A few weeks ago (or I guess more than a month ago, at this point -- geez I'm slow at writing these), Firaxis released it's "Test of Time" update for Civilization VII. Civ VII players can now finally play as the same civilization throughout the entire game, which addresses one of the player base's biggest criticisms with the game. The internet is now abuzz with the question of whether or not this patch "fixes" or "saves" Civilization VII. From what I've seen so far, it seems to be very well-received, with many internet pundits saying (or implying with their YouTube thumbnails) that Civ VII is "fixed".

Test of Time certainly is a good update. The biggest change is that players now have the choice to play as any civilization in any age, and can choose to play as the same civilization for the entire game, if you choose. To accomplish this, Firaxis gave every civilization an "apex age" in which they are the most powerful. During the apex age, their abilities are the strongest, and they have access to all of their unique units. During non-apex ages, each civ has less powerful versions of their ability, and they are stuck with stock units.

Players can now choose to keep the same civilization when transitioning into a new age.

This approach is similar to Humankind, which also gave players the option to stay as the same culture when progressing to a new era. The big difference is that in Humankind, staying with the same culture would give that culture the same generic bonus every time; whereas in Civ VII, each civ still has a unique ability, it's just a weaker version of their apex unique ability. So Civ VII's approach is a little bit more flavorful in that regard. Basically, Humankind's version of this feature was (as far as I can tell) just a fall-back option if all the good cultures have already been selected by other players. If you don't want any of the available cultures, you can just stay as the same culture, and continue to field their unique units and build their unique infrastructure, and get some small buff. In Civ VII, by contrast, sticking with the same civ is framed as a more assertive decision. You choose that civ because you want their abilities, not simply because you don't want the other civs.

Personally, I still prefer Humankind's method of culture-switching over Civ VII's. I prefer how it is tied to the individual civilization's progress through the eras, and doesn't stop the game at arbitrary points to force everyone to switch. I also like how there's a competitive, first-come-first-serve aspect to switching cultures in Humankind, which lights a fire under the player's butt to make sure to advance fast enough to get a prime pick of the upcoming era's cultures. Humankind's approach feels like a much more organic and natural part of the game that doesn't interrupt the game's pacing at all (but in fact, adds to the pacing). This is in stark contrast to Civ VII's design, which feels forced, arbitrary, and exceedingly "game-ified".

But perhaps a full analysis of Humankind's culture-switching compared to Civ VII should be the subject of another essay, similar to what I did with Civ VII and Ara: History Untold... For now, I want to talk about Civ VII specifically.

In addition to being able to play civs outside of their apex age, Test of Time completely replaces the Legacy paths with new, more granular and more varied "Triumphs". These are smaller goals and milestones that unlock dedication bonuses for the next age. This is intended to add more variety to each age, and make it so that players don't feel like they're following the same rote steps to achieve the same 4 goals every time they play.

Legacy paths were replaced with more varied and granular Triumphs.

Again, this is a good change.

I finally had a few hours to play some VR while the kids were out of the house a few weekends ago. I only had a limited amount of time though, so I decided to go with a short game that I could hopefully finish in a single sitting, instead of trying Aces of Thunder again. I was looking forward to Aces of Thunder (literally counting down the days till its release), but after a couple days of playing it after release, frustrations with the controls and lack of any tutorials put me off of playing it. I decided to put it off to the side in the hopes that it would be updated with a tutorial or more accessibility options.

Not having the time to learn Aces of Thunder, I settled on a game that's been in my back-log for quite a while: the slice-of-life, BAFTA-award-winning indie game Before Your Eyes. This is a novel VR experience that is controlled entirely through eye-motion and blinking. No controller needed! The core conceit is that the game is made up of a series of slice-of-life vignettes, and when you blink your eyes, the game advances to the next vignette. As such, the protagonist's life literally "flashes before your eyes".

Maybe I'll be able to come back to Aces of Thunder next week, when my 4-year-old is with his grandparents visiting my sister out of state?

Life moves quickly, and often feels like a series of "blink-and-you-miss-it" events.

Blink and you miss it

I was expecting a game about witnessing a person's entire life, seeing relationships come and go, children grow up, pets and loved ones growing old and dying, and so forth. It was pitched to me as emphasizing the idea that life happens fast, and that there are moments that feel like you "blink and you miss them". Like one minute I'd witnessing the birth of a child, and 2 blinks later, that child would be going to the first day of school, and then a couple blinks later, graduating high school and going off to college. Before I know it, I'd be seeing the birth of grand children. I'd be left wondering what happened to all the time in between. It would supposedly be about living in the moment and trying to treasure the time you have as you're experiencing it, because that time will be fleeting and gone before you know it. And maybe there would be branching plots based on unconscious decisions such as whether your gaze lingers on certain things, or how long you stay in a particular vignette.

I was expecting something along the lines of a VR version of The Inner Light.

How would life be different if you studied instead of playing video games all day? (Or vice-versa?)

The game is still about these things, to some extent, but it goes in a direction that I totally did not expect. I was expecting a story that is sentimental and maybe nostalgic, and just a general vision of the highs and lows of life in general. What I got instead was something that was a lot more specific and a lot more heartbreaking.

When I went back to re-download and play Surviving The Aftermath, I also noticed that Surviving Mars was in my library. I guess I must've bought it a while back on sale and forgotten about it. Due to the similarities of the name, I mistakenly thought that these 2 games were developed by the same studio, so I downloaded both. I had also seen some headlines and social media posts about controversy regarding a "Re-Launched" version of Surviving Mars. I wasn't quite sure what was going on there, but I decided to give the original game a test run and see if the Re-Launched version would be something I might like to try. If Re-Launched fixed some of the complaints that I had with the original game, than maybe I would upgrade to that. Or at least, that's what naive me thought.

After playing for a day or 2, I was liking Surviving Mars, so I went to the Steam page to see how cheap the upgrade to Re-Launched is. That is when I realized what all the controversy is about.

Paradox, in it's infinitely consumer-unfriendly wisdom, decided to make Surviving Mars: Re-Launched into a completely new game; it is not an upgrade or update to the original game! Paradox is selling Re-Launched at full price, even if you already have the original game. Worse yet, Re-Launched is basically a "complete edition" of the game, with all the DLC expansions packaged in, and with a slight graphics update. The original game looks fine as is, so I don't think a graphics update was necessary. But they also de-listed the original game, and all of its DLC expansions, so that if you own the original game, you cannot buy any of the expansions!

Re-Launched is not an update to Surviving Mars; it is a separate, full-priced release on Steam.

This is a kick in the gut to anybody who bought the original version of the game. Especially if you never got around to buying the DLC, and are now completely locked out of being able to do so.

I'm sorry, but this is basically strike 3 for Paradox. I gave them plenty of chances to right their ship, but they have now completely capsized and have lost all of my good will. They bungled the premature release of Star Trek: Infinite and killed that game basically out of the gate. They then went on to do the same thing to Cities Skylines II, and then fired Colossal Order from its own series. And now there's these shenanigans with Surviving Mars. This is all on top of all the older controversy involving Paradox's greedy piecemeal DLC pricing, releasing updates to games that make old saves incompatible, and releasing games that felt generally incomplete.

I have had it with Paradox! I don't think I can buy another game from Paradox, and I am actually starting to feel guilty for playing the Paradox games that I already own. It's a shame too, because Paradox, as a publisher, sells games that are right up my alley. They specialize in strategy, management, and simulation games -- often with historic or sci-fi themes. Now I feel like I can't play any of these games, or else I'm giving money and support to a company that might very well be the sleaziest, greediest, and overall worst game publisher on the market right now. Possibly as bad or worse than the likes of Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K.

I don't know, maybe Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and 2K are still far worse. I haven't been keeping up as much with news on those companies since I haven't been on social media as much, and since I actively avoid their games (other than buying used copies of EA's football games). On top of all that, Stephanie Sterling hasn't been making new Jimquisition episodes (now rebranded as "High-Steph") to tell me all about the evils of these companies and their executives. Well, except for a recent episode that reminded everyone of former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick's close association with convicted pedophile Jeffery Epstein...

I liked Tormented Souls well enough that I was curious to see if the sequel would fix the first game's flaws. It helped that the developers put out a free demo of the game on the PSN, which I downloaded and played. It was surprisingly long, covering most of the first full level of the game.

The demo also did show signs of improvement over the first game. Enough so that I was motivated to buy the full game when it released (though it still took a few months to actually get around to playing it). If the sequel could maintain the positive aspects of the first game, while fixing or improving on the first game's flaws, then we could have a true gem of a traditional survival horror game on our hands.

Modernization at the cost of frustration

Almost immediately, I started noticing quality of life and gameplay improvements over the first game. Caroline is more mobile. She can move while aiming a weapon. Perhaps best of all, there's a quick inventory. It's mapped to the right stick, which is a bit clunky and imprecise, but it's fine. It's still better than having to go into the inventory every time I need to switch between the nail gun and a melee weapon, and vice versa.

Caroline can move with her weapon drawn.

Cool! They fixed the biggest problems with the original game: the archaic-feeling controls! Right?

Well, not so fast. While these are strict improvements over the original, they do come with a catch. To offset Caroline's new mobility, enemies are much faster, more aggressive, and tankier. The ability to move with the weapon drawn helps, especially in long hallways and the rare open spaces. I can backpedal and shoot instead of having to go through a cumbersome process of aim, shoot, turn around to run away, and turn back around to aim and shoot again. I can even strafe! This works well in the relatively wide halls of the opening convent level, but it stops being useful basically as soon as you leave the convent, at which point the game ambushes the player with multiple enemies or gives them the ability to hit you from further away.

The problem is that there's rarely -- if ever -- enough room to maneuver with this newfound mobility. The arenas are cramped and cluttered, the enemies completely block narrow paths, they have huge hit boxes, and their hit tracking makes it almost impossible to run around them. The camera angles constantly hide enemies off-screen, making it impossible for me to judge distance or know if I have a clear shot until the enemy is right up in my face, and close enough for them to get a couple cheap shots in. Regardless of whether I was using "tank" controls or analog movement, if I did try moving around during combat, I was constantly running into tables and chairs in the middle of rooms, or I was getting stuck on geometry along the periphery of combat arenas (often at the edge of the screen). The small rooms mean that camera changes are frequent. Every time the camera changed, I would lose a step because the character would turn the wrong direction or run into another obstacle.

There rarely seems to be enough room to use Caroline's newfound mobility.

On top of all this, the game seems to be stingier with supplies (at least early on). The first boss ate through all of my remaining ammo after getting through the first level. I had to finish her off with melee in her final phase. This forced me to have to burn through all my healing items as well, since she has a close-range area-of-effect ground smash attack that I wasn't able to avoid at that close range.

I played the demo for Across the Unknown back in November or December. I was not impressed. The demo felt like little more than a dumbed-down mobile game that breezes through Wikipedia summaries of Star Trek: Voyager episodes. The demo was pitifully easy to play through, and the decisions didn't seem very impactful. The fact that you can choose to use the Caretaker's Array to go back home and end the game before it even starts seemed like a silly novelty at the time. I doubted that the actual in-game decisions could prove to be as meaningful.

But the game released, and I'm a sucker for Star Trek games. So I went ahead and bought it (it was discounted on release!). And I'll be damned if I didn't end up being just a tiny bit impressed!

Being able to use the Caretaker to go home and end the game prematurely
is the only major deviation from the show's overarching plot.

The platonic ideal of a mobile game?

Now, when I say "impressed", that comes with some huge asterisks and qualifiers! Remember, based on pre-release marketing and the demo, I was going into this game expecting a PC port of a mobile game along the lines of Star Trek: Fleet Command or Trexels. That was the measuring stick by which I was judging this game. I wasn't expecting it to be Birth of the Federation or A Final Unity.

Yes, Across the Unknown is a mobile game that was released for consoles and PC. It's like a combination of Star Trek: Fleet Command and Fallout: Shelters, except that it isn't a mobile game. Mechanically, it's almost the same, but it completely lacks any of the time and money-wasting pay-to-play grind that mobile games are built around. Yes, you do collect resources and wait for rooms on Voyager to be built. But those rooms don't take real-life hours or days to build; they take just a few in-game "cycles" (it's unclear if a "cycle" represents hours or days in the game), and are done in a matter of seconds or minutes of real time. And there are no "premium currencies" that ask you to shell out a credit card number if you don't feel like waiting for days to grind. Dilithium definitely seems like it could have been a premium currency, as it acts as a gate for higher tier technologies and room upgrades. There's no daily login bonuses. No ads. No "limited time only" promotions. It's just the raw game, stripped of everything that makes mobile gaming so obnoxious and predatory.

The blend of resource-collection and base-building will be familiar to anyone who's played a mobile game.

This is kind of the best possible version of what mobile games were promised to be, before they were completely co-opted by greedy corporations. This is not thoughtless shovel-ware designed by soulless corporations to prey on people who will compulsively through money at it. The player is constantly engaged with things to do and decisions to make. And those decisions occasionally have weight and consequence. And it all comes together to tell the coherent story of the entire Star Trek: Voyager TV show! Yeah, the individual encounters are abridged Cliff's Notes summaries of Voyager episodes, but they come together to tell an overarching story that adds up to slightly more than the sum of its parts.