This week’s Saturday Spotlight is loose and rambling. I’m afraid that you may encounter more of this from me over the next couple of months. The day job that allows me to support the (admittedly slight) costs of running Arcadian Rhythms has been making greater demands on my time over the past six weeks, and this is likely to continue for some time. As a result my head isn’t fully in the game of videogames. Hopefully the fact that I’m going to focus on writing short Saturday Spotlight pieces will mitigate this a little.
If you’re a reader just happening by the site I’m sorry about the self-indulgent intro. I felt the regular readers of AR deserved to know what’s been going on. Now, on to Cargo Commander!
It would’ve been all too easy for Cargo Commander to pass me by.
Nowadays I don’t read too much gaming press. Frankly, I find it a struggle to keep up with any of the major sites, trampled as they by the dread footfall of marketing colossi. Even Rock Paper Shotgun is a pain to keep up with. Oh, for an RSS feed that separates out the critical wheat from the marketing chaff.
But this grumbling is beside the point. I am old and I don’t have much free time: join the queue, grandpa.
Tom Chick of QT3, one of my favourite game reviewers, wrote a preview of Cargo Commander last year. The game never got a full review on Quarter To Three but the preview made it sound like an interesting title, even if the elevator pitch of ‘Michael Bay directing the spacewalk scene from 2001’ was less appealing.
Still, it wasn’t until I read this short piece on SecondQuest (later unpacked and explored a bit more here) that I perked up and paid attention. Apparently a mechanically sound, imaginative, procedurally-generated platformer / exploration game isn’t quite enough to get me to buy in, but if you bolt on a loose plot that explores themes consonant with its mechanical conceits I’ll be hammering at your door.
You’re best off reading the pieces I’ve linked to in order to find out why this game is worth your time. I will add that the game exhibits a few modern PC bugbears that mightily aggravate me. First up: it doesn’t detect and set to your monitor’s resolution. I’m using an old LCD TV as my primary monitor and it doesn’t display anything not at its native resolution, so games which launch fullscreen at anything other than 1680×1050 require me to flip to my other monitor, set the game to windowed, then close, flip back and relaunch.
Okay, so that’s a problem specific to me. Less specific to me is the fact that the game has gamepad support but this doesn’t fully extend into its UI and menus. Sometimes you can’t select every option with the gamepad and have to reach over for the mouse. Not the biggest problem in the world, though if I were playing Cargo Commander in my living room via Steam’s Big Picture I’d be pretty annoyed to have to fetch a mouse whenever I wanted to read a glossary entry.
Otherwise, though, it’s a rather splendid game of exploration, salvaging and dying alone in the cold vacuum of space.
Comments
10 responses to “Saturday Spotlight: Cargo Commander”
Hahah, it's clear to see you dip into the same sites as I because I first heard of Cargo Commander through Qt3 then later on Secondquest. I inevitably picked it up from… somewhere… a bundle maybe? I can't remember. I'm yet to play it though unfortunately.
I totally relate to your LCD TV woes. Only last weekend did I replace my 6-7 year old Sony Bravia because the limited 1360×768 native PC input resolution (other inputs infuriatingly supported 1080p) didn't do justice to a lot of newer games. It also suffered that same problem of being very fussy with what resolutions it displayed. Often it just freaked out if the resolution wasn't native so certain games just didn't display, and I'm too lazy to drag my old monitor through to access the options. It was usually a case of digging into the ini files and editing those instead! I was also running into the netbook problem of not having enough screen height for certain windows as well so… Anyway, I've got full 1080p over PC input now on a TV that doesn't freak out when I choose lesser resolution of pretty much any shape. Hurrah! Big Picture is nice for these big screens too.
I'll try and check this out sometime, any particular level/seeds you're happy to throw my way for a bit of friendly competition? That was something I remember liking about Cargo Commander from what I read.
Ha, yes we do seem to stop by the same places a bunch. I'm pretty sure you're not the Gregg who comments on QT3 a lot. He seems to be a slightly butthurt minor troll. :P
Oh, Intense Debate. Thank you for deleting the rest of my comment. Let me try this again.
It's not the biggest deal in the world to switch to my second monitor to address these problems and compared to the PC gaming problems of yesteryear it's nothing really. I've spent far more time trying to get sound and mouse drivers working in DOS, trying to get 1990s games to talk to each other over a LAN, or trying to put the right numbers into Dosbox to make a game run at sensible speeds. I guess I am just spoiled these days. But it is still a bit annoying.
Your setup sounds great! I'm currently building up a second PC – just a cheap one based on an old Dell Optiplex – which will be a Steam Big Picture PC for the living room loaded with video files and games that aren't too hardware intensive. Audiosurf should be awesome!
I've not tried generating any of my own levels in Cargo Commander – I'm ambling about the popular ones, mostly dying a lot – but that is a really nice feature of the game. If this article was more than me complaining about not having much spare time and saying this game is kinda cool, I'd have remembered to mention it! Anyway, we should definitely do a Tap Repeatedly / Arcadian Rhythms, er, cargo cult some time.
Yeah, there are a few Greg/gs lurking about on Qt3 and one GregB too. They’re imposters. The double g’s the key ;-)
Tap Repeatedly and Arcadian Rhythms it is! I’ll let you know when I’ve traversed them.
Also, totally unrelated: Kingdom Rush is now on Android for 69p! Finally! Instabuy, and so far, very promising. Should see me well while I’m in London for the EG Expo. Any possibility of you folks being around?
AJ, Potter and I will be around. Possibly Spann too, though we're not sure if he'll be with his new lot (Midnight Resistance) instead. :)
I'm still Puzzle & Dragoning for the most part. So much for mobile gaming involving lots of short-play games for me to write about!
UPDATE: oh man those guys are organised! http://midnightresistance.co.uk/articles/eurogame…
We should just show up there.
Although recording a podcast might be difficult.
Everything that you wrote there Gregg makes me shudder.
Although consoles are fast going in the same direction.
To be fair, if I was normal, I'd have a normal monitor with normal resolutions at a normal size and avoid all that messing about, but my PC setup is more like a lounge/console setup so I have to have a larger screen which necessitates me using a TV as a monitor. My last TV was 32" and I was fine with that for a while but the limited resolution (over PC input) just throttled all the pretty out of various games, hence why I picked up a higher res TV. It's thankfully a lot more forgiving of strange resolutions than my old Bravia was so that's a big plus. The end result is that my PC is as communal as most lounge setups typically are, so for local multiplayer it's ace (I'm currently revving up to play Rayman Legends with my other half). I just wish my local multiplayer friends were up for half of the cool/weird multiplayer shit that's available out there… I suppose there's always Joel next time he visits, whenever that might be.
Well that makes a lot of sense, although it is these very same hiccups that make me not want to invest in playing games on PC. Something that Apple has certainly got right with their devices is the fact that most of it is a simple 'plug it in and go' is the same thing that I have favoured consoles for so long.
I don't want to worry about this after a long day of work, I want to boot the title and go.
I am really psyched about Rayman legends, as soon as I stop being poor it is next on my must buy list. Not sure if the game is going to be a little too dexterous for my Co-Op buddy but we will see.
Incidentally, where are you planning on going after Eurogamer Expo?
Well that makes a lot of sense, although it is these very same hiccups that make me not want to invest in playing games on PC. Something that Apple has certainly got right with their devices is the fact that most of it is a simple 'plug it in and go' is the same thing that I have favoured consoles for so long.
I don't want to worry about this after a long day of work, I want to boot the title and go.
I am really psyched about Rayman legends, as soon as I stop being poor it is next on my must buy list. Not sure if the game is going to be a little too dexterous for my Co-Op buddy but we will see.
Incidentally, where are you planning on going after Eurogamer Expo?
Potter is mainly excited about the prospect of a cosplay competition…
I’d have had to jump through the same hoops on a Mac to be honest; it’s a TV interfacing with a home computer thing, not just a PC thing. I haven’t even mentioned chroma subsampling and 4:4:4 yet when it comes to TVs! Not even TV manufacturers cover that shit anywhere in the documentation and it’s so important for rendering a computer signal properly. Without it, you get slightly fuzzy edges on things, which can be bad for text and other fine graphics. And don’t get me started on computer to AV receiver to 5.1…
I’m not sure where we’re heading yet after the EG Expo but we will definitely be going to a pub and possibly grabbing a bite to eat, Friday and/or Saturday (I think Joel is around on Saturday). If you send me an email with yours and Shaun’s mobile numbers in, I’ll try and let you both know in advance. I’m hoping we’ll have some idea before we head down there otherwise I can let you know if we wind up somewhere unexpected. I think the first year we went to a pub a block away from Earl’s Court with some of the folks from BnB Gaming. Last year we went to some indie/dev get together — I say ‘get together’, it was more like an overcrowded sweaty basement, with awful loud music and overpriced booze. Ed Stern and Eric Wolpaw were there so there was that. Eric won a copy of Natural Selection 2 on the raffle. Bastard.
Eurogamer Truck Simulator 2013 cosplay. Blame Electron Dance.