sat down and knocked Mirror’s Edge Catalyst after leaving it unplayed on my PS4 for… 5? 6? years
I think it’s good, just not as good as the original. too many moments of flow state interruption. I think the open world does it some favors, which gets canceled out by the ending going “and the fight continues!” as some sort of weirdo sequel hook and justification for still being able to run around after the story (which is similar to the original in some beats but stupider)
well, surely the next game I have on there will be short an- Horizon Zero Dawn? okay, I guess I’ll go over to the PC for my backlog an- Tales of Arise? okay, my Switch can bail me ou- is that a musou
About a week ago I got a wild hair to play Koei’s Aerobiz, a 1992 strategy/simulation game for the SNES about running an airline (actually it’s for the Genesis and Sharp X68000 too but I didn’t realize that until recently, so I’ve been playing the SNES version). Today I’m happy to say that I managed to complete a special goal I’ve had since I started playing, which I’ll describe as I fill in the details.
The game features lots of romantic plane imagery, destined to bring a tear to the eye of any warm-hearted aircraft enthusiast.
Of course, unlike most gushy games about airplanes, you don’t actually do any flying of them. Instead, you have your airline buy them, and then presumably it pays other people to fly them, although you’re positioned at such a high level as the CEO that the game glosses over payroll as some vague part of operating expenses. Despite this, the game has enough attention to detail that your maintenance crew can strike for better working conditions.
On that note, part of why I wanted to play this game was to experience the byzantine atmosphere of a Koei strategy title cut along different lines than Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. As political/economic actors go, I’m not exactly fond of for-profit corporations, but I’m even less fond of autocratic warlords, and on top of that the murder+disease+famine atmosphere of Ambition and Three Kingdoms starts to get to me after playing for a while, so I thought this might make a nice change of pace by comparison. (I wish I could play Koei’s Super Dog World which might be even more up my alley, but it’s only for PC-98, and I don’t know of a PC-98 emulator that can protect against blinky light patterns—that’s why my screenshots of this game are all motion-blurry by the way).
Anyhow, here’s the basic way the game works. You send your top executives from city to city around the world negotiating for “slots” at their airport; having a slot means you can fly a plane to or from that airport. (They’re a real thing, although the real-life version is a little more complicated—for instance the game lets you hold onto slots you’re not using as long as you keep paying for them, whereas real-world slots often come with stipulations to prevent that.) Once you’ve got open slots at two airports, you can set up a route between them, but only if you have planes available that are capable of flying the distance. You buy the planes from real-world manufacturers like Boeing and McDonnell Douglas (who was still in business when this game came out), and you can also buy Soviet-made planes like the Il-62—well, depending on where you’re located. If your airline is headquartered in a strongly U.S.-aligned region, and the in-game date is before the Iron Curtain fell, you can’t buy Soviet planes; likewise if you start in a Soviet-aligned region, you can’t buy the American-made planes, as long as the U.S.S.R. is still shakin’. Airlines from more neutral regions can buy from either, but tend to be in poorer areas of the world where it’s harder to get started. As you can probably tell, Koei went to rather remarkable lengths to give the game’s mechanics a lifelike quality.
The game’s interface is centered around a world map. Here I’m playing as Japan Air out of Tokyo, about to win:
However, I didn’t start out playing from Tokyo. When I booted up the game for the first time, I decided to start in Lagos, because I felt like the story of a Nigerian airline rising to the top of the world air travel market would be one of the more exciting tales that could play out in a game like this. However, even though I diligently read the manual before playing, I found this to be remarkably hard: even on the lowest difficulty, I went bankrupt in only a handful of turns. You start out with far less money in Lagos than airlines from wealthier cities, and your selection of starting routes is mostly to other relatively poor cities that don’t see a lot of air travel, so it’s easy for the better-off competition to trounce you right away.
After a few attempts out of Lagos, I decided to try playing out of Tokyo instead, to see if I could at least get the hang of the game that way. Tokyo is one of the largest and wealthiest cities, and its location makes it easy to expand into Eurasia or the Americas at the beginning depending on what’s more strategically favorable. (Other easy places to start from include New York, L.A., and London.) With the experience I’d built up losing a few times out of Lagos, I was able to win the game on my first attempt out of Tokyo, although still at the lowest difficulty. However, when I tried playing as Lagos once more, I got about half the map covered and then abruptly went bankrupt again.
At this point I had an epiphany. Maybe to some people on this forum it’s obvious, but in all my years of gaming I had actually never before thought to do this: I put the game on the very highest difficulty instead, and resolved to watch the computer players like a hawk, taking detailed notes on their every move, to see if I could extract mechanical principles from them. I played from Tokyo again to give myself as much time to survive as possible, so I could gather the most data. To my immense surprise, I figured out so much about the game in the course of doing this that I won fairly rapidly, in 9 in-game years, several years before the point when I had lost out of Lagos last time (the above screenshot is from that playthrough).
Today, I am proud to say that I started my next game from Lagos at the highest difficulty, and won once again, so my dream of seeing a Nigerian airline sweep the globe has been fulfilled!! When I first started playing this game several days ago I was doubtful that it was even possible. Sadly I didn’t think to get any screenshots of the moment of my victory, but this is pretty close-to:
You can see I went for a somewhat different strategy in this playthrough of only going for long-distance routes. They fetch the highest ticket prices and tend to get more business. As I discovered, though, it’s hard to make long-distance routes break even unless the route is also between relatively high-population cities (with the type of economy the city has also making some difference—people from industrial towns like to fly to tourist towns, though some towns are large enough that they support both types of activity). When I was playing from Tokyo as in the previous screenshot, I started out with a mix of short and long, and then replaced my least-trafficked short-distance routes with more attractive ultra-long-distance routes between large cities once a truly long-distance jet became available (the renowned 747, which goes on sale in 1969 just like it did in real life). I think that might be a better tactic to keep cash flowing in the midgame—I had a near scrape with bankruptcy in my winning Lagos run in the early '70s, ironically just before I established a very secure position. I’ll have to play as Lagos again to see if a mix allows for a quicker and steadier victory even there, but in any case I think my experience so far shows that either strategy is viable. I guess I could try it in Scenario 2, also, which goes from 1983–2015 and thus starts with a wider selection of planes (Scenario 1 goes from 1963–1995 and starts with a kind of awkwardly limited selection of planes at first, just like in actual 1963 I guess).
As a side note, I realized as I was writing this that I also have the Japanese version on my computer, titled Air Management: Ouzora ni Kakeru (“Betting on the Open Sky”). If I had noticed before I might’ve been playing that version instead for the sake of Japanese practice, but I guess it makes sense to post English-language screenshots at least since this is primarily an English-language forum. Here’s some screenshots from the Japanese version though:
Left:
Usage fee per slot: $40,000
Slot count
“How many slots should I request?”
Right:
Blue Wing - SALES
“Which manufacturer shall we visit?”
There’s a bit of Japanese practice at least. For some reason, the Japanese version has “Blue Wing (ブルーウイング)” instead of “Boeing,” “Double Link (ダブルリンク)” instead of “MCD” for McDonnell Douglas, and “Airliner (エアライナー)” instead of “Airbus,” although the name of the (invented) Soviet vendor, “Miriyakov (ミリヤーコフ),” is pretty similar to their name in English, “Markov” (maybe a little jokey reference by the translator to mathematician Andrey Markov, of Markov chain fame). I kind of doubt the different names are for trademark reasons since they were willing to use them in English, so maybe those companies just aren’t very well-known in Japan? Seems kind of hard to imagine though—I could chalk it up to classic American navel-gazing on my part with Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, but Airbus is a pan-European company and I think everyone here still knows about them(?), so maybe there’s yet another explanation.
Anyway, to close out, here are the themes that play in the Lagos and Tokyo airports respectively, and in the background on the normal map screen as well if you’re playing out of one or the other city. As you might imagine I’ve heard them plenty over the course of the last week, but luckily they’re pretty catchy:
I played a 3 player game of Aerobiz or Aerobiz Supersonic back in ye olde 16 bit days, never did hunker down and play the games seriously (I only owned the latter, the first was a rental) but always enjoyed busting them out once every few years to screw around with.
i’m a little peeved that the dialogue options dont yet substantially change as a result of time loops so it’s not quite the full ‘what if this happened to me’ experience but im sure that will build on itself. ive explored the planets you know about at the beginning about halfway i think. funny moment on the interloper when it was the first ‘planet’ i went to but in the process of attempting to land on it it got too close to the sun and i burned to death
it’s hard to talk about this game without spoilers but it’s also hard to talk about it without getting spoiled! but i want to talk about it! lol
for the most part there’s just not much dialog after the first 1/4 of the game, you pretty quickly exhaust your opportunities to talk to people, a lot of the later revelations come via the environment rather than dialog trees
i forgot to mention this game is really excellent at giving me stupid ways to lose my ship, my fave yet was first time visiting brittle hollow i followed the signalscope music into the core and went ‘holy fuck it’s a black hole aaaa’ and looked for a place to set down the ship but jammed it precariously into the side of an overhanging rock breaking it so i hopped out to do repairs but of course fell into the fucking black hole and expected to be turned into spaghetti but of course got warped to the white hole station other side of the solar system… and then eventually found my way back but RIGHT AS I WARPED BACK to brittle hollow my ship fell into the black hole… so i was standing back on the surface of brittle hollow looking at this waypoint in the sky that said SHIP 12.7KM like “what the fuck just happened”
they really make the most of that tiny solar system too like i was thinking about how it’s the exact opposite approach of the first mass effect game where there’s these massive drivable planets but the only things on them are poorly textured (procedurally generated?) rock formations. here everything unfolds and unfolds, very cool
i bought a buncha stuff for the winter sales and so far i have not played:
daikatana - lol. i’ll play it soon and talk about it in the daikatana thread probably.
what i have played:
mobile suit baba - an (explicit) into the breach knock-off featuring all your favourite baba is you characters. i have not played baba is you, nor have i played into the breach. this was free on itch for like 10 hours and i was like ok why not. i have played approximately 1 hour of this and decided that i will come back to it… probably. maybe. i don’t mind cos it was free and also i learned that it’s made in multimedia fusion 2 which i’d never heard of and it looks neat so whatever.
star of providence - you ever heard of that uhh binding of isaac game? or nuclear throne? yeah they still make games like that apparently. idk why i bought it tbh i entered a fugue state and then it was in my library when i came to. anyway it was only like 2 bux or something so who cares. it’s fine. it’s the second game from that BIGMODE publisher which tells u something about their idea of originality. no offense to the game it’s alright. i wish it were just a cool hard action game with levels instead of an endless roguelike nonsense game.
dungeon siege - lol. lmao. i played this cos it’s in the opening to the skyway is gone. it sucks (the game i mean, the film is cool) but i have no regrets.
E.Y.E: divine cybermancy - LOL. LMAO. i played 101 minutes of this and said “hahaha that’s enough” and i more or less stand by that. i reckon it might be a funny thing to play with some buds over sometime but otherwise i don’t care. pc arse videogame.
darkest dungeon ii - dude, videogames rule.
i played a heap of dd1 and i respect the hell outa that game, but i never got far in it because failure in that game is such a brutal time-sink. i loved the combat, and i could tell that if the game were arranged a little differently i could’ve had a great time building teams and finding class synergies. as it was i spent all my time trying to claw my way back to a position from which i could actually have a reasonable attempt at a run and so i never actually got to like, play the game.
dd2 is, so far, everything i could possibly have asked for coming from this background; the game is so respectful of my time. instead of waiting for the right character to come along you purchase them from a roster (you can unlock all characters within like an hour of starting) and after that you can just use them in a run whenever you want. there’s no individual character leveling or any bullshit like that, they’re just ready to go. you still get incremental upgrades as you play: access to new abilities/attacks on a per-class basis, increased resistance to death, variations on the classes themselves that allow you to twist them into slightly different roles, and so on. if a character dies they’re only dead for that particular expedition. if you wipe or end the expedition early not only do you still get rewarded for trying, but all your characters are alive again immediately and you can get right back into it. this means it’s really easy to try a team combo, decide whether or not it’s any good, and then try again.
i’ve only been playing for two days (17 hours lollll) and i’ve already beaten 1 of the 5 (6?) expeditions (this game’s equivalent of dungeons), which is wayyyy further than i ever got in dd1. i can’t recommend this enough.
i’ve never had such an emotional journey reading one of your posts than seeing “going to post about daikatana!” to “i don’t like dungeon siege and EYE”
this one is originally from 2017 and was originally called Monolith - i guess copyright must have forced them to change their name. i played it a bunch i wanna say around 2019 and i liked it! one of my fav rougelite type games. that’s not really saying tons, tho, cuz it’s not one of my favorite genres. i don’t know how BIGMODE is involved though - maybe with a console release? haven’t felt the need to come back to it after a certain point, as with many of those games. addictive loops that don’t really leave much for me after a certain point.
