Gaurav Vaidya

Aspyr asks: To SteamPlay or not to SteamPlay

There's been a lot of nervousness about whether the upcoming release of Civilization V for MacOS X will be marked SteamPlay (i.e. free for those who already own Civ5/Win on Steam). Of course, while that's arguably the Right Thing to do, it means Aspyr will be giving out free copies, since they won't get paid for Civ5/Win releases. So, in an unusual move for a relatively large game distributor, they've gone to their community to see what they have to say about this issue, being open and honest about how important this lost revenue is for them. How awesome is that?

Unfortunately, I can't post to their website (something about a proxy; not so surprising when you consider the Singapore isn't on their list of supported countries for GameAgent.com, their online game store). So I'm leaving my comment here:

First off, let me just say that I really appreciate how open and honest you are being with us about this. It's too easy for us to forget the Civ5/Win and Civ5/Mac are practically two separate games, put out by two awesome companies, who have their own interests to look out for.

My primary gaming machine is a Mac, and I haven't have a Windows computer for myself in years. Therefore, SteamPlay doesn't mean much to me: while it's of course possible that I will own a Windows machine at some point in the future, and it'd be nice to have SteamPlay so I don't need to re-purchase the Windows versions of my favourite games, but it isn't at the moment a very big deal for me.

However, I do really hope that Civ5Mac will be released *on* Steam, and not just on GameAgent. As a Singaporean resident, I can't purchase games from GameAgent (at any rate, Singapore is not listed as a supported country in your FAQs). I *could* spend next weekend running around from Mac shop to Mac shop, hoping to find a box set of Civ5Mac, but it'd be an effort (and certainly isn't something I'd do for most other Aspyr games: that much effort is only really worth it for known-great games like Civ5 :). On the other hand, despite wanting to wait until a Steam sale, I really can't imagine *not* pre-ordering Civ5Mac if it becomes available on Steam before launch - it's easy, convenient, and I get to play the game on day one. Steam is also becoming a fantastic global marketplace for Mac games - I know I check if a game is available on it before looking for it anywhere else - so it can only be in your interest to get involved, so your fantastic games have access to the largest number of possible customers.

That's just my perspective. In any case, I'm really looking forward to November 23, and all the best for a fantastic launch!

By the by, I don't know how SteamPlay works, but this sounds like it's confirmed that Civ5 will be available for sale on Steam, and that Aspyr are just trying to work out whether to mark it as a SteamPlay version of Civ5/Win or as its own game. If so, I'm really going to be pleased, and will definitely consider (read: not sure how I'll resist) pre-ordering -- there's nothing quite like being able to support a good game developer.

Elgin City, #8 Scotland FL Third Division season 2009-10

And thus the 2009-10 season comes to an end (before you get confused, I mean in the comfortable enclosure of Football Manager 2010, the football simulation game I've written about earlier). There's no easy way to get my actual history or statistics out of the game, so the following is from memory.

The year didn't start all that well: being a complete newbie to FM2010, I had no idea what I was doing, and consequently (1) signed up lots of so-so players at exorbitant rates, (2) moved people around quite a bit trying to come up with a flexible strategy, which meant that my team took ages to get to know each other, and (3) took a while figuring out all the ways I can affect on-field performance (I'm still discovering new ones!). Still, at some point early on, my team did quite well, moving up to the mid-ranges of the Scottish Third Division (as high as #5 or maybe even #4, I think) and a couple of games into the Scottish Cup (2, I think). So not a bad start.

Things only really started to go pear-shaped in the last three months of game time (two weeks in real world time). Something went wrong somewhere - tiredness? A lack of senior strikers? Some angst over players whose contracts could not be renewed because of, ah, mutual differences? I had no idea: all I know is that once my two favourite players (Craig Gunn and Gary Tierney) were out of play because of injury, the squad slowly collapsed from a winning, positive team to a depressed group incapable of scoring against the weakest opponents. I managed to drag us through to the final, narrowly winning one match, which at least kept our losing streak to a merely-embarrassing eight. And that victory - along with the return of Gunn, Tierney, and some very talented new players - buoyed us up enough to keep us scoring goals (without, alas, clear victories) through our last few matches.

... which is pretty awful, as those last few matches ended up deciding our final position in the list. For ages, we maintained a very respectable #6 in the season (not bad for a team the press had written off to a #9 or #10!). As the last six matches came upon us, #7 and #8 were edging closer and closer to us. The last two matches - with those two exact teams - sealed our fate; a draw and a loss results in us having to settle for a very disappointing #8.

On the plus side, we've got some fantastic new players coming in over the transfer period (one of whom I played in that crucial last match: a good move, as he set up a crucial goal assist and played excellently in general); we have a lot of older, expensive players (thanks to my ineffectual negotiation last year) who will be renegotiating their contracts or leaving altogether. And now that I have a more-or-less clear strategy (aggressive 4-3-1-2s moving to 4-2-1-3 or 4-4-2 depending on our opponents), I can pick up players who fill those roles, and fill them well. Most of all, I'm looking forward to picking one or two core teams, and having them play each other extensively to build up camaraderie before Third Division season 2010-11 starts. Next season: #4 or bust.

Incidentally, losing out on #6 is slightly less grating now that I've discovered that the actual Elgin City team came nineth that year! Okay, I'm only doing one position better than the actual team, but for somebody who started the season knowing nothing about football, it's not a bad start.

It's raining games

Stressed as I am with my graduate applications (now coming to the apex of the get-in-touch-with-Profs phase; next up: GRE, applications, and interviews), I'm really appreciating games which let me get a little fillip of gaming without either drawing me in too deeply (I'm looking at you, Football Manager) nor keeping me unentertained with sharp learning curves. If you're stuck in this sort of situation, here's some suggestions:

• Civilization IV via the Civilization Play by E-mail League: a fantastic group of people who play out entire games of Civilization by e-mailing each turn back and forth between the players. It's tons of fun, and only takes ten or fifteen minutes a day to play out all your turns and e-mail them out to other players. The community is really fantastic as well.

• Myth-Weavers: A fantastic Play-By-Post community for all kinds of role-playing games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons. It takes quite a bit of effort to get started, but - once you have - you'll be off in an imaginary world for fifteen to thirty minutes a day.

• I started writing this blog post mainly to talk about two new additions to this list. The first is EA's FIFA 2011, who's demo has given me a ton of fun. With each half reduced to five minutes, that's ten minutes of play per game. Three games after work can be had in just half an hour. What I'm really looking forward to (after the game releases in a week or two) is multiplayer: doing this with other human beings promises to be even more fun, and will - with any luck - take about the same amount of time. Sort of like Starcraft II Lite, I hope.

• My last discovery in this area is a really cutie: Altitude is a cross-platform multiplayer 2D game where you fly little airplanes around a map, weaving in and out of cover and shooting up your opponents. Shooting down other planes nets you experience points, which open up different engine configurations, plane types and other tidbits. If shoot-'em-up's not for you, there's plenty of other game types available, from carry-the-flag type missions to carry-the-bomb type missions. Exactly the sort of game that you can lose yourself in for a relaxing ten-to-twenty minutes before walking away, refreshed, happy, and ready for work.

Football Manager scares me

So I've just been playing Football Manager 2010, and let me tell you right now, it scares the living daylights out of me.

First the basics: it's a business simulator which sets you up as the manager of a football club. No, scratch that: it sets you up as a football manager. You can elect to start the game clubless if you like, relying on your reputation to work your way up the leagues. You manage your team hands-on, but can delegate responsibilities onto assistant coaches (or even take holidays in-game!). Your in-game character hosts interviews, has personal relations (successful or otherwise) with his players, and can be anything from a sympathetic mentor to a demanding taskmaster. That's a huge attraction to me right there: creating this virtual football manager persona is fun, like creating a character in a role-playing game, and of course it's always fun to manage to somebody else's career for a bit.

Managing a football team in this game consists primarily of buying and managing the best players to create an effective and successful football team. To do this, you'll also need to hire coaches and scouts to pick new players and train existing ones. As you go in to a match, you'll need to pick which players to play and in which formation, both of which you can tweak while the match is in progress. Although you don't control individual players, you still a number of tools to control their behavior: leading up to the game, you can tweak players' training, encourage or discourage particular types of play, and praise or complain about them publicly. Once in a game, you can substitute them off if they're failing, shout at or encourage them at half-time, or move them around in the formation to take the pressure of them if needed. You can also give the entire team overall instructions: when to be aggressive and when defensive, and give them a number of preset instructions, such as working the flank, moving the ball forward quickly, and others.

This game is filled with data, but in a way that's completely unintimidating. Row upon row of numbers march down many pages, and my glaze over at their approach, but inevitably there's a quick summary somewhere nearby to give you the meat. Most football acronyms have rollover text to explain what they mean (alas, there's no help available in explaining the explanations, which are written in perfect footballese). Plenty of pretty pictures - logos, faces, graphs - dot every surface. Seriously, I could learn a ton about making useful, easy-to-use interfaces from these guys.

Apart from checking all my boxes, I'm astonished at how quickly I was sucked into a game based around football. I am fantastically ignorant of any and all sports, apart from a passing acquaintance with cricket and a "hello-there" familiarity with the basics of football, so, yeah. That was odd, unexpected, and exciting. I started my first game and stopped, several hours later, in the wee hours of the morning; the first time I've done that since my first Civilization IV game. To my mind, games like this inspire fear as much as awe: these games destroy days. Gamer, beware.