Stardock To Helm New Star Control

It was going to take a mighty piece of news indeed to get to me to forget about all the triple-A releases that I totally can't afford this month. Luckily, such news has been delivered.

Gamasutra is featuring an interview with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock (Galactic Civilizations) in which Wardell says that their next games are going to be a new Master of Orion and a new Star Control.

Better still, the new games are going to be based on Master of Orion 2 and Star Control 2. The horrible third iterations of those franchises will be discarded like the chaff they are. ("We just pretend that never happened," says Wardell.)

But how, you may ask, will Stardock secure the rights? No-one cares! If big fistfuls of money won't let them put the Star Control name on a new box, then they'll go down the Bioshock route and make one of those "spiritual successors" that are all the rage these days. And, you know, that's fine by me.

Stardock is on my big list of developers worth trusting, a list notable for absences like "Midway" and "Sega", and this is pretty much the best news ever. Ever.

Now, take everything I've said above and go and blog it. And tell your friends. Your friends, and also strangers. It is not an over-reaction to use YouTube. I say this because wishing things sometimes makes them true, and candy-filled space unicorns only appear to people who believe in them, and suchlike. True story. And once you've done all that word-spreadage, come on back here, so I can mention that, actually, these appear to just be options that Stardock is exploring, or thinking about, rather than actual new game announcements. And you can hear that, and put on your pouty face, and we can all go drink ourselves happy.

This is the way news works.

(Read the actual interview.)

UPDATE: Zounds! I realised this article was totally lacking context. Some among you may not even know why this is great news. So, to fill you in, let me say this: Star Control 2 was the most awesome game ever made. I think it shot Hitler. With a crossbow. In space. A sequel would be like if it had done all that while riding a dinosaur. That should clear up the confusion. Thanks.

The Political Machine

It may be a bit late to be casting my votes on The Political Machine, seeing as it's been out four years, but this is a PC game, and quite frankly it's taken me that long to work out how to download and install the damn thing.

The Political Machine is a game from Stardock Entertainment, the same folks responsible for Sins Of A Solar Empire, and much like Sins it has the feel of a boardgame that got too complex for dice and tokens.

The game claims to simulate the 2004 United States election, and it does a pretty good job of it. You pick out a candidate from a list of real-life possibilities and sit down for a protracted session of bamboozling the American public. Candidates range from the realistic (John Kerry, George W Bush) to the "what-if" (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Condoleeza Rice) through to the patently ridiculous (Chloe Sullivan from Smallville). A raft of extra candidates are unlockable as you play. You can also draft up your own by choosing a portrait and assigning points to a variety of traits, allowing you to play as Adolf Hitler or Julius Caesar.

Once you've secured the Democrat nomination for Candidate Hitler, it's time to get down to the nitty-gritty of cheerfully hijacking the electoral system. Over 41 weeks, you'll undertake such tasks as building headquarters, holding fundraisers, giving TV interviews, and launching advertising campaigns.

You'll soon discover that the US only has six or seven "useful" states, and by "useful" I mean large electoral college representation and buckets of sweet, sweet war chest cash. Old Adolf will find himself hanging out in Texas, California, Florida, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, while secretly plotting how best to send the worthless populations of Wyoming and Montana to the gas chambers.

Most of the game revolves around managing issues. You need to determine what the issues are both nationally and in the key states, and appeal to them. Of course, sometimes you're stuck on the losing side of an issue, so if you want your "death camps for homosexuals" plan to fly in California you'll have to talk up an alternate issue, such as "fighting crime" or "quelling internal unrest" until it's the only thing the public cares about.

All this malarkey is a heap of fun the first few times you play it, but you'll soon realise that the game's got a bit of a one-track mind. Every election is the 2004 election. It doesn't matter whether your opponent is Hillary Clinton or Richard Nixon, the key issues on the national mind are the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. It gets old real fast.

Theoretically there are a whole bunch of "endorsements" you can win by building social capital. These range from the Christian right to the Blue Collar left, but because of all this fixation on well-armed men in turbans, most of these endorsements are more useless than a VHS video library. You'll race to grab Foreign Policy and the Environmentalists while repeatedly giving the Women's Movement a one-fingered salute.

The game does feature a "fantasy play" option where you can change the key issues, along with other factors like "international tension" and "national unrest", but there's no real structure to this mode, and it'll leave you asking why you're bothering. The real action is in the campaign mode where you can unlock new candidates, but if you want a piece of it you'll need to love 2004 because that's all you'll be seeing.

You can play the game multiplayer, which is a blast, but you'll need two computers (there's no hotseat play), and there doesn't appear to be any way of chatting to your opponent outside of the pre-game lobby. Without communication, the line between a flesh-and-blood antagonist and an artificial intelligence can grow mighty thin.

While it may seem I've got nothing but whinging and spit for this game, the truth is it's actually reasonably decent considering (a) the game sells for about $25 AUD by direct download, and (b) there's really no other games in the genre to compare it to. If you want electoral gaming, this is the summit, and it's yours for a bargain price. Also, what The Political Machine occasionally lacks in pure fun it makes up for in educational value - you will genuinely learn something about US elections from playing.

The sequel, focusing on the 2008 election, is apparently just around the corner, so there's a good chance that the next iteration will featuring the fine tuning that this one was lacking. And in the mean time, hearing Adolf Hitler tell George W Bush to "kiss his democratic butt" is good for a laugh every time.

Sins Of A Solar Empire

I don't really know what to say about Sins Of A Solar Empire other than that I've been enjoying it. It's one of the few shining lights in the vast emptiness of contemporary PC gaming.

It's a multiplayer space real-time strategy. I say multiplayer because the single player options are limited to customisable skirmishes against AI opponents. Shipping without any significant single-player campaign is an option that worked for Rise of Nations and it works again here.

The game's biggest claim to fame is its epic scope. You can zoom right in to see the details on your smallest ships as they fire lasers and dogfight, which makes the game look a lot like genre classic Homeworld, or you can zoom out to see the entire gravity well in which you're fighting, the neighbouring planets, the solar system, the local cluster, or in extreme cases the galaxy and neighbouring galaxies.

The game also borrows heavily from Warcraft III for some of its gameplay elements. Your capital ships are effectively hero-class units. They're worth entire fleets of smaller ships, and they gain experience through combat, which allows them to purchase new abilities or level up existing ones.

The third interesting innovation is the bounty system. Each solar system features a "pirate planet", guarded by a fleet of pirates so immense as to make defeating them generally not worthwhile. Every ten minutes or so the pirates will dispatch a fleet to attack a player. Players can pay credits to set bounties on other players; the player with the highest bounty when the pirate timer runs down will be the target of the attack, and the size of the fleet that attacks is based on the size of the bounty.

Players can collect bounty on other players too. Each time a player loses an asset, the person who destroyed that asset claims some of the bounty on the asset's owner. In this way bounties can run all the way down to zero. In multiplayer games it can serve as a way of motivating opponents to fight amongst themselves.

The game doesn't look particularly wonderful when you zoom right in. Ship textures are clean and crisp, but dull, and most of the ship designs are variations on the idea of a flying rectangle. Thankfully the gameplay is the real star, and matches can be customised in a huge variety of ways for maximum fun.

If you're a PC gamer who attends LAN parties or plays online, Sins of a Solar Empire is an easily recommendable purchase. The solo gamer might not get as much out of it, but it remains a fun experience even against AIs.