Listen to the Rain

I have almost no experience with musou (無双, "peerless, unrivaled," referring to the skill of the warriors) games, other than playing Dynasty Warriors 3 with my high school friends. I had a soft spot for Pang Tong and played him in multiplayer a couple times, and the phrase "Humble the rebels!" is a meme among us to this day. But that's about as far as it went. Some of them continued further in the Warriors series, but I never did.

That means that I came into Hyrule Warriors without any preconceptions. I knew that I would be fighting enemy lieutenants and generals, that I'd be running around accomplishing objectives, and that I'd be killing thousands of enemies. And all of that definitely happened! I saw a stream of the game before I bought it and the streamer was complaining that it didn't feel like a Legend of Zelda game, and I can see that. There's no puzzles to solve. There's no dungeons to delve into. But Hyrule Warriors is a Koei game, and thus a musou game first, and it actually had more Zelda in it than I was lead to expect.

I mean, I was constantly throwing bombs at everything. That's quintessential Legend of Zelda.

I had originally planned to play this game in Japanese, but after I bought it on the eShop, I learned that, bizarrely, Koei games often have Western and Eastern versions and I had bought the Western version with only European language support. It's not a mainline Zelda game, so it doesn't really bother me, but it was a bit surprising. Had I played it in Japanese, the title would have been ゼルダ無双 ハイラルオールスターズ DX, "Zelda Unrivaled Hyrule All Stars DX."


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This is from a few days ago, but I opened up my RSS feeds and found an article about how Slitherine was thinking about making a new Master of Magic game after buying the IP.

Master of Magic is my favorite strategy game of all time, mainly because it completely ignored the concept of balance. There are five different schools of magic--Life, Nature, Sorcery, Chaos, and Death; I'm sure the resemblance to Magic: the Gathering's colors is a total coincidence--fourteen races, two parallel worlds, a bunch of possible "retorts" like Artificer (making cheaper artifacts) or Myrran (start on the parallel world of Myrror) or Nature Mastery, dozens heroes with special abilities, and all of this combined into a huge stew of cheap strategies. But there were so many cheap strategies that it was possible to use another cheap strategy to counter particular one. Enemy is massing elite halfling slingers? Use dark elf warlocks to Doom Bolt them into oblivion. Rushing wraiths? Summon fairies to blast them at range and avoid their life drain attack. Mass paladins? That one's harder, but go to Myrror and recruit trolls so you can hurl wave after wave of bodies at them and heal back to full after battles.

There have been plenty of attempts to make a spiritual successor to Master of Magic, but all of them fall short. A lot of them forget that MoM's massive imbalance is part of what made it fun. Some don't have tactical combat. Some focus too much on tech trees and city-building, when the magic was really the only progression method in MoM. But they all fall short.

The IP is meaningless--other than splitting the races into the mirror worlds and putting dwarves, dark elves, trolls, beastmen, and draconians together in the mirror world instead of the main one, the setting isn't anything special--but I'm excited to see someone try again. And through the comments on the article I learned about Caster of Magic, a Master of Magic mod that tries to fix some bugs and make the AI actually interesting to play against (MoM's biggest problem), so even if this goes nowhere the news was still invaluable to me.

Back when video game magazines were a real thing that came every month, when they were the only real source of gaming news other than your friend's uncle who worked at Nintendo, one of my favorite magazines was PC Gamer. Not for the news contained within, necessarily, but for the demo disks that came with it. I got probably thousands of gaming hours of those demos--I remember waking up early every morning for a week while I was in middle school to play the demo of Master of Magic, Merlin against Kali--and one of the ones my sister and I both loved to play was Theme Hospital. There were only a couple levels and a small complement of the full list of diseases, but we extracted all the fun it had and then some. My sister can still quote lines from the game's announcer now, almost twenty years after she first played the game.

So when I saw that GOG had it available and that it was on sale, I snapped it up. I had never played the full game for any length of time and now was my chance, now that all the gaming wealth of the world is available to us. I was deciding between Frozen Synapse and Theme Hospital and did a bit of research on the internet. After finding a few comments about Frozen Synapse's more annoying levels, I decided to go with Theme Hospital. HLTB says it's about 24 hours, which is longish for a non-RPG but not a bad length of time, and about the same as Frozen Synapse. And playing it was so much fun when I was a child, right?

Well, dear reader, let me tell you--sometimes you should let a happy memory remain a memory.



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Twenty-two years ago, I put a demo disc in my computer and installed a demo for a game called X-Com: UFO Defense. The demo was a single tactical mission with no strategic layer at all, where you took six soldiers with laser weapons and a mix of armor on a terror mission. At night. Against snakemen and chryssalids.



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