The game has already consumed over 40 hours of my time, and I’ve got plenty more campaign to go. It does just about all the stuff I wanted JA2 to have to make it play faster - combat is faster, looting is faster, inventory is faster. It has a few things that look like X-COM, but it still mostly plays like JA. The early game is the roughest part but things definitely shaped up once I had a team with size, experience and gear.

And the campaign is detailed with a few surprises and plenty of side quests - it does some things to pull the rug on you, which is rude, but rewarding if you play along and accept a few losses(or carefully savescum and go out of your way to avoid triggering timed quests).

My principle of “blockchain’s fundamental value” is simply this: A blockchain that secures valuable information is valuable.

To break that down further:

• “Valuable information” isn’t data - it’s something that you can interpret, that has meaning and power to affect your actions. So, price speculation taking place on a chain isn’t that valuable in a broad, utilitarian sense, but something like encyclopedic knowledge, historical records, and the like might be. The sense of “this is real” vs “this is Monopoly money” is related to the information quality.
• “Secures” means that we have some idea of where the information came from, who can access it, and whether it’s been altered or tampered. Most blockchains follow the Bitcoin model and are fully public ledgers, storing everything - and just within that model(leaving aside Monero etc.) there are positive applications, but “automatically secure” is all dependent on what application you’re aiming for.

You don’t need to include tokens, trading, finance, or the specific method of security, to arrive at this idea of what a blockchain does, but having them involved addresses - though maybe without concretely solving - the question of paying upkeep costs, a problem that has always dogged open, distributed projects in the past. If the whole chain becomes more valuable because one person contributes something to it, then you have a positive feedback loop in which a culture of remixing and tipping is good. It tends to get undercut by “what if I made scam tokens and bribed an exchange to list them”, the maxi- “we will rule the world” cultures of Bitcoin and Ethereum, or the cynical “VC-backed corporate blockchains”, but the public alt chains that are a bit out of the spotlight with longer histories, stuff like Tezos and NEM/Symbol, tend to have a more visible sense of purpose in this direction - they need to make a myth about themselves, and the myth turns into information by chance and persistence.

What tends to break people’s brains - both the maxis, and people who are rabidly anti-crypto - is that securing on-chain value in this way also isn’t a case of “public” vs “private” goods. It’s more akin to “commons” vs “enclosed” spaces, which is an older notion that hasn’t been felt in our political lives in centuries, because the partnership of nation-states and capital has been so strong as a societal coordinating force - the state says where the capital should go, the people that follow that lead and build out an empire get rewarded. The commons is, in essence, the voice in the back of your mind asking, “Why are you in the rat race? Do you really need an empire?” And this technology is stating that, clearly and patiently: making a common space better is another way to live.

And so there is a huge amount of spam around “ownership”, but ownership itself isn’t really a factor. That’s just another kind of information that the technology is geared towards storing. The social contract is more along the lines that if you are doing good for a chain and taking few risks, a modest, livable amount of credit is likely to flow to you in time. Everyone making “plays” and getting burned is trying to gamble with it, or to advance empire-building goals in a basically hostile environment that will patch you out of the flow of information.

To me, a big difference is in the lengthy prelude, which follows the model of TOS, just with an updated production. First the synths layered with strings, which are very 80’s wonder-music(it could be right out of the score for Flight of the Navigator or The Goonies) and then the french horns come in playing a round, which adds a Wagnerian element.

The percussive “march music” elements quoting TMP are subdued in TNG’s arrangement - it’s a less compressed, “punchy” sound, and I believe the mic has been set farther back or they’ve EQ’d out some higher frequencies. Those decisions, plus a few choices of instrumentation like the harp glissandos, tone down the bombastic energy and add a gliding, romantic quality. Again, more like TOS, but updated.

My favorite example of “weird camera” is Journey to the Planets. It’s an Atari 800 game with graphics that are more 2600-esque. It’s mostly side view, but the proportions are abstract, like a child’s drawing: the spaceship is about 1/3rd the size of the player sprite, but then as you lift off it shows zoomed out terrain and the sprite is the same size. The game is based around solving adventure game puzzles with objects that are mostly just glowing rectangles, but your way of interacting with the puzzles involves a lot of shooting. Even though there’s so little detail, every room feels “hand-crafted”.

I’m pretty sure the game permanently altered my sense of aesthetics.