Game Review: Carrier Command Gaea Mission

I just found this one the other day. After doing a bit of research, that is, checking youtube for gameplay previews and various other sites for hype, I decided that I would check it out.

Turns out, wasn't too great. Not terrible, mind you, but reallllllllllly needs improvement.

I should point out that I have not yet bothered with the Campaign, just the strategy mode.

You are a solider in an Interplanetary fleet. You command a navel based aircraft carrier on an alien world.

Yeah, that's where I raised an eyebrow too.

 

(the Carrier)

You are tasked with liberating a large chain of islands. It plays like an RTS/FPS. You are always controlling something, whether it be the carrier or the Mantis

or the Walrus

 

You get four of each vehicles. That's it. You can control them RTS style or jump in and control them yourself. It's a neat and very well executed concept. It is, however, fairly limiting. You get four of each and whenever one is destroyed, you have to build one and then have it delivered to you via cargo ship, which can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on where you are. Your carrier also runs on fuel, which can be depleted. If you run out, you have to have the cargo ship bring you more. That was quite annoying.

You also have limited line of sight. Your own islands can't see anything, so if the enemy carrier goes nearby, you don't know. Speaking of the enemy carrier, of which there is only one, it's a freaking PAIN.

Whenever you get within radar range of it, it flees like a mouse when you turn on the kitchen light. It's also slightly faster than your own ship, so if the mission is to destroy the enemy carrier, the only way you'll catch it is if it is heading at you.

In closing, I wouldn't buy it. At least not new. Wait for it to go on heavily marked down sale. It's good, but the drawbacks are very, very annoying. But when combat gets going on enemy islands, it becomes really fun.

I do miss being able to tank rush though.

Electronic Arts Strikes Again

This week, BioWare founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk announced that they were stepping down and leaving BioWare.

I smell something foul. Something that reeks with the stench of greed, a complete disregard for an industry and a company built to serve a large part of the population not to mention the stench of a small game studio that had been absorbed by a larger entity that has a track record of absorbing and liquidating small game companies and...

.....Oh, that makes sense now. I mean, it's not like EA has gone around buying up small game studios and then liquidating those assets, resulting in some really, really bad games, right?

.......well shit.



In any case, the retirement of the BioWare founders only months AFTER Mass Effect 3's (which was good, but lacked a lot, especially in the ending) launch and subsequent scandal and just after the announcement of Dragon Age 3 (admittedly, that doesn't matter to me, since I don't play that series. But some people love it, apparently), only brings about suspicions that EA is once again messing with a company that started with an amazing reputation. Now just shadows of what they once were. For example, MAXIS. Sims, SimCity. Sims 3 is the latest and features an in game market, where players use real money to buy points to buy more stuff in game. (ignoring the whole bit about the never ending amount of expansion packs, since that's been going since day 1) SimCity. SimCity was a revolution in it's day. SimCity 2000 was one of the best games I had growing up. The latest installment that is soon to be released has been converted into an MMO in all but name.

Westwood studios. Makers of Command & Conquer as well as Dune. CnC is my all time favourite game series. Red Alert 2 was amazing. Westwood studios was liquidated and closed shortly after RA2 launch (though many Westwood veterans went on to form Petroglyph Studios that brought Star Wars Empire at War, which was amazing). Generals set the bar for modern RTS combat. Red Alert 3 was so zany and off the wall it blew my mind. Command and Conquer 4, the supposed "finale" in the Tiberium series was so much of a failure that I played it for a half hour, uninstalled it and haven't touched it since. Recently, EA announced a new game, GENERALS 2. I was so happy! But even more recently they changed it from GENERALS 2 to just Command and Conquer Free2Play with no single player (they later said that SP will be added later) or Skirmish mode. Once again an MMO in all but name.

NUFF SAID. I really shouldn't have to add that EA's big boss has proudly said that he has never green lit any games that are purely single player, but I will anyway, because he's a moron.

For whatever difference it makes, I'm riding myself of EA and tossing my support behind THQ and other developers that understand how important single player is.

Parenting

Before I begin, (and to avoid any overly negative feedback after I publish this) let me start by saying that I am not a parent. Therefore, anything said in this entry should be assumed to be pure opinion based on available facts and not experience.

Okay that's done with.

Exhibit A:
Recently something came to my attention, a mother in Texas was arrested and held in prison overnight for "abandonment". Pretty bad parent, don't you think?

I sure don't.

Her children were riding around outside on scooters and she just out of view. Why did she get arrested? Because one of her neighbors made a quick decision and called 9-1-1 because they didn't see the mother anywhere.

The mother was put in jail for 18 hours. 18. Hours. Because one of the neighbors wasn't able to see her watching her kids.

Now, even less than a decade ago, kids were playing outside in residential neighborhoods, unsupervised (I was living in the middle of nowhere, so I can't make much of a comparison). Not only was this accepted, it was the norm. Go farther back and kids were outside all day.

What's changed?

Some people will say that there are more predators, pedophiles and rapists out there. I disagree. I say that we've just succumbed to fear. There are more, yes, thanks to the internet, but not many more. Not enough to cause this level of dread. (whatever happened to block watch, anyway? Neighbors looking out for each others kids).

Now we come to exhibit B. Actual bad parenting.

A report out of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada back in May of this year was a story about a family that was torn apart. I say that literally. Police and paramedics arrived at an Edmonton home and arrested two adults, a male and a female (the courts have prevented them from being named to protect the identities of the children). Their two children were taken to hospital. Two year old twin girls. Both bruised, dangerously malnourished to the point that their body weight was HALF of a normal girl that age. One even went into cardiac arrest.

"The parents said the twins were hurt when they fell down some stairs they had been playing on with their older brother three days earlier. They also maintained the girls were able to crawl and walk with assistance at the time.
However, “medical evidence suggests that this could not be possible,” according to the court documents.
A pediatrician is quoted in the documents saying the girls were “profoundly malnourished,” and would not have been mobile three days earlier. He is also quoted saying the bruises on the girls were “clearly due to multiple impacts” and “cannot be explained by only one event.”"

As of Friday, September 21, 2012, one of the children, known by the name of "Baby M" to protect her identity, was taken off of life support and passed away. It should be noted that both parents, who are not allowed to have contact with each other, went to the Supreme Court of Canada to try and prevent the ventilator from being taken off. That does not redeem them. I have not heard any word on the condition of the other child.


I guess the take away from this entry is that we should be careful when judging parents. There are people, like exhibit B, who are not fit to be parents and frankly, should be rendered sterile. Alongside that, there are parents like exhibit A, simply out of sight at the wrong time and whose neighbor is apparently so paranoid that they call the police at the first sign of something odd.

If kids aren't allowed to explore, then they don't learn. That's my view.

Education

So an article came to my attention recently.

Teacher fired

So let me get this straight, a teacher has been fired, for teaching kids about how the real world works.

In what reality does that make sense?

It would have been a bit better if the person behind the firing wasn't the school's principal. The man who wrote a letter to the Edmonton School Board saying that Mr. Dorval had shown “obvious neglect of duty as a professional teacher, his repeated insubordination and his continued refusal to obey lawful orders.”

I'll give your brain a moment to process the irony in that statement.

All done? Good.

So apparently, letting students not complete work and give them "behavioural codes" when they didn't fix that problem is okay while giving them a flat out ZERO for the missed assignment and potentially alienating their feelings is a no-no.

Let me be very clear. People fail. That is how nature works. Someone is always going to be left behind, alienated and outright fail. Deal with it. Does a heard of Zebras running from some Lions stop and wait for the slowest to catch up so that everyone is on equal pace?

HELL NO.

They all run as fast as they can. The slowest get eaten. By not giving students zeros we're letting the system eat everyone up. Sure kids who do good work still excel, but why should they? They're going to pass the class whether they do the work or not. Most kids hate schoolwork. This gives them a free excuse to not do anything.

I skipped on some homework when I was in high school. What happened? I had a C average. I didn't put much effort into my grade 12 Spanish homework. What happened? I FAILED (only by a percentage point, mind you and I still got my diploma, but that was five years ago).

The principal of Ross Shepard high school has even gone so far to say: “I am here to tell you that you did nothing wrong,” Ron Bradley says. “Everything you did with regards to student achievement and high school completion was the right thing.”

He also was quoted as saying that the news media’s take on the policy is “narrow” and oversimplified.
“In my opinion, the culture of the media deteriorated to the quality of pulp fiction and talk radio,”


Dude, get your head out of your ass. You are encouraging kids to be lazy, unproductive slackers. With this kind of policy in effect, the crop of kids who graduate in a few years is going to be so warped that they won't have any idea how the real world actually works!


Now why is this happening? My theory is pretty simple, money.

Public schools are funded by governments. To the best of my knowledge, (this might not actually be the case, I will do some further checking, so don't quote me on this) the higher the grade averages, the more money they get. Zeros look pretty bad and the more of them that happen, the lower the average is so the less money they get. The no Zero policy means that the grade average stays high, since "behavioural codes" don't imfluence the grade average. But that's just my theory.

I just got an official reply from Alberta Ministry of Education and as far as money coming from them, the above is not the case. Each school board sends money as it chooses.

Teachers have spent the last couple decades teaching kids to "feel good about themselves" and "imagine how the world can be". The problem with that is that it doesn't really do anything useful for the students and all it does is breed lazy hippies.

Now if you've read the rest of this blog, you'll know that I am fairly left wing in both politics and beliefs. I always tell people to dream big and if you believe hard enough, you'll have a hard time letting yourself fail. That said, I hate this. It's encouraging kids to not do anything. After all, if they think that no matter what, they can't fail, then get out into the real world and fail constantly, won't that destroy their self esteem and self worth faster than getting an F on a homework assignment? What does that lead to? I'd rather not think about it. Failure builds experience. After all, Thomas Edison did find 2000 ways NOT to make a lightbulb. If we don't fail, then we never have the chance to stand back up, dust ourselves off and look at a problem from a different angle.

That's just my theory.

My return

I apologize for my almost year long hiatus. I just didn't feel like writing anymore. But I've been feeling that with the world the way it is, I should be writing.

Also more than a few movie reviews I've wanted to do haven't had a home.

So, with that in mind,

I'M BACK! Expect new posts shortly.