October Spook-tacular Playoffs sudden death update! Styles of the century!

Well the Orioles got swept so that sucks. I was so haunted by their defeat I couldn't even make room for a scary movie last weekend. The only way the Orioles and I can make up our terrible failings to you, the home viewer, is to extend the Scare-tacular Playoffs for another five five five! weeks!!!!!

When I looked at my queue and realized I had horror movies from all but one of the last ten decades, I thought to myself: why not continue for a full century, back to the 1920s? You know, it's pretty crazy that we're a few years away from a new '20s, since that's the first decade people talk about. No, it's not crazy. It's downright insane. Anyway, I didn't have anything from the '40s because what the hell was going on in horror movies in the '40s? Google tells me the war was scary enough that people didn't need horror so I guess that's that. I did manage to find a couple known films that aren't just Universal monster sequels, and thus was the list complete.

It then also occurred to me that I had quite the variety of styles on display, most fairly representative of their decade, so why not try to "catch 'em all"? So for the '10s we've got The Conjuring (2013) to represent the paranormal ghost adventures that have been highly popular lately; in the '00s we have a creature feature, The Mist (2007), even if the I-don't-care-for-it "torture porn" style was the decade's forte; in the '90s there's Event Horizon (1997), a scifi John Carpenter-wannabe like everything else at the time; Parents (1989) should bring some of the dark comedic joy of the '80s; the '70s wouldn't be the same without slashers, so we've got Halloween (1978); heading up the wave of '60s/'70s Satanic obsession is Rosemary's Baby (1968); in hopes to double-cover '50s B-movie scifi and Lovecraft I've got The Quartermass Xperiment (1955); whatever was going on in the '40s, The Cat People (1942) is meant to be a psycho-sexual delight; the '30s brought us the mothers of all franchise monsters, so we'll watch Karloff in The Mummy (1932); and bringing it all back home to surrealist German experssionism we have The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920).

From here I'll be watching in reverse chronological order - just pretend 2013 accidentally got lost somewhere in the 90s. God knows I did. But THAT is a story for another day.

Not just code - you can't prove games *aren't* art

First let me assuage your fears that the following has anything to do with defining "art" or delving into whether games are "real art" - it doesn't. We're just going to assume that anything can be art ever because it can and who cares anyway. This is more on the subject of what is a medium and the creator/audience relationship (regardless of whether the providence is "art"). Also it's a protracted response to an 18-month old article on a politics site so whatever that means.

So it starts here:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112646/moma-applied-design-exhibit-mistakes-video-games-art

Don't worry, it's short and there's a historical fact or two to learn. To summarize Leibovitz's argument, video games aren't art because they are code and code can be functionally duplicated without actual duplication. Essentially that the experience created by a video game is not one-to-one with the process of creation. 

While I could break that down on about a million levels, what I find downright captivating is the writer's complete ignorance to the distinction between engine and content. For one thing, the music, imagery, and script (story) that go into a game are produced the exact same way as any other artwork, they are not, like, made of code. Yes they are all stored electronically, but duplicating the sprite for Pac-Man is as plagiaristic as copying an .mp3 file and claiming it as your own work. 

Still, let's bring the argument to a more abstract level, as it could be said that the drawings and songs and dialogue are incidental. If we break a game down into component parts we can see that the Leibovitz's approach only applies to half of a work. Let's call the first component a rule set, what might also be designated mechanics or an engine. The rule set governs what elements can be present in the game - inputs, graphics, sounds, avatars, static or autonomous feedback, etc. - and how such things respond and interact. The second formative component is content, the actual realization of the rule set. Content includes the aesthetics mentioned in the previous paragraph and beyond that the actual compositional elements, from levels to characters to actions, all heavily dependent on what the rule set is. Typically it's stuff that falls under a "design" umbrella, be it art design, stage design, or whatever.

Let's look at the example from the article, Pac-Man. While enumerating the entire rule set isn't feasible in this format (that would amount to rewriting the game), we can list a few basic surface level concepts. Pac-Man and four ghosts are the graphically represented characters on the screen. Each character can face in one of the four cardinal directions. When a character is facing in a direction, they move at a constant speed. If the player moves the joystick in one of the cardinal directions, Pac-Man turns to face in that direction. Walls are a graphically represented element on screen. Walls do not move. When Pac-Man is facing against a wall and directly adjacent to it, he stops moving. You get the idea. This part of the game is indeed entirely embedded in code - code being what Leibovitz describes as an instructional set for a processor.

The second part of Pac-Man is the content, the constructs built upon these rules. The graphical representation of Pac-Man is a yellow Pac-Man-looking guy. Walls are blue lines. Most importantly, walls, pellets, and fruit are laid out in corridor mazes of fixed definition. These layouts, visuals, and sounds are immutable elements of the Pac-Man experience; Level 1 always has the same layout, and that layout is not generated by the processor. I have no idea how Pac-Man itself is written, but likely the graphics are stored as image files originally produced by hand in a drawing program and the layouts are stored as some kind of numerical coordinate databases, also generated by hand (or through a graphical editor).

The content stored in those files, though interpreted by code to present an interactive representation, is originally manually created, and a game without those same elements - the same level design - is not the same game. Not anymore so than basketball would be basketball if played with a raw turkey in the snow with 100 points awarded for each basket. Are we to understand that every film directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell is the same? Near equally incredible, sure, but not the same movie.

Compare it to the work of a composer: a note can be represented on the page by its name, by a black dot on a staff, or by a literal representation of the instrument (e.g. tablature), yet a performer (human or electronic) will always play it the same regardless. It's the choice and arrangement of the notes, not their representation, that constitutes composition. No one would argue that "Moonlight" is a different piece written as a guitar tab than on a staff, nor would they argue that it is not unique because of that multiplicity of documentation. Why? Because the sheets are just a set of instructions that explicate to a human how to reproduce a series of sounds. As an .mp3 file is a set of instructions that explicate to a machine how to reproduce a series of sounds. As code is a set of instructions that explicate to a machine how to reproduce a series of sounds, images, and interactions. Cool notes don't make good songs; cool arrangements of notes do. The same goes for games.

Sadly we are living in an age where the primary gaming audience doesn't realize that level design actually exists. See Leibovitz's invocation of Angry Bird - to him that game is expressly composed of flicking a finger and watching a bird eat pigs (or w/e happens in that game). Then again, most film audiences don't realize the difference between explosions and themes, so it's not like gaming is much worse off.

What's interesting in the case of code and games is the utterly abstract nature of the output. Sheet music is limited to producing music. A filmstrip is constricted to projecting a sequence of images. Yet the code of a game can go further to create responses, physics, random events, even intelligences - all those aforementioned elements of a rule set. Thus it's ultimately ironic that Leibovitz in his piece indicts games as constrained by computers, as if computers are mystical black boxes that can't be understood. While the technological prerequisite for video gaming is hypothetically troubling, exacting boundaries on the complexity of materials is an arbitrary science. Bring a filmstrip or vinyl recording 500 years in the past and try to explain it. Just as film has a more primitive form in drama and music in song, so does video gaming in... games. Unless you'd like to make a case that the only arts are the senses, expression takes different forms across cultures and accordingly adapts to technology - eternal persistence is a fallacy. 

Hell, forget history. Literature can't even make it across language borders. Leibovitz's example of Finnegan's Wake is self-defeating in its reliance on the grapheme/phoneme associations of the English language. Though it may transcend vocabulary, the work is still inaccessible to the illiterate and non-English-speakers, and needless to say it couldn't be produced by either categories any more deftly than a monkey could write Shakespeare. To that end a video game can be far more universal than a novel. Educational, technological, and cultural boundaries are inherent in, possibly even necessary to, our current art forms. Given that programming education and computers are so readily available in our culture, the point of accessibility and universality is moot unless we reframe the debate as "are video games art in tribal Maori society in 1783?".

Flawed though the article is, picking out the shortcomings set me thinking on the staged procedure of game development. What's interesting about the division of games into a rule set and content is that it results in two individuated creative processes - there's the rule design in which the tools are created, then the actual construction of the player experience. The first person in the process is essentially inventing the medium for the second, as if redefining the notes a composer has to work with or the colors for a painter. A single game is its own medium in which countless authors can experiment and create, each owning it in their own way. Taken thusly, video gaming as a whole becomes a sort of meta-medium in which diverse unique media - game rule sets - are collected under the principle of interactivity, and the creation of those media is itself a medium. Creating a strong rule set that facilitates expression and creativity is itself an artistic triumph, even if that canvas is only available to a select few. Public level creators, simulation games, and even franchise iteration expose the inspirational power a good set of mechanics can have.

The creative interaction between the development of rules and content is reflected in the relationship of the player and the game. Though the element of audience participation has been ingrained in art criticism for over a hundred years, games bring interactivity to the explicit, conscious level. The player takes progression into their own hands and is free to explore the experience in accordance with their own predilections. The degree to which a game facilitates this and the uniqueness of feedback is a discussion unto itself - the well-known subject of "depth" - but the presence of control at all puts the player into a creative role. Thus the chain of agency is completed and you know games become the greatest artistic super-medium ever conceived by mankind etc.

October Spook-tacular Playoffs: The Mist

October is always a treat, being that the weather is nice and the theme colors are the Baltimore Orioles colors. This is especially important this year because the Orioles are in the playoffs, which also happens in October! The team will gain a significant advantage by seeing their colors all around the country and on the TV for the Halloween season. This is a big factor in baseball and explains how the Orioles colors were originally chosen.

The only way to celebrate this certain-to-be historical playoff run is... horror movies! I'm going to knock five movies off my queue, one each weekend and one each from the last five decades. Then at the end of October we'll have a little "playoffs" where I choose which was best. I think that's how the World Series works? All of the teams play each other in the same game? Those 8-team innings sure can drag on. Here are the movies.

Halloween (1978)

Parents (1989)

Event Horizon (1997)

The Mist (2007)

The Conjuring (2013)

Title: The Mist

Director: Frank Darabont

Writer: Frank Darabont, based on a novella by Stevie King
Actors I know by name: Thomas "I'm Tom Jane" Jane

While my OCD tells me I should have gone in chronological order, I had already watched The Mist by the time I came up with this idea so it was too late. Plus hey this way I can save Halloween for Halloween.

What I know going in: A mist traps a town indoors and there are monsters out there and didn't I see this movie back in the '80s (before I was born)?

From the moment The Mist cuts in on posters for The Thing, The Dark Tower, and Pan's Labyrinth, I knew we were in for some apocalyptic dimension-hopping shenanigans. That's a good omen for me; weird trans-dimensional shenaniganry is my jam, be it Silent Hill, From Beyond, or H.P. Lovecraft. Simultaneously it was an omen of the on-the-nose cheesiness that permeates the entire movie - the classic King explicit reference. That's this movie - solid premises taken in extremely loud directions. Sometimes the arresting volume is satisfying - a stormy opening punctuated by a tree bursting into our protagonist's home, angrily foreshadowing monsters that pierce the dimensional window into our world. Other times it's pandering, like the repetition of the line "something's in the mist!". It also ranges into frustrating, as my reaction to faux-Biblical rant #847 can testify. However stylized it may be, the material sticks to core themes of faith and despair in the face of the unknown - my only real objection is how those questions are resolved.

I probably should expect obnoxiousness from Darabont and King, the creative team behind the most painfully cloying and obvious "classic" of our time, The Shawshank Redemption. The Mist has a lot of wowing "what is a man?" moments, from the illogically blustering lawyer neighbor to the burn victim begging for death to a crowd silently staring down a mother begging for help finding her children. There's this general suggestion that people are acting extra psycho (i.e. hammy) because that's what fear does; the dialogue is extremely on the nose in pointing out "they're scared", "it's okay to be scared", etc. While this gels with the movie's theme of fear as the root of faith, dialogically it has the awkward repercussion of feeling like an excuse for exaggerated characterization. While my brain tells me The Mist is going for bombast, the movie itself tells me it's supposed to be realistic. I prefer to ignore that claim.

A horror/disaster movie posits what happens when ordinary people are confronted with extraordinary circumstances. The Mist shows us fear driving the existing social order to extremes. In the case of resident church-lady antagonist Miss Carmody, it draws forth ultimate faith in despair. She heralds the mist as judgment day: in the giant locusts she sees a Biblical plague, in the military man she sees a sacrificial lamb, in herself she sees a prophet. There's no other side to this character, no humanization whatsoever - when Amanda calmly and kindly suggests she might be projecting her fear, Miss Carmody responds by calling her a sinful whore or something. Likewise, Mr. Law and Order sits staunchly on the claim that there aren't monsters unless he can see proof, even as he sounds growingly hysterical in his attack. This works on the allegorical level where characters are simply incarnations of their metaphorical function, and in terms of story, that's the film's strongest suit. The Mist doesn't falter until it gets to the sympathetic players.

Sorry, no monsters. You can watch the movie or do a Bing (unpopular search engine) if you really want to see them.

Believability is an issue here. Believability is not a question of whether we're dealing with tentacle monsters and that I think the physics of tentacle monsters are sufficiently explained. It's a matter of whether a microcosm rings true. While the aforementioned societal stand-ins work as the pillars of this world, the behavior of normal people is really what's being analyzed. That's where The Mist loses me a bit. That the supermarket crowd is won over so quickly to religious fundamentalism is a strong damnation of human nature and needs sufficient support for me to buy into. What the movie is lacking is any actual character to illustrate that transformation. Miss Carmody was preaching the downfall of man in the supermarket aisles before the mist descended. Everyone else shuffles over in the background as things get worse, the only conversion we see being the dumb guy who gets super-traumatized. I just didn't find a convincing argument that this is what people do - it was all kinda quickly slotted to status quo so our hero would have cultish opposition. I like that as a plot point - the blathering doomsayer is usually the first to go, so having people rally around her is a nice inversion. It's just that the philosophical backbone is more idea than argument.

[major spoilers in the next paragraph]
The hero, David Drayton, works well enough. He's a bit on the uninteresting side, but oh well. He's the everyman in a sea of caricatures. His arc takes him from hope to despair, though its conclusion is a bit too dark to resonate with me. David is a man of action willing to do anything except sit and wait for death, whether it's investigating the generator, going to the pharmacy, or eventually making a run for it. Yet every action he takes makes the situation worse and gets people killed. In the end he chooses to kill his companions and his son rather than wait for the monsters to find him, acting on despair rather than hope. Unsurprisingly, he's a minute too soon - the mist rolls back and reveals that salvation was moments away. So complacent faith in despair was the way to survive? Action leads only to self-destruction? Even if methodically developed, our protagonist's lack of self-awareness strikes me as a bit bitter on the part of Darabont.

[end spoilers]

For all the heightened dialogue and characterization, when the horror gets going, the movie gets damn good. The pacing is spot on, starting with the normalcy of a grocery shopping trip silenced by air raid sirens. We slowly increment from there, taking plenty of time away from the monsters to focus on human turmoil and build the mystique of what's out there. The mid-movie foray into the pharmacy is so Aliens it hurts, but jesus if my skin wasn't crawling at every spidery image, most of all the fate of the still-living MP. And the appearance of the locusts nails everything that I like about this movie's atmosphere - the sense of awe and proportion, the patience of the monstrosities, and the genuinely hellish and end-of-times sensibility. The Mist is a story of anti-survivors, a group of people who could easily stay alive if they weren't so determined to die. That shot from outside the store as the locusts flit and prance carries an ominous natural beauty juxtaposed against humanity tearing itself apart inside a glass cage.

Fine, here are some monsters.

The creature design and effects are largely fantastic as well. Those tentacles get us off to a great disconcerting start - "what are those things attached to?" is a great question left unanswered. We get the predator/prey relationship between the vulture-things and the bug-things and the various size/ages of spiders, hearkening back to what makes the Alien xenomorph such a memorable creation - the naturalistic approach. There's the sense that these are real beings with their own life-cycles, rendering humanity all the less significant. In keeping with the Alien-inspired design, these things are deadly in all kinds of ways, be it acid-webbing, venomous stings, or shredding talons. The spiders are definitely the best-realized of the fiends and are absolutely the high point of the movie, even in spite of the overabundance of giant spiders in fantasy. At the other end of the spectrum, the lurkers in the mist felt kinda lame and almost comical, and I'd have preferred further development of another monster over their perfunctory appearances. Overall, this is a top tier creature feature and worth seeing on those grounds alone. I'm of the opinion that monster movies have largely suffered at the hands of CGI, but The Mist proves that CGI is ready to please (now if we could just get the mainstream off the current ghost movie fetish...).

What I know going out: It's hard to call The Mist a great movie when it has such ugly things to say, but the fact it can even be approached at that level is a testament to its quality. While I'm still left searching for a modern creature-feature adventure, I suspect The Mist will have legs and hope that someday I find a more resonant message at its core. 

What I'm Playing, September '14

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Here's a crazy thing I came up with that I probably won't follow through on. Starting now (now being when I had the idea, mid-September) I'm going to have a fixed length queue for games - that is to say, I'm not going to start a new game until I finish one I have in progress. I've listed out at least 120 games I currently have in progress, so it's no big deal. But from now on the Finished/Started lists should be about the same length.

Because of that, I'm adding a new category called One and Done for games I played but have no intention of completing.

By the way, we're now up to date! After two weeks of constant What I'm Playings, there won't be another til the end of October!

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Azure Striker Gunvolt (Nintendo 3DS)

They^[who?] said Mega Man was dead, but Inti Creates here proved there are still different directions to take the concept for unique gameplay that isn't nearly as redundant as screenshots will make you think.

Actually this screenshot doesn't make it look all that redundant.

Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge (Xbox / Xbox Originals)

One of the best flying game I've ever played, replete with unique enemies and obstacle-filled environments - Pilotwings 64 meets Rogue Squadron. High Road to Revenge never languishes in endless dogfighting, keeping the gameplay mixed up in each mission even as it iterates over the same styles of aerial strikes, escorts, races, and of course dogfights. The game keeps interesting by introducing a more complex setting every couple missions, from the mountainous island of world 1 to a full-on metropolis and finishing with underground caves and ruins. Each style of gameplay takes on a different character dependent on the environment it's set in.

Devil May Cry (PS2)

I'd say Devil May Cry holds up really well, but I never played it back when it originally came out, so all I can say is that were it released today it would still be one of the best action games on the market. In fact, it's particularly refreshing to visit a game that is a.) short (4.5 hours on a first run), b.) mechanically simple, and c.) focused almost entirely on mini-bosses and bosses. The most interesting takeaway for me is that the game feels more like Ninja Gaiden than Devil May Cry 3. While the former goes for environmental variation, wild enemy variety, and challenge through survival, the latter is more about mechanical variation, enemy volume, and challenge through style/score. In fact playing Devil May Cry made me realize Ninja Gaiden is not as original as I originally thought, though that's hardly a bad thing - I only wish there were more action games that took their approach.

Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight (NES / 3DS VC)

If it wasn't for the inappropriate name, I wonder if this Alien Soldier-esque boss rush game wouldn't have a cult following, particularly thanks to its consistently unique approaches driven by variations of enemy movement patterns and environmental properties. The game provides infinite continues, so with save states to keep a session going victory is just a matter of mastering one stage at a time, making it a perfect handheld experience. The controls are on the complex side for an NES game and the end-lag on most moves takes some getting used to, but it's all very precise once you get your bearings and every attack will eventually be revealed to serve some purpose.

Games Finished:

Mario Kart 7 (Nintendo 3DS)

I only had this because it came with my 3DS, but it's hard not to enjoy such a perfect game design, even if it's becoming impossible to tell the difference between new courses and repeats. This time around I was most fond of the SNES courses, as they've benefited the most from mechanical changes in the series - taking the continuous 90-degree turns of Super Rainbow Road as one giant drift is really satisfying and not like anything else in the game.

Games Started:

Dark Cloud 2 (PS2)

This is like a treatise on the subject of crafting, skipping traditional character-based role-playing for two separate systems of item customization. The supporting world-building side-game isn't really a sim (there's no passage of time / interaction of creations) so much as it is another free-form crafting system that lets you play in a sandbox and earn points for making things that look cool/balanced. That is to say, it's more like house decoration in Animal Crossing than city building in Sim City. While it passes its time with dungeon-crawling, at its core this is a game about manipulating numeric systems to accelerate progress. If my post about New Horizons didn't make it clear, I enjoy maximization/minimization problems far more than traditional puzzles, so this really works well for me.

One and Done:

Wizards and Warriors 3 (NES)

Played this for platformer-of-the-week night with Greg L. (possibly an upcoming feature? who's to say?!). Wander around a light-on-content world and find self-contained platforming challenges - WiziWar 3 is what you'd get if you took Wonder Boy 3 and cranked up the size of the hub town and downsized the dungeons to 60-second runs. The "guilds" (dungeons) make for neat obstacle courses that iterate over a handful of themes, but they are so hard to find and brief that the game ends up mostly as bland wandering, far more reminiscent of Ufouria than Castlevania II. If you like exploring without much challenge, you might enjoy this, but it's not too satisfying as a platformer.

Super Smash Bros. Demo (3DS)

Who cuts the options screen out of a demo? The default controls are NES-style instead of SNES-style (weird for a diamond layout like 3DS) and I just want to fix it! Mega Man is pretty cool and the AI is still such a joke that I beat a level 9 computer on my very first try at the game with a character I had never played before and controls that were super annoying. Most importantly, when unleashed from an assist trophy, Knuckle Joe still shouts his trademark "KNUCKLE-EEE!" I only listed this because I'm pretty positive I'm not going to get Smash on 3DS - I'm a series fan but it's too intense a game to play on handhelds and I'm happy sticking to Brawl until whenever it is I buy a Wii U.

Discover the Age of Discovery with Uncharted Waters: New Horizons

I can't believe I forgot to mention New Horizons during my post about history games, seeing as it's A.) about an atypical period of history and B.) a really really good game. 

A lot of times it's called Uncharted Waters: New Horizons after the English title of the first game in the series, but the box art disagrees with that nomenclature

The Age of Discovery (1978-2009) isn't exactly the secret history of Addis Ababa. In the United States it's the earliest era of history that gets serious attention even in elementary school because, surprise surprise, it's the first period that can be construed to be about America. I think the only historical facts I remember from old Youth's Benefit Elementary are: "1492 etc." and "the Civil War was fought over slavery". I don't think I ever really 'got' why Cristobel Columbus was such a big deal (and learned later that's because he really wasn't) but I do know one thing: he proved the earth was round. Hang on, spell check is suggesting I correct "he proved the earth was round" to "that was already common knowledge for hundreds of years preceding". But you're used to typos here. As for the Civil War, I still resent that they taught us that. It's such an insidious lie on so many levels. 

But, as the saying goes, that's all uncharted water under the bridge, because there's still plenty to learn about the days of sailing a ship into the blue yonder and discovering New Horizons. Yes, when I got back from my yacht trip to Japan I couldn't wait to open my new SNES game and give it a try. What I found was a delightful mix of Oregon Trail's survivalism, Sid Meier Is Pirates' open-ended variety, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms' deep strategic gameplay. The game is essentially an RPG - you're a little dude of your choosing and the king of your choosing sends you on a quest. The difference here is that the little dudes are (fictional) captains from the (real) major powers of the Age of Discovery with according socio-military-political quests more akin to what you see in 4X strategy games. England's out for blood for oil, the Netherlands is just trying to chill out, and the Ottoman Empire... well, let's not even talk about the Ottoman Empire.

On your way to making history there are a wide variety of tools at your disposal to face the wide variety of challenges at your anti-disposal. Regardless of goals, the same key factors will be in play: you'll have to build up a fleet, man it, keep it supplied, and keep wealth moving if you don't want to end up stranded. From the moment you set sail you need to be tracking the status of your fleet and the waters you're traveling through, not to mention your gold reserves. Unpaid and unfed men won't last long in pirate territory, even if your flagship is brimming with cannons. Nor will a battle armada be capable of crossing the turbulent Atlantic ocean.

Fleet construction, navigation, trading, and turn-based combat form the pillars of gameplay no matter which journey you choose, while the role-playing varies wildly from game to game. Any of the characters can go down whichever road they like - there are no restrictions once the game starts - but different starting conditions and bonuses make each better adaptable to their designated quest (and technically the game only ends when that quest is accomplished).

Mr. Dutch doesn't start with much of anything and doesn't get a lot of help from his homeland, but he has the most straightforward goal - to chart the entire world. On the surface this sounds pretty boring, but it's not as easy as driving around every square of the map and calling it a day. The world, it turns out, is a big place, and lots of bad things can happen on a long journey into unknown territories. You'll need to pick ships that can stand up to crashes and storms - all the speed in the world won't make up for dead wind or a wrecked fleet. It'll take a lot of sailors too, unless you want to get stuck on the banks of the Nile when your whole crew gets eaten by crocodiles. Then there's the matter of budgeting supplies - too much food and water will slow you down and waste space that could be used for cannons, but too little and you won't make it back. Determining these parameters takes a lot of experimentation that'll gradually familiarize you with the logistics, and as you get better you'll be able to successfully manage longer - and more profitable - journeys.

Whether you're building a ship to explore the world or playing a Turkish merchant, trade will be the foundation of your budget. Ships and supplies are expensive, and long voyages of discovery, though they bring back expensive exotic goods, are risky at best. This isn't the kind of RPG where you can grind for cash - you'll need to be able to turn money into more money by wisely buying and selling cargo. The goods available vary from port to port, as do the prices, so you'll need to figure out which trips can turn a profit, while also considering that longer trips will be more dangerous and costly in supplies. Beyond that, flooding one market with a certain type of cargo will devalue it, so you'll need to regularly pursue new routes and keep a balance. Again your fleet will be the bottleneck that controls how much you can haul, how much a trip costs (not only are bigger ships more expensive to buy, construct, and maintain, but they require larger crews who will drain your money in salary and provisions), and how quickly you can traverse destinations. Since you'll probably be sailing the hotly contested seas of Europe, if you can't outrun pirates and foreign marauders, you'll need to be able to defend your toothless cargo ships.

War is unavoidable when playing as Jeff Britain or Sabrina the Spaniard, both of whom start out with powerful fleets and are tasked with increasing their nations' dominance on the continent. International relations can be brokered and allies will leave you alone while enemies harass you and your ports. Winning over ports is primarily a financial struggle, while taking the seas comes down to combat. Attacking enemy fleets will make the world safer for your ships and ports, but can also be used to increase your own wealth and firepower - preying on merchants and commandeering rather than sinking enemy ships is a fast way to vast resources. Once initiated, combat takes place on a grid resembling Fire Emblem or Shining Force where ships launch into turn based battle. Combat is probably the hardest part of the game to grasp, as wind, ship type, cannon type, position, commanding officers, and other factors I'm sure I'm forgetting play a role. If you want to win battles but either can't figure out the fleet situation or just don't have a fleet, you can get tricky and pull up to the enemy flagship for a quick duel. Dueling is essentially a protracted game of rock-paper-scissors (there's also equipment that comes into play) and, while risky, a successful duel means you now own a new fleet. That, of course, means that many more ships to manage.

Rounding out the character set we have James Franco of Portugal - the 'main' character recommended for newcomers, his story has regimented objectives that cover the modes of gameplay - and Pagliacci, the prototypical sad Italian clown. If you hone in on the story objectives and already know what you're doing, you can beat the six campaigns in maybe 10 hours apiece, but you'd also be missing out on all the exploration and experimentation that makes the game so interesting. I put around 30 hours each into Dutch Dave and The Brit, which I think sufficiently covered the game's content. Like any good strategy/simulation/RPG, the devil is in the details and every replay is different, so there's no real 'finishing' with the game.

How much actual history does it teach? It's a mixed bag. This is a great simulator game in that I feel as if I'm managing a fleet spearheading world domination. It keeps me engaged with minutiae while also providing enough autonomy that it doesn't bog down. However, that autonomy means that, while the setting is historical, the sequence of events is not. No Spanish pirate conquered the British empire in 1608. I don't know that the Ottomans had colonies in Africa or the New World, and I definitely don't know any better after playing this game. The ships themselves are so rigidly balanced and standardized that they don't seem representative of any reality, and I'm guessing many of these models did not coexist. While the summaries are short, the "landmarks" - encompassing everything from durians to the pyramids to the North Pole - do a good (ballpark) job of placing many of the discoveries first introduced to Europeans in this age. The major ports and goods of the era and their relative significance is also neat to explore.

I don't know a lot of games that are easily comparable to New Horizons. Though this is technically the second game in the fiveish-part Daikoukai Jidai series, only it and the first (Uncharted Waters) made it out of Japan. Naturally Koei's own Romance of the Three Kingdoms series bears similar strategic gameplay, but it never frees the player from the basic strategy map-and-menu interface and the singular goal of conquest. What makes New Horizons such a unique role-playing experience is the autonomy, the continuous challenge of maintaining a fleet while also having indirect control over the state of the world at large. It's a scope not even most WRPGs touch; a perfectly measured balance of challenging survivalism that delivers more influence and freedom with increased mastery.