SPOnG eyes Nexus: The Jupiter Incident with a certain level of trepidation. It’s a strategy game, one of those games that other people play. SPOnG imagines a desk in a dark room. The desk is viewed frontally, with aspects of the user’s bulky frame visable around the periphery of the monitor. Junk food wrappings fall to floor as intergalactic star captain Graham declares “Ghar, shar, you didn’t exthpect my level theven thuper lather Captain wubbisth!”
Commanding virtual star battalions is geek territory, no question. However, so much of what we all do every day has been established as geek heartland for decades. Geek snobbery, that’s what SPOnG has to deal with. Why is it ok to sit on the tube pretentiously flipping the pages of Famitsu Weekly, all the time sporting a disingenuously knowledgeable eye, and not acceptable to wear Star Trek t-shirts? Again, what gives SPOnG the right to covetously finger its sealed copy of Radiant SilverGun every Sunday afternoon and pour scorn on those doing the same with version 3 Luke SkyWalker with opposable arms? Geek snobbery – identified and now up for discussion.
So here’s the deal: Nexus is a strategy combat game set in space. It runs in real time and the player controls a fleet of assorted space craft. There is no resource management to contend with. We like this. Sorting out resources, usually presented in the firm of tedious endless mining of some alien mineral, ruins strategy games for us. Strategy games are about war. War, as has been proven time and time again, is all about killing. Collecting stuff isn’t killing, killing is. Nexus gets one point.
Commanding virtual star battalions is geek territory, no question. However, so much of what we all do every day has been established as geek heartland for decades. Geek snobbery, that’s what SPOnG has to deal with. Why is it ok to sit on the tube pretentiously flipping the pages of Famitsu Weekly, all the time sporting a disingenuously knowledgeable eye, and not acceptable to wear Star Trek t-shirts? Again, what gives SPOnG the right to covetously finger its sealed copy of Radiant SilverGun every Sunday afternoon and pour scorn on those doing the same with version 3 Luke SkyWalker with opposable arms? Geek snobbery – identified and now up for discussion.
So here’s the deal: Nexus is a strategy combat game set in space. It runs in real time and the player controls a fleet of assorted space craft. There is no resource management to contend with. We like this. Sorting out resources, usually presented in the firm of tedious endless mining of some alien mineral, ruins strategy games for us. Strategy games are about war. War, as has been proven time and time again, is all about killing. Collecting stuff isn’t killing, killing is. Nexus gets one point.
