Computer Gaming

By Patrick S. Baker

Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties (Plumbers) was developed by Kirin Entertainment (no relation to the fine Japanese beer) and released in 1994. It has been variously called an adult-oriented “romantic comedy”, a visual novel, and dating sim, as well as a full motion video game. Whatever the developers’ ambitions for the game were, they were not met. The game actually turned out to be a branching slideshow with strictly limited player interaction.

Plumbers feature John and Jane, who are being pressured by their respective parents to go out and find a spouse. The player’s task is to get John and Jane together.  Set in the fictional city of “New Lost Wages,” a stand-in for Las Vegas, the game is centered on the lives of the two main characters.

John is an unemployed plumber, while Jane is a beautiful and ambitious woman caught in a bizarre love triangle between her rich father and an oddball photographer.  The gameplay consists mainly of making choices at various branching points in the story.

Players must navigate through a range of quirky and inexplicable situations, each filled with absurd and unexpected twists. As the game moves along, the player meets a range of flamboyant characters, including a domineering boss, a sexy secret agent, and a leather-clad dominatrix.

By Mitch Reed

I hope many of you can recall my article from the Connections Wargaming Conference in 2022 and the podcast from 2019 that spoke to this event. The 2023 event held at National War College in Washington DC was yet another for the record books and we here at NDNG were glad to attend in force as well as help sponsor the Dice-Breaker social event.

By Mitch Reed

Recently I had to spend some time recuperating at home from “cave cough” which is prevalent in our West Virginia mountain bunker. This gave me the chance to check out the new release from Micro Prose called Second Front. I had the game on my wish list since the first news of the game came out well over a year ago. I was able to spend a good amount of time on the game and discovered how much fun it was.

“At least I know where bottom of the ocean is.” 

Sergey Titov, on Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

By Patrick S. Baker

“Bottom of the ocean” is correct. This 2003 racing game has an aggregate 8 out of 100 score on Metacritic and reportedly a 1 out of 10 on the now-defunct Gamerrankings.com website. Both of these scores are the lowest in history. One reviewer stated that “Big Rigs is so devoid of design, game play, structure, aesthetic or functioning technology that it can’t be called a game at all.”

“How do you make a sequel to a game that covered all of human history?” ~ Brian Reynolds

By Patrick S. Baker

The thunderous success of the original Sid Meier’s Civilization (Civ I) in 1991, today would demand a sequel, and quickly, but back in the dark days of the early 1990s that just wasn’t so. In fact, the game that would become Sid Meier’s Civilization II (Civ II) was the first direct sequel that MicroProse would develop and market.

MicroProse management assigned the sequel development task to Brian Reynolds. Reynolds was no newbie to the game design and development business. He went to work for MicroProse in 1991, developing adventure games like Return of the Phantom. He had also previously collaborated with Sid Meier on Sid Meier’s Colonization. But none of his experience answered the basic question to which he needed a good response: “How do you make a sequel to a game that covered all of human history?”

Reynolds went to the source first, Meier himself. Reynolds later said: “We (he and Meier) sat down and brainstormed about it and hashed out ideas…” but Meier had little else to do with the game which would still bear his name.

by Mitch Reed

Last month wargamers of every ilk converged at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) facility in Alexandria, for the annual Connections Wargaming Conference. This was the first live event since 2019 due to COVID19 and many people, including myself, were excited to have an in-person event.

“Just…One…More…Turn…”

– Everyone who has played Civilization

• By Patrick S. Baker

Bill Stealey and Sid Meier co-founded MicroProse in 1982 and over the next few years published several phenomenally successful flight and military simulation games, such as Spitfire Ace, Solo Flight and Red Storm Rising.  Then, in 1987, the company, at Meier’s insistence, shifted into also producing highly successful strategy and adventure games such as Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Sword of the Samurai and Railroad Tycoon.

In 1990, after completing and releasing Railroad Tycoon, Meier and his protégé, Bruce Shelley turned to working, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, on an espionage adventure game called Covert Action. At this same time, the newly married Meier was also working on another project on his own time, which would eventually become Sid Meier’s Civilization (Civ I).

Various sources report different inspirations for the game: One source says that Civ I came out of Meier’s enduring fascination with SimCity. Meier thought the “so-called software toy” was a “stunning achievement” and thought he could “gamify” it to make the experience more involving.

By Mitch Reed

I have been a fan of the Strategic Command series since a company called Battlefront came out with two games that covered World War II and the Great War. Now that Slitherine Games has become involved with this series they have released a new version of the first two games and have released Strategic Command: American Civil War, which like its predecessors is an addictive time suck that makes you wonder where the day went.

“Come on, you apes, do you want to live forever?”

—Attributed to an unnamed US Marine Corps gunnery sergeant, 6 June 1918

By Patrick S. Baker

Starship Troopers: Terran Command is a fun and engrossing real-time tactics (RTT) game.  The developers, The Aristocrats, are clearly fans of the 1997 Paul Verhoeven movie and have integrated that film’s “look and feel” without distracting from the actual game play.

Just like in the 1959 Robert A. Heinlein book and the film, humankind is fighting a genocidal war against the Bugs (called the Pseudo-Arachnids in the book), an alien race of giant insect-like creatures.  As the player, you are put in charge of the campaign of 19 scenarios to secure the desert mining planet of Kwalasha from the Bugs.

“We came to serve God, and to get rich.” ― Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo

By Patrick S. Baker

1984’s The Seven Cities of Gold (henceforth Seven Cities) is generally acknowledged as one of the most successful and influential early “open-world” video games.

In an open-world video game, the player can wander freely through the virtual world and has significant freedom in choosing how and when to approach the game objectives. In the game a player takes on the character of a 15th-century conquistador, sailing across the Atlantic to the New World to explore, obtain gold and make the Spanish court happy.

The name of the game comes from the legend of the seven cities of gold variously called Cibola, Quivira, or El Dorado. The mythical cities were fabulously wealthy and supposedly located somewhere in what is now the American Southwest.