I have a funny pair of videos for you, to tide you over while I finish my school project. The first video is an excellent example of why I find Rimworld fascinating (you can read my posts about it if you like). The second one is what happens when the people making Sesame Street love Game of Thrones.
First, bad things happening to desperate space-wreck survivors (hint, it goes poorly):
Second, yes, they really did this:
Correction: with Alpha 7‘s release, the space magic continues. Or, uh, the starving frontier space magic, beset by violent thugs and now diseases. But let’s look on the bright side of things: even as Ludeon has introduced plague, it has also given us the prosthetics and organ harvesting and transplantation, in addition to a welter of other neat new features.
The introduction of prosthetics is far more important than you might realize. The last version, Alpha 6, introduced a complex medical system which tracks injury and debility by location, though perhaps without quite the same granularity as Dwarf Fortress‘:
My Alpha 6 colony had a slowly growing number of people who’d lost appendages to chronic cases of gunfire and explosions. I was forever terrified of having my wonderful and productive citizens maimed horribly while defending the colony. Now, it looks like we can give our debilitated friends a leg up, so to speak, by building prostheses for them to replace whatever they’ve lost. Given the constant scarcity of more advanced medical supplies, I foresee specifically targeting raiders with cybernetic prosthetics so that I can strip the things I want from their cold, dead bodies. Or from their warm and unconscious bodies, if they somehow survive the fusillade of bullets and seem like they aren’t worth rehabilitating.
This is Rimworld, after all, and I already do my best to hunt down fleeing raiders when they’re wearing or carrying things I find especially desirable. It’s hard to come by powered combat armor without taking it off the body of an erstwhile attacker. Traits have already made a meaningful entry into the game, affecting everything from move- and work-speed to mental stability and opinions of cannibalism, and there’s nothing quite like having a murder-happy speed demon ready to hunt down your fleeing enemies. You just have to make sure that they never suffer a mental break or suddenly decide to betray you.
The first time I played this game, my people nearly starved to death. I tried to solve this by getting tricksy and using sunlamps outdoors in order to boost my crop’s growth cycle, only to discover that many electrical systems explode and catch fire when exposed to rain. I did manage to pull through in the end, but it was pretty tight for a while.
That was all several releases back. When I last reviewed the game, I mentioned that I thought it wasn’t yet worth its $30 asking price, but that it could be if it continued to develop as well as it had thus far. Now, here I am several releases later, ready to tell you whether or not I think it’s continued to live up to its earlier promise.
My answer is easy: it has. I’m not saying that it’s all the way there yet, but the game is damn interesting and its central features have been expanded aggressively over the past few months. Any given change usually feels small, but the shift from when I first played back in early March has been impressive. In addition to there simply being more junk that I can make for my colony, the world around my colony has gotten considerably more interesting, and often far more threatening as well. I won’t cover everything, but…
I set down on the planet with complete awareness of the dangers that I would face, and a steady sense that I would do better than those who had come before me. As I established my new outpost, eagerly digging into the cliff face nearby to harvest the easily accessed metal and provide my fellow accidental colonists with shelter, I was certain that I was in the right place, doing the right thing. I planned out my dwelling carefully, designed it with defense in mind, and laughed at the idea that I might have missed any of the silly issues which had so beset the Let’s Plays that I had watched before I picked up the game.
I forgot, of course, to plant any food. Welcome to Rimworld.
I’ve been lax in my duties to this blog. My apologies. I should have explained further with my post last week: I’m in Portland, Oregon, and on Monday I spent all day running my Call of Cthulhu game for a number of fellow Reedies. Today I’ll be co-teaching a stage combat class, and Saturday will see a second run of the same scenario from Monday.
I’m afraid that all means that I won’t have new material for you this week apart from this apology. On the plus side, I finally cast my eyes upon RimWorld, a fascinating base-building simulation with an AI-managed event-engine that I’m itching to get my hands on and tell you about (yes, I want to tell you about the event engine, follow that link and read about it). I’m also moving ever closer to having a complete version of my Call of Cthulhu scenario, though I’m not yet certain whether my most recent alterations are progress or regression. Either way, I’ll be back here to bother you about cool stories, games, and story games next week.
Fistful of Wits 
