This is a follow-up to the previous topic, in which I talked about gameplanning, and Madden's general failure to simulate the process of gameplanning for an opponent. This time, I will be talking more about the procedural element of preparing for the next opponent, which is the various practice and preparatory tasks that coaches and players perform in the week leading up to a match. Weekly practice is something that Madden also currently fails to simulate. But it's also something that Madden (and other football games from other developers) has made multiple attempts at emulating in the past. Some of the previous solutions that EA came up with are, in my opinion, much better than what is available now.

Skill Trainer was good practice!

I will begin by actually ranting about something that I like in modern-ish Madden!

Up until a few years ago, Madden's Franchise Mode allowed the user to play Skill Trainer drills for offense and defense as your weekly practice. In general, I love the Skill Trainer in Madden! I genuinely think that it is one of the best features that has ever been included in any sports video game ever. In addition to acting as a series of gameplay tutorials, the Skill Trainer also makes an effort to teach some basic football concepts and strategies to gamers. The Skill Trainer teaches users things ranging from how blocking schemes work, to how to read the conflict defender on option plays, to how to read different route combinations against different defenses. And it also teaches some defensive concepts such as how to play as a force or cutback contain defender, and which defensive coverages are designed to stop which route combinations, and much more!

The fact that EA used to incorporate these tutorials into Franchise Mode was especially genius. Each week, you could choose one offensive and 1 defensive Skill Trainer drill to run. Depending on how well you performed in the drills, your team would get scaled ratings boost whenever you call the relevant plays in the upcoming match. This allows the player to take the role of a coach and choose specific concepts to practice and focus on in a given week, depending on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team. If that sounds a heck of a lot like how I described actual NFL gameplanning in the previous installment, then yeah! That's kind of the point! Madden used to do this, and do it fairly well, but it doesn't any more.

Skill Trainer drills used to be part of Franchise's Weekly Training feature.

A few years ago, EA changed the Weekly Training feature in Franchise and removed the Skill Trainer. Now you choose very broad, vague concepts to practice, such as "defend inside run", or "throw the ball deep", instead of more specific concepts based on an individual team's scheme. Ironically, this new Weekly Training menu gives a more detailed scouting report of opponent tendencies, that would have worked better with the old training mode using the Skill Trainer. It actually shows which concepts the opponent runs most in different situations, which would have helped the user choose which Skill Trainer drills to run. Now, we have this extra information, but no Skill Trainer drills; and the more vague practice categories don't relate directly to the tendencies listed in the new scouting report.

I love Pacific Drive, and have actually been coming back to it periodically over the past year, whenever I need to kill some time. I'm not usually a trophy (a.k.a. "achievement") hunter, but I will go for them if it's not too far out of my way. My first playthrough of the campaign earned me all but a handful of the trophies in the game, and the remainder seemed fairly achievable. After all, there is no trophy for doing things like "collect all Frequency Files" or the other documents, or for completing the in-game encyclopedia. Stuff like that is a grind that I would never bother to do. So as I've been playing the game's epilogue, I've been trying to earn the few remaining trophies.

There was one trophy, however, that was driving me up the wall. If you've played Pacific Drive, and made any effort to try to get all the trophies/achievements (or you've spent a lot of time on Pacific Drive forums and subreddit), then you probably know what trophy I'm talking about. That's right, the one trophy that looked like it might stand between me and a Platinum was the "Watch out for hop-ons!" trophy.

Like many other players, I was one of the unfortunate ones for whom this trophy seemed to refuse to pop.

"Watch Out For Hop-Ons!" is the one trophy that
stands between Pacific Drive players and a Platinum.

I spent hours driving around various junctions with various bunnies and hares attached to my Remnant (usually with a YouTube video playing on my phone, so that I wouldn't feel like I was completely wasting my time), but the trophy just wouldn't pop.

I even tried the "pause the game while driving with an attached bunny" recommendation that showed up in so many forum and Reddit responses, even though Ironwood Studios has insisted that pausing doesn't trigger the achievement.

I planned entire runs around going through as many junctions as possible that had bunnies and/or hares listed in the anomalies.

But this trophy just would not unlock...

... That is, until last week.

Continuing to go through my back-log of shorter games that I've bought in bulk on sales, I spent a couple nights going through an indie game called Exo One. Exo One is a sci-fi ... um ... adventure game? Puzzle game? Platformer? Infinite runner? I'm really not sure how to classify this game ludically. Exo One feels like somebody thought "let's adapt the last 10 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey into a game" So it's part 2001, with a little bit of Contact thrown in for good measure, and plays similarly to Journey (but without any of the multiplayer aspects that made Journey such a beloved insta-classic). Basically, it's a game about going somewhere, but without really knowing where that "somewhere" is supposed to be. As such, it's the journey that matters; not the destination.

The basic plot, as I understood it (because it's a bit trippy and difficult to follow), is that an alien civilization transmitted data to Earth containing plans on how to build an exotic interstellar space craft (hence, the Contact reference). When a crew of astronauts travel to Jupiter to test the spacecraft, there is some kind of accident or unexplained phenomena that causes one of the astronauts to become lost in space. We play as that astronaut trying to return home -- well, actually, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but what's actually happening falls into spoiler territory, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

The spacecraft itself is a metallic, shapeshifting ball that can transform into a discus-shaped glider. It is equipped with a "gravity drive" that allows it to temporarily multiply the the force of gravity that is applied to it. As such, the core gameplay loop consists of rolling this ball across alien landscapes, using the gravity drive to pick up speed whenever you are falling or rolling downhill, and then jumping and transforming into the discus glider in order to reach higher elevation or travel long distances.

What if the climax of 2001: A Space Odyssey were a game?

Yeah, it's a weird one...

When Civilization VI released, it was criticized by many as being a "do-over of Civ V." It was, indeed, a much more iterative release than many other Civ games have been, taking the concept of "un-stacking" units that was pioneered by Civ V, and expanding that to include un-stacking of cities. Then it threw in some iterative changes to many other core systems that had been introduced in Civ V, such as city states, religion, trade routes, and archaeology (to varying degrees of success). The end result is that Civ VI felt very familiar to anyone who had played Civ V.

That is absolutely not the case with Civilization VII, which enters life in a much more competitive market, and may have felt pressured to do things different. Civilization isn't the only dog in the yard anymore, when it comes to historic 4-x strategy gaming. For the first time in the series' history, it has real competitors in the form of Amplitude's Humankind, Microsoft's Ara: History Untold, Paradox's Millennia, and others. In fact, Civ VII seems to have taken many design cues from these competitors, and there definitely seems to be a lot of convergent design.

For example, Civilization VII borrows the idea of changing cultures between the different eras, which was introduced by Humankind. It divides the game up into 3 distinct Ages, similar to how Ara divides its gameplay up into 3 Acts. And all of Humankind, Millennia, Ara, and Civ VII feature units that stack together into armies. And that says nothing about all the "live service"-inspired systems that have been added, such as cumulative progression rewards for each leader, profile badges, and so forth. These all represent pretty dramatic departures from what Civ V and Civ VI were doing, and I'm not sure if I like the way that these creative choices have affected this version of Civilization.

3 ages of history

The division of the game into 3 Ages is probably going to be the most controversial change, since it fundamentally changes the way that the game is played.

Civilization VII is not designed as a single, seamless trek through alternate human history. Instead, it is basically divided up into 3 smaller, more focused games, each with their own distinct gameplay mechanics and goals. I couldn't find any statements from 2K or Firaxis that the ages were implemented in order to better facilitate multiplayer, but that seems to be the consensus among the game media. Many articles (from GameRant, The Gamer, and others) highlight how each of the ages can be played as a stand-alone multiplayer game that is much shorter than a traditional game of Civ, thus resulting in more mutliplayer sessions that actually go to a proper resolution, rather than everyone simply stopping because it's 3 in the morning.

This is great for players who do want to be able to complete a game, and reach a proper ending within a single afternoon. It's less good for players who do want a full, Civilization game. Put simply, the Ages create hard stops and resets at pre-determined points in the game, which hurts the sense of continuity when playing a full game.

The game is divided into 3 ages, with hard resets in between each age.

An age might just end when I'm in the middle of doing something, or with there still being things that I wanted to accomplish. Maybe I wanted to settle another city, or capture another player's city, or annex a city state, or build a wonder? Nope. Can't. The age just ends, and the game kicks me back out to a loading screen before advancing straight to the start of the next era, which may skip decades or centuries on the in-game calendar.

I've been trying to go through some of my backlog of games on both the PC and PS5, and recently played through a retro, lo-fi indie horror game called No One Lives Under the Lighthouse. I'm not quire sure what to make of it, and have very mixed feelings. In essence, the first half of the game is excellent. It perfectly evokes the loneliness and sense of isolation of being a lighthouse keeper, and both the lighthouse and the island it sits on are incredibly atmospheric. The back half of the game, however, kind of went off the rails for me. It jumps around a lot, the imagery becomes exceedingly abstract and difficult to parse, and it was just overall confusing. Honestly, I kind of wasn't even sure if I was playing as the new lighthouse keeper, or if the game had flashed me back to the past to play as the previous lighthouse keeper who had gone missing. That's right, the game was so confusing that I wasn't even sure which character I was playing as!

It doesn't help that the dialogue and narration is completely text-based, and that text is too small, and the font is too elaborately-decorated in an Old English style. So I may have mis-read some of the text that might have explained what is going on. There's no options to change the size of the text or use a more plain type-face either.

The premise is to maintain a lighthouse after the former keeper disappeared.

The basic premise is that a lighthouse keeper goes missing under mysterious circumstances, with no body being found. A new keeper comes to the island to take over that missing keeper's duties, and the nature of the previous keeper's disappearance is gradually revealed. Or at least, it's supposed to be revealed, but I honestly couldn't follow along with what was happening.

After the prologue, it is assumed that I'm playing as the replacement keeper. But later in the game, it starts to be implied that either I've switched to playing as the previous keeper in the past, or that I was playing as the previous keeper all along. There might also be a third lighthouse keeper, who was the original keeper before the one who disappears in the prologue? I don't know.