Sickness update (February 21, 2018)

So I'm still sick, but getting much better.  I also have houseguests at the moment, so that's complicating my schedule just a wee bit, not to mention all the time I've been spending in bed angrily trying to force myself to be well again.

All things considered, though, and barring any complications, we should be back to our regularly scheduled program starting next Monday, February 26.

Thank you for your patience.  Now I'm going back to bed.

I'm sick :(

So yeah,  I appear to have been struck down in my prime with a virulent plague.  There will, therefore, be no post today.  I deeply apologize.

Tell my wife I love her.

Vault of the Obscure Introduction

Hello hello hello!  Yes, I'm aware I totally missed last Friday's post.  That was all my fault, I made some miscalculations regarding when certain things were happening, and it kind of got missed.  Sorry about that.

But that's okay, because I'll be posting last Friday's article right now, in addition to another post tomorrow evening.  For this first part, I'm very happy to finally be formally introducing the Vault of the Obscure!  I've mentioned this new series before, but just in case you're new around here, allow me to bring you up to speed.

The Vault of the Obscure is a mysterious place, located deep within the recesses of the obsessive part of my mind.  The collection housed within, though initially seeming slapdash and haphazard, is rather a feverishly-cultivated gallery of the hidden, the forgotten, and the obscure.  This could mean a random television show you've never heard of, but it's usually a bit more focused than that.  I am the curator, after all, and so this collection is particular to me and my interests.

See, when I get into something, I get way into it.  Let's say, for example, that I one day become interested in (fictional) video game series Dwarfstone.  Well, I'd start playing the game, of course, but I wouldn't stop there.  I'd watch the Dwarfstone animated series, not to mention the awful live action Dwarfstone movie from the '80s.  I'd even track down a copy of the brilliant but short-lived '90s comic book adaptation, the one that managed to perfectly capture everything great about the video games in one self-contained, twelve-issue epic.

And maybe it wouldn't even stop there.  I mean, we all remember the Dwarfstone toys, right?  Well, I'd read about those and lament the fact that I got rid of the ones I had as a kid, since they're ridiculously expensive now. Oh well.

Wait, what?  There was a Dwarfstone soundtrack?  And a tabletop roleplaying game?  And a cereal???

Now, Dwarfstone may not technically be a real thing, but it offers up a perfect example of what I want to highlight.  Here we have a long-running franchise that started as a series of pretty good video games, that eventually branched its way out into every kind of media you can think of.  And yet, with the passage of time, and maybe a reboot of the series here and there, these things often get left behind, and become little more than faded memories.

The problem is, a lot of times these things don't deserve to be forgotten.  And that's exactly why I created the Vault of the Obscure.  I've taken it upon myself to, in some small way, catalog the flotsam and jetsam of pop culture in the way I know best: by writing about it.  It won't always be a spin-off from a popular franchise, there's no real overarching plan, no road map to follow.  It'll just be me, as the Keeper of the Vault, bringing a new curiosity to your attention every week, more or less.

Vault of the Obscure won't be replacing the things I usually post, such as Confirmed Kills or Worth Your Time.  Instead, it will allow me to have a steadier stream of content, since those two things are highly situational and fairly inconsistent.  But don't worry, I'm still hacking away at finishing games, and I have plans for other things in the future.

For now, though, the Vault will be the focus around here.  Not only will it allow me to more consistently have new things to talk about, but it will hopefully play into my attention-deficit nature by always giving me something new to focus on.

And so, with all that said, I hope you guys are half as excited as I am about all this new stuff.  Like I said, the first entry in the Vault will be up tomorrow evening, plus the regularly scheduled post on Friday.  Look forward to it!

For the record, that Dwarfstone cereal is gross.  Don't eat it.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Various
Playing - Euro Truck Simulator 2 (2012)
Reading - Judge Dredd Complete Case File 05 (2003)
Watching - Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return (2017)

Confirmed Kill: DOOM (1993)

Title: DOOM

Original Release: December 10, 1993 (MS-DOS)

Finished Release: The Ultimate DOOM (1995) [Modded]

Oh, here we go.

So let's be straight with each other right from the beginning.  See, you don't need me to write this review.  If you're my age or older (or even several years younger), you've probably played DOOM.  If you haven't played it you probably know someone who has.  No matter your age, the odds are very high that you've heard of it, and seen bits and pieces of it here and there.

So much has been said about what a masterpiece this game is, and you don't need me to tell you it's all true.  Beyond that, I don't even know if I could do the game any justice by attempting to be analytical towards it.  This game and the legacy it created is so much bigger than me that all I can really offer you is an explanation of what it means to me.  So that's all I'm going to do.

The shareware version of DOOM was originally released six days after my fourth birthday, so my memories of its beginning are hazy at best, and almost certainly unreliable.  Even once I was older I can't remember ever really playing it all that much myself.  I definitely started it, probably several times, but my attention span then was somehow worse than it is now.  It was also probably a bit too difficult for me, if I had to guess.

Instead, my earliest memories of DOOM are of my dad playing it.  He was still in his early twenties at the time, and PC gaming was always his thing, and so of course DOOM was installed on every computer he built for years to come.  I can vaguely remember him starting it up on new computers all throughout my childhood, just to see how it ran on the new hardware.

In a lot of ways, DOOM is to Wolfenstein 3D what Super Mario Bros. 3 is to Super Mario Bros.  That is to say, the original showed what a particular style of game could do, while the follow-up showed what that same style of game could be.  I'll always love Wolf3D, and it may have more or less created the FPS genre, but DOOM made sure it was here to stay.

And we can't forget shovelware!

The reason for that is that DOOM is more than just one amazing game.  Sure, it had a sequel the next year, and it was great too, but that's really just one part of the wave that DOOM brought with it.  This was the Age of the FPS, and it's an era that lasted for more than a decade and was responsible for some of my fondest memories.  I miss those days, but I'm happy that I now live in a

n age where it's easier than ever to appreciate them.

And beyond that, nostalgia has brought about a resurgence of interest in games from that time.  New, awesome mods for DOOM are still being made to this day (such as this one), and that's to say nothing of the throwback games currently being developed.  DUSK looks amazing. Amid Evil is basically a new version of Heretic.  And there's rumblings that 3D Realms is even developing a new game using the Build Engine, the same development suite used to make Duke Nukem 3D.  It's a great time to be a gamer.

And yet, with all that said, I still never got around to actually sitting down and playing it through until now, just under a year shy of its 25th anniversary.  I dunno what took me so long, but I expected greatness, and I was not disappointed.

In the interest of clarity, I'll just quickly explain that I played through all four episodes of The Ultimate DOOM release currently available on Steam and GOG.  I applied the latest release of fan mod GZDoom, but the only options I had applied were a more modern mouse and keyboard control scheme (but still with no Y axis) and a larger screen resolution.  I played on the neutral difficulty level, Hurt Me Plenty, and didn't put any great effort into finding secrets.

My amazement with DOOM began before I had even reached the title screen, right from the staff credits screen:

The sheer amount of talent represented on that screen is staggering.  You have the obvious ones, like John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack, all founding fathers of id Software and titans in their own right.  But then you also have names like American McGee, who would later create the underrated American McGee's Alice just a few years later, which was one of my favorite games as a kid.  And my personal favorite on this list, Sandy Petersen, creator of the classic Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG.   Not only that, but he would later go on to create one of my favorite board games, Cthulhu Wars, and here he is designing levels for one of the most influential games of all time.

Anyway, I then went on to start up the game itself, and a weird thing happened: the controls threw me off.  I don't know if it was because I had gotten so used to Wolf3D or if DOOM is just that particular, but it didn't feel the way I expected it to.  There's this momentum-based movement that was strange at first, where it takes a split second to get up to full speed and another split second to stop. It took me a while to get used to.

And when I say "a while" I actually mean 30 seconds.  At most.  Because as strange as the whole thing felt at first blush, it immediately became second-nature.  By the end of the game movement in DOOM had become an automatic function of my biology so that I all I needed to be concerned about was killing demons... and switch puzzles.

There was also some D&D mixed in.

Other than that, everything is exactly what everyone else says it is.  The graphics are bright and colorful, but in a way that it still brings across the gloomy and deadly atmosphere.  I especially loved how the locations slowly transitioned away from the futuristic colony feeling and more into a very hard rock version of Hell itself.

In fact, "hard rock," is a good thing to bring up, since the whole game is just metal.  From the soundtrack itself (sometimes liberally borrowed from bands such as Black Sabbath and the like) to the creature designs, the whole game just feels like you stepped into a rock album, and I meant that in the best possible way.  Just look at the game cover up there; it perfectly captures the feel of the game.

Except for that other space marine.  I dunno why he's there.

It's difficult for me to find bad things to say about this game.  I can look at it as a whole, and I can tell you that it's not perfect, but I'd be hard-pressed to tell you why.  I mean, I guess the very fact that I had to mod the control scheme is technically a point against it, but that's not really the fault of the game.  Some of the levels aren't as good as the rest, maybe?

I dunno, I'm genuinely trying to come up with negative things and I find myself at a loss.  Logically speaking, nothing is perfect.  But DOOM is just so enjoyable that looking back over it I guess I manage to ignore the little things that may have bothered me when I was playing it.  It is the game that every other game like it was measured against for years after for good reason, and it still puts up a good fight against most games released since. I fully believe that it will continue to be looked upon as one of the best the genre has ever had to offer for years and years to come.

Hell, I'd play it again right now.

Until next time!

Current interests:

Listening - Various

Playing - DOOM II (1994)

Reading - Thor: God of Thunder (2011)

Watching - Lazy Game Reviews

I'm apocryphal!

Confirmed Kill: Spear of Destiny

Title: Spear of Destiny

Original Release: MS-DOS (September 18, 1992)

Finished Release: MS-DOS (1992) [Modded]

So this is weird.  I'm sure you remember Wolfenstein 3D, which we talked about last time (and you can read about rightcha).  I'll just quickly reiterate that, even though it wasn't technically the first "first person shooter" ever made, it essentially created the genre.  Admittedly, the follow-up, DOOM (which we'll be discussing soon, possibly) solidified that the genre was actually going somewhere, but Wolf3D was the first big stepping stone.

And yet no one ever talks about the sequel.  I'll admit up front that I'm nothing like a gaming historian or anything like that, but I'm pretty sure that I had never even heard of this game before I bought the pack on Steam.  But it does exist, I played it, and you have to read about it, so here we go.

So here's a big spoiler for the original Wolfenstein 3D: it ends with you, as B.J. Blazkowicz, killing Adolf Hitler (who's in a robot suit), thus presumably bringing an end to World War II.  That's pretty sweet and obviously historically accurate, but it creates a problem: where do you go from there?

Well, that's a question left unanswered, since Spear of Destiny, much like the Nocturnal Missions from the original game, takes place before any of that.  In fact, Spear of Destiny takes place before even those add-on missions, thus making this B.J. Blazkowicz's first mission, at least as far as we're allowed to play.  And his mission this time is an interesting one, as we're tasked with infiltrating a Nazi base in order to retrieve the titular Spear of Destiny, which Hitler's forces intend to use in some sort of supernatural powerplay to turn the tide of the war in their favor.

I warned you that you should get used to it.

It's actually kind of difficult to talk about Spear of Destiny, because it's basically just more of Wolfenstein 3D, and in that respect it succeeds, mostly.  The first big change I noticed was that one of the early levels has vines hanging from the ceiling that you can walk through, which I thought was really cool the first time I saw it.  Unfortunately things like this almost completely obscure your vision, and the creators seemed to really enjoy throwing bunches of enemies into them, making those sections sheer trial and error as you try to learn where all of the enemies are without dying.  Still, it's a cool effect.

But when I say that Spear of Destiny is just more of Wolfenstein 3D, I really mean it.  The enemies look the same, the level textures are often the same, the weapons are the same, and that's pretty much it.  The previously-mentioned vines notwithstanding, the only majorly new things are the bosses, but they did not disappoint.  Sure, the first boss is literally just a reskin of the first boss of Wolf3D, but the rest are unique, at least in design, and the final boss is genuinely surprising when you see it, possibly on par with robo-Hitler.  And one of them (the best one, obviously), is an Ubermutant!

"Ubermutant" literally means "it's a mutant, but better, obviously," in German.

In terms of complexity, the Spear of Destiny levels feel like they pick up directly from where Wolf3D left off, and this is, unfortunately, almost always a bad thing.  The labyrinthine feeling of the Nocturnal Missions is back in all its glory, and it really gets to the point where each level starts to feel like more and more of a slog.  This doesn't detract from the overall atmosphere of the game itself, which I still love, but I had easily had my fill of it by the end of SoD's 27 levels (not including secret levels).

So like I said above, the Spear of Destiny campaign is 27 levels, not counting secret levels, which is just as many as the original three episodes of Wolfenstein 3D put together.  The difference here is that the game isn't broken into episodes.  Instead it's just one continuous set of levels, with a boss level every five or so.  Some levels are fun, some are ridiculously frustrating, but it's overall a positive experience, and the final level features a twist that I knew was coming, yet somehow didn't see coming.  I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that it's worth playing through the whole game just for that, but it definitely made the whole experience that much more memorable.

And then you finish that level, you get a few story scenes congratulating you for a job well done, and the game is over.  OR IS IT?

Well, no.

See, Spear of Destiny was followed up by two "Mission Packs," referred to as Mission 2: Return to Danger and Mission 3: Ultimate Challenge, and these things... hoo boy.

See, after all the trouble you went through to steal the Spear from the Nazis, it gets stolen back from the Allies offscreen, and only B.J. Blazkowicz can get it back.  That's irritating right off the bat (that will be a pun in a second), but whatever.  Let's get this over with.  27 new levels! Here we go!

So first, the cool: the mission packs are actually a total conversion for the game.  Basically what that means is that everything plays exactly like Wolfenstein 3D, but it's been completely overhauled, graphically speaking.  The stage textures have all been redesigned, as have the enemy sprites, weapons, and items.  After the entirety of the first game and the base missions of Spear, this was a very welcome change, if for no other reason than just having something new to look at.  It helps that the updated designs are almost universally improvements on the old look of the game.

Everything's so blue...

The new enemy designs are especially good with one glaring omission, which I'll get to in a moment.  For the most part, the new designs do a great job of preserving the feel of the original designs, while not being quite so cartoony.   The one big exception to this is the mutant.  Why?  Because it isn't a mutant anymore.  Seriously, my favorite enemy is the one that gets completely changed, because of course.  And that wouldn't be so bad, but what did it get changed to?

A bat.  A bat, flapping around, carrying machine guns in its feet.  Now don't get me wrong, Wolfenstein is at its best when it's straining credulity, but this just breaks it in two.  And it raises so many questions!  Who's training these bats to fire guns?  Who's designing the guns so that they can be held and fired by bat-feet??  And the most pertinent follow-up question to both of those is Why???  Not to mention that the bats are hard to see, thus them ten times as frustrating as the mutants ever were, and the mutants were already on that spectrum.

Pictured: Bat-feet

But other than that, Mission 2 is fine, right?  'Cause it's just more Wolfenstein 3D again?  Well, no, because it's here where the game starts making a cardinal mistake.  This is something I was afraid of for the entirety of the original game, but by this point had convinced myself wasn't going to happen.

So remember how the secrets worked in Wolf3D?  Certain walls could just be interacted with, so you could push them out of the way, revealing the secret behind them?  Remember how much I hated that system?  Yeah, well, here it's needed to progress.  Let me make that clearer: in order to complete this game, you are required to find pushwalls.  This means vast stretches of time were you're running throughout the entirety of a given level, pounding the spacebar like it insulted your mother, all in the hopes of finally revealing the path forward.

There is almost never any indication of which part of the wall is the one you're looking for, and the levels are huge.  And this doesn't just happen once or twice, it quickly becomes normal.  It isn't fun, it isn't engaging, and it doesn't make you feel any sense of accomplishment when you finally figure it out.  It is the very definition of a waste of time.

Eat your heart out, Skeletor.

But hey, new bosses!  On the whole I don't think they're quite as interesting as the ones in the base Spear of Destiny game, but they're still pretty cool, for the most part.  Hell, one of them, "The Axe" is probably my favorite boss in the series.  He looks like an '80s cartoon villain!

But yeah, you get the Spear (again), they pull the exact same twist again, show the exact same ending scenes, and the game is over.

Don't get me wrong, there's still fun to be had here, and the new look of everything, for the most part, does a lot to freshen things up.  But it's clear to see that we're getting further and further away from the trendsetter the original Wolfenstein 3D was.

And then we come to Mission 3, and I honestly don't know why they bothered.  The Spear has been stolen by the Nazis.  Again.  The graphics are the same as Mission 2.  The enemies are the same.  The pushwalls are the same, the bosses are the same, the ending is the same (again.), it's just all the same.  Except that by this point, each level has gone past the point of being a slog, and well into the realm of tedium.

The only real saving grace of this mission pack is the final level.  It pulls the same twist for the third time, but there's a clever little tweak to it that I quite enjoyed, so that was a pleasant surprise.

But overall, Mission 3 is an exercise in patience, and I can't recommend it to anyone unless you're absolutely dying to play more Wolfenstein 3D.  Even then, you could probably easily find a fanmade mod that would be a better use of your time.

So, at the end of the day, Spear of Destiny and its add-ons are a mixed bag with more bad than good.  There's fun to be had, but it's hard to recommend any of it outright.  Honestly, the best thing to do is probably to mod the original Wolfenstein 3D so that it uses the graphics introduced to Mission 2.  But even that isn't much of a good idea, because then you'd have no mutants.

And no one wants that.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Various
Playing - Elite Dangerous: Horizons (2015)
Reading - Thor: God of Thunder (2011)
Watching - Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Why do you exist?!

Announcements and Upcoming Plans 2018.1

I've been on vacation and completely neglected to mention that!  Oops.

But yeah, all sorts of things have been going on over here.  My roommate went to Florida for a few days, so my wife Jessie and I decided to just enjoy having the house to ourselves.  Unfortunately Jess caught a bad cold, so a lot of our time was actually spent with her feeling poorly.

On a more positive note, my sister-in-law is currently visiting with her daughter.  Jessie and I haven't seen our niece since she was a baby, so this has been our first chance to really interact with her, which has been a lot of fun.  I've always felt like I would be a good dad but an awesome uncle.

Oh, I've also been playing a blue ton of Elite Dangerous.  I'm actually supercruising to a space station as I write this post.  So yeah, you could say I've been distracted.

But that's okay, because I'm still here, and I actually have a lot of announcements to make regarding upcoming posts.  So without further ado or adon't, let's get to it!

Announcement Numero Uno: I am happy to announce that I will now be keeping to a specific schedule for blog posts.  Starting today and continuing into the foreseeable future, new posts will go up on Monday and Friday.  Specifically, I'll be writing a post every Monday and Friday afternoon, to be posted in the evening, after they've been checked over and whatnot.

There's no hard schedule as to what kind of posts will go up when, it'll basically be whatever I have in the tank, but I already have two Confirmed Kills (my laziness has been productive) and a smattering of "obscure stuff" reviews.

Speaking of which, I'm also here to officially announce the title of that series: Vault of the Obscure!.  And yes, the exclamation point is part of the title.  I'll have the first of those posts up either Monday or Friday of next week (so either February 5th or 9th) depending on how things work out.  This is something I'm really excited to get started on, and I hope you guys enjoy it as much as I will.

On a somewhat related note, you may have noticed some subtle (and not so subtle) changes to the layout of the blog over the past few weeks as I've tried to figure out what works and what doesn't.  I'm generally happy with how it looks right now, but I've still been feeling like it doesn't have enough of its own identity, especially when it comes to each individual series of posts.

And so, with that in mind, I'm going to slowly (as in, over the course of months) be overhauling the site completely, with a new layout, new designs, and official logos and headers for the site itself as well for the different post series, such as Confirmed Kills, Blogtober, and otherwise.  The idea is to give this blog its own identity, as well as give each series its own, slightly different, feel.

But with all that said, that's pretty much all the announcements I have for today.  This Friday, February 2nd, will see the first Confirmed Kill post of the new schedule, so look forward to that, and in the meantime I'll be working hard to make sure I have new stuff to write about all the time.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - Persona 5 Original Soundtrack (2017)
Playing - Elite Dangerous: Horizons (2015)
Reading - Deadlands: Hell on Earth (IDW, 1998)
Watching - The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

Worth Your Time: Civilization VI/Humble Monthly

Boy, time has really gotten away from me.   That first "obscure stuff" post was supposed to be up days ago!  Don't worry, I'm still working on it, I've just hit some snags along the way that have caused some delays.  For now, though, I'm here to tell you about a deal that you can take advantage of right now!

Ugh, forget I said that.  This isn't a sales pitch.

You may have heard of Humble Bundle before.  Maybe you've even partaken of their awesome "cheap bundles of digital content that also provide money to charity" in the past.  If so, good on you!  You're both contributing to a great cause and getting a great deal.  I've personally been taking advantage of the service for a few years now, and I have a ton of awesome stuff to show for it.

Something that's relatively new to me, however, is Humble's monthly subscription service, aptly titled Humble Monthly.  It's sort of like a digital Loot Crate kind of thing, where you pay $12 (USD) a month, and you get a whole slew of digital games delivered to your Humble account.  Each game is attached to a code that you then redeem on Steam, and the game is added to your Steam library.

Now, I've known about the service for a few months now, but I had yet to see any major games on offer that really made me pull the trigger.  Don't get me wrong, it's always great stuff, it's just so far been great stuff that I personally already own or am not interested in.  This month, though, they finally hooked me.

I've been a big fan of the Civilization series ever since I first played Civ3 back in the day.  I've never been great at strategy style games, but I still love to play them every now and then, and Civilization is pretty much my go-to.  Civ5 was, unfortunately, not quite what I was hoping it would be.  I didn't hate it, but it just didn't gel with me at the time for whatever reason.

Still, though, as soon as I heard about Civ6, I knew I would get it eventually.  I was mainly just waiting for a good price to converge with a driving urge to play it.  Well, imagine my excitement when I discovered that Civilization VI is the leading game in this month's Humble Monthly package.

Let me put that into clear terms.  Up until February 1st, you can go to Humble Bundle, pay $12 (USD) to sign up for Humble Monthly, and get Civilization VI, plus two DLC packs for it (Australia Civlization & Scenario Pack and Vikings Scenario Pack), plus a whole host of other games that haven't been revealed yet.  And just to top it off, you also get 10% off any purchases made in the Humble store, and that even applies to things that are already on sale.

So naturally, I jumped at the deal, and am now a Humble Monthly member.  I can't say now whether I'll stay signed up permanently, but it's safe to say I'll hang around for at least a couple months.

But what about Civilization VI?  Well, I blazed through that signup process and installed the game ASAP.  According to my Steam page, I've already put 21 hours into it, and I've been having a blast.  Before I get into my specific thoughts on the game, though, I'd like to take a second to address something up front.

See, here's the thing: there's this weird controversy surrounding the game that I genuinely don't understand, but it seems to orbit around the prospect of DLC for the game.  Basically, the base game comes with 18 Civilizations (19 if you count the fact that Greece has two separate leaders, but we'll ignore that), and other Civs can be bought as DLC for between $4.99 and $8.99 USD (the more expensive ones come with two Civilizations).

If you go to the Steam store page for pretty much any piece of DLC for the game (and the game itself, to an extent), you'll see them awash with scathing reviews.  These negative reviews are almost always centered around the fact that DLC exists for the game at all.  People accuse 2K Games and Firaxis of cutting this content out of the base game just to charge more for it.  They make the accusation that the base game is basically just a demo, and suggest you have to buy all of these Civilizations in order to actually own the "complete" game.

Now, let's ignore for a moment the fact that we live in a world in which EA Games bases their entire business model around "games as a service," squeezing every nickel they can out of every game they make for the smallest amount of effort possible, thus making these accusations comparatively laughable.

No, instead let's focus on the fact that, back in 2010, Civilization V also launched with 18 civilizations.  Let's talk about the fact that Civilization V's store page also has extra Civilizations on sale as DLC and still charges a minimum of $4.99 USD for this DLC for an eight-year-old game.  And let's talk about the fact that not a single damn review on the base game's store page has anything negative to say about this whatsoever.

Look, if you don't like DLC, that's fine.  Personally I think the question of "yes" or "no" for DLC is a complicated one.  It's difficult to get it right, but I love it when it happens (like Super Smash Bros.) because I always want more content in my games.  But if you are the type of person that just rejects any DLC on principle, well, that's cool for you, and I honestly can't wholeheartedly disagree with you.

The issue here is the double standard.  You have two games, six years apart, that do the exact same thing (something that has only become more common in those six years, and will continue to do so), and yet one is given a free pass.  Why???  Admittedly, the one dual civilization pack for Civ5 is cheaper than the dual packs for Civ6 by about $1.50, but you're still talking about an eight-year-old game!  And they still charge the exact same price for their major expansions as what Civ6 will be charging for the upcoming Rise and Fall expansion ($29.99 USD).  The mind boggles.

But enough of that rant, because it went on for way too long.  The game itself has so far definitely lived up to what I hoped it would be.  It's not perfect, and some of the complaints on the Steam store page are legitimate, but overall I've really enjoyed myself.  Like I said, I've only put about 21 hours into it across two campaigns, but I'll talk a bit about what I liked and disliked, based on my little bit of exposure.

First off, I absolutely love the character designs.  I mean, I guess you'd call them character designs, even though the civilization leaders are real people.  Either way, they look like something out of Disney's recent CG movies like Frozen or Big Hero 6, and I mean that in the best possible way.  They're the perfect kind of cartoony: expressive and full of life, but not so over-the-top that you can't take them seriously.

I also really like that the research tree and the civics tree have been separated, thus allowing you to learn two things at once.  This is, for me, a very welcome change, since I was always annoyed that I couldn't learn how to make a bow & arrow because I was too busy learning what a law is.  Like, what?  On a related note, I also like how easy it is to customize your government.  You still pick an overall system of government, but now you acquire different "civics cards" as you progress through your Civics tree.  These cards give you different bonuses or focuses in addition to what you get from your base government choice.  And these bonuses can be swapped out for others at pretty much any time to focus on what you need at any given moment.  It's a really cool system that gives you that extra bit of fluidity and adaptability.

And the last thing I want to focus on is the big one: districts.  Basically, when building the area around your city, you can now add city districts.  There's quite a few of these districts, such as a harbor, business district, theatre district, etc., and they all serve a different purpose.  Each district takes up one of the hexes in your city's region, with each district getting certain bonuses from surrounding hexes.  Now, on the one hand, this could cause you to have to give up a valuable food space or a productive mine, but these districts are crucial to the growth of your city.  You can't have a school without a campus, you can't have boats without a harbor, and you can't have religion without a holy site.

The districts system is probably my favorite new feature of Civ6 because it's just so cool.  Even just having played two campaigns, I've already had to make some serious decisions over whether or not a certain district is worth it to a certain city, and sometimes it's not.  I found myself, more often than not, focusing each city on one or two particular districts (Boston, of course, focused on the campus), but if you learn the game and are pretty good with your ability to think ahead, I could easily see someone really getting as much benefit as possible out of each and every city.  It's just a really great system, and I'd love to see it expanded even further in a future update or something.

Like I said before, though, Civ6 isn't perfect, and it definitely has some room for improvements.  For one thing, I found myself clicking around the UI trying to find things a bit more often than I would like.  For another, sometimes the game suffers from these really weird pauses.  Like, not like the game itself will freeze, but you'll click "next turn" or whatever, and it just idles there for a while, and sometimes I have to click it three or four times to get it to go.

Also, as much as the DLC civs don't bother me on principle, there is one thing about it that irks me.  The Greek civilization has two leaders, and neither one of them is Alexander the Great!  Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that Alexander has had his time to shine, and at least it's still possible to get him as leader of the Macedon civilization.  Still, I do really wish he were part of the base game, even if it meant just swapping him with someone else I'm not overly fond of.  But hey, at least it helps me decide which DLC pack to buy first.

So far, I'm more than happy with Civilization VI, and what few complaints I have about it are pretty much a non-issue because of how cheaply I got it.  Seriously, I plan to buy all the DLC civilizations over time, and I still won't have spent as much as the normal price for the base game.  I'll also most likely buy the Rise and Fall expansion eventually, if for no other reason than to have even more civilizations because that's what I want!  The game definitely needs a bit of work here and there, but I'm very excited to see where it goes.

Now here's the icky part, because this is where I ask you for a favor.  See, yet another perk for being a member of Humble Monthly is that I now have a special referral link attached to my account.  Basically, what that does is that whenever someone uses that link and signs up for Humble Monthly (up to 30 people), I get a kickback of a few dollars in my Humble wallet, to spend in their store.

Let me make a couple things very clear.  First, Humble has not asked me to write this blog post.  They have no idea who I am (outside of being a moderately recurring customer), and they haven't offered me any special incentive to convince you to sign up.  This is the exact same referral program that you will have access to if you sign up yourself.  No one pays me to type these words.

Secondly, I'm not writing this post because of the referral program.  I was genuinely going to write all this before I even knew about it.  I honestly, wholeheartedly, just want to share what I feel is a great deal for a great game, plus a bunch of extra stuff.  I don't have many recurring readers, but I take my blog and my own sense of honesty very seriously.  I hate deception, and I will never be deceitful for money or rewards.  I say what I believe.

Lastly, and this is the thing I really want to stress, you don't get anything special out of my referral link.  I'm not saying that to be an ass, because I honestly wish I could offer you some sort of special promo or exclusive deal.  But no, outside of all of the regular perks of Humble Monthly (and there really are quite a few), I can't give you anything extra, except for my genuine appreciation.

So yeah, don't sign up for Humble Monthly to help me out.  I'd appreciate it greatly, and I'd use the referral credit to get some new stuff to review.  But don't let that be why you do or do not choose to sign up.  If Humble Monthly doesn't interest you, that's totally cool, and thanks for taking the time to read all this.  And hey, if you do decide to sign up but don't want to click my link just to spite me, well that's cool too.  I won't hold it against you.  Hell, I'll even provide the regular Humble Monthly link, and if you don't trust that, well it's just a quick google away.

My link is here, and the vanilla link is here.

Here's hoping that you have some serious fun, no matter what.

Until next time!

Current interests:
Listening - The Sickness (Disturbed, 2000)
Playing - The Ultimate DOOM (1995)
Reading - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (IDW, 2011)
Watching - The Toys That Made Us (2017)