Universe Review

[Ailene Goldhirsh]

Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.

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I mentioned earlier that I was really excited about this new book by Charles Yu, and I'd been planning to save a review until closer to the release date, in September, but since Yu has been generating a lot of positive buzz* I figured I might as well tell you about it now, and then remind you again later.

When it happens, this is what happens: I shoot myself.

Not, you know, my self self. I shoot my future self. He steps out of a time machine, introduces himself as Charles Yu. What else am I supposed to do? I kill him. I kill my own future.

I was hoping it would be characterized as a time machine, although I realize there is no section for time machines in most bookstores. ... In terms of genre, I would be happy for it to be shelved in both fiction and in science fiction. Or maybe under a new category, where they would put books that resist either classification. A lot of my favorite books would be in that category.

Thanks for the intersting review! Could you maybe give a short comment how it compares to the My Sonic Lab Signature Platinum which is also a quite low impedance cartridge but IMHO another league than the My Sonic Lab Ultra Eminent BC you compared it to.

Look out, tabletop RPG fans, my The Walking Dead Universe RPG review is moaning and groaning in your direction. Before we succumb to the horde, here are some housekeeping details. Free League Publishing kindly provided a copy of the Core Rules and Starter Set for this review, and my thoughts are based on a thorough reading of the books, plus some limited playtesting of the Starter Set adventure.

The Walking Dead Universe Roleplaying Game is a tabletop RPG based (primarily) on The Walking Dead TV series. Like many titles from Free League Publishing, it uses a version of the Year Zero dice system.

The name of the game here is throwing a fistful of d6s and hoping for at least one success roll. You can also take points of stress to increase your odds, with negative consequences for rolling badly on a stress die. In my experience, this is a mid-complexity system that keeps RPG math at a minimum to leave plenty of room for storytelling.

For comparison, the Blade Runner RPG Starter Set offers a 50-plus adventure booklet, designed to run over several sessions. The One Ring Starter Set adventure is 30-ish pages and offers three adventures as part of a mini-campaign. The Walking Dead Universe starter adventure is 16 pages long, and an efficient group could probably finish it in a single session.

The only mechanics with depth were those surrounding zombie attacks, but these felt cumbersome rather than crunchy. Free League has attempted to streamline your zombie management (a good call, considering how big the hordes can get), but there are still too many plates to spin.

I am disappointed, though. The Walking Dead Universe RPG is underwhelming in many ways. And thanks to games like Blade Runner, The One Ring, and Mrk Borg, I expect a lot more from a high-quality publisher like Free League.

Being home due to covid is a good time to visit (or revisit) the world of Marvel superheroes streaming in film, on tv and in the world of comic books. This was a fabulous Marvel exhibit I attended a year ago in Philadelphia.

The timed ticket is good for a 30 minute window so my 9:30 entrance ticket sold at 9:45 was good to enter the Marvel exhibit up to 10 am. The ramp up to the entrance is a bit long and during peak time will be filled with folks waiting to enter. As it was early Sunday morning, there was no line and my only wait was a few minutes as there is controlled entry to view the short film before beginning your visit.

The short film gives you a peek into the early days when Stan took over a fledgling paper. Once the 12 minute film ends you can begin the visit. There tends to be a bit of a bottleneck here to read the panels and see the first comic book produced (worth millions!). Once you get past this hallway the exhibit opens up and gives you the freedom to wander about.

We all know the story of Peter Parker and have probably watched some (if not all) of the movies with different actors portraying the web slinger. The displays at Marvel Universe of Super Heroes highlights Spiderman over the years in the comics, art, props and newest entrant, Spiderman, Entering the Spiderverse, which received an Academy Award for animated feature. The Spiderverse introduces us to Miles Morales and the many universes of Spiderman. Spiderman continues to be a fan favorite and new movies are planned for the future.

The universe is big. Really, really big. Unfathomably big. So big that our brains cannot understand the numbers involved. Back in 2006, I remember being really excited about Spore and Mass Effect. Both were games that promised they'd really give us a sense of scale; tiny people, tiny beings, competing on a mind-bogglingly large stage. They failed, of course - and for the longest time I felt that I'd never see something that would really make me feel utterly insignificant. And then I played Distant Worlds.

Distant Worlds is both defined and limited by its bigness. On the one hand, its sheer size gives it a radical and unique feel; on the other, it struggles with scale in the same way we do, and can't effectively handle its own dizzying complexity.

Distant Worlds puts you at the helm of a civilization. After choosing an era of galactic history, you'll guide your race, helping them develop warp drives and then move out into the stars. And there are a lot of stars. An average map will have a few hundred, each with its own set of planets and most planets with their own set of moons. Each of those can carry bases, colonies and mining centres. Even so, you can build many of those same structures near massive nebulae, or near other cosmic phenomena. Even a small map is mind-bogglingly dense. Seriously, here's a picture:

In just about every solar system lurks some ancient ruin or long-lost secret. I recall encountering countless structures that each seemed to point somewhere else. With small, procedurally generated details, Distant Worlds establishes both a temporal and a spatial sense of scale. Knowing that other star-faring civilizations came before you and that more will surely come after imparts a disturbing, morbid spin on the whole experience.

Much like other "4X" strategy games, Distant Worlds pushes you to explore, expand, exploit and exterminate the races and civilizations around you... kind of. Unlike even Civilization, a game often praised for its variety of non-military, non-action win conditions, Distant Worlds has a system that encourages growth of the private economy and far-reaching control. Each race also has its own specific victory condition. These are intended to reflect the intrinsic sensibilities of your populace, such as a predisposition for research or being the player with the fewest breaches of trade treaties.

Running around murdering everyone is still an option, of course. The game's default goal is having a third of the private economy, a third of the galactic population and a third of all colonies; technically, killing everyone that's not with you can achieve that, but it's not an explicit goal, just an implicit means to attaining another goal. And that's indicative of most of the game.

Really dense, complex strategy titles have a tendency to have very clear goals. Ostensibly there may be many ways to achieve those goals, but they tend to require a lot of micromanagement to push an empire smoothly in one direction or another. Distant Worlds isn't so discrete, though. It's not a monolith so much as an amorphous blob of code - for better and for worse.

For example: you're supposed to foster a general level of prosperity, but that also only applies to the private sector of the economy - something over which you have no direct control. As a leader, you can build starbases, maintain defensive structures and order the construction of mines and escort trade ships, but you can't do much beyond that to influence economic success. Building up the private economy is one step removed from the tools you actually have at your disposal, and this is another trait that feeds into the bigness of Distant Worlds.

Much like real-world economies, a few simple policy changes won't immediately fix a fundamental systemic problem. In Civilization, budget deficits can be solved with a few clicks, but in Distant Worlds it can be a lengthy affair. You'll likely need to increase tax revenue, which means building more starbases and mining facilities, but those also cost a decent chunk of resources to complete and maintain. Chances are that you'll be running low on some critical resource like lead or gold as well, and that you'll need to keep your empire limping along until you can find an untapped planet that has what you need. Too often, economic troubles are abstracted so far out from their root cause their true solution isn't imminently clear - in both games and in the real world. Distant Worlds does a phenomenal job of representing that.

Those layers of depth are hidden, initially at least, and with good reason. With such intricacy comes the necessity to learn... a lot. Typically I can pick up a new strategy game in just a few minutes; most have an underlying sensibility that guides their interface and their rule set. Distant Worlds isn't one of those games. I had to spend a few hours and a few practice games with some cheats turned on before I really started getting the hang of it.

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