So even though I've all but given up on newfangled games (to be honest, everything since The World Ends With You feels like old-hat, retreads of tried and true formulas, or just minute curiosities compared to the incredible innovation we saw in the mid-to-late 2000s), I often check out Good Old Games, a website that snatches up the rights to classic PC titles and sells them dirt-cheap (AND DRM free, making it a nice alternative to the Steam powerhouse). The reason being that when I was a kid, I didn't have money for newfangled PC games, much less a computer that could run them. When I did get to play a PC game, it was usually just a demo, and oh how I dreamed of playing the full versions of these games. Well now I can!
I typically pick up a strategy title or two whenever there's a decent sale ($1-3 US), and play it for a brief period of time, wishing that I had the same amount of free time as I did when I was younger. Most recently, I got a copy of Settlers 3, one of the stronger titles in the Settlers series of city-building/resource management/light warfare games. The tutorial seemed less robust than what I remember as a kid, and as early as the second stage, I was forced to perform a task that weren't explained by the game at all - creating a trade route between two islands. Years of gaming experience allowed me to brute force my way to the desired outcome, despite none of the hover-over tags being of any help (and so it was that I accomplished anything in this game, other than very basic resource setups that were half-halfheartedly explained in the tutorial).
Now, if you're older than say, 24, you probably remember a time when video games didn't hold your hand every five minutes (or seconds, if we're being honest about most AAA titles today). The fast-food variety of tutorial interface (big bubbly text and arrows pointing everywhere) had yet to become the standard, so you were either assaulted with massive text boxes in an ugly font, or next to nothing. The only option then was to *GASP* read the manual! Don't get me wrong, as a kid, reading a manual was the next best thing to actually playing a game (sometimes better if there were cool pictures or diagrams).
And so it was that I turned to the manual-turned-PDF that came with my digital download of the game, only to find that the damn thing is just barely north of 20 pages, 4 of which are introductory or system instructions, 5 pages of credits, and an extremely poorly written digest of the in-game tutorial that spans 4 more pages. This leaves a few pages of vague descriptions of various buildings and units - nothing regarding their requirements or uses. Total BS! By comparison, most games from around the same era have an 80-page booklet detailing absolutely everything the game has to offer, often times including detailed statistical information that may or may not appeal to the sort of people that buy these games to begin with. Emperor (the last game in Sierra's ancient-civilization city-builder series), which came little more than a year later and is no less complex, has a 150-page booklet (and a sort-of extensive, if old-school style, tutorial). Total BS!
That said, the game is very entertaining and interesting, so much so that I'm inclined to use the map editor to create a map that would serve as a real tutorial to teach the ins-and-outs of the game. The game, which, nobody is likely ever to play as more resources were poured into Settlers II: 10th Anniversary, released 7 years later and Settlers HD (available for all manner of mobile devices). Apparently there are other games in the series as well, but of course, by the time those were released I was already knee-deep in the legendary DS and PS2 titles pouring out of Japan.
I typically pick up a strategy title or two whenever there's a decent sale ($1-3 US), and play it for a brief period of time, wishing that I had the same amount of free time as I did when I was younger. Most recently, I got a copy of Settlers 3, one of the stronger titles in the Settlers series of city-building/resource management/light warfare games. The tutorial seemed less robust than what I remember as a kid, and as early as the second stage, I was forced to perform a task that weren't explained by the game at all - creating a trade route between two islands. Years of gaming experience allowed me to brute force my way to the desired outcome, despite none of the hover-over tags being of any help (and so it was that I accomplished anything in this game, other than very basic resource setups that were half-halfheartedly explained in the tutorial).
Now, if you're older than say, 24, you probably remember a time when video games didn't hold your hand every five minutes (or seconds, if we're being honest about most AAA titles today). The fast-food variety of tutorial interface (big bubbly text and arrows pointing everywhere) had yet to become the standard, so you were either assaulted with massive text boxes in an ugly font, or next to nothing. The only option then was to *GASP* read the manual! Don't get me wrong, as a kid, reading a manual was the next best thing to actually playing a game (sometimes better if there were cool pictures or diagrams).
And so it was that I turned to the manual-turned-PDF that came with my digital download of the game, only to find that the damn thing is just barely north of 20 pages, 4 of which are introductory or system instructions, 5 pages of credits, and an extremely poorly written digest of the in-game tutorial that spans 4 more pages. This leaves a few pages of vague descriptions of various buildings and units - nothing regarding their requirements or uses. Total BS! By comparison, most games from around the same era have an 80-page booklet detailing absolutely everything the game has to offer, often times including detailed statistical information that may or may not appeal to the sort of people that buy these games to begin with. Emperor (the last game in Sierra's ancient-civilization city-builder series), which came little more than a year later and is no less complex, has a 150-page booklet (and a sort-of extensive, if old-school style, tutorial). Total BS!
That said, the game is very entertaining and interesting, so much so that I'm inclined to use the map editor to create a map that would serve as a real tutorial to teach the ins-and-outs of the game. The game, which, nobody is likely ever to play as more resources were poured into Settlers II: 10th Anniversary, released 7 years later and Settlers HD (available for all manner of mobile devices). Apparently there are other games in the series as well, but of course, by the time those were released I was already knee-deep in the legendary DS and PS2 titles pouring out of Japan.
