Alan Emrich, then Computer Gaming World’s Online Editor, gave Master of Orion an XXXX rating when previewing it in 1993 as a cheeky way of describing the essential elements of the strategic conquest game: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate.

(The term was changed to “4X games” to accord it some decorum, which is a good thing because the phrase “XXXX strategy games” brings to mind “Sid Meier’s True Anal Stories” and nobody needs the associated mental imagery.)

But four Xes might also describe the experience of playing any given 4X game. The player must explore the complex ruleset, experiment to realise their strategies then extend those strategies to cope with playing the game at higher difficulty levels.

The fourth and final X of the player experience is exhaustion, which inevitably sets in after sinking dozens if not hundreds of hours into campaign after campaign. No matter how deep and expansive the 4X game, there eventually comes a moment when the one-more-turn compulsion is replaced by ennui.

Even the Civilization series, the standard bearer for 4X gaming, is not immune to this. Anyone who has been with the series since the first game is entitled to feel a little jaded two decades later. The rules may be tweaked, new mechanics may be added, the presentation may be improved but the Civilization experience is fundamentally the same and at some point the thought of having to rediscover Pottery for the umpteenth time simply crushes the spirit.

Fortunately, Firaxis anticipated this so the fourth game in the Civilization series was deliberately designed to be highly moddable and this led to some outstanding fan-created variations on the basic Civilization formula.

(Image source.)

Fall from Heaven 2, developed by a team of 15 led by Derek “Kael” Paxton, is arguably the best of the lot. It’s the perfect mod for those who appreciated everything Civilization IV brought to the table in 2005 but couldn’t get much into it because they’ve just played too much Civilization. The mod’s greatest achievement, and it is a considerable one, is returning the joy of exploration and experimentation to the jaded Civilization player.

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The Atari ST is almost a forgotten machine these days, unsurprising since it was primarily popular in Europe, and both gamer and media attention is usually focused with laser intensity on the American and Japanese gaming scenes to the exclusion of all else. A full-fledged personal computer whose stand-out feature was its affordability, the Atari ST was a fine gaming machine for its time and many a talented game developer worked on it including Peter Molyneux, David Jones, Jez San and, of course, the Bitmap Brothers.

The Bitmap Brothers not only took the EA “developer as artist” credo to heart, they pushed it further to become self-described rock star developers complete with sunglasses, leather jackets and cocksure attitudes. They were perhaps a tad overrated and it’s telling that, unlike their notable peers of the era, the Bitmap Brothers had trouble transitioning out of the Motorola 68000 game space. (The PC version of their 1993 game, The Chaos Engine, was excoriated in Computer Gaming World with “Gamers wishing they could turn their Pentium into a Super Nintendo so they can play a home video rip-off of some 1980 arcade hit need look no further …”) Their arcade-inspired games were enjoyable and had some neat ideas but they weren’t especially innovative. Yet when the Bitmap Brothers did think outside the box, they did manage to come up with one of the best two-player games of the early 90s.

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Din’s Curse is not on Steam.

Soldak’s first game, Depths of Peril, is available on Valve’s digital distribution service but not Soldak’s second, Kivi’s Underworld, nor Din’s Curse, its third and best yet. The game is available on Impulse and GamersGate but Valve rejected it for undisclosed reasons. Soldak itself has no idea why.

(Original image source.)

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because it isn’t good. Game reviewers with over a decade of experience have been generally positive with their comments. Anyone who puts stock in Metacritic’s subtly massaged Metascores might take something away from the fact Din’s Curse Metascore is higher than a lot of games on Steam.

But then the Metascore doesn’t actually matter because Valve doesn’t seem to have much in the way of standards for games it accepts for its digital distribution service. For example, take this title. Comments from various reviewers include “… it’s best to skip this one …”, “… 90 percent first-person shooter, 10 percent strategy game, and 100 percent bad …” and “… a complete failure … I couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that this game exists.” This “complete failure” of a game is somehow good enough for Steam.

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because it’s a broken, unplayable mess. Soldak has been particularly outstanding with its post-release support. As an indie developer, it cannot afford to support games indefinitely yet it still has put out multiple patches for Din’s Curse in the year since its release to fix minor bugs, fine-tune gameplay and even add new features. There’s nothing in the game that qualifies as a major bug — not a single crash to the desktop, nothing that prevents play. There are buggier games on Steam — the Known Issues thread for Magicka now spans 57 pages — yet Valve has no problems selling them.

Din’s Curse couldn’t have been rejected because the digital distribution service lacks physical shelf space to stock it. The game’s installer takes up less than 200MB of hard disk real estate so it’s not going to overload Valve’s servers or strain Steam’s bandwidth pipes. Valve can afford to allocate 1GB for each of Steam’s 30-million-plus accounts to store screenshots so it’s clearly not short of storage space.

So what is it exactly?
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Din’s Curse is slightly more complex than your average action RPG and it may seem overwhelming in the beginning. Here are some hints and tips for those starting out.

• If the town is being assaulted and you’re not sure where the attacker is, pay attention to how the townsfolk are oriented. Use that in combination with the mini-map to locate the invaders.
• If NPCs are under attack in town or in the dungeons, hit P to pause the game and throw them some food and/or a health potion to save them.
• To a catch a stealthy thief in town, move the mouse cursor slowly around the vendors. If present, the thief will become faintly visible.
• Enemies respawn in the dungeons depending on the pace of the world. If you can’t seem to find enough of a species on a particular dungeon level to complete a quest, consider completing other quests. Alternatively, try searching on other dungeon levels.
• If you can’t seem to find a boss or item on a level, it’s probably because there’s a hidden room somewhere. Note that there are sometimes hidden rooms behind hidden rooms.
• If potions and food seem more expensive than usual, it’s due to a shortage. (There should be a flashing icon or two in the vendor inventory.) Visit the Apothecary and make the related quest the main priority.
• Be sure to stock up on potions and food before you leave a saved town. Prices might be prohibitively high in the next town or there might not be any vendors there at all.

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