(While I’m recommending Carrion, I should also highly recommend The Things by Peter Watts. If you like one of these pieces of media, you’ll like the other, too).

I adore Carrion, it is simply magnificent in every respect. I think probably the only thing I could fault it on is that it is too short, i.e it has an ending and less than infinity levels. Though to be fair it does have first-class mod support, a level editor, and several great expansions so in a way if kind of does have infinity levels.

The premise: you are a simple, innocent, multi-mouthed and betentacled polymorphic biomass, similar to but legally distinct from the creature in The Thing, intent only on sharing your special brand of love with the rest of the universe’s creatures by becoming one with them. You travel about a kajillion light-years to a small blue-green planet somewhere in the uncharted backwaters of a nondescript galaxy, only to be immediately captured and cruelly experimented on by their scienticians! Luckily, these “hunams” who have captured you are silly creatures and have critically underestimated just how flexible you are, so you manage to escape your confinement. Now all you need to do is make it out of the sprawling gubmint facility where you were being held. Along the way you will encounter hordes of enemies ranging from defenseless to terrifying, and puzzles ranging from simple to devious. You will also find several other captives similar to yourself, and take the opportunity to merge with their biomass, gaining new abilities from them and growing in size as you make your way to the surface.

Carrion is spectacular. It is resplendent. Where to begin?

The Graphics. Carrion uses a pixel-art style which might look simple at first glance, but is subtle in its complexity, and oozes atmosphere. In addition to the pixel-art style, you’ll also see some really great use of smoke/particle and lighting effects which fit right in and really look awesome, taking the graphics to the next level.

The Soundtrack is really fantastic. Think of every horror movie soundtrack you’ve ever heard, put them all in a blender, then add action cues and reactivity when battles break out. It’s really really great. If you listen, you’ll hear cues quite reminiscent of several classic horror movies, and the music always adds to the atmosphere of the environment you’re in. And then you’ll stumble into a room and find yourself forced to battle it out with a mech similar to, but legally distinct from, the one in aliens and you’ll hear the classic “bwah” hit, similar to, but legally distinct from, the one in every Christopher Nolan movie.

The level design is something special. Each level has its own feel and despite using a somewhat simple tiled pixel-art aesthetic, the design is distinct enough that you’re not going to get lost or confused, instead you’ll find yourself saying “oh I’m back here” as you explore the facility looking for your way out. This is helpful as the levels are inventive and tend to branch out from central hubs and get more complex as you open up more areas. You’ll also find yourself up against a series of environmental puzzles which will get more difficult as the game progresses, but which are never so challenging as to be frustrating – you will spend your time exploring more often than you’ll be scratching your head wondering what to do next. The level design also combines realy well with the special abilities you’ll gain throughout your playthrough, with previously inaccessible areas becoming accessible as you gain new abilities, and you’ll be rewarded for going back and exploring previous areas once you’ve gained a new ability.

The gameplay is really fantastic, with an innovative control scheme unlike anything I’ve played before. It has similarities to a twin-stick shooter, but it’s really not that. And the gameplay and level design has really excellent progression, introducing new abilities, teaching you their mechanics, and then introducing puzzles to solve with them, gradually getting more challenging and introducing new elements as the game progresses.

The violence, and the gore. Oh, the glorious, gratuitous, hilarious, pixel-art gore, and the hilariously over-the-top ultra-violence. It’s a sight to behold. Viscera will fly and paint the walls red as you rip the puny hunams in half, throwing them across the room into each other, or picking up desks, doors, grates, or whatever else is lying around and throwing them at the hunams fast enough to break them in two, and then you’ll devour them whole to recover your biomass. Laugh and enjoy as the defenseless scientician cowers in the corner whimpering while you force him to watch as you consume all his friends alive before finally consuming him, too. The best way to deal with a room full of hunams with weapons is often to launch into a paroxysm of ultra-violence. These never cease to be a delight as you create interesting works of art in shades of red on the ceiling, walls, and floor, turning an orderly laboratory into a scene of utter chaos in the span of ten seconds or so.

The story. Carrion has a minmalistic story, but it does have a story told through several “cutscenes” where you control one of the hunams. There is a story there, but I found it a little big ambiguous and thought it could perhaps use some more text dialogue or even some voice acting in these parts. Fortunately though this story isn’t hugely important, I don’t think, in much the same way that you don’t need to know The Thing’s backstory for it to be a great sci-fi horror movie.

The tropes. So. Many. Tropes. This is a love-letter to horror and sci-fi movies, particularly The Thing. But it also blends in elements from several other horror and/or sci-fi films, but does so in a way that they’re just generic enough to not be a wink or a nod to any specific movie most of the time. The game is not saying “hey look at me! Remember Aliens?”, it tends instead to use the devices and tropes from that genre of film to enhance the story and atmosphere of the game with very minimal visual cues. It’s glorious.

There are not many games which I have the patience to 100%, but with Carrion it was easy for me to do so – I wanted more game. This kind of comes back to my one criticisim – which is sort of a real criticism – the story mode was too short for my liking. i probably completed it in about 10 hours and 100%’d the game in 15 hours or so. But this is a slight criticism because as mentioned it has a level editor and great mod support. Not only did I 100% it, I then went and played the christmas DLC and a bunch of user level packs.

Carrion is one of the best games I’ve played this decade. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The premise and gameplay work together to create a really unique and supremely enjoyable experience. The graphics, music, and sound are pitch-perfect for what the game is trying to do. I didn’t encounter a single bug or crash or weird behaviour in the course of 100%ing it, or in any of the addons I played. I would buy a sequel in a heartbeat and will likely be watching for other titles from this developer. Highly, highly recommended.

Recently the complete edition of Civilization: Beyond Earth went on sale. I think I paid about $10-15 for it. I’d been waiting for this to happen for a couple of years, since I insist on buying the whole game rather than buying it in 3 transactions (I want all the DLC, i.e the whole game), and because you’ll have to do something really special to make me think about spending $60 for a game.

Humble Store Link.

I’ve just finished my first playthrough, and here are my thoughts. They’re not easy to sum up in just 200 characters.

Let me start by saying it’s good. You’d expect it to be – they’ve done like 15 Civilization games so far, so they should have a good idea of what works and what doesn’t. You’d expect anything under the Civilization banner these days to be super-polished and addictive. And it is, with the usual caveat that the AI isn’t particularly smart. But I’m willing to let that one slide since we don’t have general AI yet – it’s a complex game and building an AI for it is not going to be easy.

Weirdly, I found it both more and less complex than Civ V (the most recent one I’ve played, I have Civ 6 but have only put in maybe an hour so far). For instance, the diplomatic options seem very cut-down – you can’t e.g surround an enemy with a huge army and then demand a “gift”, or even have any customised dialogue – the options are limited to making trade agreements and setting a cooperation level (ranging from war to allied). That’s it. This seems to be a curious change for a Civ game, given that the diplomacy is such a big part of it. So it’s less complex, but at the same time there are a bunch of new mechanics that make it more complex, e.g orbital units, which I think are cool but didn’t strike me as particularly useful – I ignored them for most of the game.

I haven’t played Alpha Centauri in a couple of years, but I remember being really really impressed with it. I don’t think this is as good. And it’s not as good as Civ V, which might be the ultimate version of Civilization – it’s super-super-polished, faithful enough to the older games that I didn’t notice anything missing, and yet has enough new stuff that seemed to fit in well that I felt like it was more than just a rehash.

It pains me to say that any of these are better than the original, Civ 1, but objectively speaking I’d say that all of these probably are – I still play Civ 1 occasionally and compared with these games it feels kinda simple, and the graphics are antiquated. It is still hugely fun and massively addictive and it’s undoubtedly one of the most important games ever made, but if you’re new to Civ you probably want to start with Civ V.

Another pet-peeve I had with beyond earth is the technology / science system – I feel like the tech web idea (it’s a web rather than a tree) precludes a logical progression of science, because the dependencies for any given item aren’t particularly deep. So you could theoretically go to the end of a particular branch of the web by researching only 4 or 5 prerequisites, as opposed to the more conventional tech tree where railroads require steam engines, which require alloys, which requires steel, which requires metallurgy, which requires bronze, etc etc etc. Granted, the tech web is perhaps more realistic and reflects how you could change the focus of your research drastically and that research in computing is probably not going to impact biology very much, but I think the deeper tech tree with less choices at each branch is a better game mechanic.

The other problem I have with the tech tree/web in this game is that I felt like most of the technologies and unit names were just made up technobabble – I’m somebody who knows his sci-fi and futurism and I didn’t find myself saying “oh I know what that is”. And in a few cases I did know where something was, and was disappointed that the game didn’t really give me that. For example, there’s a mass driver. I said “ooooh cooool, mass driver!”. And then I got an improvement that gave my city better offensive capabilities, no mass driver graphic or animation to be seen, no weeapon I can target enemies with to throw meteors at them. In my book this should have been a devastating orbital unit, but nope. Note that this doesn’t apply to all of the technologies or units – some of them are logical hypothetical technologies and some of them do just what it says on the tin. But a lot of it is researching inverse phase polarity infusers, which give you a temporal gyreforge improvement that for some reason gives your city +3 production, or whatever. It’s been a while since I played Alpha Centauri, but I seem to recall that having a more logical tech tree, and the units/improvements you get from each tech make more sense with regard to what each technology is. But I might be wrong about that. Maybe it’s just that I’ve played regular Civilization more recently, and it has a very logical tech progression where you automatically know what everything is, as per my rail example above (which is just off the top of my head, but is probably fairly close to the actual progression).

I found several things in the UI unintuitive. For example I was about two-thirds of the way into the game before I figured out how to assign specialists, i.e where you assign a citizen as a scientist or engineer to get a science or production bonus. At first I assumed it didn’t have them, and then I figured out that you have to check the ‘show buildings’ checkbox, and certain buildings give you slots for specialists which you can click to assign. Another example of the unintuitive AI was that at a certain point I noticed that the colour of the aliens had changed. At first it was blue and then at a certain point I noticed it was orange. It was only when I destroyed a nest and the aliens changed from orange to red that I realised that they were getting more and more hostile. This despite me having all the advisors turned on, and it telling me every 3 turns that I can change my personality traits, and me screaming “yeah I’m happy with the ones I have, shut up!”.

Don’t take all these criticisms as me saying that the game isn’t great, though – it still has that addictive “one more turn” thing going on that you expect from a Civ game. But I don’t think it’s as good as Civ V or Alpha Centauri. If you’re looking for a purchasing recommendation, here’s mine: Buy Civilization V complete when it’s on sale ($80?!? seriously?), then buy Alpha Centauri on GOG (Listed at AU$8 at the time of writing including the expansion, a fair price), and then buy the complete edition of Beyond Earth when it’s on sale. If you can get the complete edition for $10-15 it’s worth it. If you don’t already own Civ V and Alpha Centauri then I’d recommend getting those first. I’m just going to assume you already own Civ 1. Which strangely doesn’t seem to be on GOG at the time of writing. Luckily, I own a boxed copy for the Amiga. </bragging>

Note that, of course, all these games support Linux. You might think that Alpha Centauri doesn’t, but loki games did a port back in the day. Apparently it can be difficult to get it running on modern systems, and that may or may not be true for the GOG version, but this installer works just fine on my xubuntu 16.04 laptop with my original Alpha Centauri CD. The only issue I have with Alpha Centauri is that it insists on running at 1024×768, which means it’s fairly small on my laptop screen, which won’t actually switch to that resolution. If you have a way to make it run at 1920×1080 (or 1680×1050), I’d love to hear it – the only info i could find was for the windows version. But it doesn’t make the game less awesome.

Apparently you have to own a game to review it on steam, and since I’ve been playing a friend’s copy of ARK via family sharing, my opinion is meaningless. The best part is that they let you spend time writing your review and then tell you that you can’t review the game when you press “post”. So here’s my review of ARK: Survival Evolved:

Hugely impressive and ambitious, but not finished. ARK has the potential to be a really excellent game, if all the bugs are ever ironed out. At first the bugs will just be annoyances, but once you’ve put some real time into this game they’ll come to rule your experience and you’ll find yourself increasingly frustrated.

Two particularly big ones are dinosaur AI and building structures. You’ll find your tame dinosaurs getting constantly stuck while they’re trying to follow you, to the point that you’ll have to turn around every minute or so to count how many dinosaurs are following you and go back and rescue stragglers. This isn’t such a big deal when you have 3 dinos following you a small distance, but it becomes incredibly tedious when you have 15 and you’re on an epic 20km journey. As for building structures, I hope you like grinding to collect resources, because you’ll spend 20 minutes collecting stuff to craft a piece of a structure, and then the game will refuse to place it where you want it, so you have to demolish something and go out to collect the necessary resources to rebuild in the esoteric order the game wants. Or the game will place it in the wrong place, or in the wrong direction, and you’ll be left with no choice but to demolish the structure and go out and collect more resources to rebuild.

If you search around a bit, you’ll find that both of these issues have been problems for YEARS, and that no fix seems to be forthoming. It seems that the devs are busy building DLC rather than finishing the game. See also the fiasco where the scorched earth DLC was released while the game was still in early access. Apparently the solution to that was to just remove the ‘early access’ tag, to hell with the bugs.

I’d really like to recommend ARK, there really is a fantastic game buried under all those bugs, and perhaps one day these issues will be addressed and I’ll re-visit this review, but as it stands this game is regrettably not worth the AAA price tag attached to it. If you can get it for less than $20 with all the DLC then I’d say it’s probably worth it.

Australian Courts open up a can of whoop-ass on Valve for their violation of Australian consumer protection laws

And all they had to do was refund my $2.49. They tried to tell me they were above the law. I told them they weren’t. Seems like the courts agree with me.

So in addition to not ever getting another cent from me, Valve got dragged through our courts and will now be fined. And they refunded my $2.49 plus fees (I did a chargeback).

It’s always nice when justice actually happens.