaged system is a no-brainer. What about when you’ve vented the ship to repel boarders and only then does life support, which is all the way on the other side of the ship, take a critical hit? (Ship design and system placement also plays a huge role in how you manage your crew.) Somebody has to hold their breath. And which critical post do you abandon in order to repair it? Can you afford to leave the helm when under missile attack or for your weapons to charge up a few seconds slower? And when your ace pilot is killed trying to aid a sick colony do you put off ship upgrades while you look for a jump point with a general store that might or might not have replacements readily available? And even if they do, you’ve still lost half a game’s worth of experience at the helm. It’s a never-ending string of decisions that you have to make and, very often, you have to make them blindly.

This is where the genius of FTL lies. Jump to jump you have no idea what you’ll encounter and, although there is a counter to every attack, there is no way to outfit your ship to handle everything you might face. One minute you’ll wish you had the ability to power more weapons, the next you’ll wish you had saved enough scrap to afford that transporter that would’ve let you send crew over to take out a ship from the inside that that you can’t even hope to scratch on the outside. One minute you sit smugly in your chair knowing a rival can’t touch you, the next you’re cursing the gods as you frantically send crewmen to extinguish a fire and repair a damaged engine that is your only hope of escape. It’s a game of strategic and tactical choices, but it’s also a game of luck. It’s an addicting combination that never ever plays out the same way twice.

FTL may not quite be everything I’d ever wanted from or hoped for in a starship simulator, but it’s much, much closer than anyone else has ever gotten. Matthew Davis and Justin Ma deserve every accolade they receive for this effort, but mostly I just want them to get to work on a bigger and badder version, be it add-on content or an outright sequel. In the meantime, look for FTL as a digital download from either Steam or GOG.com.

SimCity Returns as…SimCity

No number. Just SimCity for PC.

Of all of the “big name” classic PC franchises, this is one that I never got into. Not even sure why but I was never a SimCity guy. It’s slated to return in 2013 and here’s the PR from EA:

Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ:EA) today announced that SimCity™ is breaking new ground (set for release in) in 2013. SimCity for PC, a brand new entry in the franchise is currently in development at Maxis Emeryville, and was revealed today during Game Changers @ GDC, a symposium that featured inspirational speeches from Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and charity: water CEO and founder Scott Harrison.

“We’d like to thank the millions of fans who have helped make SimCity synonymous with the city-building genre. This is a franchise that means the world to us at Maxis and we’re happy to be bringing it back home where we are reimagining it for an entirely new generation of players,” said Lucy Bradshaw, Senior Vice President of EA’s Maxis Label. “Using our proprietary GlassBox Engine, SimCity for PC will equip players with the tools to play the most sophisticated simulation of its kind. We are dedicated to making sure the experience – no matter the platform – has the fun, flavor and playability that has been intrinsic to the franchise since its birth.”

SimCity, slated for release in calendar year 2013 for PC, is a true rebirth of the franchise that brings the depth of simulation that has been the series hallmark for more than two decades and marries it with next generation accessibility and a robust multiplayer mode, giving players the power to change a world together. Fans can catch their first glimpse of the rebirth of SimCity by viewing the extended trailer at www.SimCity.com .

For more than two decades, the king of city-building simulators has sworn in millions of virtual mayors from around the world With its return in 2013, SimCity will engage an entirely new generation of PC gamers as they take charge of their own customized cities and build a world that co-exists alongside friends. For the first time in SimCity franchise history, players’ decisions will have long-lasting repercussions that will extend beyond their city limits. Together, players will address real global challenges such as climate change, the search for renewable resources and natural disasters. It’s up to the players to decide whether to compete or collaborate to shape the world of tomorrow – for better or for worse.

Powered by the GlassBox Engine, Maxis’ proprietary engine, the simulation comes to life in a way never before possible everything you see in the world we sim – Sims in each city will have jobs or can lose them, buy homes, be prosperous or be an economic drain on the city. SimCity is the city builder in which every choice powers real change that affects the character of your city, the state of your region and fellow players within the entire SimCity world. Original fans and newcomers alike will relish the opportunity to build visually and functionally unique cities that take on the character of their choices. Combining fun, addictive gameplay elements with an interface that encourages anyone to jump in and begin playing, SimCity will usher forth a new era of city-building simulation as players work to change a world together (be available in 2013.)