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osmw1 · 5 years

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Dimension Wave Chapter 29 — Dimension Wave: Conclusion

—?!

It wasn’t clear who landed the final blow, but Cerberus let out as if he had been torn apart. At the same time, a flash of white light blinded everybody in the instance as they braced themselves for the next attack. The light dissipated and revealed white clouds on a backdrop of blue… just as the skies had been before all of this happened. White petals blew across the battlefield; we were now in a field of flowers in full bloom.

“We did it!”

Everybody was in high spirits and some were crying out from our shared triumph.

“Good job, team.” “Well done!” “That was a doozy.” “Hell yeah.”

A victory fanfare played in the background—this is an MMO, so of course it did. I sat down on the bed of flower as both my—as both Kizuna†Exceed’s body and mind were exhausted. The tension and anxiety I was holding back crushed me all at once now. It was extremely stressful avoiding getting hit as a Spirit.

—The first wave of Dimension Wave has been defeated!

The game popped up a message in my vision. There was also a ranking of who contributed the most. Let’s see where I placed…

—Overall rank #77: Kizuna†Exceed

Looks like I’m 77th place among all other players. There were a few other rankings as well.

—Total damage given rank #1: Tsugumi†Exceed

No surprise there. That scythe was great for crowd control.

Oh, there’s a ranking for resources contribution as well. Alto and Romina were in the top 10. They did a lot to back us up, eh?

Another category was “Everyday”. I assume that’s for like activities, like cooking and other roleplaying elements? I’m at #542 for that.

“Holy! Look! There’s someone who took 80,000 points of damage!”

That guy was #2 for most damage received, but who’s #1?

—Total damage received rank #1: Kizuna†Exceed

… hey, that name looks familiar! I fell prostrate on the ground. Now that I look at myself, my clothes had been unequipped, leaving me in my underwear.

Name/ Kizuna†Exceed Race/ Spirit Energy/ 19,550 Mana/ 8,100 Serin/ 46,780

Skills/ Energy Production X, Mana Production VII, Fishing Mastery IV, Hate & Lure I, Gutting Mastery IV, Cleaver III, Speed Gutting III, Naval Combat IV, Transmutation I

… well, that makes sense.

“Required level to equip… Energy, in my case…”

I never knew there was a level requirement for my clothes. They got unequipped because I don’t have enough Energy now, I assumed. Guess I don’t have much of a choice but to use my old equipment. I’m glad I kept everything in my inventory. I clicked out of the rankings and looked through other information.

—Buffs and item usage

There were patch notes for new skills, equipment, and other changes as well. More weapon types were added too. Something I was just talking about is the new specialization for scythes, called war scythes; dual blades derived from one-handed swords; and katanas from two-handed swords. I can’t tell for sure unless I check with the next one, but I’m sure there are new items and skills that are affected by each Dimension Wave.

Oh, hey, it said that fishing rods can now be equipped with reels. I’ve gotta get me one of those. I kept scrolling through the notes.

“Racial powers unlocked?”

That line caught my attention while I was skimming. First off, lemme see what’s in store for Spirits.

—Stone of Mediation implemented.

A crystal that allows its user to project their soul. Or, at least, that’s what this Spirit-exclusive rock claims to be able to do. Every Stone of Mediation has a different effect. Some may shorten the amount of time needed to produce Energy or reduce skills’ Energy usage.

Finally, it looks like we all get something from participating in Dimension Wave. Ranks 1-5, 6-100, 101-1,000, 1,001-5,000 all get different items.

And since I’m number 77, I should be getting something pretty decent. I clicked Yes on the dialog box asking me whether I’d like to receive my reward. Then, a slot machine with numbers and fruits on its reels popped up in my vision. After a quick spin, three icons of souls lined up in the center.

—Energy Blade obtained.

It looked so fitting for a Spirit like me, though the description looked far from normal.

Energy Blade Weapon type/ Not applicable Attack/ 0 Prerequisites/ Must be a Spirit User must have at least 2 Energy to equip this weapon. The user charges up the blade with Energy then unleashes all of it in one single blow. Beware that all charged Energy will be expended upon making an attack, regardless of its success.

All that’s there to the weapon is just its handle. It’s reminiscent of old movies and anime, like how the blade part would only appear if the sword chooses its wielder. It sounds cool and all, but I’ll hold off judgement until I try it out. Personally, I don’t have strong feelings either way. Since it’s a Spirit-exclusive weapon, it’s quite the oddball. I bet it’ll be tricky to use as well. At the very least, it’s not an option for me in my current state. It won’t be long until I’m back in business, so I’ll just keep it safe for now.

“Kizuna.”

Shouko showed up just as I had finished stowing away the Energy Blade into my inventory. Just like everybody else, I congratulated her with a “Well done out there”. But even though we’ve defeated the Dimension Wave, she looked less than happy. I couldn’t help but worry about her.

“What’s wrong? Did something happen?” “No, it’s just that… I overdid it out on the battlefield, causing you to suffer such terrible damage…” “Oh, that’s what’s bothering you? Don’t worry about it. The true winners in games are ones who enjoy themselves, isn’t that right?” “Still—”

Shouko seemed to be bothered about me losing my Energy. I had been swarmed by the mob, hurt myself in trying to protect Tsugumi, and nearly lost my life when I was drawing the boss’ aggro. Even if I had voluntarily done all that, she must be feeling guilty about all of the damage I faced. But I knew. I knew Shouko had tirelessly used her counterattack skill to protect me. Still, the fan-type weapon needs to be charged so, of course, she couldn’t block 100% of Cerberus’ attacks. Nevertheless, it was touching to hear that she had been thinking of me the entire time.

“More importantly, the sea! I mean, I’d love to head back out onto the water, but with the little Energy I have left, I’ll just be dead weight.” “Nonsense. I will help you reach… no, rather, I wish to be by your side and reach beyond the horizon together.” “I couldn’t ask for anybody better. I knew that before, but seeing you out there today, I’m even more sure of it.”

I can’t forget how graceful of an acrobatic Shouko was when facing Cerberus. And frighteningly, she’s as skilled as Tsugumi. Even though her prowess suits the frontlines much better, knowing her and her personality, I’m sure she’ll choose to stay with me. But I know better than to outright ask her to return to the frontlines.

“It’s been a long day. Let’s head back to the First and get some rest.” “Oh, but…” “Hmm?”

Shouko pressed her index finger to her lips, cueing me to stay quiet. Then, she looked over at Cerberus’ corpse. I get it now… gutting, eh? I was going to tell Roz and his party about the power of gutting-type weapons, but I didn’t get the chance to do so. I definitely had a hard time keeping cool back there. I mean, it’s only natural to get mad when someone insults you and your friends, right?

We made our way over to where Cerberus fell and eyed the other players. Many of them were already teleporting out of the instance since the raid was finished. The thriftier ones were walking home while the frontliners didn’t even bat an eye when they used their Tomes of Returning. Some of the braver ones were even saying how they’re headed off for the next battle. There were still too many people around for me to start gutting—that is if I still wanted to keep this a secret.

“Shall we stay here for a while? It’d be a waste to not enjoy the scenery.” “… yeah, why not?”

The bed of flowers was simply fantastic—both in the sense that it was beautiful but also unrealistically so. It’s almost as if the devs put it in here for us players to relax after the raid. Well, Cerberus’ corpse lying there kinda spoils the view though.

“Miss Kizuna!” “Oh, hey, Yamikage. Good work back there.” “I thank ye, but I bear exciting news.” “Ooh, what is it?” “I am now the highest ranked Spirit!” “Number one in the Energy rankings, eh?”

It’s no surprise for someone who has accumulated a total of more than a million Energy. I bet Circle Drain contributed a lot to her growth too.

“Where’s Sheryl anyway?” “… I have been here the whole time.” “Agh! Don’t scare me like that.”

Sheryl suddenly spoke up from behind me. I had no idea she was with us. It’s almost like she concealed herself or something. Well, I’m probably unperceptive because I’m just too tired.

Near the end of the raid, Sheryl was still fighting the mob to not get in our way. It’s boring, but someone’s gotta do it. Or rather, it shows exactly how considerate and attentive Sheryl is. Like that time with the bird-type monster who tried to run from us. She’s always there to back us up and to take care of loose ends. Anyway, it looks like we’re all back together now.

“I don’t think I need to explain much, but let’s enjoy the garden here while we’re waiting to do that thing I always do.” “‘Tis a splendid idea!” “‘kay.” “Yes, let’s.”

I’ll be honest. I’ve never sat around in a park to enjoy the cherry blossoms or anything like that in real life. But perhaps I’m still feeling the adrenaline rush from the fight, this was a little exciting. … I mean, as exciting as looking as flowers can be.

“It’s a little boring to sit around with nothing. I’ll make sure I take up cooking next time, so we can have a picnic or something.” “Will it not be straining your Energy reserves, Miss Kizuna?” “You’re right, but it’s something I should learn sooner or later. It’ll be useful for our voyage on the seas.” “That would not be a bad idea. We bring some food on board, but if we run out, we can rely on cooking.” “Since we have Shouko and Yamikage as specced purely for combat and Sheryl for crafting. I guess that leaves me as the team’s cook.” “… only if you’re okay with it.” “It’ll synergize well with my weapon type too.”

I’ll catch and cook our meals. Now that I think about it, I don’t do much with the fish after I catch them. Why didn’t I take up cooking sooner? The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Hmm? It sounds like someone’s running up to us. It was Tsugumi and Roz’s party.

“Big brooooo!”

She barreled towards me and squeezed me tightly in her arms. Maybe because I’m low on Energy, but I didn’t have the strength to pry her off of me.

“That was some amazing support there, Kizuna.” “You too, Roz. Almost all of you are ranked in the top 100, right?” “Ah, we were just lucky.” “You guys wanna join us? We were just about to celebrate our victory.”

Roz looked like he thought about it for a quick second. Well, I don’t blame him for being hesitant in front of total strangers.

“I hate to say no, but we’ve got to get going.” “You guys heading out for more grinding?” “Nah, but we’ve gotta figure out our equipment and skills.” “Frontliners sure have it rough. Well, good luck with that then.”

They’re throwing themselves back out onto the battlefield right after a huge raid battle. Honestly, I’m ready to pass out already. Frontliners are just so impressive. Well, I mean, I’ve been in their position before too. I know just how addictive games can be. Roz didn’t look like he was here just to say hi.

“Anyways, I was hoping to talk to the girl with the fan.” “Yes? What is it?”

Shouko looked at him with suspicion. He’s gonna ask her to join their party, I bet. Well, after seeing Shouko perform like that during the raid, everybody should be begging her to join their parties.

“I was wondering if you’d like to join—” “No, thank you.”

She cut Roz off before he could even finish his sentence. Yamikage and Sheryl looked like they wanted to say something but judging by how quickly she rejected him, I don’t think anyone could change Shouko’s mind. It was a bit of a shock, frankly speaking. I wouldn’t have expected her to flatly reject him like that, given how considerate Shouko is. She was quick to understand what he wanted as well. But even for being such an upright and proper lady, Shouko has her brash moments too, I guess. To refuse him like that is not unimaginable. Rosette seemed a little taken aback as well.

“But with your skill, you’d be perfect for the frontlines.” “I will follow Kizuna no matter what.”

… I’ve knew from the get-go that Shouko is like that, but still, that’s super embarrassing for me. I can still remember how politely she bowed to me when we first met.

“I see… sorry for trying to poach your party member like that, Kizuna.” “No worries. That’s just how Shouko is.” “Yeah, I can tell… those bastards have no idea what they’re missing out on.”

I’m guessing he’s referring to Shouko’s previous party members. It’s easy to judge us Spirits by the rumors that surround us. A lot of people fall into a bad habit of blindly listening to whatever strategy sites or wiki pages instead of seeing it for themselves. It really is a shame for them. I’ve really hit it off with Shouko. Not only is she a great person, she’s real skilled at combat too.

“Alrighty, then we’ll be heading off.” “Gotcha. I can’t wait to fight alongside you guys again.”

Roz and his party waved goodbye before teleporting away. But my sister, Tsugumi, is still clung onto me like a koala.

“Listen…” “What’s good, bro?” “Your party’s gone already, y’know?”

Tsugumi looked over her shoulder to see no traces of her teammates anywhere. Then, she shook her head and looked at me.

“What’s up?” “… big bro, are you guys going to sit here and chill for a bit?” “That’s what we’re planning to do. What about it?” “…”

For some reason, Tsugumi was staring straight into my eyes. She only looks like this when she’s really concentrating at her games. She must be thinking long and hard about something. No one—not even Kanata—can break her concentration. It’s like Tsugumi gets into some sort of a trance. Shouko gets into a hyper-aware state like this sometimes too. But Tsugumi? She only gets like this when she’s doing something she likes… that is to say when only when she’s gaming. And seemingly as if she’s figured it all out, she beamed with a smile.

“Alright! I’ve made up my mind! See ya, big bro!”

Then, she disappears after using a Tome of Returning. What was that all about?

“Anyway. Let’s go enjoy the flowers, shall we?”

We sat around chatting until everyone around us had left.

contents: /prologue/ /ch001/ /ch002/ /ch003/ /ch004/ /ch005/ /ch006/ /ch007/ /ch008/ /ch009/ /ch010/ /ch011/ /ch012/ /ch013/ /ch014/ /ch015/ /ch016/ /ch017/ /ch018/ /ch019/ /ch020/ /ch021/ /ch022/ /ch023/ /ch024/ /ch025/ /ch026/ /ch027/ /ch028/ /ch029/ /next/

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afcjones · 5 years

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more soccer AU positions

(lowkey cont. from this)

America: Forward. For much the same reason as Denmark is a forward tbh. He’s a rookie playing his first season in a top-tier league, a total goober off the field, but don’t be fooled by his boyish grin --- this boy is ambitious as hell. When he’s out on the pitch, he’s surprisingly tactful and utterly merciless; he doesn’t care if they’re up 5-0, he’s gonna keep going for goal. He’s kind of a jerk on the field honestly; he’s young and his emotions get the better of him at times, and just like Den, he wants every single goal, but his style isn’t as aggressive as Denmark’s overall: his fouls are usually tactical and he’s mostly just making himself a nuisance for the opposing team --- particularly by nutmegging other players, one of his absolute favorite things to do. (It gets him in trouble. A lot.) His platforms of choice are Snapchat and Instagram, 80% of which are selfies, but also gets surprisingly political over on Twitter. He likes to hang out with kids at the park or the academy, and young fans at the stadium too, because he was one of them not too long ago and he really wants soccer to get bigger in the U.S. Much like Denmark, you either love him or hate him, there’s no in-between with this kid.

Canada: Defender (winger) Alfred’s twin brother. It’s something commentators love to talk about, because he plays in Canada, which also competes in MLS --- and I’m gonna namedrop Toronto FC here because I feel like the atmosphere suits him better than Montreal or Vancouver --- which means that the two of them are always pitted against each other, at least outside of the national team. It’s the trend we’re all familiar with: Matthew is the quieter one, keeps to himself, doesn’t do as many interviews, and isn’t a striker, so 8 times out of 10 when people are talking about him, it’s in comparison with his brother. He’s used to it, though it’s not entirely fair; Matthew is just as intense on the field as he is mild off of it, he’s just as fast as Alfred (and they are fast, holy jesus), just as skilled with the ball, and it doesn’t take long before he’s a regular in the starting lineup. This boy will shut you down. He’s the player you don’t really know anything about, but you always want him on the field, ‘cause nobody can get past this kid.

England: Coach. Previously an attacking midfielder in his playing days; all the good parts of maintaining a solid midfield, with the added bonus of scoring goals. Still young enough that Alfred and Matthew remember watching him play whenever English football was on TV, but retired due to problems with injuries; he had a rather hot-headed style of play back then that led to a lot of collisions and fouls. Tends to be hard on his players. Sometimes a little too hard --- nitpicky, one could even say, communication isn’t always his best skill --- but it’s all in the name of good football, you see. He’s not disappointed in you because you suck, he’s disappointed because what you’re doing sucks, and he knows you can be better, so what on earth was that performance? Known for getting, uh. Passionate, shall we say, on the sidelines. Probably coaching Alfred’s team. Also probably grooming Alfred to be captain one day. Maybe also putting a little too much pressure on him as a result...they’ll probably be fine...

France: Retired forward. To quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.” Was a star for a hot minute in his day, and probably played for a club that likes to collect star players like Paris Saint-Germain. His career came to a head somewhat early with France’s 1998 World Cup win --- that, combined with the seasons right before and after, was his best run, and something he’s still incredibly proud of. Retired early, perhaps due to injury or because he wasn’t enjoying it enough anymore, and is now in some completely unrelated industry like teaching culinary arts for kids. Still an avid football fan, however, and probably the owner of a club somewhere. A bit of a strange man, very French, but you can’t help but like him. He’s so charming... Small aside: Could perhaps be Alfred and Matthew’s weird uncle. Definitely something going on between him and Arthur. Friends? Rivals? Secret lovers? All of the above? Rumors and theories abound, but nothing has been proven.

Germany: Defender (center-back, vice-captain). This man takes “defending champions of the world” very seriously. Ludwig Beilschmidt is a one-man wall. He’s still young, close to Alfred’s age, but he’s been playing football since he was old enough to kick a ball, and he’s on his way to being one of the best defenders to come out of Germany. Would make a great goalkeeper too, and actually started out as one in his youth, but he wants to be in on the action and influencing the game. Very good at reading the situation. Also very precise, great for corner kicks, intercepting the ball, and long passes. His ambition and hard work mostly serve him well, although he does have a tendency to stress about his performance and dwell way too much on mistakes, which can trip him up and cause a cycle of frustration. It’s just really important to him. Dude is intense. Which is funny, because he’s actually pretty sweet IRL; stern-faced and awkward, but well-meaning. Isn’t on social media much, but his instagram is almost exclusively pictures and videos of his cat and dogs. He’s either a blessing or a curse, depending on which team you’re rooting for.

BONUS

Prussia: Retired defender (left-back, captain). Battled with some chronic health problems before a career-ending injury finally forced him to quit early, but still embedded in the industry somehow; coaching or working with an academy would probably suit him. He’s just as intense as his baby brother (whose praises he will sing at every opportunity as long as Ludwig’s not within earshot; despite his teasing, he’s very proud), but he’s an awesome good mentor and has a deep respect for the sport. Keeping his eye on the growing American soccer market... Small aside: a big fan of the German club Eintracht Frankfurt. There’s just something about that white&black + eagle combination that really...speaks to him...plus, how much more awesome can you get than having an actual, real live eagle as a mascot? Named Attila?! Only if Gilbert himself were playing for them could they ever be more awesome than that.

Japan: Dude is one of the best FIFA19 players you’ve ever seen. Ever. Has a degree in web design or programming, but he’s made his career out of being really damn good at FIFA. Practically an eSports legend. You think eSports is dumb? You think it’s just a video game? Just watch this guy.

China: He’s been here so long he’s played pretty much every position, and he’s not going anywhere any time soon. He’s that player who seems to have been around since the dawn of time, and yet somehow hasn’t aged a day since he turned 30. Probably immortal. May, in fact, never retire, but if he did, he’d still be breaking records for longest coaching career in the history of football.

Mexico: One of the voices urging her country to put more into women’s soccer. Although soccer is incredibly popular in South America, it’s also incredibly male-dominated; women’s soccer teams are largely amateur, and the women’s national team relies heavily on Mexican diaspora in other countries like the USA. It’s so important to her to be nothing less than absolutely outstanding, and boy oh boy, she is. I’m not sure what position she’d play, but I get the feeling she’d be very versatile on the field no matter what. This girl is out there working her ass off every single day.

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918kissmalaysia3-blog · 5 years

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ofouthatif2kwse-blog · 4 years

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How to sell cars on gta 5?

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spaceybot · 7 years

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Send help I haven't seen transformers since I was little and now I can only remember starscream, Optimus prime, and bumblebee. Help me remember/update? ;-;

Dude I am so sorry I didn’t even see this in my inbox till now!!

You got the big names down I think so lemme introduce you to some of my faves! I’ll keep these examples to more well known characters to avoid overwhelming you. I hope you join the TF Fandom if you haven’t already . :D

Soundwave: I’m sure once you hear his iconic voice you’ll remember him. He’s the robo dad to a bunch of tiny bots and he turns into a cassette player. Every one of his incarnations (IDW, G1, etc.) is badass and I love them equally but I recommend watching him on Transformers Prime. It captures his creepiness spot on. He’s a communications officer (usually) and the only hyper-competent Decepticon aside from Megatron.

Ratchet: He’s in EVERY piece of Transformers media ever so there’s no missing him. He’s amazing and complex in each one but I especially like the IDW version because of his complex interactions with the cast. Every version of Ratchet is somewhat unique but all you need to know is that he the cranky Autobot medic/grandpa.

Jazz: I’ve loved Jazz since I played Fall of Cybertron (just a TF video game, you can look up his gameplay on Youtube!) He is guaranteed to make you smile and he’s almost always written with a big personality. He is a certified bro. Everyone needs a best friend like jazz. Also he’s in charge of Special Operations so he’s a badass on top of being cute.

Skyfire/Jetfire: He’s the first bot I ever loved tbh. Usually, he’s the one who transports other Autobots around. He’s also a giant cinnamon roll. Please, I’m begging you, go watch “Fire in the Sky” on Youtube. It’s his debut episode in Transformers G1. You will see why he’s deserves protection. He’s precious.

Now for some fan favorites!

Swindle: He’s an asshole. But everybody (myself included) loves him because of that. He’s like a used car salesman and loves money. Also he has huge purple optics/eyes which is kind of weird cause nobody else really has them. He’s a bit sweeter in the IDW comics. He’s also supposed to be part of a combiner team but his team gets ignored because apparently they’re less interesting. I’m salty because I love the others as much as I love Swindle.

Sideswipe: Bad boy delinquent who likes to play pranks. People like him because he’s hot. Sometimes he gets violent. VERY POPULAR EVERYWHERE. He actually has a twin brother but he gets ignored too lol.

NAUTICA, Windblade, Chromia, The Torchbearers (Fembots): I freaking love my girls. I’m sure you knew of Arcee when you were little but there are far more female characters now and they are very well-written and diverse. Unfortunately they’re mostly exclusive to the comics. I listed a bunch so I can’t go in-depth. Just know that Nautica is bae. She turns into a boat. I would die for her.

I have a lot of favorites but I didn’t want to overwhelm you with my nerdiness. Please, if you ever need some more specific recommendations (single characters you wanna know, TF media you’re interested in, etc.) message me and I shall wholeheartedly indulge you!!!

#i know i probably should have mentioned starscream #but i don't like him #I'M SORRY DON't HAte me lol

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curriebelle · 7 years

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I’m sure you all guessed this but if you’re lookin for something to do between Thursdays I’m gonna recommend Baldur’s Gate II to e v e r y o n e. Especially if you don’t have a D&D group at home, because it’s the closest you’ll get to D&D without one, and ESPECIALLY if you’re also a Bioware fan. I have some thinky thoughts about it & Dragon Age II here. Not so much the usual #currie academia, but along those lines nonetheless.

So I said in a post before that Baldur’s Gate II is very much like what Dragon Age 2 should have been, and I want to pull that apart for you somewhat. Disclaimer here that while I’ve played DA2 a disgusting number of times, I’m only 20 or so days into BG2 (Chapter 3, I think)

I acknowledge that technically speaking, DA2 is rightfully the lowest-rated game of the Dragon Age franchise, but it’s also my favourite by far. This is largely because I admired what it aspired to be. It wanted to be an in-depth exploration of a single, fascinating locale, and all the conflicts that could arise from it across time. Some of the things people complained about - such as Hawke having such a limited background, the divisiveness of the companions and their behaviour, and the lack of a single overarching villain - were the result of reaching for this goal and failing. Bioware either lost their direction or lacked the time to pull it off . A lot of the other problems with the game, particularly the repeated dungeon maps, but also the useless junk-gathering and slimmed-down combat (which I actually liked, but I get that it’s controversial) managed to cripple this particular aspiration even further. Kirkwall lost parts of its complexity and bigness, but clues of it remained behind - particularly in the morally complex sidequests, which often hold a mirror up to the larger conflicts. My favourite one is when you head out to find the son of some noble or count and it turns out that he’s just a regular old straight-up murderer. No demons in his head, but suffering a mental illness - not one I’m qualified to diagnose, but one that each of the party members misinterprets as a pathetic excuse for his violence. Their preferred solution is to kill the bastard, but a player - if they actually know what mental illness is, and how it can be mismanaged - is left with much more to think about.

The resemblance between Dragon Age II and Baldur’s Gate 2 started out as simple allusions and parallels, which I thought were amusing. Now I know who Edwina the barmaid is, and now I know why the loading screens say “gather your party before venturing forth”, and now I know why they make you collect pantaloons. I’ve also met some of the predecessors of the Dragon Age party members. Imoen looks a heckofa lot like an early-2000s Leliana and gets the same broken-bird treatment. Jan Jansen is Varric after several heavy doses of hallucinatory drugs, from the family merchant business to the hand-made crossbow to the penchant for tall tales. I’m pretty sure Velanna from Awakening is a re-skinned Viconia (and I think they share a VA, to boot). Also, I feel like some of the flatter BG2 characters were revamped, re-examined, or re-incarnated. Anomen is pretty much a sexist prick so far, but he’s had some interesting chats with me about his lawful-neutralness. I wonder if their answer to him was to take the same ethics but fix the sexism problem with a genderflip, because in a lot of ways he reminds me of Aveline. (Disclaimer: this in no way takes away from the fact that Aveline is the greatest thing ever and Anomen is a lil shit). Moreover, Morrigan’s eternally grumpy power-hungry practicality, as well her potential prideful fall, and her return, in a sequel, as a semi-friendly spy embedded in a political clusterfuck (Orlesian court vs. Shadow Thieves) makes her quite reminiscent of Edwin. There are others, too, as there are exceptions. I don’t see a clear Fenris analogue in BG2 yet, nor has Minsc ever been properly revived (though Iron Bull maybe comes close). I think that’s smart, though. Imoen/Leliana is a good template to reuse but Minsc shall never be equaled.

Beyond the people in my party, I started to see traces of Kirkwall in Athkatla. Some of the districts have obvious analogues (Keep = Government, Hightown = Waukeen’s Promenade (same aesthetic, even, with all the white stone), Darktown/Lowtown = Slums/Graveyard, Docks = ....well, Docks). There’s also the sense that there are some really hecked-up things going on in the underbelly of the Athkatla, what with the random lich I found in the Egyptian-style tomb under the graveyard (?), the beholders in the sewers (FUCK) and the strange women Naruto-running around at night and casting dominate on random thugs (???). Plus they have a strangely perpendicular policy on magic. Mages in Athkatla are both the Circle and the Templars - that is, the practice of magic is heavily restricted, but it’s restricted by the Cowled Wizards (who have conveniently cast Immunity to Government on themselves). Or perhaps Athkatla is what the Tevinter Imperium looks like from the inside?

Quest structures are also re-used between the games. The overarching quest of the first part of BG2 is identical to Dragon Age II′s - I have to raise enough money to Save my Sister, either to protect her from the Circle or steal her back from Irenicus. The anti-qunari cult and the weirdness of the Primeval Thaig are not dissimilar to the Cult of the Unseeing Eye quest (except for the FUCKING BEHOLDERS aaah). There’s somebody skinning people in the Bridge District at the moment, and though I haven’t advanced very far in that quest I’m catching the horrible, creeping scent of All That Remains about it. One of the very first quests was to return a handful of acorns to a faerie queen, which requires that you leave Athkatla - and it felt almost exactly like turning over Flemeth’s amulet, even before I found the red dragon hanging out in the same area. I’m even getting companion loyalty quests now (hence, Edwina) and while reuniting Keldorn with his wife was considerably less funny (though just as heartwarming) as convincing Aveline and Donnic to Cup each others’ Joinings, I’m not surprised I’ll be helping people with everything from marriages to magic mishaps. Let’s just hope Jan Jansen doesn’t make me gather poo for his turnip-based explosives so he can bomb the Cowled Wizards or something (Cheers, Justice, I’ll always love you).

But these similarities aren’t really a bad thing at all. I’m certainly not accusing Bioware of copying their own homework - I’m actually accusing them of failing to copy their own homework. Or, to stretch the metaphor, for their horrible teacher Mr. EA to change the deadlines to their homework without telling them so they had to rush it and get a C+ from all the game critics. Poor muffins.

Here’s the thing. The inklings I had about The Point of setting things exclusively in Kirkwall are full-on confirmed by the existence of Baldur’s Gate II and Athkatla. Games like DA:O and DA:I are explorations of breadth, spanning countries; games like DA2 and BG2 are explorations in depth, spanning time, and digging deep into a particular city. Athkatla feels amazingly alive to me, and endlessly fascinating and complex. There are multiple underground ruins alluding to ancient magic and long-forgotten deaths. There are hints in the government district that everyone from nobility to turnip farmers regularly drown in ineffective bureaucracy. The Shadow Thieves, the Cowled Wizards, the noble families, and the Radiant Heart, and the Circus, all of them fill out the middle ranks of a squabbling, rule-breaking, living populace. Party members have ties to everyone from peasants, to nobility, to Cambions from Sigil. And there are strange individuals everywhere, spies and liars and con artists and performers and collectors and people who will only sell me turnips. I just finished a quest where three young boys asked me to buy them swords and I bought them a keg of ale instead. It was awesome.

Anyway, this actually segues into something else that’s interesting for me - Dragon Age 2 was all set to tackle the coolest thing that emerged, quite organically, in BG2 - the fact that of all the characters in the game, Athkatla is the most interesting. Playing it, you begin to understand why the quests are so similar between it and DA2. Exploring things like lost ruins, or the different rewards, invitations and behaviours of different organizations, or serial killers and justice systems, or problems with merchants, or entertainment venues like theatres and circuses, or religious conflicts - those are all quests that deeply engage one in the character of a place. Quite frankly, I like that better than hopping town-to-town and solving problems as you pass, which is the DA:O/DA:I model. It’s far too easy to seem random that way (what did those werewolves in DA:O ever amount to?). And conversely, it’s also why things like the party in Orlais are the most exciting things in those games: they offer you glimpses into the operation of society, into how the fantasy world truly works from the crowns to the cobblestones. BG2 is made of that experience of depth, and DA2 was prepared to be that but more.

In certain places, you can see how DA2 fixed the very, very few problems BG2 actually had (alongside a decade of technological development, of course.) The rivalry/friendship system in DA2 is a huge improvement on the reputation/alignment system of BG2. I am effective as shit at solving problems so why does Edwin grouse at me just because I’m nice? Moreover, why do I have to choose between mega-discounts and the game’s best wizard? I much prefer the idea of friendship/rivalry, because real people can respect and disagree with you, and (although this might just be because I have his romance mod installed *ahem*) the DA2-esque Rivalry relationship seems to better characterize how Edwin thinks of me anyway. And while I’m on my soapbox, why’d they take that system away from Inquisition? Rivalry was certainly would have given me a better time with Vivienne, whom I desperately wanted to love but couldn’t because I could never get her approval high enough to offer me any quests. Heck, at least Edwin will still get Nether Scroll’d even if he constantly complains about me rescuing kittens.

Moreover, before its flawed execution, the skeleton of DA2 is far more ambitious and intriguing than BG2′s. BG2 is still a defeat-the-evil wizard game, and it stumbled across the story-of-a-city model largely by accident (one of the most graceful stumbles I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure). I assume (though correct me if I’m wrong) that I’ll still be kickin’ Irenicus’s unsympathetic ass as an endgame (unless he goes Sephiroth Supernova or has an evil boss or something). DA2’s conflicts with the qunari, and especially the conflict between the mages and the templars, turned the city into DA2′s most interesting character and its primary villain, which is the logical, brilliant extenstion of what BG2 accomplished. Meredith, Anders and Orsino - the trifecta of DA2’s endgame catalysts - were all emblematic of an impossible social and political conflict, born out of everything Kirkwall was over the span of a decade. Almost every little plotline in DA2 gives you something new to think about in terms of law, order, magic and rule in Kirkwall, and the finale was a culmination of that. It was a narrative waterfall into which the stream of every sidequest fed. It’s a brilliant structure - but it failed to spark the love its narratively inferior predecessor did, and certainly failed to achieve the quality of BG2.

And it’s only because Kirkwall is no Athkatla. It could have been, but it wasn’t. It felt emptier, and thinner, less populated and less complex, even though all the bones were there. This was largely because of those repeated dungeons - there’s something new in every corner in BG2, and the exploration of the wilderness outside the city is more extended, and every room is different, whereas the dungeons in DA2 wear out their welcome before the first act is over. It’s immensely frustrating, because Dragon Age 2 was so close to being BG2 but better. And there are things (particularly that friendship/rivalry thing) that are marks of improvement and reflection borne of lessons learned from BG2 and DA:O. It makes DA2 even more of a tragedy than it already was. Suffice to say I love both these games a lot, and I am indeed recommending that anybody whose curiosity has been piqued immediately download BG2 from gog.com (I hear there’s a bear companion in the Enhanced Edition. His name is Wilson).

But if I might replace the soapbox a second, I think the biggest tragedy of all of this was that Bioware didn’t try again. For all that Dragon Age 2 felt unfinished and unfocused, it was nowhere near as soulless and directionless as Dragon Age Inquisition, at least for me. Inquisition functioned fine, and it’s not a “bad” game by any quantifiable metric, but I could not be asked to play it more than once. I know people like it, and there are things about it to like - from my own perspective, I loved the fancy-party sequence, and there have been few companions in any game as interesting to me as Blackwall (is that a weird choice? I don’t know, I’m not really In This Fandom). But I did not care about my Inquisitor the way I cared about Hawke. I didn’t care about something as indistinct as The Inquisition the way I cared about Kirkwall, as underdeveloped as it was. I admired DA:II’s aspirations; I do not admire Inquisition’s attempt to be Skyrim when that’s not what we come to Bioware for. I don’t want Bioware to make Skyrim, I want Bioware to try BG2/DA2 again. It could be so phenomenal if they pulled it off.

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Master of Orion

Given the shadow which the original Master of Orion still casts over the gaming landscape of today, one might be forgiven for assuming, as many younger gamers doubtless do, that it was the very first conquer-the-galaxy grand-strategy game ever made. The reality, however, is quite different. For all that its position of influence is hardly misbegotten for other very good reasons, it was already the heir to a long tradition of such games at the time of its release in 1993. In fact, the tradition dates back to well before computer games as we know them today even existed.

The roots of the strategic space opera can be traced back to the tabletop game known as Diplomacy, designed by Allan B. Calhamer and first published in 1959 by Avalon Hill. Taking place in the years just prior to World War I, it put seven players in the roles of leaders of the various “great powers” of Europe. Although it included a playing board, tokens, and most of the other accoutrements of a typical board game, the real action, at least if you were playing it properly, was entirely social, in the alliances that were forged and broken and the shady deals that were struck. In this respect, it presaged many of the ideas that would later go into Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games. It thus represents an instant in gaming history as seminal in its own way as the 1954 publication of Avalon Hill’s Tactics, the canonical first tabletop wargame and the one which touched off the hobby of experiential gaming in general. But just as importantly for our purposes, Diplomacy‘s shifting alliances and the back-stabbings they led to would become an essential part of countless strategic space operas, including Master of Orion 34 years later.

Because getting seven friends together in the same room for the all-day affair that was a complete game of Diplomacy was almost as hard in the 1960s as it is today, inventive gamers developed systems for playing it via post; the first example of this breed would seem to date from 1963. And once players had started modifying the rules of Diplomacy to make it work under this new paradigm, it was a relatively short leap to begin making entirely new play-by-post games with new themes which shared some commonalities of approach with Calhamer’s magnum opus.

Thus in December of 1966, Dan Brannon announced a play-by-post game called Xeno, whose concept sounds very familiar indeed in the broad strokes. Each player started with a cluster of five planets — a tiny toehold in a sprawling, unknown galaxy waiting to be colonized. “The vastness of the playing space, the secrecy of the identity of the other players, the secrecy of the locations of ships and planets, the total lack of information without efforts of investigation, all these factors are meant to create the real problems of a race trying to expand to other planets,” wrote Brannon. Although the new game would be like Diplomacy in that it would presumably still culminate in negotiations, betrayals, and the inevitable final war to determine the ultimate victor, these stages would now be preceded by those of exploration and colonization, until a galaxy that had seemed so unfathomably big at the start proved not to be big enough to accommodate all of its would-be space empires. Certainly all of this too will be familiar to any player of Master of Orion or one of its heirs. Brannon’s game even included a tech tree of sorts, with players able to acquire better engines, weapons, and shields for their ships every eight turns they managed to survive.

In practice, Xenon played out at a pace to which the word “glacial” hardly does justice. The game didn’t really get started until September of 1967, and by a year after that just three turns had been completed. I don’t know whether a single full game of it was ever finished. Nevertheless, it proved hugely influential within the small community of experiential-gaming fanzines and play-by-post enthusiasts. The first similar game, called Galaxy and run by H. David Montgomery, had already appeared before Xeno had processed its third turn.

But the idea was, literally and figuratively speaking, too big for the medium for which it had been devised; it was just too compelling to remain confined to those few stalwart souls with the patience for play-by-post gaming. It soon branched out into two new mediums, each of which offered a more immediate sort of satisfaction.

In 1975, following rejections from Avalon Hill and others, one Howard Thompson formed his own company to publish the face-to-face board game Stellar Conquest, the first strategic space opera to appear in an actual box on store shelves. When Stellar Conquest became a success, it spawned a string of similar board games with titles like Godsfire, Outreach, Second Empire, and Starfall during this, the heyday of experiential gaming on the tabletop. But the big problem with such games was their sheer scope and math-heavy nature, which were enough to test the limits of many a salty old grognard who usually reveled in complexity. They all took at least three or four hours to play in their simplest variants, and a single game of at least one of them — SPI’s Outreach — could absorb weeks of gaming Saturdays. Meanwhile they were all dependent on pages and pages of fiddly manual calculations, in the time before spreadsheet macros or even handheld calculators were commonplace. (One hates to contemplate the plight of the Outreach group who have just spent the last two months resolving who shall become master of the galaxy, only to discover that the victor made a mistake on her production worksheet back on the second turn which invalidated all of the numbers that followed…) These games were, in other words, crying out for computerization.

Luckily, then, that too had already started to happen by the end of the 1970s. One of the reasons that play-by-post games of this type tended to run so sluggishly — beyond, that is, the inherent sluggishness of the medium itself — came down to the same problem as that faced by their tabletop progeny: the burden their size and complexity placed on their administrators. Therefore in 1976, Rick Loomis, the founder of a little company called Flying Buffalo, started running the commercial play-by-post game Starweb on what gaming historian Shannon Appelcline has called “probably the first computer ever purchased exclusively to play games” (or, at least, to administrate them): a $14,000 Raytheon 704 minicomputer. He would continue to run Starweb for more than thirty years — albeit presumably not on the same computer throughout that time.

But the first full-fledged incarnation of the computerized strategic space opera — in the sense of a self-contained game meant to be played locally on a single computer — arrived only in 1983. Called Reach for the Stars, it was the first fruit of what would turn into a long-running and prolific partnership between the Aussies Roger Keating and Ian Trout, who in that rather grandiose fashion that was so typical of grognard culture had named themselves the Strategic Studies Group. Reach for the Stars was based so heavily upon Stellar Conquest that it’s been called an outright unlicensed clone. Nevertheless, it’s a remarkable achievement for the way that it manages to capture that sense of size and scope that is such a huge part of these games’ appeal on 8-bit Apple IIs and Commodore 64s with just 64 K of memory. Although the whole is necessarily rather bare-bones compared to what would come later, the computer players’ artificial intelligence, always a point of pride with Keating and Trout, is surprisingly effective; on the harder difficulty level, the computer can truly give you a run for your money, and seems to do so without relying solely on egregious cheating.

It doesn’t look like much, but the basic hallmarks of the strategic space opera are all there in Reach for the Stars.

Reach for the Stars did very well, prompting updated ports to more powerful machines like the Apple Macintosh and IIGS and the Commodore Amiga as the decade wore on. A modest trickle of other boxed computer games of a similar stripe also appeared, albeit none which did much to comprehensively improve on SSG’s effort: Imperium Galactum, Spaceward Ho!, Armada 2525, Pax Imperia. Meanwhile the commercial online service CompuServe offered up MegaWars III, in which up to 100 players vied for control of the galaxy; it played a bit like one of those years-long play-by-post campaigns of yore compressed into four to six weeks of constant — and expensive, given CompuServe’s hourly dial-up rates — action and intrigue. Even the shareware scene got in on the act, via titles like Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021 and the earliest versions of the cult classic VGA Planets, a game which is still actively maintained and played to this day. And then, finally, along came Master of Orion in 1993 to truly take this style of game to the next level.

Had things gone just a little bit differently, Master of Orion too might have been a shareware release. It was designed in the spare time of Steve Barcia, an electrical engineer living in Austin, Texas, and programmed by Steve himself, his wife Marcia Barcia, and their friend Ken Burd. Steve claims not ever to have played any of the computer games I’ve just mentioned, but, as an avid and longtime tabletop gamer, he was very familiar with Stellar Conquest and a number of its successors. (No surprise there: Howard Thompson and his game were in fact also products of Austin’s vibrant board-gaming scene.)

After working on their computer game, which they called Star Lords, on and off for years, the little band of hobbyist programmers submitted it to MicroProse, whose grand-strategy game of Civilization, a creation of their leading in-house designer Sid Meier, had just taken the world by storm. A MicroProse producer named Jeff Johannigman — himself another member of the Austin gaming fraternity, as it happened, one who had just left Origin Systems in Austin to join MicroProse up in Baltimore — took a shine to the unpolished gem and signed its creators to develop it further. Seeing their hobby about to become a real business, the trio quit their jobs, took the name of SimTex, and leased a cramped office above a gyro joint to finish their game under Johannigman’s remote supervision, with a little additional help from MicroProse’s art department.

A fellow named Alan Emrich was one of most prominent voices in strategy-game criticism at the time; he was the foremost scribe on the subject at Computer Gaming World magazine, the industry’s accepted journal of record, and had just published a book-length strategy guide on Civilization in tandem with Johnny Wilson, the same magazine’s senior editor. Thanks to that project, Emrich was well-connected with MicroProse, and was happy to serve as a sounding board for them. And so, one fateful day very early in 1993, Johannigman asked if he’d like to have a look at a new submission called Star Lords.

As Emrich himself puts it, his initial impressions “were not that great.” He remembers thinking the game looked like “something from the late 1980s” — an eternity in the fast-changing computing scene of the early 1990s. Yet there was just something about it; the more he played, the more he wanted to keep playing. So, he shared Star Lords with his friend Tom Hughes, with whom he’d been playing tabletop and computerized strategy games for twenty years. Hughes had the same experience. Emrich:

After intense, repeated playing of the game, Tom and I were soon making numerous suggestions to [Johannigman], who, in turn, got tired of passing them on to the designer and lead programmer, Steve Barcia. Soon, we were talking to Steve directly. The telephone lines were burning regularly and a lot of ideas went back and forth. All the while, Steve was cooking up a better and better game. It was during this time that the title changed to Master of Orion and the game’s theme and focus crystallized.

I wrote a sneak preview for Computer Gaming World magazine where I indicated that Master of Orion was shaping up to be a good game. It had a lot of promise, but I didn’t think it was up there with Sid Meier’s Civilization, the hobby’s hallmark of strategy gaming at that time. But by the time that story hit the newsstands, I had changed my mind. I found myself still playing the game constantly and was reflecting on that fact when Tom called me. We talked about Master of Orion, of course, and Tom said, “You know, I think this game might become more addicting even than Civilization.” I replied, “You know, I think it already is.”

I was hard on Emrich in earlier articles for his silly assertion that Civilization‘s inclusion of global warming as a threat to progress and women’s suffrage as a Wonder of the World contituted some form of surrender to left-wing political correctness, as I was for his even sillier assertion that the game’s simplistic and highly artificial economic model could somehow be held up as proof for the pseudo-scientific theory of trickle-down economics. Therefore let me be very clear in praising him here: Emrich and Hughes played an absolutely massive role in making Master of Orion one of the greatest strategy games of all time. Their contribution was such that SimTex took the unusual step of adding to the credits listing a “Special Thanks to Alan Emrich and Tom Hughes for their invaluable design critiquing and suggestions.” If anything, that credit would seem to be more ungenerous than the opposite. By all indications, a pair of full-fledged co-designer credits wouldn’t have been out of proportion to the reality of their contribution. The two would go on to write the exhaustive official strategy guide for the game, a tome numbering more than 400 pages. No one could have been more qualified to tackle that project.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Emrich did one more great service for Master of Orion and, one might even say, for gaming in general. In a “revealing sneak preview” of the game, published in the September 1993 issue of Computer Gaming World, he pronounced it to be “rated XXXX.” After the requisite measure of back-patting for such edgy turns of phrase as these, Emrich settled down to explain what he really meant by the label: “XXXX” in this context stood for “EXplore, EXpand, EXploit, and EXterminate.” And thus was a new sub-genre label born. The formulation from the article was quickly shortened to “4X” by enterprising gamers uninterested in making strained allusions to pornographic films. In that form, it would be applied to countless titles going forward, right up to the present day, and retroactively applied to countless titles of the past, including all of the earlier space operas I’ve just described as well as the original Civilization — a game to which the “EXterminate” part of the label fits perhaps less well, but such is life.

Emrich’s article also creates an amusing distinction for the more pedantic ludic taxonomists and linguists among us. Although Master of Orion definitely was not, as we’ve now seen at some length, the first 4X game in the abstract, it was the very first 4X game to be called a 4X game. Maybe this accounts for some of the pride of place it holds in modern gaming culture?

However that may be, though, the lion’s share of the credit for Master of Orion‘s enduring influence must surely be ascribed to what a superb game it is in its own right. If it didn’t invent the 4X space opera, it did in some sense perfect it, at least in its digital form. It doesn’t do anything conceptually new on the face of it — you’re still leading an alien race as it expands through a randomly created galaxy, competing with other races in the fields of economics, technology, diplomacy, and warfare to become the dominant civilization — but it just does it all so well.

A new game of Master of Orion begins with you choosing a galaxy size (from small to huge), a difficulty level (from simple to impossible), and a quantity of opposing aliens to compete against (from one to five). Then you choose which specific race you would like to play; you have ten possibilities in all, drawing from a well-worn book of science-fiction tropes, from angry cats in space to hive-mind-powered insects, from living rocks to pacifistic brainiacs, alongside the inevitable humans. Once you’ve made your choice, you’re cast into the deep end — or rather into deep space — with a single half-developed planet, a colony ship for settling a second planet as soon as you find a likely candidate, two unarmed scout ships for exploring for just such a candidate, and a minimal set of starting technologies.

You must parlay these underwhelming tools into galactic domination hundreds of turns later. You can take the last part of the 4X tag literally and win out by utterly exterminating all of your rivals, but a slightly less genocidal approach is a victory in the “Galactic Council” which meets every quarter-century (i.e., every 25 turns). Here everyone can vote on which of the two most currently populous empires’ leaders they prefer to appoint as ruler of the galaxy, with “everyone” in this context including the two leading emperors themselves. Each empire gets a number of votes determined by its population, and the first to collect two-thirds of the total vote wins outright. (Well, almost… it is possible for you to refuse to respect the outcome of a vote that goes against you, but doing so will cause all of your rivals to declare immediate and perpetual war against you, whilst effectively pooling all of their own resources and technology. Good luck with that!)

A typical game of Master of Orion plays out over three broad stages. The first stage is the land grab, the wide-open exploration and colonization phase that happens before you meet your rival aliens. Here your challenge is to balance the economic development of your existing planets against your need to settle as many new ones as possible to put yourself in a good position for the mid-game. (When exactly do I stop spending my home planet’s resources on improving its own infrastructure and start using them to build more colony ships?) The mid-game begins when you start to bump into your rivals, and comes to entail much jockeying for influence, as the various races begin to sort themselves into rival factions. (The Alkaris, bird-like creatures, loathe the Mrrshans, the aforementioned race of frenzied pussycats, and their loathing is returned in kind. I don’t have strong feelings about either one — but whose side would it most behoove me to choose from a purely strategic perspective?) The end-game is nigh when the there is no more room for anyone to expand, apart from taking planets from a rival by force, and the once-expansive galaxy suddenly seems claustrophobic. It often, although by no means always, is marked by a massive war that finally secures somebody that elusive two-thirds majority in the Galactic Council. (I’m so close now! Do I attack those stubbornly intractable Bulrathi to try to knock down their population and get myself over the two-thirds threshold that way, or do I keep trying to sweet-talk and bribe them into voting for me?) The length and character of all of these stages will of course greatly depend on the initial setup you chose; the first stage might be all but nonexistent in a small galaxy with five rivals, while it will go on for a long, long time indeed in a huge galaxy with just one or two oppoenents. (The former scenario is, for the record, far more challenging.)

And that’s how it goes, generally speaking. Yet the core genius of Master of Orion actually lies in how resistant it is to generalization. It’s no exaggeration to say that there really is no “typical” game; I’ve enjoyed plenty which played out in nothing like the pattern I’ve just described for you. I’ve played games in which I never fired a single shot in anger, even ones where I’ve never built a single armed ship of war, just as I’ve played others where I was in a constant war for survival from beginning to end. Master of Orion is gaming’s best box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get when you jump into a new galaxy. Everything about the design is engineered to keep you from falling back on patterns universally applicable to the “typical” game. It’s this quality, more so than any other, that makes Master of Orion so consistently rewarding. If I was to be stranded on the proverbial desert island, I have a pretty good idea of at least one of the games I’d choose to take with me.

I’ll return momentarily to the question of just how Master of Orion manages to build so much variation into a fairly simple set of core rules. I think it might be instructive to do so, however, in comparison with another game, one I’ve already had occasion to mention several times in this article: Civilization.

As I’m so often at pains to point out, game design is, like any creative pursuit, a form of public dialog. Certainly Civilization itself comes with a long list of antecedents, including most notably Walter Bright’s mainframe game Empire, Dani Bunten Berry’s PC game Seven Cities of Gold, and the Avalon Hill board game with which Civilization shares its name. Likewise, Civilization has its progeny, among them Master of Orion. By no means was it the sole influence on the latter; as we’ve seen, Master of Orion was also greatly influenced by the 4X space-opera tradition in board games, especially during its early phases of development.

Still, the mark of Civilization as well can be seen all over its finished design. (After all, Alan Emrich had just literally written the book on Civilization when he started bombarding Barcia with design suggestions…) For example, Master of Orion, unlike all of its space-opera predecessors, on the computer or otherwise, doesn’t bother at all with multiplayer options, preferring to optimize the single-player experience in their stead. One can’t help but feel that it was Civilization, which was likewise bereft of the multiplayer options that earlier grand-strategy games had always included as a matter of course, that empowered Steve Barcia and company to go this way.

At the same time, though, we cannot say that Jeff Johannigman was being particularly accurate when he took to calling Master of Orion “Civilization in space” for the benefit of journalists. For all that it’s easy enough to understand what made such shorthand so tempting — this new project too was a grand-strategy game played on a huge scale, incorporating technology, economics, diplomacy, and military conflict — it wasn’t ultimately fair to either game. Master of Orion is very much its own thing. Its interface, for example, is completely different. (Ironically, Barcia’s follow-up to Master of Orion, the fantasy 4X Master of Magic, hews much closer to Civilization in that respect.) In Master of Orion, Civilization‘s influence often runs as much in a negative as a positive direction; that is to say, there are places where the later design is lifting ideas from the earlier one, but also taking it upon itself to correct perceived weaknesses in their implementation.

I have to use the qualifier “perceived” there because the two games have such different personalities. Simply put, Civilization prioritizes its fictional context over its actual mechanics, while Master of Orion does just the opposite. Together they illustrate the flexibility of the interactive digital medium, showing how great games can be great in such markedly different ways, even when they’re as closely linked in terms of genre as these two are.

Civilization explicitly bills itself as a grand journey through human history, from the time in our distant past when the first hunter-gatherers settled down in villages to an optimistic near-future in space. The rules underpinning the journey are loose-goosey, full of potential exploits. The most infamous of these is undoubtedly the barbarian-horde strategy, in which you research only a few minimal technologies necessary for war-making and never attempt to evolve your society or participate in any meaningful diplomacy thereafter, but merely flood the world with miserable hardscrabble cities supporting primitive armies, attacking everything that moves until every other civilization is extinct. At the lower and moderate difficulty levels at least, this strategy works every single time, albeit whilst bypassing most of what the game was meant to be about. As put by Ralph Betza, a contributor to an early Civilization strategy guide posted to Usenet: “You can always play Despotic Conquest, regardless of the world you find yourself starting with, and you can always win without using any of the many ways to cheat. When you choose any other strategy, you are deliberately risking a loss in order to make the game more interesting.”

So very much in Civilization is of limited utility at best in purely mechanical terms. Many or most of the much-vaunted Wonders of the World, for example, really aren’t worth the cost you have to pay for them. But that’s okay; you pay for them anyway because you like the idea of having built the Pyramids of Giza or the Globe Theatre or Project Apollo, just as you choose not to go all Genghis Khan on the world because you’d rather build a civilization you can feel proud of. Perhaps the clearest statement of Civilization‘s guiding design philosophy can be found in the manual. It says that, even if you make it all the way to the end of the game only to see one of your rivals achieve the ultimate goal of mounting an expedition to Alpha Centauri before you do, “the successful direction of your civilization through the centuries is an achievement. You have survived countless wars, the pollution of the industrial age, and the risks of nuclear weapons.” Or, as Sid Meier himself puts it, “a game of Civilization is an epic story.”

We’re happy to preach peace and cooperation, as long as we’re the top dogs… er, birds.

Such sentiments are deeply foreign to Master of Orion; this is a zero-sum game if ever there was one. If you lose the final Galactic Council vote, there’s no attaboy for getting this far, much less any consolation delivered that the galaxy has entered a new era of peaceful cooperation with some other race in the leadership role. Instead the closing cinematic tells you that you’ve left the known galaxy and “set forth to conquer new worlds, vowing to return and claim the renowned title of Master of Orion.” (Better to rule in Hell, right?) There are no Wonders of the World in Master of Orion, and, while there is a tech tree to work through, you won’t find on it any of Civilization‘s more humanistic advances, such as Chivalry or Mysticism, or even Communism or The Corporation. What you get instead are technologies — it’s telling that Master of Orion talks about a “tech tree,” while Civilization prefers the word “advances” — with a direct practical application to settling worlds and making war, divided into the STEM-centric categories of Computers, Construction, Force Fields, Planetology, Propulsion, and Weapons.

So, Civilization is the more idealistic, more educational, perhaps even the nobler of the two games. And yet it often plays a little awkwardly — which awkwardness we forgive because of its aspirational qualities. Master of Orion‘s fictional context is a much thinner veneer to stretch over its mechanics, while words like “idealistic” simply don’t exist in its vocabulary. And yet, being without any high-flown themes to fall back on, it makes sure that its mechanics are absolutely tight. These dichotomies can create a dilemma for a critic like yours truly. If you asked me which game presents a better argument for gaming writ large as a potentially uplifting, ennobling pursuit, I know which of the two I’d have to point to. But then, when I’m just looking for a fun, challenging, intriguing game to play… well, let’s just say that I’ve played a lot more Master of Orion than Civilization over the last quarter-century. Indeed, Master of Orion can easily be read as the work of a designer who looked at Civilization and was unimpressed with its touchy-feely side, then set out to make a game that fixed all the other failings which that side obscured.

By way of a first example, let’s consider the two games’ implementation of an advances chart — or a tech tree, whichever you prefer. Arguably the most transformative single advance in Civilization is Railroads; they let you move your military units between your cities almost instantaneously, which makes attacks much easier and quicker to mount for warlike players and enables the more peaceful types to protect their holdings with a much smaller (and thus less expensive) standing army. The Railroads advance is so pivotal that some players build their entire strategy around acquiring it as soon as possible, by finding it on the advances chart as soon as the game begins in 4000 BC and working their way backward to find the absolute shortest path for reaching it. This is obviously problematic from a storytelling standpoint; it’s not as if the earliest villagers set about learning the craft of Pottery with an eye toward getting their hands on Railroads 6000 years later. More importantly, though, it’s damaging to the longevity of the game itself, in that it means that players can and will always employ that same Railroads strategy just as soon as they figure out what a winner it is. Here we stumble over one of the subtler but nonetheless significant axioms of game design: if you give players a hammer that works on every nail, many or most of them will use it — and only it — over and over again, even if it winds up decreasing their overall enjoyment. It’s for this reason that some players continue to use even the barbarian-horde strategy in Civilization, boring though it is. Or, to take an outside example: how many designers of CRPGs have lovingly crafted dozens of spells with their own unique advantages and disadvantages, only to watch players burn up everything they encounter with a trusty Fireball?

Master of Orion, on the other hand, works hard at every turn to make such one-size-fits-all strategies impossible — and nowhere more so than in its tech tree. When a new game begins, each race is given a randomized selection of technologies that are possible for it to research, constituting only about half of the total number of technologies in the game. Thus, while a technology roughly equivalent to Civilization‘s Railroads does exist in Master of Orion — Star Gates — you don’t know if this or any other technology is actually available to you until you advance far enough up the tree to reach the spot where it ought to be. You can’t base your entire strategy around a predictable technology progression. While you can acquire technologies that didn’t make it into your tree by trading with other empires, bullying them into giving them to you, or attacking their planets and taking them, that’s a much more fraught, uncertain path to go down than doing the research yourself, one that requires a fair amount of seat-of-your-pants strategy in its own right. Any way you slice it, in other words, you have to improvise.

We’ve been lucky here in that Hydrogen Fuel Cells, the first range-extending technology and a fairly cheap one, is available in our tree. If it wasn’t, and if we didn’t have a lot of stars conveniently close by, we’d have to dedicate our entire empire to attaining a more advanced and thus more expensive range-extending technology, lest we be left behind in the initial land grab. But this would of course mean neglecting other aspects of our empire’s development. Trade-offs like this are a constant fact of life in Master of Orion.

This one clever design choice has repercussions for every other aspect of the game. Take, for instance, the endlessly fascinating game-within-a-game of designing your fleet of starships. If the tech tree was static, players would inevitably settle upon a small set of go-to designs that worked for their style of play. As it is, though, every new ship is a fresh balancing act, its equipment calibrated to maximize your side’s technological strengths and mitigate its weaknesses, while also taking into careful account the strengths and weaknesses of the foe you expect to use it against, about which you’ve hopefully been compiling information through your espionage network. Do you build a huge number of tiny, fast, maneuverable fighters, or do you build just a few lumbering galactic dreadnoughts? Or do you build something in between? There are no universally correct answers, just sets of changing circumstances.

Another source of dynamism are the alien races you play and those you play against. The cultures in Civilization have no intrinsic strengths and weaknesses, just sets of leader tendencies when played by the computer; for your part, you’re free to play the Mongols as pacifists, or for that matter the Russians as paragons of liberal democracy and global cooperation. But in Master of Orion, each race’s unique affordances force you to play it differently. Likewise, each opposing race’s affordances in combination with those of your own force you to respond differently to that race when you encounter it, whether on the other side of a diplomats’ table or on a battlefield in space. Further, most races have one technology they’re unusually good at researching and one they’re unusually bad at. Throw in varying degrees of affinity and prejudice toward the other races, and, again, you’ve got an enormous amount of variation which defies cookie-cutter strategizing. (It’s worth noting that there’s a great deal of asymmetry here; Steve Barcia and his helpers didn’t share so many modern designers’ obsession with symmetrical play balance above all else. Some races are clearly more powerful than others: the brainiac Psilons get a huge research bonus, the insectoid Klackons get a huge bonus in worker productivity, and the Humans get huge bonuses in trade and diplomacy. Meanwhile the avian Alkaris, the feline Mrrshan, and the ursine Bulrathis have bonuses which only apply during combat, and can be overcome fairly easily by races with other, more all-encompassing advantages.)

There are yet more touches to bring yet more dynamism. Random events occur from time to time in the galaxy, some of which can change everything at a stroke: a gigantic space amoeba might show up and start eating stars, forcing everyone to forget their petty squabbles for a while and band together against this apocalyptic threat. And then there’s the mysterious star Orion, from which the game takes it name, which houses the wonders of a long-dead alien culture from the mythical past. Taking possession of it might just win the game for you — but first you’ll have to defeat its almost inconceivably powerful Guardian.

One of the perennial problems of 4X games, Civilization among them, is the long anticlimax, which begins at that point when you know you’re going to conquer the world or be the first to blast off for Alpha Centauri, but well before you actually do so. (What Civilization player isn’t familiar with the delights of scouring the map for that one remaining rival city tucked away on some forgotten island in some forgotten corner?) Here too Master of Orion comes with a mitigating idea, in the form of the Galactic Council whose workings I’ve already described. It means that, as soon as you can collect two-thirds of the vote — whether through wily diplomacy or the simpler expedient of conquering until two-thirds of the galaxy’s population is your own — the game ends and you get your victory screen.

Indeed, one of the overarching design themes of Master of Orion is its determination to minimize the boring stuff. It must be admitted, of course, that boredom is in the eye of the beholder. Non-fans have occasionally dismissed the whole 4X space-opera sub-genre as “Microsoft Excel in space,” and Master of Orion too requires a level of comfort with — or, better yet, a degree of fascination with — numbers and ratios; you’ll spend at least as much time tinkering with your economy as you will engaging in space battles. Yet the game does everything it can to minimize the pain here as well. While hardly a simple game in absolute terms, it is quite a streamlined example of its type; certainly it’s much less fiddly than Civilization. Planet management is abstracted into a set of five sliding ratio bars, allowing you decide what percentage of that planet’s total output should be devoted to building ships, building defensive installations, building industrial infrastructure, cleaning up pollution, and researching new technologies. Unlike in Civilization, there is no list of specialized structures to build one at a time, much less a need to laboriously develop the land square by square with a specialized unit. Some degree of micro-management is always going to be in the nature of this type of game, but managing dozens of planets in Master of Orion is far less painful than managing dozens of cities in Civilization.

The research screen as well operates through sliding ratio bars which let you decide how much effort to devote to each of six categories of technology. In other words, you’re almost always research multiple advances at once in Master of Orion, whereas in Civilization you only research one at a time. Further, you can never predict for sure when a technology will arrive; while each has a base cost in research points, “paying” it leads only to a slowly increasing randomized chance of acquiring the technology on any given turn. (That’s the meaning of the “17%” next to Force Fields in the screenshot above.) You also receive bonuses for maintaining steady research over a long run of turns, rather than throwing all of your research points into one technology, then into something else, etc. All of this as well serves to make the game more unpredictable and dynamic.

In short, Master of Orion tries really, really hard to work with you rather than against you, and succeeds to such a degree that it can sometimes feel like the game is reading your mind. A reductionist critic of the sort I can be on occasion might say that there are just two types of games: those that actually got played before their release and those that didn’t. With only rare exceptions, this distinction, more so than the intrinsic brilliance of the design team or any other factor, is the best predictor of the quality of the end result. Master of Orion is clearly a game that got played, and played extensively, with all of the feedback thus gathered being incorporated into the final design. The interface is about as perfect as the technical limitations of 1993 allow it to be; nothing you can possibly want to do is more than two clicks away. And the game is replete with subtle little conveniences that you only come to appreciate with time — like, just to take one example, the way it asks if you want to automatically adjust the ecology spending on every one of your planets when you acquire a more efficient environmental-cleanup technology. This lived-in quality can only be acquired the honest, old-fashioned way: by giving your game to actual players and then listening to what they tell you about it, whether the points they bring up are big or small, game-breaking or trivial.

This thoroughgoing commitment to quality is made all the more remarkable by our knowledge of circumstances inside MicroProse while Master of Orion was going through these critical final phases of its development. When the contract to publish the game was signed, MicroProse was in desperate financial straits, having lost bundles on an ill-advised standup-arcade game along with expensive forays into adventure games and CRPGs, genres far from their traditional bread and butter of military simulations and grand-strategy games. Although other projects suffered badly from the chaos, Master of Orion, perhaps because it was a rather low-priority project entrusted largely to an outside team located over a thousand miles away, was given the time and space to become its best self. It was still a work in progress on June 21, 1993, when MicroProse’s mercurial, ofttimes erratic founder and CEO “Wild Bill” Stealey sold the company to Spectrum Holobyte, a publisher with a relatively small portfolio of extant games but a big roll of venture capital behind them.

Master of Orion thus became one of the first releases from the newly conjoined entity on October 1, 1993. Helped along by the evangelism of Alan Emrich and his pals at Computer Gaming World, it did about as well as such a cerebral title, almost completely bereft of audiovisual bells and whistles, could possibly do in the new age of multimedia computing; it became the biggest strategy hit since Civilization, and the biggest 4X space opera to that point, in any medium. Later computerized iterations on the concept, including its own sequels, doubtless sold more copies in absolute numbers, but the original Master of Orion has gone on to become one of the truly seminal titles in gaming history, almost as much so as the original Civilization. It remains the game to which every new 4X space opera — and there have been many of them, far more than have tried to capture the more elusively idealistic appeal of Civilization — must be compared.

Sometimes a status such as that enjoyed by Master of Orion arrives thanks to an historical accident or a mere flashy technical innovation, but that is definitively not the case here. Master of Orion remains as rewarding as ever in all its near-infinite variation. Personally, I like to embrace its dynamic spirit for everything it’s worth by throwing a (virtual) die to set up a new game, letting the Universe decide what size galaxy I play in, how many rivals I play with, and which race I play myself. The end result never fails to be enjoyable, whether it winds up a desperate free-for-all between six alien civilizations compressed into a tiny galaxy with just 24 stars, or a wide-open, stately game of peaceful exploration in a galaxy with over 100 of them. In short, Master of Orion is the most inexhaustible well of entertainment I’ve ever found in the form of a single computer game — a timeless classic that never fails to punish you for playing lazy, but never fails to reward you for playing well. I’ve been pulling it out to try to conquer another random galaxy at least once every year or two for half my life already. I suspect I’ll still be doing so until the day I die.

(Sources: the books Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play by Morgan Ramsay, Designers & Dragons, Volume 1: The 1970s by Shannon Appelcline, and Master of Orion: The Official Strategy Guide by Alan Emrich and Tom E. Hughes, Jr.; Computer Gaming World of December 1983, June/July 1985, October 1991, June 1993, August 1993, September 1993, December 1993, and October 1995; Commodore Disk User of May 1988; Softline of March 1983. Online sources include “Per Aspera Ad Astra” by Jon Peterson from ROMchip, Alan Emrich’s historical notes from the old Master of Orion III site, a Steve Barcia video interview which originally appeared in the CD-ROM magazine Interactive Entertainment., and the Civilization Usenet FAQ, lasted updated by “Dave” in 1994.

Master of Orion I and II are available for purchase together from GOG.com. I highly recommend a tutorial, compiled many years ago by Sirian and now available only via archive.org, as an excellent way for new players to learn the ropes.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/master-of-orion/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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ggdbcheaponline-blog · 5 years

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hucc · 7 years

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Match report v Southwick Wanderers 24 Sept, North Chailey (East Sussex)

The two days before any fixture is always a tense time in the Archives’ Department. It is over these 48 hours that an elite squad of 11 dissolves away into 5 ‘definites’, 2 ‘previously-definite-but-now-a-bit-touch-and-go’, 2 ‘completely-AWOLs-less-contactable-than-undiscovered-tribes-of-the-Amazon-delta’ and 2 ‘sorry-mate-can’t-make-its’. There was therefore a sense of foreboding that greeted the arrival of an email from Anthony Pearce, pillar of our cricketing community; subject: Bad News for Sunday.

But if there is one thing the Archives can get excited about it’s an opportunity for a tortured metaphor. And so, with our captain otherwise engaged on a 2-day National Childbirth Trust class, the question needs to be asked: could our season finale against Southwick herald the birth of a new era for The Hackney Umpires. Right, metaphor over. Deep breaths everyone. (OK, now it’s really over).

Southwick Wanderers are a team we know well. Our 4 previous encounters include a win, a loss and 2 draws. A central theme running through these games has been the slow-medium wobbling delivery known as the dibbly-dobbler. This is a subject that has of course been done to death in previous match reports. But that has never stopped the Archives before, and it won’t now as we take this opportunity to discuss the proud history of the dibbly-dobbler.

Southwick, although Wanderers, play exclusively in East Sussex, where for centuries local cricketing conditions fostered a culture of dibbling, using the damp, slow wickets of The Weald to nibble the ball a bit in the air. This indigenous speciality reached its zenith in 1850 when local publican D Field (snr) invented the so-called dobbler, a ball that to all intents and purposes looked like a standard dibbler only for it to then dobble away off the pitch. Since then East Sussex has been an anathema to batsmen, fast bowlers, spinners and pretty much any kind of cricketer aside from trundling slow/medium bowlers who can do a bit in the air and land the ball seam up.

The dibbly-dobbler is a creed, a way of life. In a sense it is the East Sussex equivalent of the ancient Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang, where such seemingly opposite or contrary forces as ‘the dibble’, and its counterpart ‘the dobble’ can be seen to be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent.

D Fields II, King of the Dibbly-Dobblers, The Lord High Dobblercutioner, bestrides this lugubrious oscillation like a colossus. But after his first 4 overs the Hackney Umpires batting has thrown him off kilter. Our third wicket partnership Kieran Kumaria and Moses Otiti came together at 41-2 and set off at just under 9 runs an over culminating in a mighty lofted 6 from Mo against the previously all-conquering Vicar of Dibbly(Dobbly).

D Field changes end in search of that elusive slightly slower one that just shapes a tad in the air. Although early in the game this is a crucial phase. The HUCC selectors have put their faith in a team best described as a bowling side. In short our batting was thinner than the large font edition of the Jack Lewis Guide to Blocking for the Draw. Despite our positive start a wicket now could precipitate a decline of some rapidity.

D Field shuffles in, medallion glinting rakishly in the autumnal light. The ball enters its faintly vacillating arc....Moses swings mightily....

Earlier in the innings, with almost half the team still on the road, David and Kieran kicked things off in the sunshine at North Chailey. 35 overs a side at Southwick’s new venue, boasting a spectacular view stretching out across the downs, but the wicket itself has a familiar sluggish look about it and the outfield appears rougher than a Buckfast Tonic breakfast of champions.

Our long history of games with Southwick has often seen us slightly short of numbers willing to make the long trip down south. But such is the friendliness of this friendly that there are always willing substitute fielders on hand to make a contribution. How wryly we smile recalling the games of yesteryear where sub fielders inevitably dropping an improbable sequence of chances. I’m sure Southwick felt the same way on Sunday as our sub fielder (who shall remain nameless as he is only 13) floored a straightforward-looking chance offered up by Kieran on single figures. As they may or may not say in East Sussex: what dobbles around, dibbles around.

David Dawkins looks untroubled, strolling to 3 before he’s bowled playing ‘round a straight one. A low score but overall this year a good season at the top of the order for David.

In at no.3: Matt “Barney” Smerdon. He makes a solid start before timing the ball crisply with enough power to plough through the outfield and pierce the boundary. In elite sport an uncluttered mind is essential. Any negative thoughts have a corrosive effect on the relentless focus needed to execute your skill set. So there definitely shouldn’t be a thing where every time Matt hits a 4 we all - Matt included - then start thinking he’s now going to get out. And anyway that wasn’t a thing as he diligently blocked the next ball before once more cleanly striking the ball low through the covers...only to see short extra cover grab the ball in the tumbling dive to take a very sharp catch.

Kieran is joined by Moses in the 13th over with the score at 41-2. 7 overs later at drinks it’s 99-2, we’re on the cusp of 5-runs an over with wickets in hand and two former international cricketers at the crease.

In the long and occasionally tortuous history of the Umpires I can safely say that the phrase “two former international cricketers” does not get used too often in relation to our batting. Indeed this is so unprecedented and in truth improbable that the Club’s governing body, the shadowy and enigmatic Sub committee Sub committee has conducted an internal review and issued a ruling that future HUCC teams are limited to a maximum of two players who have represented their country at international level (except in exceptional circumstances e.g. we are a bit short players).

So anyway drinks, 15 overs to go, which, if we can push on at a conservative estimate of 7 an over gives us a handy total of 200. First over after drinks Kieran is bowled for 43.

After starting the 2017 campaign with consecutive ducks Dave Fawbert steadied the ship in his last innings against with a solid not out. He rotates the strike effectively giving Mo the opportunity to mow down the opposition bowling. Moses reaches his 50 with another glorious 6. Unfortunately the scorer had miscounted so we end up applauding the fairly nondescript single that followed it, and we are then taken by surprise as Field dobbles one through Mo’s next attempt to launch him over the Downs and bowls him for 51. Dave then picks up the mantle hitting some great shots to keep the scoreboard ticking along. New player, left-hander, Dom is bowled by the criminally under-bowled “Ronnie” and then, in the 31st over, Dave is out for 17 attempting an ambitious looking pull/flamingo shot. Billy O’Brien, in his third game for the Umpires, all against Southwick, joins Kannan out in the middle at 143 for 6. In limited over games the accepted wisdom is that you have to bat out your overs. Kannan digs in determinedly, emerging at the end of the innings 5no with Billy similarly undefeated on 2 and Southwick have been set 153 to win the game.

4.37 an-over might not sound much but the outfield is slow and we are a bowling side. Kieran and Manny open the bowling with matching maidens. Kieran riding high in the Official HUCC Premier League Fantasy Football League exudes a calm confidence. Manny at the other end riding out the bottom of a slump in that same league tops the real chart of 2017 HUCC wicket takers. And so even when Manny and Kieran trade dropped catches off each other’s bowling we remain confident, the fielding is energetic and (mostly) sharp, and even Kannan’s international conference call at 4:30pm fails to knock us off our stride.

Mo replaces Kieran at the pavilion end and strikes in his first over, bowling the dangerous looking wicketkeeper for 14. In the 10th over Manny takes his 14th wicket of the campaign removing the other opener Gemma who had valiantly fended of everything Mo had to offer but was then bowled for 6 with the score 28-2.

Southwick’s third wicket pairing seem to have more of a cutting edge, until Mo produces the delivery of the day detonating the middle stump clean out of the ground and in to the next county.

With Mo’s spell at an end the stand-in captain now has a tricky bowling change to consider. While we have made a good start we are defending a lowish total and it would only take a few boundaries for the pressure to release. As a team we struggled in the last game against Bethnal Green but David Dawkins’ accurate and wicket-taking bowling was a high point. As the saying goes: when in Rome count in numerals and eat roasted dormice; and when in East Sussex, the Appellation d'origine controlle of dibbly-dobbling, if they dibble, you dobble.

David and Billy, Chichester U13s 2017 bowler of the year, are spot on with line and length, keeping it very tight for the next few overs. At the 20-over drinks break Southwick are 60-3, well behind the curve, needing 93 runs with the run rate rising.

After drinks David continues to keep a tight rein on the batting, conceding just 10 runs in 4 overs. At the other end two wickets fall to left arm filth. The batting side know it’s now or never and hit a few boundaries reaching 119-5 after 30 overs. The equation is now 34 runs for Southwick to win in 5 overs. Their no.4 reaches his fifty. The day could go either way. But this day we were always going to back ourselves with the ball, and Kieran and Mo close it out, combining to remove the no.4 with a great swallow diving catch in the covers by Mo from Kieran’s bowling and between them conceding just 22 runs in the last 5 overs for victory.

In the end the result was a win by just 11 runs. Over the course of 70 overs and 293 runs this is a fine margin in a close game that either side could have won. So what made the difference? Mo’s two mighty 6s? Dave F’s quick fire 17 runs? Billy’s 14 dot balls in 3 high quality overs? Matt’s ever reliable wicket-keeping? Full length dives in the field to stop fours from Dom, Manny and Kieran? David D’s first 4 overs that went for 10 runs? All of these things and more were in themselves worth more than the difference between the two sides. Kieran’s closing spell of 5 overs was very high quality bowling, but for the third time in his 3 games Moses gets the nod for man of the match for his 50, his 2 wickets and the catch to get rid of the opposition’s top scorer.

When, in a previous report a little while ago now, Michael Winner stood on the deck of HMS Victory feeding Winalot to Bob Champion's dog, little did he realise that this could be something that might occur on a more regular basis, including multiple times in the same season. The story of 2017 has had a beginning (Occasional Casuals), a triumphant middle (London Fields), and now a highly satisfying conclusion (Southwick).

HUCC 152-6 (M Otiti 51; K Kumaria 43; D Fawbert 17)

Southwick Wanderers 141-6 (M Otiti 2/20; M O’Brien 2/24 K Kumaria 1/19)

HUCC win by 11 runs

Up the Umpires!

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