#i only remembered i’d made it bc my housemate just got to this part of acol

[antaripirate]

made this a couple months ago and forgot to post it🫢 (it’s so dumb)

[listoriented]

Caesar 3

Ancient History

Ah, can you smell it? The dew on the grass? The vacuum in the office? It’s the games, they begin with a different letter now, so everything seems different. A completely superficial kind of different, sure, but that’s what we’re all about. And yet, C commences with perhaps the oldest (intact from manufacture date) game yet to hit the list, a game which also happens to be set two and a half millennia ago. Artificial newness meets two kinds of old in this heady, confusing stretch of an introductory paragraph.

Handily for me, I was just on a bit of a city-builder/management games kick last month, dabbling in Islanders, nodding my head at Surviving Mars, glancing nervously at Oxygen Not Included. Unhandily, these tooltip-heavy games could only skew my expectations wildly for the difficulty that was to come.

In the background this week, cake. Also The International, my annual re-engagement with Dota, at the same time as finals approaching for the ASL - a mini e-sports glut, basically, which I’m hoping to keep half an eye on while trying to crunch through a thing for uni. Oh bountiful electronic joy.

Where/When/Why: Caesar 3 is our first encounter with the expansive Humble Sierra Bundle, from August 2016. At the time I was playing the Batman games and starting to consider how much of a long-term problem ad-hoc adding thirty old adventure games to the library might one day be. But I wanted the Gabriel Knight games (they were faves of Charlie, my housemate at the time) so I did it anyway, dumping $15 on the whole lot.

Who/What: This third iteration of the Caesar series came out in 1998. The series was developed by Massachusetts-based Impressions Games, and is apparently considered to be part of a broader City Building series that included games set in ancient Greece and Egypt. Impressions went through a series of acquisitions and folded in 2004, though wikipedia suggests Tilted Mill (who are still operating, I think), are something of a successor in terms of employees and game style.

Prior experience: Though I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed it as a kid, I don't think I've played any of the series before. AJ mentioned having repeatedly played a demo on his family's PowerMac 180 back in the 90's, so it's possible I encountered it then (both our families were Mac families, but his were the first to have colour). Roy also claims Caesar 2 was a game he grew up with, something of a replacement experience for Civilization. I more recently remembered Caesar 3 mentioned on 3MA's deep dive through the best strategy games of '98. But it's otherwise an unknown to me, and its apparent historical popularity and current familiarity to everyone else is weird and unexpected.

Veni Vidi VVVVVV: We begin with an isometric screen of grass, trees and rivers. This makes sense, because it was made in the 90s, back when life itself was still isometric. Actually before that we begin with a comfortably awful CG intro vid, giving us a rose-tinted overview of Rome's rise to power. I would expect/want nothing less. The campaign begins in tute mode, handing us the role of colony-planner during Rome's expansion in Italy in the 400 BCs - supposedly we answer to Caesar, even though IRL it’d be another few centuries until Julius Caesar happens and the name 'Caesar' becomes a term for ruler. Of course we're only pointing this out because we're a pedantic knob looking to fill some space, and we want you to know how smart we are, and we’re persisting in writing as though we are plural.

The first mission is tick-the-boxes easywork, but from there it gets tough quickly, withholding info in a way that just wouldn't fly two decades on. In the second I got stuck in a strange loop, constantly some hundred citizens short of the mission requirement and no understanding of how to break out. It seemed that even though I'd run out of arable land, my city wasn't making enough food due to a lack of labour, yet not having enough food also seemed to mean that more people wouldn't move to my town. It took me a few restarts to crack this threshold, with no real understanding of what I'd done differently other than build some extra granaries (did the game mean I was producing enough food, I just wasn't storing it properly?), and opting to not build a lot of the extra luxury buildings that became available suddenly halfway through. Rinse and repeat in the third mission, just with different problems on a larger scale, ad infinitum.

The game has an usually hectic cadence to it, for a city-builder. Things go wrong frequently, buildings collapse and burst into flames, people get sick, gods get angry because you forgot to build shrines to them, the months canter by, taking your denariis with them, and there's no functional pause so no way of stopping the ongoing collapse while you go hunting for problems or work out where the best place is to put this senate or farm or next row of houses. Little cartoony figures rush up and down the roads, moving goods around or putting out fires, something visually akin to an ants nest. The eponymous Caesar is constantly angry and disappointed because we haven't met his expectations. Everything is always on fire, for reasons that are not always clear.

If I was a little smarter at this point, I would have remembered that the internet, well, exists, and I would have gone looking for help a little earlier. One of the first tips this LP suggested was to bring the game speed down, which was something I didn’t even know I could do, because it’s an option tucked away in a menu rather than front and centre in the UI where, as a 21st century player of games, I usually expect it to be. 

I've played Caesar 3 for four hours or so and I still feel like I'm a long way from understanding it. Every time I open it I make a new and important discovery about how things are meant to work, and then I feel like a fool for not realising this earlier. Progress is incremental, barely visible. Experienced players make Roman towns that look very different to mine. The systems are there, complex and surprisingly extensive but hidden, and the game doesn't seem to have much interest in making things easy. It's no bad thing that we expect games to be better at teaching us how to play them than we did in '98, just IMO. But it's a fun city-builder, if a somewhat stressful and difficult one for someone who grew up with the more forgiving Maxis variants, and in a parallel life I stick with it and learn a valuable lesson in patience and persistence, if not anything particularly useful about history. 

next is Caesar 4

[augchamp]

jackaby fan ending bc i am still tORN UP

[in which viv isn't quite satisfied with the ending of a certain novel. thanks to @rfjackaby . hope you enjoy!] That isn't quite the end of my story, though. Everything following the blinding light, up until Charlie was kissing me on the front porch of 926 Auger Lane later that day, was a blur of colors. Auras and people and emotions and footprints all blurred together into a fine mess of vision. I didn't marry him. Not right away, at least. Instead Charlie Barker moved into the bustling household, newly refurbished, and slightly less cluttered. The library wasn't mine, per say, but I spent a lot more time in there than my employer, who preferred to spend most days either outside or in bed, with rare in betweens. ​​​​​​Jenny tended to float in and out of her house, instead opting to accompany Jackaby on most of the walks, God knows where. She was a vibrant pink whenever she returned from those expeditions, I will say. I asked Charlie once, and he had also noticed that she seemed more... Alive. I gave Douglas better access to the pond. It's quite interesting to observe him in the new pond, still figuring things out. I realized why he had chosen to stay that way, and briefly wished I too was a waterfowl. Briefly. Charlie learned how to make the best tea in all the world, I dare say better than mine. He brought me cups of it throughout the day, and at some point throughout gallons of tea, my butterfly feelings for him faded, replaced with a sense of calm. A sense of home. There was one moment when he brought me a cup of tea late in the evening, and leaned over to kiss my head, when neither of us blushed, and neither of us shyly glanced away. I kissed him back. That's how I knew I loved him. As for I, I changed in some considerable ways after our events. Lucky for me, things were unsettlingly calm for the next two months, a time where I could grab for bearings of the new colors and senses and smells and feelings. I noticed I, however, became grayer. Duller. Sharper around the edges, and now I had perpetual bags under my eyes, even as I smiled. The vision was overwhelming, exhausting, and occasionally made me frustrated enough to break down into tears. I knew I'd have to live with it, though, and if I did get upset, it was away from Jackaby, and away from Jenny. I grew comfortable with Charlie's shoulder. I knew if my employer saw me at those breaking points, he would keep himself up at night, and he'd already done that enough for too many years. It was heartbreakingly beautiful the first time I saw him grin, ear to ear. I don't think I'd ever heard him laugh the way he did just a few weeks after he'd passed the vision on. He was happy. He had color in his cheeks, and a spring in his step, and when he shot me a grin, I knew he truly was enjoying life for what it was. And for me, it was all worth it. What wasn't worth it, were the amount of inside jokes among my three housemates, who dubbed the catchphrase "I didn't die for this". It became something they immediately bonded over, and laughed about, and something else to make me crack a smile and roll my eyes. As the years grew on, we all grew on each other. From the time that Jenny took Charlie to see the things she'd chosen for her wedding (which she insisted I try on her dress), to when Jackaby and I decided to bake a cake (you do not want to hear that story), we were no longer just a group of odd faces. We eventually became a mystery quartet. Oh, how we pissed off Marlowe. We became quite the team, however, where we each played to our strengths, and helped support the others' weaknesses. We had a few bumps in the road, times where we almost died, or got eaten, or got banished from another kingdom, but it was, for the most part, exceptional. The Mystery Quartet wasn't unbeatable by any means. We were just remarkable by all others. Months became years, and cases stacked up, and our friendships and romantics only grew for others in the group. There was one instance where I threw myself in front of Charlie and Jackaby, where I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to flicker out. I could see in the others' faces that they did too. It was another year before Charlie proposed to me. He knew that I knew. Several weeks leading up to it, he'd discussed things with me, desperate to be sure I was involved in our conversations on the matter, but not quite saying when he would ask. He asked when I made us both a cup of tea after a long day. It was one of my favorite memories from there on out, one I could remember almost without the filters of color and smears of emotion. I set a glass down on the table in front of him, sat down beside him, and leaned on him, as he leaned on me, before he whispered: "Please tell me you'll marry me, Abigail." "Of course, Charlie. Of course." I had held onto the ring after he'd been revived, and he never had asked for it back until that moment, only to slide it onto my finger, lean on my shoulder, and drink his tea. We got married in the fall, a few friends attending, among those were Jackaby and Jenny, and Miss Lydia Lee. I wore Jenny's dress. She cried. It was another few years before children even entered our minds, another few years of adventure. Neither Charlie nor I were quite ready to settle down when I became pregnant, and though it turns out that you probably shouldn't be investigating a resurfacing of a certain redcap while six months pregnant, all ended safely. I didn't throw myself headfirst into danger. ​​​​​​ When I held our daughter for the first time, very few were present, among those were Charlie, Jackaby, and Jenny. I let Jackaby hold her. He cried. We raised strong children on 926 Auger Lane, four of them, to be exact. Freckled, curly haired children they were, but they were fiercely kind and stubborn, and I knew that we had gone right somewhere along the lines when our oldest son rescued a wood nymph from certain doom, and his the creature in his bedroom for months. The first expedition our children went on was catastrophic, and that was simply to a fortune teller, so when Jackaby and our oldest daughter returned from her first official dealings with the paranormal, covered in mud, you can bet I asked if anything had been set on fire. There hadn't been, but something that did set alight were my daughter's eyes, at the young age of thirteen. She'd seen things I hadn't until I was well past my thirties, and that scared me. It also instilled confidence, though. My story is never quite over, just as the Seer's isn't. I truly hope when I die, it's long after my children have learned the love and death of life, and that my daughter will be strong when colors blur before her own eyes.

[biggamebrass]

lg anon, i'm so sorry it took me so long to respond! my housemates and i are moving, so it's been really hectic around here. let me respond to your two asks separately.

part 1

last we talked about myself? nothing much is new. i mean, i'm dating a great boy (who isn't the boy i've been talking to you about GASP. more on that later.) and i'm moving to a beautiful new house with my friends, so that's great too! we move tomorrow! ah! i also finished the school year with my beautiful kindergarteners, which is so sad - i miss them so much and i'm already SO bored not having work! having summers off isn't really all that it's thought to be - especially when you can't really travel or do anything with those weeks!

last we talked about the boy? hm. nothing much is new. we didn't talk for the last three weeks at ALL. literally nothing. not a text, a phone call. nothing. so i sent him a message last monday on a complete whim explaining how frustrated and upset i was about it. the gist of the message was that i still feel super strongly about him and always have, and i'm sad that - although i always knew he wasn't ready for anything - what we had turned into what it is now - which is nothing. he didn't respond to it for a couple hours, and then i came back to my phone and had four missed calls from him, and a voicemail. he was so upset i felt that way.

i spoke to him on the phone the next night, and we talked for an hour. the gist of THAT conversation was that he would be lying to himself, and to me, if he didn't tell me that all my strong feelings about him are not fully reciprocal - he feels the same about me. "you're beautiful, you're funny, you're smart, you have a great personality and you're one of the greatest people i've ever met". he said that he feels terrible that just because he's not ready, we stopped talking. he acknowledges that while it's not an excuse, he was busy with work and kind of stopped reaching out. he reassured me that just because we didn't talk, he never stopped thinking about me and would sometimes sit there wondering what i was up to, and he took complete ownership for not reaching out in those moments. he asked me if he ever said, or did, anything that let me to believe that he didn't want to hear from me. he told me that he has never been, and will never be, upset when i reach out. he assured me that i can call or text him WHENEVER, and he will always be stoked to hear from me. he told me that he was really upset and almost cried when he read my message because he never wanted to make me upset or make me feel that way. he told me he wished he was ready, and he sees so so so much potential there with me. he told me more things too, things like his want to have a friendship with me for now, he wants me in his life and he's so happy to know me. i've been beyond patient with him, kind, caring and he told me over and over to never change because he thinks i'm truly the most incredible. that was sweet.

it went on for an hour, but that was the gist. it can all be words, but idk. he's such a great guy and that conversation made me so sad. but at least he's still around. the weeks we didn't talk, i thought that was it, and that it had fizzled and i'd lost him from my life. good to know i haven't?

thank you so much for weighing in about everything i've told you. i think honestly i am okay being friends with him for right now, who knows what the future holds.

that being said, it makes me a little wary about my current relationship, because i'm still sitting here thinking that i'm in it "until this boy is ready", but the boy i'm with is also the most incredible. he's kind,  he knows how frustrated i am with the way my housemates leave my house and he says things like "i'll always keep mine clean so you have somewhere safe and tidy to come to when you feel overwhelmed." he knows i'm stressed about moving, and texted me last night just a simple "good luck tomorrow, you've got this!". things like that. he's hilarious, we have the same sense of humour and both enjoy listening to each other's stupid humour all the time. he buys me incredible dinners, always cooks for me. my housemates went out for vegan ice cream one night when i was at his place, and i was sad i missed it so he took me to the grocery store and bought me a tub of vegan ice cream so i would feel happy. he makes so much time for me - even the original guy, the one i've been talking about, only saw me once a week. i'm not dissing him for that, he has an insane job and is always busy, but this boy makes so so much time for me.

he makes plans too! so many boys don't do that! they just say "hey, wanna hang?" and throw a movie on or something. this boy calls with a plan. let's make dinner. LET'S MAKE THIS SPECIFIC DINNER. and then he'll buy the groceries and come pick me up and we'll make it together and then he'll plan the movie or whatever and just ugh. it feels so nice. he's so cute too, he's come to the door when he's picked me up before and chatted with my housemates which is something most guys DEFINITELY wouldn't do, meet all the friends and all that so quickly, but yeah! they all love him, def support me and him lol esp. after everything i put them through re: boy #1.

anyways, he's great. i'm a little worried about it, because i still 100% believe that if the first boy called me and asked me to forgive him and he was ready, i would def leave and go to him. but maybe that will change, idk. ugh. it makes me feel shitty, i don't want to hurt this boy at all. maybe i shouldn't even be in anything. whatever, we'll see what happens. realistically, i don't think boy #1 will do that anytime soon so it's okay.

part 2

first of all - don't apologize! i'm so glad that although you originally followed me bc derick, you've found another outlet in my blog. that makes me selfishly so happy. i'm glad you've realized that within yourself - that you're not ready for a relationship. we've been talking about that a lot in my house lately. so many people want to be ready because they love love and want love, but sometimes it's important to acknowledge within yourself that you're just not ready for it. no matter what you see in someone. it's especially incredible that you're able to separate your desire for dating and your reasons for dating - which aren't necessarily what they're supposed to be. i think it's human nature to want those things, so don't beat yourself up over wanting it. it's a great idea to want to grow and change that perspective before you find a partner.

you're right, it's great to be one of those people that boys are interested in. i've been there and it's def an ego boost. but at the same time, it's sad because while there's all this interest, you still can't find it within yourself to find someone you're actually compatible with, and then it all means nothing. it's better to do your own thing and wait until someone comes along that TRULY appreciates you. you know?

don't regret the things you've said to friends, or the way you've thought about them or acted. it's great you've taken ownership of the reasons behind why you feel certain ways, and have been able to turn it into hard work for school, and on yourself. that takes a big person! which i already absolutely knew you're capable of!

it's so great that you realize relationships that you may have had were pseudorelationships, its huge to be able to tell the difference. if a boy wants a relationship, or a girl! or a person! you'll know. who knows, maybe you ARE ready to start looking again, now that you're aware of all these flags within yourself.

i'm SO happy to hear that my posts somehow helped. they were meant as just an outlet for me to express my frustration over boys and people, so it's so beautiful to hear that someone out there was actually reading and appreciated. honestly, i don't present myself in a certain way, and who knows? that may be it. boys can certainly pick up on authenticity. the media tells you to act a certain way, present yourself a certain way, as a "woman". but that's not true in regular "real person" life. boys, a move everything, just want someone true to themselves. if that's one thing i can pass on, i'll take it. it's SO important. be yourself, and the true "quality" guys will stick around. :)

(and don't apologize for being envious, you're human. we all are. wow you're amazing.)

i'm sorry that boy was shit. you'll find a good one soon, if you're anything like how you talk to me on here, people will appreciate you SO quick.

NOW onto derick. i'm so thrilled you see him the way i do and really have stuck around to be there for him like i am, it's beautiful. yay! i don't have much to add on what you said, i just absolutely love the way you're worded it and it's all SO true. you're bringing tears to my eyes - yay! i love it, love him, love you!

it's so great to see that people appreciate him for who he is. i get a lot of shit from people when they hear that he's my favourite player because he's a "has been", he's been through "every team in the league lately" etc etc but if you REALLY look, you can see how much value he has.

above it all, i'm so happy that derick was able to serve as that for you - someone to see and understand that no one is ever "done", you just have to stick tot what you want and what you believe you can do, and that good things will come. i'm so happy that you've been able to find a career for yourself that you feel comfortable and good in. yay! i'm so happy for you.

thank you SO much for these messages. you're incredible. always remember that. 💛💛💛💛💛