So I have been griping for ages now — and specifically pretty recently — about how I never really get time to play video games, and I’ve tried a number of ways of scheduling them in an attempt to get to play them, usually to no avail. On the few occasions that the schedule has worked — in 2020 the shifting schedules due to the pandemic allowed me to finally play Saint’s Row the Third and IV — circumstances have caused me to change the schedule or I ended up getting busier and so not finding the time to play them. Most recently, I set aside a couple of time slots to play in the hopes that I could continue that when I return to working from work most of the week but ended up having the schedule on its own not give me enough time to get into Dragon Age: Origins again and getting used to its mechanics, not really be good for any kind of RPG where I’d have to remember what I had done the week before — which eliminated the Wizardry and Gold Box games unless I wanted to do my own mapping, which I definitely don’t — and where the second day of that kept getting interrupted because I didn’t realize how long the other stuff on that day would actually take.
So, as is my wont, I started thinking about it. In fact, I actually put into my schedule a specific time to figure all of that out. But, of course, I thought about it at other times as well, and so came up with a rough plan before that time. The basic constraints were that I’d have about 4 – 6 hours to play on two consecutive days, and then I wouldn’t be playing again for the rest of the week until those days came around again. So I needed a game that I could at least make some good progress in playing for 4 – 6 hours, and ideally in playing for 2 – 3 hours, but that I could easily pick up again after a week without having to spend too much time figuring out what I had done the past week and what I had wanted to do the next week, without having to take notes on that, which would make it feel more like work than like fun. So that left out a lot of RPGs, as noted above. Arguably, the KotOR games would work, maybe the Dragon Age games (except Inquisition, which is just too long for that), maybe the Personas (which are pretty linear), maybe the Fallouts, but RPGs in general were going to be difficult to pull off and would take too long for me to finish to really work with them. The last thing I wanted was to try this new schedule out and fail because I didn’t finish anything and so didn’t feel like I was making progress.
However, I also have a long list of games that probably would fit well into this model. The first category of games for this is adventure games. I picked up a lot of them from Good Old Games that I haven’t gotten around to playing, and some of the shorter ones could be finished in a 2 – 3 hour block — I did the Sam & Max games that way — but even the ones that can’t be finished in that time block or even a 4 – 6 hour block wouldn’t be a problem since I’m a fairly impatient adventure gamer and so rely on walkthroughs pretty much as soon as I get stuck so it would be pretty easy for me to simply pick up from the spot in the walkthrough where I stopped the next week before. Or, at least, that’s my theory.
Another category that could work are strategy games. Some of them, obviously, wouldn’t work, as they would involve a long, unbroken campaign that would take longer than those time blocks but would require me to take too much time the next week to remember what I was trying to do. But some of them would be made up of smaller campaigns where you could fit one or more of them into that time block and then would be able to pick the next one up the next week. And some of them, especially ones where I was playing against myself, would be simple enough or provide enough feedback to allow me to pick up where I left off even after a week. Or, again, that’s the theory.
The final category is more a collection of games that I want to play but bridges genres, which is a collection of Star Wars games that I keep meaning to get back to. The game that I’d most like to play — Rebellion — obviously wouldn’t work because it would require too much thought to remember all the things I was doing the previous week, and it also tends to cause me to lose track of time which is not at all good when I need to quit at a specific time. But a game like Galactic Battlegrounds is built on a number of small scenarios that I could play one or two in that time block and then pick up the next one the next week, and there are a number of those games that are either linear or split up into scenarios and so it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a place to stop for the day that I could start from the next week. Again, that’s the theory.
So that’s what I’m going to try. I’m going to split the two days between adventure games and strategy/Star Wars games, and so play adventure games on one day and strategy/Star Wars games on the other. While this means that I may not finish an adventure game in one day when I could if I played two days, it also allows me more variety in what I’m playing. Of course, it also allows me to be flexible so if I really want to play something on both days I can do that without losing much. I think I’ll start by playing the Amiga version of the old Space Crusade game which I have through an emulator, where my plan will be to work through all the scenarios until I’ve won all of them. Since I always play on my own, I will have all three Space Marine groups to work with, so that should help, and I think I actually did that once in the past. For adventure games, I’m going to play Starship Titanic. I have the audiobook of it and liked it, and did like the small part of the game that I actually played, and have it from GOG, so I’m going to try to work through it, likely heavily relying on a walkthrough.
I’m going to dump my full list of games that I want to work through at the end of the post. Again, I don’t expect to get through all of them, but the point is to give me a lot of options so I can find the ones that work and most interest me.
Star Wars:
Star Wars Battlefront
X-Wing/Tie Fighter/X-Wing Alliance series (probably won’t run on my system)
Star Wars Rogue Squadron
Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds
Star Wars Rebel Assault 1+2
Star Wars Shadows of the Empire
Star Wars Empire at War
Star Wars Dark Forces + Jedi Knight
Strategy:
Incubation
Space Crusade
Defender of the Crown
Civilization
Sim City
Disciples 2
Majesty
Call to Power 2
Tropicos
Age of Wonders
Pirates!
Heroes of Might and Magic
Alpha Centauri
Ghost Master
Port Royale 2
Master of Orion 2
Dungeon Keeper
Afterlife
Risk
Axis and Allies
Birth of the Federation
Blood Bowl
Star Trek Armada 1 and 2
Emperor of the Fading Suns
Syndicate
Syndicate Wars
Sunrider Mask of Arcadius
Real Politiks
Victoria
Beholder
Colonization
Covert Action
Adventure:
Sanitarium
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
Escape from Monkey Island
Elvira
Dracula: Love Kills
Starship Titanic
Lure of the Temptress
Flight of the Amazon Queen
Dark Fall: Ghost Vigil
Her Story
Space Quest
Leisure Suit Larry
Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude
Blade Runner
Renowned Explorers
Red Shirt
The Guest
The Dame Was Loaded
Heart of China
Quest for Glory
Dragon’s Lair
Maniac Mansion
Eric the Unready
Spellcasting 2 + 3
Rise of the Dragon
Gabriel Knight
Phantasmagoria
Zork
Spycraft
Planetfall
Conquests of the Longbow/Conquests of Camelot
The Dagger of Amon Ra
The Colonel’s Bequest
Bloodnet
Rex Nebular and the Cosic Gender Bender
Layers of Fear
Dreamfall
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary
Star Trek: Judgement Rites
Welcome to Space Crusade
July 18, 2022So as I noted back in June, I decided to try out a new gaming schedule … which I ended up shuffling a bit for other reasons. But the one thing that I did manage to mostly stick with was playing the old Amiga version of “Space Crusade”. Now, this was actually a game that I most remember playing with some friends from high school, and then later one of those friends sent me a bunch of emulated games were, surprise, surprise, this game was included. I poked around with it a little bit and still enjoyed it, but other games and distractions replaced it and so I never really did anything more with it than that quick exploration. So when I redid my gaming schedule, I decided to just go through all of the missions and essentially “complete” it.
“Space Crusade” is a “Warhammer 40K” game, where a player can take on up to three squads of Space Marines in a mission against Chaos forces. The game is turn-based, so each squad acts in turn and then the Chaos forces act, which means that one player can take on three squads or up to three different players can play hotseat, in a mostly co-operative fashion to see who can get the most points (there is one mission where a virus was released and so the squads are encouraged to wipe out the other squads since only one of them can receive the antidote). The squad with the most points — if they exceed the mission minimum score — gets medals and awards and squads that do really badly end up being stripped of all medals. I suspect that you can assign these medals to your squad to improve things but have never actually tried it to see.
Each squad member uses a different weapon. The Commander can only engage in melee, but comes equipped with a sword and also has multiple hit points, which means that he can survive successful attacks from the Chaos forces whereas the others cannot. If Soulsucker appears — a powerful melee combatant — you really want your Commander to take the brunt of that attack. There’s also a disintegrator weapon that fires in a straight line but applies its attack roll to everything in that line at least until it hits a wall. I haven’t really tested if it will stop at enemies that survive the attack, but it can take out a lot of enemies if they happen to be lined up (I’ve picked off three or four at a time in the last mission). Then there’s a rocket launcher type weapon that kills everything in a 2×2 square, and a smart gun type weapon where if the first target is killed by it any leftover power from the rolls — all attacks are made by rolling dice — can be applied to other targets until it runs out. The last marine just gets a standard gun, but it tends to have a melee weapon which I think makes fighting in melee easier, and also the other weapons have a weight penalty to them so the marines that have them move slower.
The Chaos forces get a movement phase, but there’s also an event phase at the end of the turn where things can happen, and most of the time they aren’t good things for the marines, like attacks by traps or auto-defenses — I had a trap wipe out about half a squad once — or spawns of Soulsuckers and Chaos Marines. However, sometimes good things can happen like Master Controls being given to one of the squads, which allows them to open and close doors anywhere on the ship that the mission is taking place on. This is really useful because it turns out that you can kill enemies by closing doors on them. In one mission, the squad that got it killed two androids — enemies with a lot of dice they can roll — and a Dreadnought — very big robot enemy with a lot of attacks — through this, and in the three missions I’ve played I’ve faced three Dreadnoughts — one in each mission — and killed two of the three through closing a door on them. The bad thing is that it looks like if you close a door on something you don’t get credit for killing it and so no points from that, which hurts all the more when it’s a secondary objective to the mission.
The game can be pretty deadly. In the first mission I tried, one squad managed to lose all but two marines in the first five moves, and as mentioned the booby trap killed an entire squad at one point. If even weak enemies get good rolls they can take out a lot of marines in a hurry, and they tend to target marines instead of targeting the Commander, even if the Commander is closer to them. On the flip side of that, however, if the enemies get bad rolls and the marines get good ones you can avoid losses and come through mostly unscathed. However, the game makes you walk through the ship and then back to your starting point, and while walking back events almost always cause complications for you. I had one squad that was mostly at full strength but then had one succumb to the Lure of Chaos which converts them to a Chaos Marine, who then immediately got a turn and killed another marine. Another Soulsucker attack and I think only the Commander survived that one.
This feature is what makes me only able to play one mission at a time, even though a mission takes about an hour or so and I usually have the time to play more than one mission in that time block. Walking out and walking back, even when fighting, can be a bit ponderous and so I end up being tired of the micromanagement by the end of a mission. I enjoy the missions and enjoy thinking about good attacks I’ve made or devastating attacks from the enemies, but after an hour or so am not anxious to do another session of moving marines slowly across the map to the objective and back again, especially since the ones with the special weapons move so very, very slowly.
Still, I definitely enjoy the game and it’s a lot of fun. Unless time constraints or difficulty bites me, I should be able to play through the missions and so “finish” the game.
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