Maybe SimEarth.

This simulates a tile-based planet map. Animals grow and evolve, and things like atmospheric concentration and other aspects like surface albedo can be altered. More a toy than a game. Had a lot of fun playing with the levers.

1990 release – it’s still playable, though it’d feel pretty ancient and will not be very beautiful.

I haven’t played SimLife or Spore, and there might be some similarities there.

I’m not aware of anything else that’d be comparable.

Terraria

I’d probably put Starbound in the same genre, but yeah, those are the only games in the genre that I’m aware of. It’s pretty unusual.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in a post on Telegram, said Russia had used more than 800 glide bombs on Ukrainian targets in the past week. He issued a fresh plea in his nightly video address for better weapons systems. “The sooner the world helps us deal with the Russian combat aircraft launching these bombs, the sooner we can strike – justifiably strike – Russian military infrastructure … and the closer we will be to peace,” he said.

Well, I don’t know what kind of counter he’s aiming for. There are basically two that I can think of:

Long-range SAMs with sufficient range (and maybe mobility) to strike an aircraft launching glide bombs without being placed at risk. Ukraine’s has had some old long-range Warsaw Pact SAMs, but I don’t think that we’ve got more stores or production capacity. There are Patriots, but those are the only anti-ballistic-missile counter Ukraine presently has; using them as a counter for aircraft will cut into that. I suggested earlier that the SAMP/T systems that France sent, firing Aster missiles – which theoretically have an ABM capability, but at least earlier in the conflict, apparently weren’t intercepting them – might work, if the range is long enough.

Aircraft armed with long-range air-to-air missiles.

Russia’s newest glide bombs, according to this article, probably reach about 90 km.

To use it to directly support the front, that’s about how close they’re going to have to get. Maybe closer if they want to strike behind the front.

The US has the AIM-120. The latest version reaches 160–180 km according to WP. We have other long-range air-to-air missiles in development, but not in production today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Range_Engagement_Weapon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-260_JATM

Europe has the Meteor:

Maximum range: 200 km (110 nmi)+[4] No Escape Zone: 60 km (32 nmi)+[5]

A Ukrainian aircraft firing those will need to do so at high altitude to leverage high range, use the aircraft’s fuel rather than the missile’s. That height will make it visible to Russian air defense, and the aircraft has to avoid getting hit by Russian SAMs.

The longest-range SAM that I’m aware of that Russia has is an S-400 variant:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-400_missile_system

That can reach out 400 km with the right missile according to WP.

Now, there are a number of ways one might measure range (from what height? Are these “minimum maximum” ranges or the actual limit? Is this a no-escape range or the furthest the missile can travel? What altitude can it reach at that point?) So I can’t say “this is the range that Ukraine’s going to need” exactly. But if Russia can legitimately reach out about twice as far as any air-to-air missile, it seems to me that that’s going to be a problem for air-to-air missile use unless countermeasures or stealth or similar can prevent Russia from making use of SAMs.

Ukraine has been hitting S-400s with ATACMS, so those are, in turn, under threat.

I think that the problem is that the entire article, other than that sentence, consists of a list of bullet points. It’s conventional for articles to sometimes include a list of bullet points with an “executive summary” at the top, and then have the real article below, but this just omits that latter text.

deleted by creator

Ah, gotcha. It also looks like it was considered to be very difficult (though any game from that era is gonna generally be a lot harder than present-day games).

I also remember a one-bit, not even polygon, but wireframe Star Wars third person rail shooter. It was on the early Mac, but I think it was a port from DOS or something.

kagis

Oh, wow. Apparently, it was actually a color arcade game, Star Wars, from 1983, and I’d just only seen the black-and-white Mac port until today. I wonder if those are true vector-display graphics, like Tempest.

kagis

Apparently yes. For the younger crowd, there was a point in time with CRTs where some video games actually plotted graphics on specialized CRTs by controlling the electron beam and plotting out the graphics with the point of the beam, kind of the way an old analog oscilloscope works. I bet that there have been antialiased remakes or clones of probably most of those vector-display games by now.

EDIT: Oh, I lied. It was first-person, not third person. You did have to dodge obstacles, but you weren’t looking at your ship from behind.

Rise to Ruins is maybe the most-similar game in terms of gameplay that I can think of. You initiate construction of buildings. You have automated characters build them (kind of like Majesty and Settlers). You can upgrade them, and they can provide equipment to characters. It has the same ramping difficulty of attackers. It doesn’t start with a map populated with monster generators the way Majesty does – instead, they show up over time. It has spells. You can build “defensive buildings”. It starts with the map covered with a fog of war. Your colony’s NPCs level up over time. You can put beefy, non-critical structures to act as something like a tank to absorb attacks while your characters make their way over to deal with a threat, kind of like Majesty.

It’s got some major gameplay differences, though:

• It’s one of the “unwinnable” games – absent some ways to kinda cheese the game and win, you’re just expected to survive for as long as possible. There’s a – I forget the term, but “corruption” – that spreads around the map, making terrain more-and-more hostile, and eventually overwhelming you. Majesty is about surviving the most-unpleasant bit, but if you can overcome that, you’ll win a round.

• No gold economy or NPC incentives. Well, IIRC one can create a “golem attractor” that will tend to make a that particular type of NPCs show up in an area, and you can create structures that NPCs will frequent to tend to make them hang out in a given area.

• A strategic map (which some may like).

• Survival aspects, like needing water and food.

• Path efficiency and building roads and such matters.

• The NPCs do get more-durable, but not to the extreme level that they do in Majesty, and they don’t quite work together in the same sorts of ways.

• It’s got more of a maze-building tower-defense aspect.

There are a handful of other third-person, on-rails shooters (Sin and Punishment), but nothing recent that I’m aware of.

The original Rez isn’t recent, (though that’s a game that got a lot of acclaim for the aesthetics, mechanics aside). According to WP there’s apparently a new VR release; I think I remember seeing a video of it.

looks

Rez Infinite.

Looks like it’s just a high-resolution VR remake, not a new game.

If Nintendo’s done a new Star Fox release, I imagine that that’d qualify.

kagis

Apparently yes, though the most-recent was Star Fox 2, which was eight years ago…a lot newer than Space Harrier, but no spring chicken.

EDIT: Apparently there’s a Star Fox-alike game, Ex-Zodiac, on Steam. I’ve never heard of it before now, though.

Freedom Force

Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. It had a sequel, though, IIRC.

kagis

I assume that you’re talking about the superhero game that I’m thinking of, not the NES shooter.

Yeah, the sequel was Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich.

Can’t think of any other game that I’ve seen quite like those, though.

There are some above-view squad-based real-time tactical games, like Starship Troopers: Terran Command, but doesn’t have the focus on configurable and multi-aspect-upgradable powers that made Freedom Force interesting.

There’s also some console game which I absolutely cannot remember the name of – I never played it, just read about people who had talking about it – that used a similar theme of simulating the game starting to break to try to have a fourth-wall-breaking psychological aspect. IIRC it would misdetect controllers being disconnected and stuff.

kagis

Yeah, I dunno, can’t find it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/biel8o/does_anyone_know_some_good_games_that_have_fake/

This lists some games with that thematic element, but I don’t think that the one I heard about is among those.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the most realistic game ever made. No other game had made me ask “what would I do in real life?” before. Of course, this dies out the more you learn the meta, but your first dozen or so runs are special.

There are some other games that I’d call somewhat-similar. There’s that old Finnish game, whatsit called, is kind of similar in that it’s a wilderness survival roguelike. An innawoods run in Cataclysm can play kind of like that, though Cataclysm as a whole is a lot larger.

kagis

UnReal World

It never quite grabbed my interest the way Cataclysm has, but a lot of people like it.

Cataclysm, for those who haven’t played it, is a very complex open source open-world roguelike. The modeling of a lot of things, as the game has grown over the years, has become remarkably sophisticated, from local weather systems to things like very extensive (realistic, not like Borderlands guns) gun modding, vehicle (land, sea, air) creation and modeling, farming, NPC camps, cybernetics, mutation, sound/smell/sight tracking enemies, martial arts including weapons forms, skills, proficiencies, various types of real-world (and supernatural) diseases and parasites, brewing, modeling of fires, modeling of pain, temperature…it’s a bit of an organically-grown mishmash, but it’s become a game with an enormous amount of mechanics, albeit a very graphically-simple one. I would definitely recommend it to someone with the time and willingness to explore the game’s systems, which is not for everyone. You can just download builds yourself, or there’s a commercial version on Steam, if you want to support the developers.

I’m not familiar with Pony Island, but I’d say that Inscryption – which I quite liked – has got other games like it, as it’s a (good) deckbuilder. If I understand aright from skimming the description, what’s in common is really thematic – simple game with an “upgrade game” aspect tied to a horror theme. The plot gets gradually unfolded as you upgrade and has fourth-wall-breaking aspects, like the game starts to act differently, pretend to malfunction, etc.

Yeah, Katamari Damacy is definitely a “I wouldn’t have played it from the description” game that I found to be a lot of fun. One runs around pushing a growing sticky ball that keeps having objects attach themselves to it. The game has enormous scale change as the ball grows. Simple – almost a tech demo – but surprisingly fun, and I can’t think of anything like it other than games in the series itself.

There’s also a similar discussion on Reddit, some months back, that lists some interesting “unique” games:

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/14tqdqv/completely_unique_games/

I’ve got a couple games that maybe fit this category.

• Kerbal Space Program. This had a sequel coming out that apparently wasn’t going very well and was cancelled, so right now, the possibility of a complete additional game isn’t that great. Spaceflight simulator, where one can design and craft spacecraft and amospheric craft, as well as space bases. One can fly to other planets, set up bases, set up satellite networks, etc. There are some “build your own vehicle”-type games, but not as much of a hard sim as this. I believe that X-Plane can handle atmospheric craft modeling, though the scope of that game is much smaller and it focuses more on flying the aircraft. Has a campaign to progress through, where one performs discoveries and conducts research. I’d recommend this to someone who hasn’t played it and likes sim games.

• Kenshi. There’s a sequel coming out, so maybe it won’t be unique at some point. They player controls a squad that moves around the world in real-time – there isn’t an “overworld map”. The squad can be split up into multiple squads. One can build outposts and defenses and such and have something of an automated economy. There’s a tech tree. The world has various factions and dynamic control of regions, something like Mount & Blade: Warband. There are unique biomes to travel through. A fair bit of the world is placed. The world starts out in a mostly-hand-crafted, fixed state, but evolves over time. Character progression isn’t based on point allocation, but on specific experience; have a character get hurt, and over time his ability to take damage will rise, and so forth. I think that this is still worth playing, though it’s by no means a beautiful game and possibly (hopefully) will be surpassed by its sequel.

• Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. A real-time colony sim that can mostly run itself. One has indirect control for the most part; one directly controls upgrades, certain spell and structure abilities, and can spend money to create “incentive flags” to create missions for characters to fulfill. I don’t know if it’s right to call it a single-game genre – it’s a colony sim, and other colony sims exist, like Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and such. Populus and some god games have direct control over spells. But I don’t know of any other colony sim that plays much like it – most of the focus is on upgrades and on countering waves of invaders, and the gold economy is ununusual. The same developer tried making a sequel, but eliminated the “sandbox” mode, and turned it into more of a puzzle game, and that game didn’t do very well. One builds a colony in real time. There is no direct control over the individual characters, but for certain actions, one can spend money to incentivize them to do certain things. Characters level up and purchase equipment using gold they earn and that you expend on them to purchase items. Some of your control comes from things like building inns to cause them to spend idle time in particular locations. Building construction and maintenance is carried out automatically by peasants. As adventurers spend gold at buildings, it comes back to your control. I think that I’d have a hard time recommending today due to its age (you’re going to have 2d pixel graphics that are going to be tiny on a current computer).

• Pinball Construction Set. This is a video pinball game where the player can use premade elements to easily put together their own pinball board. Very elderly now, dates back to the early 1980s. I remember being absolutely fascinated by this back in the day. Since that time, there have been many video pinball games, as well as some systems that permit some level of authoring capability (e.g. Visual Pinball can run user-created pinball boards), but these require a lot more effort and expertise and “real” authoring tools to put together a pinball board; one can’t just drop in in-game and start throwing elements together. I don’t think that I can recommend this, as it’s absolutely ancient today.

• Noita. It’s based on Liero, but really not at all like it. It’s an action-roguelite (well, that’s a genre, but nothing really similar beneath that level of specificity) that has side-scrolling over an open world. Various materials interact and have their interactions simulated at a per-pixel level, something like the “falling sand” genre. However, there are enemies running around, and the player controls a character that walks and floats through the world. One can find various containers of substances; one can try and mix things together to manipulate the world. One finds wands with spells; one can combine spells and various spell modifiers on wands to create all sorts of custom magic weapons that can range from utility to offensive. The aim, as with many many roguelites, is to try to use some luck and synergies between various items to come up with truly game-breaking combinations. I can definitely recommend this game; I found it to be very good value-for-money.

Honorable mention:

• Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. This is not a single-game genre, but there have only been two successful games in the genre, and one, Carrier Command, is from the 1980s (and which I’ve never played). You control a carrier that moves along an island chain; it can create surface, amphibious, land, and aircraft and weapons for these. One has a limited number of AIs that can control some vehicles automatically; one can give general orders to these, control the vehicles directly. One can capture more resources from the islands to expand one’s abilities. There was a remake of Carrier Command, which flopped, and a sequel, Carrier Command 2, a relatively-recent game, but unlike Hostile Waters, is really intended to be played cooperative multiplayer; playing single-player places a very heavy workload on the player…so I have a hard time placing it in the same genre, even if it has many similarities and was inspired by the same game. While I enjoyed Hostile Waters and I think that it could still be enjoyed, it’s getting a bit long-in-the-tooth graphically, and I recall it being a bit unstable even back in the day.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-have-solved-mystery-how-wombats-poop-cubes-180976898/

Bare-nosed wombats can excrete four to eight scat pieces at a time and may poop up to 100 cubes a day. After the wombat defecates, the furry critter collects the two centimeter-sized cubes and places them around their territory, possibly to communicate with other wombats or attract mates, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo.

I imagine it depends on whether the opposite gender finds walls sexy or not. I don’t have a good feel for wombat aesthetics. Maybe they’re into pyramids.

EDIT: This looks more like Stonehenge-level construction than Great Wall of China stuff going on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat

Wombats leave distinctive cubic faeces.[9] As wombats arrange these feces to mark territories and attract mates, it is believed that the cubic shape makes them more stackable and less likely to roll, which gives this shape a biological advantage.

The engineering prowess of the beaver, Australian-style.

I bet the image of one surrounded by poo constructions makes them less-appealing.

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_today-vid-canonical-featured-desktop,f_auto,q_auto:best/MSNBC/Components/Video/__NEW/tdy_trending_qtips_160121.jpg

Compared to a golf-cart or dirt bike, a Ladoga is much better-suited for mechanized warfare.

I don’t know. Like, yes, by definition, a dirt bike isn’t what a mechanized unit uses; that’s a motorized vehicle. But…I think that there’s a fair question of how well the roles can match.

Specifically for nuclear war, then yeah, obviously the Ladoga is better. It’s got environmental protection.

But I’m not sure that light armor will necessarily have the role it has over past decades in the future.

The point of light armor is to deal with rifle and machine gun bullets – as in ambushes – and near-miss artillery fragments. It will work well for that.

I don’t know what portion of actual damage to Russian forces is presently coming from those, though. I mean, if the armor isn’t stopping what’s killing the thing, it might not buy much. It won’t stop top-attack ATGMs. It won’t stop drones carrying heavier munitions. It won’t stop guided munitions like GMLRS or guided artillery.

If we can provide enough tube artillery and shells, that might change. But if warfare here is characterized by mostly highly-accurate, long-range weapons capable of penetrating the armor that vehicles have…that armor might not provide much protection.

For an analog, think of how it used to be common for individual soldiers to wear heavy armor up until things like crossbows and firearms, long-range weapons that could penetrate it, killed it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_armour

As firearms became better and more common on the battlefield, the utility of full armour gradually declined, and full suits became restricted to those made for jousting which continued to develop.

It’s not impossible that the same phenomenon could affect vehicle armor. Maybe not all vehicles, but it might make it a lot-less-valuable to have light armor.

And unarmored vehicles tend to be faster, which helps limit their time in a dangerous zone.

I think that a dirt bike, which might be good as a vehicle for a single person, maybe two, has some serious limitations – it can’t load up anyone if they do get hurt. It can’t pull towed equipment. It has a limited ability to carry supplies.

But it can also traverse trails that four-wheel vehicles cannot. It can be easily hidden. It is inexpensive and can be easily provided in large numbers. It is light and can be delivered via air. Many people each on a dirt bike are less of a concentrated target than a group of people in an APC; against a weapon that light armor doesn’t stop, the dirt bike may be more resilient than light armor.

In World War II, there were some very substantial successes that various militaries pulled off with bicycle infantry, which is pretty analogous; Japan’s rapid movement in the Battle of Singapore is probably the poster child for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Singapore

The capture of Singapore resulted in the largest British surrender in its history.

Conventional British military thinking was that the Japanese forces were inferior and characterised that the Malayan jungles as “impassable”; the Japanese were repeatedly able to use it to their advantage to outflank hastily established defensive lines.

Despite their numerical inferiority, they advanced down the Malayan Peninsula, overwhelming the defences. The Japanese forces also used bicycle infantry and light tanks, allowing swift movement through the jungle. The Commonwealth having thought the terrain made them impractical, had no tanks and only a few armoured vehicles, which put them at a severe disadvantage.[25]

E-bikes can be very quiet.

There have been a history of unarmored vehicles that we’ve used in combat. And I don’t mean the Jeep, but in contemporary times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Patrol_Vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Strike_Vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interim_Fast_Attack_Vehicle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1161_Growler

In reality, Germany became entirely dependent on Russian gas, oil and coal. Think about it as Schroeder, Merkel, Nord Stream. For some reason no one really talked about it.

It was left to Donald Trump to point out the contradictions and dangers in that position. When he did, everybody laughed and pointed to it as proof of what an idiot he was.

While I get that it was obnoxious to have the German contingent there laughing at him as he warned him – prior to Russia draining down Germany’s storage and then using it as leverage – that was also not Donald-Trump-the-individual. That will have been at the tail end of a long chain of warnings from the American government that eventually made it up to recommending that the President publicly comment on it. Trump won’t have been the one to identify it; he’ll just have been the last messenger in a chain of many.

The New Balance of Power in Europe is going to look a lot more like 1848 than 1948. In place of the Austrian Empire, however, will be the alliance of the UK and Ukraine, bound in a hundred year Covenant to secure the peace of Europe.

Ehhh. I think that that’s stretching things.

There were also EU member states who acted; the article is specifically talking about Poland.

I think that there is a fair accusation that the EU as an institution was not very active on this. I think that it’s also fair to say that there are some members who took a long while to move. But the EU isn’t a monolith, either: some member states did move.

And the EU-as-an-institution isn’t static and unchanging, either. Like, I don’t know what changes are being made, but I would assume that having been burned once, EU politicians are probably looking at what they can do to avoid a repeat. Countries don’t normally just sit there are get burned over and over. I would be reasonably confident that Russia isn’t going to be able to use natural gas access as leverage to split the EU again. Maybe it’ll be changes to the Single Market, maybe political changes, maybe counterintelligence stuff, maybe mandates on some minimum level of supply diversification, dunno.

https://www.verizon.com/coverage-map/

This shows that Verizon has good coverage in part of Wanaque, moderate coverage in part, and no coverage in part.