Cory Milne discusses the Android game Hoplite and relates it to ancient Greek military tactics.
CM: "Every now and then a game will come along, seemingly out of nowhere, and arrest large amounts of my time. Such was the case with a little strategy game on Android (and iOS) called Hoplite. The game consists of guiding your little hoplite soldier across a procedurally generated battlefield, acquiring upgrades and slaying monsters, in search of the golden fleece. Not only is it fun, challenging and free (there is a more content rich premium version), the game does a wonderful job of transferring 8th century BC (-ish. Historians can never agree on dates like this) battlefield tactics meant for large groups of fighting men, onto a single figure"
Free Android games are crap, most of them at least. Digital detritus, designed to manipulate rather than to entertain. The worst thing about them is that they take something that is good, even innocent, and by charging for elements that should be found, earned or experienced, they turn what is good in gaming into something crappy. By taking advantage of gamers’ desire to play and by charging piecemeal and aggressively for the stuff of play, they not only suck the fun out of our playtime, they slap a price tag on what should be just fun. In short, they suck.
Hoplite is a turn-based strategy game developed by Magma Fortress, which aims to make you think before you act. The game is available for iOS and Android devices, and if the title of the game confuses you, we’ll give you a brief backgrounder based on the description. In here, you have to make strategical choices to upgrade your abilities, as you play through procedurally generated levels to ensure that each game you play is different from the last. And since the word “hoplite” refers to a type of ancient Greek troop, the goal of the game is in line with that – your objective is to head to Depth 16 of the underworld and grab the Golden Fleece.
New Yorker: In 1980, a group of computer-science students at the University of California started working together on a game called Rogue. Before Rogue, computer games were text-based; Rogue was one of the first to feature graphics, which it drew using artfully arranged letters, numbers, and punctuation. In Rogue, your job was to explore a vast dungeon, find a MacGuffin called the Amulet of Yendor—“Yendor” was the name of the game’s protagonist, Rodney, spelled backwards—and then make your way back to the surface, all while moving, one step at a time, as in a board game. Besides the graphics, two things distinguished Rogue and insured its immortality. The first was that its dungeons were generated on the fly, by the computer: each time you played, they were different. The second was that you had only one life: if you died, you had to start over. That uncompromising setup leant the game a tragic air. In general, video games are about defying the rules of everyday life. Rogue, despite its fantastical premise, seemed to reify them. No matter how much you explored, every game ended the same way.
