Gratuitous Space Battles (PC)

The good: Designing spaceships and pitting them against an enemy fleet is fun. Space battles can be thrilling to watch.
The bad: Once you start a battle, there is nothing to do but watch it progress or abort it. Despite having only 2D graphics, the game stutters when spaceships start firing at each other, especially when played at high speed.
The tally: 7 / 10

About the Game

"Who needs backstory? Who needs resource-gathering? Diplomacy is so last year. Gratuitous Space Battles cuts right to the chase of sci-fi strategy games, and deals with large, completely unjustified space battles between huge opposing space fleets."

This is how the Steam store describes Gratuitous Space Battles, an appropriately titled PC game that was released on November 2009. This game is so unique that it defies categorization. Its manual describes it as a "strategy / management game," a category that does not quite fit because there is hardly any strategy or management involved in it. There is no resource management to speak of, and battles are resolved automatically after unit deployment. The Wikipedia describes it as a tower defense game, an absurd description because the units that you create are anything but static towers, and enemy units do not attempt to reach some objective on a map, thereby decreasing your remaining lives. Perhaps the best way to explain what Gratuitous Space Battles is all about is by discussing its mechanics.

The game play consists of designing space ships by choosing hulls and attaching a number of modules to them. There are three types of hulls that you may use: fighters are tiny, fast, single-pilot ships that are easy to kill but can get close enough to enemies to bypass their shields; cruisers are gigantic and ponderous capital ships that pack a lot of firepower and protection; between the two in terms of size is the frigate, whose firepower, speed, and protection are also middling. Each hull and module has an associated cost that contributes toward the total cost of a ship.

At the start of the game, you will have a fairly small number of hulls and modules to choose from. Each time you win a battle, however, you will gain honor, which is the currency you use to unlock additional modules and hulls. The amount of honor you may gain in a battle depends on your odds of winning it. If the game estimates that your forces and that of the enemy are evenly matched, you stand to gain only a small amount of honor. If the battle seems to be lopsided in favor of the enemy, you may gain considerably more honor, but you also put your fleet in greater peril.

Once you have designed all the ships you intend to use, you may initiate a battle. At the pre-battle screen, you choose one of several missions to play then deploy your ships at the designated starting area. The strength of your forces is limited by the total cost of your fleet and the maximum number of pilots that the mission will allow. Some missions will impose additional limitations to your fleet composition, so you will want to pay attention to what those are before selecting your ships. Apart from deciding on your units' placement, you may also change the priorities by which any of your ships will attack each enemy ship type. For instance, you may decide that one of your frigates should prioritize attacking fighters over cruisers and other frigates. After setting up your units and choosing a difficulty level, you click the "Fight" button to watch the fireworks.

At this point, watching the fireworks is just about the only thing you can do, apart from aborting the mission. Your ships and those of the enemy will engage each other without your prompting. Fortunately, the battles are often thrilling to watch, much like your favorite sports games. All the graphics are in 2D, but the gun and missile fire effects are rendered well. It is satisfying to see enemy ships getting blasted apart piece by piece, and it is just as worrisome to see your own ships getting damaged in a similar fashion. Nevertheless, when too many ships start blasting each other simultaneously, the game may start to stutter, especially when the battles are played at high speed. You can tweak your video options to make the game run more smoothly, and you can play your battles at the default speed or slower to ameliorate issues with the frame rate.

There are no consequences for losing a battle apart from being unable to unlock the next mission. Since there is no loss of resources involved, you may simply go back to the drawing board to redesign your ships then jump into the fray once more. If you need more honor to unlock some much-needed modules or hulls, you may replay earlier missions.

Room for Improvement

Apart from technical issues with the frame rate, the major weakness of Gratuitous Space Battles is a lack of interactivity during combat sequences. Thrilling as the battles might be to watch, there is no meaningful player input involved in them. The game play would have improved much more if players were allowed to issue movement and fire orders throughout combat. Gratuitous Space Battles could have been a very engaging war game with this little addition of interactivity.

Conclusion

Gratuitous Space Battles delivers exactly what is expected from its title. Its game play revolves around designing fleets of ships from the ground up, but apart from that, the only interaction involved in combat is during ship deployment. The fights are exciting to watch, and it's fun to experiment with ship designs that will hopefully win battles, but a deeper level of player involvement could have been attained if the game had allowed players to issue movement and fire orders.

Academagia: The Making of Mages (PC)

The good: Academagia immerses you in the day-to-day life of a first-year middle school student at a school of wizardry. If you’ve ever fantasized about studying at Hogwarts, this game is for you.
The bad: Tons of text may deter those who are not inclined to read. The disorganized presentation is bound to confuse players. Like The Sims, there are no set objectives to attain.
The tally: 7 / 10

About the Game

Released on August 2010, Academagia: The Making of Mages offers a way for every Harry Potter fan to live out their fantasy of being a young student at a wizard academy. Academagia is a life simulation, a kind of role-playing game with no set objective other than to interactively experience a life that is not your own. The game manual tells us that life simulations are big in Japan but aren’t well known in the West. Apparently, the way you experience life simulations is by reading the situations that you are presented with and choosing your subsequent action from one of several options. If my understanding is correct, life simulations are close cousins of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books and are distant, non-graphical relatives of The Sims.

When you start a new game, you first create your character. From the outset, the number of options that are open to you is large, and the text that you have to wade through is sizeable. This is a precursor of things to come. The world of Academagia is rich and detailed, and to present it without graphics requires an impressive amount of text.

Once you’ve created your character, you are ready to live life as a first-year student of wizardry one day at a time. The core gameplay consists of tweaking your schedule for the current day and confirming your orders when you are done. By default, a typical day of school consists of two periods of class and one period of rest. You don’t have to stick to the suggested schedule. In fact, you may cut classes if you like, but if you do it too often, you’ll be risking detention.

Upon confirming your schedule, your actions will be resolved, and you will be presented with a number of events as well as several options for reacting to each situation. The color of the text indicates how likely you are to succeed with any given option. Green means that you will succeed. Blue indicates a high chance of success. Black means that you have an even chance of success or failure. Red indicates that you will probably fail, and purple means that you will almost certainly fail. The last two color codes aren’t particularly intuitive to me. I would have thought that purple would indicate a low chance of success and that red would refer to almost certain failure, not the other way around.

Your chance of success is determined by what skill is involved in any given option and your level in that skill. Skills are made up of several sub-skills, each of which has its own level. Your level in any given skill is determined by your level in the sub-skills that comprise it. I’ve counted fifty skills in my one play-through, although there may be more. Academagia reveals only the skills that you have at the start of the game or that you attempted to use during the course of your life as a first-year student. I never bothered to count the number of sub-skills that I’ve seen, but trust me, there are a lot.

Typically, you raise your sub-skill levels by training in them, which is one of the many actions that you can engage in during the day. When you raise enough of your sub-skills by a level or more, the skill under which these sub-skills fall will improve as well. There are other ways for you to raise a sub-skill, such as training on the job or going to some forbidden school of magic.

Six of the skills in the game are academic courses of study. Apart from training in those skills, you have to study them separately. Studying an academic skill will help you pass your exams but won’t improve your proficiency in that skill. In other words, studying will improve your theoretical knowledge, but training will improve your practical knowledge. Thankfully, there are no sub-skills that you have to study for. Instead, you study for the academic skill itself.

The way the sub-skills are organized under each skill is far from intuitive. For example, if you’re looking for the Artisan sub-skill, you probably would not think to look for it under the Sabotage skill unless you’ve been playing Academagia for quite a while. To cite another example, you probably would not think to look for the Patience sub-skill under the Malice skill, but there it is. I have no doubt that the designers have their reasons for choosing which skills to put each sub-skill under, but the result is confusing to those playing Academagia for the first time or so.

Apart from skills, your character will get to learn spells. Learning a spell requires that you first learn all the “phemes” that comprise that spell. Phemes are the building blocks of spells. Once you’ve learned all the phemes of a spell, you learn the spell as well. Spells can give you bonuses on your skills, so before you attempt to use a particular skill, you may want to cast a spell that will enhance it. You can learn phemes by attending classes, although there are many other ways that you can learn them. Neither the manual nor the game lists the spells that are available or the phemes that comprise them, so you are left on your own to discover what they are.

During the course of the game, you may want to build friendships with other students. Doing so will grant you bonuses in the skills in which they excel and will open up new opportunities for adventuring with them.

You are also bound to meet other students who will rub you the wrong way. During my play through, there was one student in particular who bullied my character often and caused him undue stress. I was so irritated with that bully that I attempted to harm her with my spells. None of the actions of first-year students are lethal, though, so I just wound up wasting time that I could have spent more productively on my training or adventures. I’m sure there is a lesson to be learned from this experience, one that can apply to real life as well.

The 2D graphics in the game are spartan, consisting of static pictures of the students, faculty, and environs. There are no animations here as all the action is illustrated through words. There are no sound effects in this game, although it does have some Baroque music. The music and artwork suggests that the world of Academagia is like a fantasy version of the European Renaissance period, unlike the modern times of Harry Potter's world.

Although I’ve played through Academagia only once, I’m impressed with the sheer variety of events that my character experienced. I’m pretty sure that I’ve barely scratched the surface of what a student of wizardry may undergo in this game. Academagia is a work of love, and it shows in the quality and volume of the writing. Despite the simplicity of the core mechanics, the game is oddly compelling, rather like a novel that you can’t bring yourself to put down even though it’s way past your bedtime.

Room for Improvement

A text-based game like Academagia has plenty of room for improvement. The most obvious one would be to present the game primarily through animated graphics with sound effects instead of just text. With the power of modern desktop computers, the designers missed out on an opportunity to engage players through many sensory levels.

Nevertheless, the biggest improvement in my opinion would be to reorganize the system of skills and sub-skills to make them more intuitive to find and use. As a role-playing system, Academagia is a mess. Re-engineering the fundamental mechanics of the game would go a long way toward making it less confusing to use.

Conclusion

Academagia is a deeply immersive game, one that offers you a virtual life as a young student of wizardry. As long as you don’t mind having to wade through pages upon pages of text and can tolerate the unintuitive presentation, you just might be drawn into its world.