Night Shift

Or rather, very early morning shift (6am, to be precise), even though it’ll be 11am by the time most of you read this. Although, time zones being what they are, it’s always night somewhere. This is something I used to do over at Strategy Informer, where for a good few weeks I’d find myself working on late on one thing or another, and so I’d engage in the community aspect of our site and just blog about something.

Since it was night time, I usually called it the ‘Night Shift’. That just made me want to blog properly though, which lead me here. My sleeping patterns have been weird this week… saying that, it’s mainly me playing games for far  longer than I should, and then trying to deal with the aftermath. Ended up with a lot of late-for-work guilt this week… same again happened tonight, but instead of trying to ‘deal’ I decided to just power through the night and catch an early night Friday. It’s my weird way of trying to ‘reset’ my sleeping habits… although I should probably work on my gaming habits too.

Around trying to play Magicka (poor thing is still ever so slightly buggy), I’ve been getting stuck in to Sword of the Stars. Feel free to switch off here as it’s a very hardcore space-based 4X Strategy game, with both Real time and Turn based elements. The ‘4X’ part stands for “explore, expand, exploit and exterminate”, and basically applies to strategy games that have empire management in them, although it goes a bit beyond that. Basically a lot of depth, and a lot detail, but if you like that sort of thing it can be a lot of fun. The phrase was coined in 1993 by Alan Emrich, who was a games designer but who also wrote about videogames as well.

At the recent Paradox Convention I told you about, they were showing off the sequel – Sword of the Stars II, so I thought I’d do some ‘research’ so I could better appreciate where the game was coming from. Considering it’s only four years old, it could have aged better, but it’s a very enjoyable game. Talking with the lead designer was really fascinating – the vision he has for his game… it’s going to very micro-management heavy I think, but to be honest so long as it’s not frivolous then I don’t really mind.

The original has some frivolous micro-management in it, unfortunately. One of the great things about this game is that you get to design your own ships using interchangeable sections and weapons, as you get new/updated tech, you get to update the designs or create yet more. It can be a bit tedious thought to upgrade all your ship designs simply because they can now have a slightly more powerful laser. If I wanted to swap that laser out for something else – fine, but considering it’s an upgrade of an existing weapon, I’d kind of like the design to update itself.

Anyway, that’s what’s kept me up all night… I should get me one of those ‘life’ things everyone keeps going on about, I hear they’re fun.

Until next time.