Aion: Impressions from Closed Betas #4 and 5

It's been a few hours since the server shutdown commemorating the end of the 5th closed beta test for Aion, and as of right now, my thoughts on the game are somewhere between cautiously optimistic and enthusiastic. On the one hand, the game didn't seem to have anything particularly compelling. In damn near 20 levels (out of the maximum 50), I didn't find one thing that hasn't been done in another game. On the other hand, the only time I felt genuinely let down was when I discovered that flying is constrained to a few select areas. The game has been going strong in Asia for quite some time now, and it really shows; despite being a beta, the only flaws I could find were related to the localization.

In beta #4, I spent most of my time playing an Elyos sorcerer. Sorcs are the glass cannon of the game, and the class certainly delivers on both fronts. The kind of damage that a sorc can dish out is jaw-dropping, and it comes equipped with the standard compliment of control and escape spells to (hopefully) avoid getting your squishy ass blown up in 5 seconds (not an exaggeration). The class plays like a mixture of a WoW mage and a Guild Wars elementalist, with a good blend of nukes and instant casts. Like all classes, the sorcerer utilizes various ability chains, which is (imo) a much more effective way of limiting the power of various abilities. For instance, early on, you receive an instant cast, 30 second cooldown spell which does decent damage and knocks your target down, but it can only be used within a few seconds of your 2 second cast ice nuke/snare. The class was fun, but too fragile for my tastes.

In beta #5, I played a gladiator, which is a warrior of the no-frills, smash stuff with a 2-hander variety. The class makes much more extensive use of the ability chains than the sorc; by level 19 I had two different 3-move chains. One interesting aspect of the class is that you actually make a solid tank while wielding a 2-hander, thanks to the ridiculous amount of parry that the two handed swords and polearms have innately. I'm sure the class won't be a viable main tank in endgame PvE, but for leveling, a gladiator gets the job done just fine. Damage output was also quite respectable, and the class has a variety of knockdowns. I have a feeling that this will be one of the mainstay classes in PvP.

The crytek engine ensures that the game looks relentlessly pretty while still running on my 5 year old computer (albeit barely). Even with the bare minimum detail settings and a resolution below my monitor's native 1680x1050, this is the best looking MMO I have ever seen.

Zone layout and quest design felt very solid overall. Things progressed at a natural rate, and there was only one time where I ran out of quests and had to grind out monsters for half a level. Quests are the standard "kill X of Y and then talk to Z" that we've all come to know and love, but they were well organized and rarely felt tedious. Quest hubs were well dispersed and easy to find. Also, in a stunningly intelligent move, the game can locate virtually any NPC or "pick this up off the ground" item for you, eliminating the need to alt-tab into a browser window to look up the location of that quest goal who's location was not adequately explained in the text. Levels came on at a slow but satisfying pace, and each level up brought a noticeable and rewarding boost in power.

Flying is a ton of fun, and you can do it within your first few hours of playing. Even in the zones where you can't fly freely, you can still jump off a tall object and glide around for a good amount of time. The control felt natural, and I have high hopes for the aerial combat, though I have yet to really experience it.

One pleasant surprise was a lack of instances. Perhaps they are there at higher levels, but there was not a single one in the first two zones for either race. If things stay that way, I think that the endgame could be very promising; WoW largely lost its charm for me when Blizzard started instancing everything under the sun. If NCsoft manages to cultivate the sort of spontaneous, open-world PvP that used to happen in WoW, they would have at least one happy subscriber.

Of course, the game is not without its drawbacks. The style is typically East Asian. Women are cute and girly, men are slightly less cute and girly, armor for both genders is revealing and feminine, and the animations are hugely over-the-top. I prefer a more gothic* style to my fantasy games personally, although the azn-a-rific styling isn't enough to put me off of a game by itself.

Also, as mentioned, the flying is disappointingly limited. I had assumed that a game which advertises the fact that your character can fly would actually let the player, you know, fly. Instead, the vast majority of the areas I encountered would only allow you to glide off of a high point. The reason is obvious, of course: players would bypass content if they could fly everywhere. But to my mind, this kind of reasoning represents the height of developer arrogance. If people are bypassing your content, then the solution is to make better content that your players won't want to bypass. I bought this game in part because I liked the idea of 3D combat, and it was disappointing to see such a good concept be so under-utilized.

The UI is also barely adequate. It certainly looks nice, but the functionality feels very hacked-together. Even in the default configuration, it is common to have important displays covering each other up.

Additionally, while it may be seen as a good thing to some (and I am of a more or less neutral opinion on the matter), the game starts to become very unfriendly to solo play in the late teens. This was a bigger problem in the beta than it will be on live, since the developers had global channels (including the looking for group channel) disabled, and the LFG interface is pretty poor.

And finally, the in-game auction house is mediocre, at best. It lacks any sort of powerful search system, forcing you to sort through 20 or 30 pages of low level stuff to find things you might want to use. On top of that, there is a limit of roughly a dozen items that you can put up for auction at any given time. This limit is somewhat compensated for by the fact that you can list something for sale to other players directly from your inventory, however effectively using this feature requires you to idle in a busy area, lagging the place up for anyone trying to get something done.

On the whole, though, the game was enjoyable. I'm hoping to make it to the abyss in the final closed beta, so that I can see whether the PvP is worth the price of admission, but on the whole, I feel that my pre-order was money well spent.

*As in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art, not the pussy kids that dress up like vampires.

Why I will always be a PC gamer

People have been decrying the end of the PC as a gaming platform since the original Playstation was released (and probably even before that). Looking at the current generation of titles, it isn't hard to see why; there are precious few AAA PC-exclusive titles, and the power of the current generation of consoles has hit the point where you really can't tell that PC physics/graphics/etc. are "better" without a lot of scrutiny. And the increasing multimedia capability in machines that, even at the high end, are cheaper than a new gaming PC, makes the price gap harder to justify. Hell, you can buy an Xbox 360 for the same price as a new mid-range videocard.

But despite all of this, there is one critical thing PCs have that no console will ever possess: an open platform. The PC is not controlled by any one company, and is sold with the intention that the user will have a very great deal of control over how the hardware and software is used. With the advent of the internet, this capability is, to me, the defining feature of the PC as an entertainment platform. User-made content such as mods, additional levels, new skins, widescreen patches, and more help add longevity to today's titles, and can breathe new life into the classics of yesterday.

As an illustration, let me talk about my current replay of Final Fantasy VII. This is one of the classics of gaming, and yet the PC version is practically the definition of "shitty console port"; the graphical options are severely limited, the music is done in horrible-sounding MIDI, and several areas of the game still bear the Playstation's circle-X-square-triangle button designations. The videos are forced to run off of the CD, leading to some nasty lag in the game when one of the hundreds of FMVs is queued up. Worst of all, the minigames lack a CPU limiter, so on a modern computer, they run so fast as to be unplayable (the motorcycle game can be over in a matter of seconds)! The game was widely panned solely on the basis of this sloppy porting job. And yet, for the PC gamer with an internet connection, some time spent googling, and a bit of patience, the game today is better than the PS1 version!

Fans of this classic, especially the community over at Qhimm, have done marvelous work restoring and enhancing the game. Some quick poking through the registry revealed that the path to the videos can be altered, allowing you to copy and paste the files from the CD to your hard drive, giving instant load times. The old 640x480 max resolution has been obliterated by an ingenious hack that allows for any resolution you could possibly want, even widescreen (albeit of the "black bars on the side" variety). Another program allows you to replace the low quality MIDI music with either the original Playstation music files, or your own set of MP3s (say, a CD rip of the original soundtrack, which sounds gorgeous). Think the game is too easy? There are hard mode mods. Think the 9999 limit is bogus? That can be hacked away. Hate the blocky, no-hand models on the field map? There's a hack to replace the main characters with their battle models, and some players have even started an ambitious project to completely re-make every NPC model with a higher polygon count. There's also a mod that just adds hands. There's even a project to add a full voice script. All this on top of the dozen or so fixes for the shitty porting job. None of these patches requires anything more intimidating than editing a text file or modifying a few registry keys.

There are countless other such hacks, fixes, and projects out there, for a myriad of PC games. Any title with enough fans likely has a similar community out there, keeping their favorite games alive and poking around to find ways to enhance them. This kind of thing simply isn't possible on a closed platform like a console, and it never will be unless Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo want to give up their hardware monopoly (not likely).

And that is why the PC will remain not just a viable platform, but a great one. And also why it will continue to be my platform of choice.

EVE Update

Atlas, Sc0rched Earth, and the Curse coalition have pretty much broken the once mighty Red Alliance, capturing their home system of C-J6MT, and locking down untold billions worth of assets in the process. Admitidly, our efforts were assisted greatly by a failed internal coup, but given the progress we had been making in Insmother, that only accelerated the inevitable. With KenZoku finnaly out of the picture, Goonswarm and Pandemic Legion (mostly PL) are now starting to bring us the fights that our pilots have been hungry for. So hungry, in fact, that they took a sniper BS gang that was lacking in support out to fight a PL sniper HAC gang. Oops.

It will be interesting to see see what happens to the political landscape now. Already, the drone regions have gone through a bit of a shakeup, with XIX resetting Intrepid Crossing and Etherial Dawn. And while nobody ever believed the NC/Goon/PL NAP-fest when they said they would reset each other after BoB/KenZoku were dead, stranger things have happened. The only thing that makes me nervous is seeing how Atlas will fare on the defensive. We have proven to be quite the powerhouse on the offensive, to the point that we literally scared away most of the fights we could have gotten in Detorid and Insmother. But we are fairly untested in defending space, and most of our recent acquisitions are not yet fortified.

On the carebear front, my Caldari missioning alt is finally through with level 1 missions, and is now owning the hell out of level 2s in a pimped-out Caracal that I haven't even insured because 3/4ths of the value is in the modules. I must say, I really enjoy the change of pace that pounding through a few missions can provide. It is also pretty crazy what a huge difference all the tech II modules make; missions that broke the tank on my poor little Maller can't even drop the passive shield tank on my Caracal below 40%. I can't wait to see what a Drake will be able to do.

Morality in Gaming

Ever since KotOR and Fable hit the scene, it seems like morality systems have been all the rage, especially in RPGs. Unfortunately, very few games ever really do it well, and the end result is a distinct feeling that the developers saw it as a cheap way to add replay value. The reason is twofold. First, most moral choices are annoyingly black and white; either you send an orphaned kitten to college, or you punt him across the room for no good reason. Protip: If all your dialogue options look exactly the same, with one obviously good, one neutral, and one obviously evil choice, then you need to come up with some more creative dialogue choices (I'm looking at you, Mass Effect). Nuance is what makes moral choices interesting, and in an RPG, it is essential if you want to allow your players the freedom to play a character that is interesting to them. The various D&D based games are usually better about this, since they have the law/chaos distinction alongside good/evil, but most other games pretty fall flat. Even on my recent playthrough of KotOR, I found the good/evil distinction blatantly apparent in 95% of the situations I faced, and rarely did it present the option that I would have liked to choose.

The other problem is the lack of impact that your decisions may have. Most games will have almost exactly the same story, regardless of what choices you make. Fable II at least made an attempt at changing this, but most games don't even bother. When playing on the darker side, I often find myself wondering why I'm fighting this evil guy all the time, when it would be much easier to ally with him, and then betray him at a convinient moment. Not only would it be a lot easier than having to cut my way through his entire fucking army single-handedly, but it would also let me use him to take out those who would be my biggest opposition once I sieze power for myself. But instead, I get stuck with the good-guy's storyline, and as a consolation I can be a huge prick all throughout it. To be fair, some games do add some epic "betray the good guys" scenes (KotOR and NWN2 are extremely well done in that regard), but they're always at or near the end, too late to have a meaningful impact on the story.

A side effect of this is a tendancy towards extremely watered-down options. Since allowing a player to be too good or too evil would totally throw the storyline off, such actions aren't allowed, and the result is that being good mostly amounts to giving money to beggars, and being evil mostly involves holding them up for whatever they have left. The good guy always talks his way through a problem, while the bad guy uses force etc., etc. Additionally, the biggest sacrifices that a good player has to make usually amount to something completely trivial, like a sum of money or a cool item, while the biggest punishment for being evil is most often having to act like a brat half the time so that you don't accidently swing your alignment towards good, and/or enduring lectures from your more light-minded comrades.

And on that note, it seems like Fallout 3 is the first game since Baulder's Gate II to limit your companions based on your alignment. It never ceases to amaze me what atrocities a good-aligned NPC will help me commit, and all without offering more than a dissparoving snippet of dialogue in protest.

To be frank, I wish most games would stop mucking about with big-picture morality, and just focus on doing one branch of the story well. Mass Effect did a good job of this, by offering a character that was obviously good, but giving the player the option to choose what kind of a good guy he would be.

I <3 Dwarf Fortress

I know I bullet-pointed this game in my back-from-the-internet-dead post, but after watching several hours disappear yesterday, I feel it deserves more than that.

For the uninitiated, go read about Boatmurdered, then go play through this tutorial. Or if you're the just-jump-in type, download it directly from the Bay 12 site.

This is probably the first game that I have ever had to watch myself to make sure it didn't ruin my life. I never missed a commitment to play EVE, never sold my blood to pay for my WoW habit, but I'll be damned if I didn't start playing DF one saturday night and didn't stop until I started hearing birds chirping outside my window and realized it was 5 AM. It is that enthralling.

DF is sandbox gaming in its purest form; it gives you a world, some dwarves, and a few supplies, and then says "have fun". Fun can be finding hilarious things to do, like equipping every noble's quarters with a "mandate lever" that floods their room with water/magma/captured goblins. Alternately, some people will have their dwarves create some impressive meagconstructions. Or if you're OCD, you can try to build the perfect fort for whatever it is you want to do.

In an ordinary game, seeing "losing is fun" in the in-game help would raise alarm bells, but that's because those games have neither dwarves nor fortresses. If a miner gets pissed off, it is not uncommon for him to grab his pick and go on a killing spree. If one of the guys that he murders has a friend that was already on edge, he may then decide to go off some dwarves as well. This can quickly spiral out of control, especially if your population is already on edge from some other problem. Or you could simply have a doomsday device blow up in your face (your fort does have a doomsday device, right?). But however you go out, failures will often result in stories ranging from mildly amusing to "it hurts to laugh, but I can't stop".

In short, this is the kind of game that has been left behind in the modern era of mass marketing and insanely powerful 3D accelerators; it is a game that is made not to tell a story, sell an engine, or to provide a venue for competition, but simply something to be played and enjoyed.

Diablo is Overrated

There, I said it. Overrated. Two entertaining but forgettable entries in a genre that is now packed to the brim with imitators. Maybe I just don't "get it", but believe me I've tried. I've played through Diablo II's first act no fewer than three times, with a different class each on each go. None of these attempts made it past act 2 before succumbing to boredom.

How a basic hack-n-slash with simplistic character customization ever became so popular will probably always remain a mystery to me. To be sure, it is fairly well put together, with visuals that have stood the test of time, and straightforward, no-nonsense gameplay. But it usually takes something more than that for a game to be considered a phenomenon. Starcraft is widely regarded as the gold standard for competitive games, yet it still remains accessable and enjoyable for a newcomer. Half-Life still has one of the most compelling universes and storylines of any FPS ever made, plus it has so many mods that you could be playing for years off of a single purchase. Halo takes a great deal of the responsibility for bringing online multiplayer and the entire FPS genre into console mainstream. Even World of Warcraft managed to establish that an MMORPG doesn't have to be a thing created only for the hardcore.

The best thing that can be said for Diablo is that its "play a zillion times until that one item you really want finally drops" mechanic served as the core for World of Warcraft. But the thing is, that is all Diablo has going for it: the addiction factor. The story is pathetic for something that carries the RPG moniker, the character designs are unoriginal D&D knockoffs, and just about any problem you encounter can be solved with more grinding. Even the different difficulty levels are an admission of this fact; they simply ramp up the numerical challenge factor, allowing you to play the same game again, but with a higher level character.

Really, the only non-pedestrian aspect of the gameplay is the random world that is generated for each playthrough. But there's a reason that few modern games have such a feature: a random algorhithm will never be able to make a beautiful and rememberable map with the same frequency as a team of artists working closely with a group of level designers.

To me, the game seems to be the equivalent of a masterfully crafted, jewel-inlaid chalice. Sure, it's pretty, and yeah, it was a part of history. But it's still just a fucking cup, stop treating it like a Beethoven symphony.

Hellstorm in Detorid

Since Thursday, Atlas, along with friendlies from Aggression, Cult of War, Krautbreak, and Minor Threat, have been laying absolute waste to Detorid, with minimal resistance. On two separate occasions, Atlas has hit the 256 man fleet cap, and we have had over 100 capitals on the field for multiple ops. This is in stark contrast to our invasion of Omist, where 150 in fleet was considered a good turnout.

As of this post, it has been 11 days since we first started this campaign, and Atlas has killed 117 towers, 163 battleships, 33 dreadnoughts, and countless support ships. Oh yeah, and a titan. In addition, we successfully secured the 1V-LI2 system, which until now had not been captured for roughly 3 years. Our enemies have untold billions worth of assets in that system, which they have now lost access to. I lost my trusty battlecruiser in the process, but that was a pretty small price to pay.

It will be interesting to see the reaction from Goons and the NC. It seems pretty clear that nobody expected the east to heat up like this. Atlas leadership has done a good job of keeping the enemy firmly on the defensive, and we have built up considerable momentum. With xdeath banished back to the dronelands, and RA still under heavy pressure on their northern border from Intrepid Crossing and Ethereal Dawn, it seems pretty clear that they will need to call in backup if they want to put a halt to our advance, let alone push us back. Our pilots have been spoiling for a fight, and the battle for 1V-LI2 did little to satiate our blood lust. Hopefully, the next time NC sends backup for their Russian friends, they won't run headlong into some AAA titans.

Just One More™

ATLAS has been busy as of late. It was recently decided that the Detorid region had lived under the oppressive Legion of xxxXXXxxxXXXDEATHXXXxxxXXXxxxXXXxxxXXXxxx, ruling as goon proxies, for long enough. It was time to liberate those systems, for freedom's sake!

Over the weekend, the enemy turned out in force, calling in backup from Red Alliance and Pandemic Legion to field some impressive capital fleets, but since the start of the month, there has been pretty much zero resistance, which has allowed us to kill over 50 enemy towers, and put another ~30 into reinforced mode, and as I write this, our capital fleet is shooting another, to the commonly recurring phrase "come on guys, we've just got one more tower to shoot in here."

This is also coming on the heals of our collaboration with Aggression that has pretty much evicted United Legion from the Immensea region.

My only complaint is that the southeast is starting to turn pretty blue now, but on the plus side that means that we will probably be heading west to join Kenzoku and friends in the fight to kick goonswarm out of 0.0, once we finish up here.

All in all, a good time to be playing.

EVE Online (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet Spaceships)

I have previously written about this game. I thought that perhaps if the early game were better, then I would be able to stick with things long enough to hit the epic endgame of 0.0 space warfare. This thought is why I didn't enjoy it. EVE isn't like any other MMO I've played; it doesn't obey the pattern set forth by Everquest and (arguably) perfected with WoW. So, if you want to enjoy it, you have to forget everything you know about MMORPGs. Character advancement is never ending, so the concept of a level-capped "endgame" is meaningless. People who use the best gear in PvP are not gods, they just have more isk than brains*. Nearly everything is player-driven. Bigger does not necessarily mean better, and nearly every ship can play a useful role in a fight. Once I got these concepts through my brain, the game seemed to change.

So how did I wind up in New Eden? It began with introduction of the new honor system in the 2.0 patch of WoW. Open-world PvP had been struggling, but was still reasonably healthy up until that point. But that patch finally pushed things over the edge. With the mass emigration of PvP into instanced areas died the sense of danger and excitement that came from living on a PvP server. This was what had really gotten me hooked on the game; the idea that a mundane activity like picking herbs could (and often did) turn into a brawl at the drop of a hat was thrilling. As time went on, I found other things I enjoyed, but they were all transient, and somehow the game always felt as empty as the Aezeroth that now served as merely a connection between instances.

Fast forward a few years. With the realization that WAR is just not going to run on my computer behind me, I am now in the early weeks of my third attempt to get into EVE. I had recently joined up with the now-defunct Eth3real corporation, and had gotten a taste of 0.0 up in the Venal region (before Morsus Mihi came and booted us out). The entire area was crawling with hostiles, and it was an adventure just moving beyond the two or three systems that we had staked a claim to. I had had my first taste of fear in years, and it was glorious.

But what really hooked me was when we were back into empire space and I got to turn the tables. A small group of us got together in a high security system with some cheap destroyers, fit for raw damage. We waited in a safe spot a few thousand km away from an asteroid belt, where a guy was peacefully mining, blissfully unaware of our intentions. When the signal was given, we all warped in right on top of him, and blew up his fancy mining ship, with a 9-figure price tag, before getting ourselves blown up by CONCORD, the EVE equivalent of town guards. Our total loss was under 10 million. This immediately brought back fond memories of my glory days in WoW; ganking people in BRM, wiping people doing elemental dukes in silithus, destroying people in Ironforge and the deeprun tram. Here at last was a game with the kind of hardcore PvP that I had been missing for years. Nowhere and nobody was ever truely safe.

A few months later, I somehow managed to get my ass into one of the largest alliances in the game, ATLAS. Given my newbie status, I really have no business being here, but I sure as hell don't want to leave. I wound up on the right side of the current conflict rampaging through new eden between Goonswarm (think /b/tards, only not funny) and their pets, and the alliance of Band of Brothers, Against All Authorities, ATLAS, and others. I'm fighting alongside some awesome human beings (and a few people that are even more retarded than I am) against a foe that is dedicated to victory by any means necessary, no matter how dishonorable. At stake is not just a rating or a title, but the essential resources that fuel the war effort, and our home space itself.

None of it is scripted, none of it is instanced, and none of it will get reset in the interest of "leveling the playing field". Fuck your battlegrounds, fuck your epic loot, fuck games that don't really start until 6 months in. I'm through fighting a long and epic battle that somehow manages to have absolutely no consequences on the game world. I have an internet spaceship now, and I am loving it.



*Note that this can mean that the player is either rich but terrible, or that they are actually pretty good, but are richer than god himself. Thankfully, the first is far more common than the second

Left4Dead 2

Valve's announcement of this game has left me horribly torn. On the one hand, it looks like everything the original L4D should have been. It has chainsaws, daylight, and a better variety of special infected, including witches that are (reportedly) tough to deal with. The new cast of characters doesn't seem to have quite the same charm, but then again all we have to go off of is a few short trailers. RPS has a hands-on preview, and I found myself sharing their enthusiasm.

On the other hand, this is what the original L4D should have been. Coming only a year later, after a release that was short on content to begin with (and noticeably chainsaw-free), it feels distinctly un-Valve-like. I expect other studios to push out a half-finished game and then charge again once they release the fully polished "sequel", but until now Valve has been above that kind of crap.

Now, I'm not going to say that the original L4D isn't a great game in its own right, because it is. But really, I'm left feeling like a bit of a sucker now. The short development cycle makes it painfully obvious that another 6 months could have given us an irate Francis cleaving apart a Charger with his trusty axe. Not only would I have waited another half-year, but I would even be willing to throw down a 20 for the new content that L4D 2 is set to deliver. But a full priced game? "I hate blatant cash-grabs."

Rumors of my demise...

Sometimes you sign up for 17 hours of class thinking you will have an above-average workload, only to discover that the two 1-credit labs you have actually demand 3 credits' worth of work. Ah, the joys of a science major.

Anyway, here's 6 months' worth of posts, condensed down to a series of bullet points:

• WAR is a fun game, but their shitty fucking code means that I can't do large scale keep sieges or any of the higher rank scenarios on my aging dinosaur of a computer. Subscription Canceled.
• Fable II puts the "RP" back into RPGs, and that makes me a happy nerd.
  
• Portal is the best puzzle game ever.
• Team Fortress 2 kicks ass, but I suck at it. ='(
• EVE can actually be a lot of fun, but you can't treat it like an everquest-type game. Also, you need to be borderline OCD and not afraid to lose your shit (more on this in another post).
• Left 4 Dead is awesome. In face, pretty much anything with a Valve logo would be worth buying even at twice the price.
  
• World War II shooters need to die.
• Aion: Tower of Eternity looks potentially sweet.
• Even though I'll get pissed and stop playing for a month because some emo pretty-boy asshat villain has to be killed half a dozen times before it sticks, and the character that I based my entire playstyle around will get kidnapped/imprisoned/killed, I will still buy and play Final Fantasy XIII when it hits shelves.
• Mass Effect is one game where I would actually be happy to see a near endless train of sequels.
• If your epic boss fight requires nullifying a specific playstyle in order to be challenging, then you fail as a game designer. If it relies on numerical challenge, you get a D-.
  
• I am on a self-imposed dwarf fortress ban, because otherwise it would ruin my life. This game is proof that a good idea and solid execution are all you really need to make a fun game.
• David Sirlin's article on the scrub is a must read, if for some reason you haven't yet. In fact, the entire Playing to Win series is great, and it now comes in book form.

Annnnd that's about it.