Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Lovable Spaz!

I was going to write about minimalism in games, how minimalism is perhaps the finest means by which to tell a story in a video game. But then I downloaded a little game, a fifteen dollar game designed by two Canadians, and it turned out to be huge. It ended up eating a huge part of my week, most of my free time and a little bit of my homework. So my lovesong to the voiceless protagonist and the open environment is forestalled for a week - in its place this has emerged: the ultimately insufficient praise that I must muster for Space Pirates and Zombies.

When I was homeless in Vienna, bouncing from dorm room floor to dorm room floor for a month before heading off and becoming really, really homeless, I spent a lot of time indoors. But I didn't have any money. I barely spoke the language. I had to my name only a handful of books, a few changes of clothes, my laptop computer and a CAT 5 cable I would use to hook into the University of Vienna's internet. I didn't speak anywhere near enough German to navigate the Viennese landscape, a harsh and xenophobic place, its hatred of foreigners that much more ironic for how critical they were to the economy not only of the city but of Austria as a whole. So I spent most of my time indoors, reading, writing and playing games I could find for free on the internet: Warcraft III mods, flash games and an open source version of Star Control 2 called The Ur Quan Masters.

Star Control 2 wasn't a magical force that made Vienna more livable through some eldritch wizardry – that came from the surging energy brought by the World Cup's, which ignited the city and, more importantly, the city's poor, who would spend their nights watching games projected on giant canvas screens under bridges and in public parks. Star Control 2 was just a fantastic game that happened to come into my life at this point, an old school game that I could lose myself in for hours and hours at a time. When it was finally time to leave Vienna I'd spent easily a hundred hours in Star Control 2'sunforgiving environs, trying to save as many crew as possible, recruiting alien races to my cause, developing new technologies and upgrading my mothership for the final battle. When I left, Star Control 2 stayed with me, and in the months that followed I'd often find myself sitting down and opening up Ur Quan Masters whenever I needed a little taste of its magic.

But I haven’t played it in ages. I was done with it, with its wonderful universe filled with strange birds and pterodactyls and one group of aliens I’m pretty sure were the literal devil given voice as a society. There was even a bunch of sentient gas clouds. And underneath that atmosphere lay one of the most compelling and addictive gameplay models that I’ve had the privilege to enjoy. It centered around a massive fleet accompanying your mothership, a fleet you would pilot into combat against bands of enemy ships which, more often than not, were considerably more powerful, more agile and more durable than yours.

The end result was a game taking shape amidst a desperate struggle against a vastly superior force set against a vibrant, living world with factions vying for power and territory. Star Control 2 had a pulse, a pulse that changed based on how you played and rewarded you for your exploration. And this energy is what made Star Control 2 more than just a footnote or a memory: it transformed what would otherwise be a memorable footnote into a classic, a nod towards open world gameplay before the term existed.

It’s a model of gameplay that was more or less forgotten for a long while, a model that shines through in Space Pirates and Zombies, a lovingly retro sendup of the genre. Space Pirates and Zombies is an ambitious game, a smart little game with a lot of heart. It takes the top down combat of Star Control 2, mostly its take on using multiple weapons with one ship and the ephemeral, slightly sloppy “feel” of its combat, and it casts it against a slow burning RPG-like model of progression. The end result is a retro game with a modern sensibility, a game that learned the lessons of Star Control and made game progress an easy choice rather than an arduous hit-or-miss search.

See Star Control 2’s punishing difficulty only partially stemmed from its combat system and mentality of making you the underdog for the vast majority of the game. It also owed quite a bit to the fact that the game didn’t give a shit whether or not you knew where to go next. Even if you managed to win battle after battle in Star Control 2 there was no guarantee you were working towards your actual end goal, no assurance that your hard won contributions to the fight against the titular Ur-Quan masters would actually prove useful. Unless you used a guide (and at this point, who wouldn’t?) the game required a notebook scarred with directions and notes if a player wanted any chance of winning.

SPAZ, as it is affectionately known to its adherents, doesn’t have this problem. Not sure where to go? There’s a green arrow on your map showing you exactly what you need to do next. Not that you have to follow it. I’ve spent most of the game avoiding that green arrow, dicking around and acquiring new ships and resources to build them with. The sensation of unlocking a new piece of technology, of leveling up your ships or arming them with new and devastating weapons is tremendously rewarding. And while the loss of the “underdog” sensation as the game progresses is a bit bittersweet the constantly rising stakes, stacked against the sheer size of the procedurally generated world you can explore, keep the game engaging.

See, SPAZ is all about unlocking little areas of the map so you can collect one of the game’s three resources: Rez, goons and data. Rez can be traded for goons, and goons can turn into Rez or data, or they can help you out by crewing your ships, making them subtly shippier. Rez can be used to buy blueprints or build ships which, by the end of the game, will start to take up some pretty hefty chunks of change. And data is basically experience – you want to constantly be earning data. And you’ll normally be collecting a little bit of each of these resources each time you make a kill or complete a mission. You’re constantly getting bits of feedback which contribute to your overall progress. And with no timers on game critical missions and no chance to get lost, all of this progress feeds into an affably loose story about a band of space pirates, none of whom fit into conventional archetypes, all of whom seem to fit the game just right.

SPAZ is a time sink – I’ve put in over 20 hours at this point and I think I’m at least five to ten hours away from actually finishing the game – if you choose to unlock all of the technology available to you you might even spend more time with it. And the developers are so dedicated to their lovable, runty little child that they’re still building and releasing new scraps of content to their adoring fans, free of charge. It’s tough to beat SPAZ in terms of raw value – I’ve already dropped my fun-to-bucks ratio below a dollar an hour at this point, and I’m still not done with it. If I went to a movie my dollars to fun ratio would be abysmal by comparison, and if I bought a popcorn I’d probably spend about as much as I did on SPAZ.

But there’s more than just economic value in SPAZ and what it does – there’s cultural value. SPAZ is the kind of game that doesn’t get made anymore, the kind of sprawling, intelligent playground that gives us just enough direction and just enough potential for failure to make us feel like we’re actually fighting against something without ever placing overly harsh constraints on the player. This could all change for me soon – perhaps I’ll unlock a portion of the game where the grind I’ve found pleasant and empowering becomes a tedious necessity in a fight against a vastly superior force. Perhaps I’ll run up against a brick wall of difficulty which traps me in a single battle again and again. Perhaps the game will just end without letting me enjoy the fruits of my labor. But it’s difficult to imagine any of these scenarios emerging right now. And that’s something in and of itself – if nothing else, SPAZ has created an engine capable of evaporating my cynicism and making me love games, developers and gameplay the way I did when I was hunting down free to play games with low rent graphics, chortling at every childish accomplishment.