One hour in four

<saltygirl> we bombed iraq in time for this weeks snl
<saltygirl> sweet

Excuse me, a doormat is good honest work....

Only the bored and wicked rich don't know that....

One hour in four
Tritone churchbells and bloody chickensex if I've not spent 18 of the past 72 hours playing Cosmic Rift. Yow! I've been ranting away on the forums a lot so I'm going to keep my remarks here less detailed than they've been elsewhere, if only because I have other things on my mind. I do have a few things to say however.

Most glaring among the negative reactions to this game I've been seeing in the last few days is the unbelievably obvious contradiction in the claim that both 1) Cosmic Rift is nothing but a ripoff of Subspace, and 2) its developers have fucked it all up. To those out there claiming both: Duh? Did you want it to be more like Subspace so you could complain better about the similarities? To those among you making only one of these claims, observe those making the other: Magically, you and they are having entirely different experiences while performing the same acts within the same game.

I urge you to drop some of that old baggage and observe the game as it actually plays: achingly slow, far too dangerous in close combat, not a whole lot of variation among the ships or weapons. I hazard a guess that, after at least eight months of development, these things are not accidents. Are they any fun? Maybe not - but curiously it's the Subspace players who find the game awkward who aren't having any fun. Often it seems they are the same people who can't enjoy more than a few zones within Subspace. Maybe you've seen the face of God but to me it just looked like a computer game. You can get used to a new computer game. Imagine for a moment that this is in fact what you are doing.

We're carrying a lot of baggage on this trip and it's not fitting in the overhead compartments this time.

That aching slowness goes with the dangerous combat. Keep your speed always at a maximum, never be without something to bounce off of. Stay away from your enemy. Those days of coming in close and flirting with death and getting another chance are over. In this game the rule seems to be that you must make the kill or you immediately put yourself at a horrible disadvantage, struggling against your own inertia while your opponent - if he's smart he hasn't yet fired a shot - comes at you with the momentum he's been saving up, bounces off the surface he was choosing while you were eyeing his jugular, and comes at you with an attack you often simply cannot avoid. The outcome was decided when you misjudged what he had to work with and you mistakenly fired your first shot.

The pacing seemed less slow once I came to notice these things. I realized that those slow turns and hesitant moments were part of the fight, and in accepting that I noticed something else: The best War Zone and Turf Zone games and the sneakiest Chaos Zone tunnel hunts often are made up from long periods of suspenseful quiet punctuated by explosions of violence. Cosmic Rift seems to follow this principle on a micro level, so that the dogfighting can even become relaxing. So often though the kill is sudden, unexpected, and even shocking. In failure I am surprised at my inability to act; in victory I am amazed at my brutality. The highs and lows are high contrast, uncommonly satisfying. The pacing is as alien here in one direction as the lightning fast intricacies of Quake rocket fights might be in the other - the pacing in this game is a conscious act of defiance.

The other things on my mind went away. What I want to do now is play the game. But my DSL is broken again, and so I think I need to take a walk.