Spaz-ing out

No, I'm not being rude to disadvantaged members of society, I'm looking to talk about my latest Big Game.
(warning - this post is a Scattergun post)

Space
Pirates
And
Zombies

Aka SPAZ. It's an indie game that's actually still in development, although you wouldn't know it from the current package. I'm almost saying "final" package there because "final" is the perceived quality of the current beta. To non pooter people, there's several stages to software development :

Alpha - bits work, other bits aren't included yet. Bit like getting the engine into the car but not having a gearbox. It's the way things are done - finish bits & polish them and then move on to the next thing.
Beta - everything's just come all together and it's representive of a finished product. This is the testing phase where you hunt bugs and make sure it all works together.
Release Candidates - not everyone does this but people like Microsoft do it for pre-release versions of their Windows stuff. There's only so much you can do in a lab, for really complicated stuff you have to expose it to users.

And finished product that goes on sale. To be honest, far too many software people never get beyond Beta and some even try to release Alpha rubbish (Sports Interactive's CM3). I'd definitely describe Dawn of War II as Beta quality, I've not got too deep into that because it keeps crashing. Waste of too much money.

If you think I'm blaming developers there, think again. It's often the publishers that force software on to the market long before it's ready. Or, like Lucasarts, they will refuse to allow patches out that fix crash bugs (KOTOR).

Oh hell - I'm going way off the point again. This was supposed to be about SPAZ !

Here's one link - http://spacepiratesandzombies.com/
That's the site run by the developers. There's a big hefty Buy It Now on there which would take you to Impulse, which appears to be Stardock in disguise. I'd forgotten I'd had dealings with Stardock before when boredom overrode prejudice making me buy GalCiv. The prejudice was there because of the attitude of the GalCiv developers on usenet forums, you should only trash other people's games on forums if you have a good one of your own. And I thought Galciv sucked. Didn't even finish a game cos it was as tedious as yesterday's FA Cup final.

Difference between watching cricket and football - cricket you're waiting for something to happen but you're quite able to do something else while it's on because the action happens when the bowler lobs the ball. Football, you're also waiting for something to happen but you have to stay glued to it in case it does. There's a subtle difference there that you'd only get if you're a fan of cricket. Or rugby.

Did I warn about a scattergun approach ? Doh - time to add a comment up top.

Space Pirates And Zombies - top down shooter with space ships. And zombies, although I haven't seen the zombies yet (I'm using selective amnesia with the TotalBiscuit preview). Some games I classify as tedious. Other's as playable, more as Pretty Darn Good (I'm selective with what I buy) and the occasional one as "OMG I have a sore neck".

The last one comes from firing the game up, doing a few missions and then before you realise, it's gone dark outside, your neck has frozen and you think you should have gone to bed ages ago because you gotta get up for work in an hour and on top of that, you forgot to have dinner.

Addictive personalities need watching. Or alarm clocks. I'd actually prefer the "watching" choice of those two especially if she was pretty.

Moo2 is the original "OMG I Have Sore Neck" game and Master Of Magic was up there too. Warcraft has it up to a point. It demands you do Just ... One ... More ... Quest ... but suffers from running out of things to do. How about SPAZ ?

It has a storyline mode tying it together, which points you towards exploring the galaxy. Early days for me so far but what I've seen so far is HARD. I finally beat the Graveyard mission last night after much bashing of head on desk. It gives just enough to keep the gamer interested while keeping the complexity down. A lot of modern games have gone so overcomplicated that they're just Not Fun to play (Football Manager).

Dungeon Overlords on Facebook (which I quit just not too long before Sony online gaming imploded) fell foul of the overcomplication. So much depth included in there but it got tedious and boring to play, especially with resource leaks (game slowing down when you Did Stuff) endemic. I never actually got to the deeper parts of Dungeon Overlord because the Time Invested vs Enjoyment Gained was not equalling Fun.

I'm enjoying it so far. At 25% off (£9.50ish) for the "Beta" version, it's a bargain. As far as beta goes, I've not made it crash yet and I'm fairly happy with the balance and gameplay. I think I've got my value out of it already. Can't talk too much about gameplay here with words but there's a "WTF is ... ?" by TotalBiscuit that's linked on the SPAZ site.

Take a peek - you may end up getting drawn in by TB's video too. Although I will say, he's a great commentator but sounded like he wanted to get let off the leash as narrator ...