Category Archives: Video Games

I just need to get out of my system how weird Pokémon Conquest is

You all know Pokémon, right?  That game about cute animals battling each other that’s so popular with kids and young adults.  I’ve been a fan all my life and recently got into the DS game Pokémon Conquest because it was described to me as Pokémon meets Fire Emblem.  So far so good.  The game is set during an alt-history warring states period in which all the warriors of Japan use Pokémon to fight each other.  The “Kingdoms” of Pokémon Conquest are all elementally-aligned and so take the place of the traditional Pokémon gyms.  There’s the fire kingdom, the water kingdom, the grass kingdom, and our heroes have to defeat them all to reunite Japan.  

The moderate amounts of insanity begin early on, however when we find out that Nobunaga is also a Pokémon trainer and is trying to conquer Japan himself.  In Japanese culture Nobunaga was once described to me as “George Washington Hitler” due to the complex and often contradictory role he is seen in.  On the one hand he was the Great Unifier who’s successes in uniting Japan lead to the direct predecessor of the modern Japanese state and the end of the Sengoku period.  This characterization can lead to positive portrayals.  On the other hand he is often viewed as needlessly, even gleefully cruel and portrayed in some media as a diabolical schemer taking pleasure in the pain of others.  So when I saw him in a Pokémon game I did not know what to expect.

Insanity ramps up when the game reveals that your assistant, an unconfident girl with a Jigglypuff named Oichi, is also the secret sister of Nobunaga.  Nobunaga reveals that his signature Pokémon is the Gen V legendary Zekrom, so I guess that’s how he conquered Japan, by using a legendary Pokémon.  But I couldn’t get over my laughter at how the game decided that the shy assistant girl would be the sister of the main antagonist, like sure that’s storytelling plot twist #1: have a secret relationship.  But it seemed so out of the blue and didn’t really add much to how I saw either character.  It didn’t add dimensions to Nobunaga because we barely see him, and it didn’t add dimensions to Oichi because she barely has character and neither she nor anyone else acts differently because of this revelation.  It felt like a twist for twist’s sake.

The highlight of this game’s weird and wacky insanity was when your main character evolves.  Yes that’s right, in this game Pokémon aren’t the only ones who evolve.  After a bunch of events happen the main character evolves into a cooler version of themselves, with all the evolution sound effects and music that you’d expect from a Pokémon evolution, and they aren’t the only ones that can do that.  Oichi herself can evolve too, as can some of the other main characters if certain conditions are met.  I wonder if this power will ever carry over to the main games?  I should ask my friends if anyone ever evolved in Pokémon Legends, Arceus.

The finally hilarity for me was the finale where you reveal that the continent you’re on bears more relation to Arceus (the Poké-God) then to historical Japan, and Arceus itself comes down and basically says that your main character should be the one to defeat/catch it.  OK sure, whatever, catch ‘em all.  But God himself coming down and saying “catch me bro” just put the final pin in the corkboard for me, I think this game is a comedy and I wish it had gone all out on it.  Maybe it’s because I’m not 10 anymore, maybe this would feel like a stirring epic if I’d played it as a kid, but I couldn’t keep a straight face through any of it.  There are some things that are just instantly hilarious to me, and mixing Pokémon with history is one of them.  I still giggle at how Lt. Surge apparently fought in wars with his Raichu, and now we can add him to the long list of war-fighting trainers from this game.

Pokémon Conquest: how Eevee and Jigglypuff reunited Japan.

Random thoughts about Dyson Sphere Program

So Dyson Sphere Program (DSP for short) is a video game I’ve put way too much time into, and I decided to write down some random thoughts I had on it

I now know why Factorio was helped by having biters: they give you something to do and work on.  I spend a lot of time in DSP just waiting for the next research to finish. I had nothing to lose but time, and no idea of what to do next. Biters in Factorio at least gave you a goal and a thing to work on whenever you were stuck. “I don’t know what to do, well the biters to the west are giving me trouble, I’ll reinforce the defenses or destroy the nests, maybe both.”

It feels like there’s too much research and also it’s a mistake to let you queue it all immediately.  I end up researching a lot of things that I don’t know what they do or why they help. I just queue up everything I can currently research and I end up wondering what the hell any of it did because I wasn’t really thinking about my decisions. The research queue is a QOL feature, but its absence does at least force the player to kind of go back to the tech tree and glance over the techs every few minutes instead of every few hours.

Also I think the research tree could use some UI help.  There are certain techs that require other techs… but those techs don’t directly precede them.  If I MUST research Tech A before Tech B, then Tech A should be linked to Tech B and immediately precede it.  OR AT LEAST if I click on Tech B because I want to research it, then Tech A should get queued automatically before Tech B.  As it stands I found myself wanting to research certain techs and having to hunt around the tech tree to find the required pre-reqs (logistics/interplanetary logistics were where I had the most trouble)

Other times I research a tech only to find that although I can craft New Item B, that item relies on Other Item A which I do NOT have the tech for.  So again I have to hunt through the tech tree to find Other Item A so I can finally craft New Item B like I wanted to.  Again, if B requires A then A should immediately precede B and I shouldn’t be allowed to research B until I have A.

I feel like this game doesn’t really ramp up in scope and scale as much as Factorio did, and because of this I found myself not really needing or caring to expand all that much.  After making an initial spaghetti base I moved on the starting planet to two new spots to set up research lines, and that basically carried me through half or more of the tech tree.  My starting resources never/barely ran out and I didn’t need to go to new planets for more iron or copper, just for the titanium and silicon that didn’t spawn on my starting planet.  Having certain resources only spawn on specific planets is certainly one way to incentivize moving off-world, but I’d also like it more if higher levels of science required massively increased amounts of resources, forcing you to colonize more and more planets to meet the resource requirements much like how Factorio forces you to expand further and further outwards to meet the higher requirements for Blue/Purple/Yellow science.

Blueprints were the opposite of intuitive.  I understood Factorio blueprints pretty quickly, but I could not possibly figure out how to create a blueprint here without going online.

I really like the multiple levels for transport belts, really makes the spaghetti come alive and does at least mitigate my disappointment in not having double sided belts like Factorio. Double sided belts were where you could create a T-intersection with belts with say Iron Gears from the left and Green Circuits from the right, and the result would be a belt with Gears on its left half and Circuits on its right half. DSP doesn’t have that, but at least with multiple layers of belts all on top of each other it isn’t *too* much trouble to get everything where I want it, possibly even easier.

Having liquids exist as little cubes on belts took some getting used to, but since pipes in Factorio were always a little opaque and had strange fail conditions, I really like this system

Why does every single planet have coal?  Is it just to give a player something to mine for energy when they first land on a planet, to make sure they can always get the energy to get back home?  Because coal being dead plant matter on earth makes it seem like ALL these planets were once life-bearing.