War

Unmanned is a boring game. This is not a criticism; it's part of the point.

In Unmanned, you play Kirk, a USAF missile operator assigned to drone duty. While the game does partly involve missile attacks on what you believe to be hostiles, the larger point of the game is the distancing that drone warfare involves; the discontinuity between its effects -- large explosions and death on the ground; and the nature of the "warriors" who control the craft, sitting in a remote structure someplace safe, staring at a screen.

This is one of the best games I've played since maybe Minecraft. I was like, way into it. Oh wait, for a minute I thought I was writing for Game Informer.

This game put me in the mindset of Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the JFK and Johnson administrations. We burned to death 100,000 civilians in a night, men, women and children, but at least they aren't 100,000 zombies! There's also kitschy 60s music in the soundtrack, it really goes for a 60s aesthetic, which is a nice compliment to the kitschy 50s aesthetic that the Fallout series pioneered. After all, there is no nuclear war in this scenario, only Llama bombs, Zombies, and panicked civillians.

The most telling aspect of carry is its subtitle. Most RPGs, as proud descendants of wargames, are games of war. carry is a game about war. The Vietnam war to be exact, but also war in general. The game doesn't focus on the combat; the focus is on how the combat affects the people in the war.

The day after 9-11 I mowed the lawn on the rider, burning gas to halve flora on non-food producing land, then I played a videogame using brown electricity. Had I been playing Stallions In America or I Was In The War then the circle of life would have been complete - unfortunately we didn't have the technology back then.

Cactus' game is an action shooter, using the ASWD and the mouse to run and gun. You play four superstuds with soy-processed American Cheese(tm) names like Cody and Mitch, and you go through every US State slaughtering everyone, birds, bees, pigeons, peacocks, men, women and children. The moral of the story is, I guess, that they hate us because we're free.

Supreme Ruler, like Making History or Europa Universalis, is an extraordinarily detailed and complex grand strategic game covering the entire globe, with economic, military, and diplomatic aspects. As long-time readers may know, I'm a sucker for this kind of game.

Unlike the others, Supreme Ruler is set in the modern world -- sort of. It's set in a hypothetical near future, which is canny of BattleGoat but also somewhat disappointing; canny, because if you try to simulate the real world, you're always going to get flack on minute levels of detail (e.g., "I am from the country of Mystflx, but why don't you show the iron mines at Qwertyuiop?"), so it's easier to create a game that is representative, but not an explicit simulation. Disappointing, because playing around with a good version of the real world would be interesting.