Bloody-handed space opera rules.

Got some chores today, got some creative time to catch up on. But soon, I’m gonna get a pizza, a bottle of some disgustingly sweet carbonated whatever liquid, I’m gonna sit down in front of my superannuated Emachines 633 Celeron box and I’m going to show some digital emulations of alien pugnacity how imperial expansion’s done. Because I will stomp on their little pixilated tails in the doing!

There is something refreshingly honest about my current fave game – Star General. It’s part of a corral of games I’ve had for a long time but have only now cracked open. Why I’m playing games that had their day several years ago is not as important as their convenience – my PC just can’t handle anything much more recent.

But I’m the guy who once staged an entire battle using nothing but recycle-bin paper and some rubber bands. An outrageous violation of minimalism, of course – I could have been truly frugal and just used the paper, man those crumpled up wads / catapult boulders are destructive – but the point is that I’ve never let a game, computer or otherwise, pre-empt my imagination.

(Heck, some of those old games kicked fundament anyway! LET’S HEAR IT! Old PC heads, and survivors of OS’s older than today’s console-thumping generation – are you with me or what?)

Anyway. Star General is “resource wargaming” of the old school. Hex-sided maps and flat bitmaps, oh my. But you get to manage an economy too, a chore if you’re going to buy all that excitingly destructive hardware. Battleships! Battlecruisers! Missile Boats! Monitors! Tenders! And Transports full of loyal troops ready to fall from the skies onto the planetary bastions of your craven Enemy!!

Its Big Badass Iron on the Final Frontier, and folks, I don’t need destructible digital sets (you know, when you fire off one of the sawed-off siege weapons which passes for personal armament in most first-person shooters, and holes get blasted in walls / windows etc) or blood flying or – or whatever.

If there’s a point to this post, it’s that our imagination for violence is enough to demand respect. There was something enthralling about last night’s bout in Star General. At the end of a week with its share and more of endings, I finally, after having played that scenario off and on for a month, had my units in place for an outright invasion of the capital planet of the opposing computer-controlled fool.

It was the first time I had conducted a planetary invasion, so I was kind of nervous and threw in about three times the number of units as would have gotten the job done. It’s not like it turned out to be much of a challenge! … but it was gratifying, to see the troops come down from orbit, their bridgeheads secured and the mass of the army, so carefully selected to compose a balanced force, move out in an orderly way and proceed to whomp the soon-to-be evicted aliens...

There’s also something to be said for the iterative power of simulation: it used to be just flight simulators, but damn near any non-trivial operation sponsored by just a few equations can instruct us about how things actually work in the real world.

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