4X and Strategy

Images taken from official Steam pages. All rights reserved.

It is a common misconception that country boys with limited internet access entertain themselves by going out playing in the mud and wranglin' the cows and ridin' dirt bikes in The Pit.

It was accurate at one point. Unfortunately, I had some internet access, and I used it to play many strategy games over the years.

A few of my favorites include:

Supreme Commander & Supreme Commander 2

Supreme Commander is the definition of "overkill" given physical form and squeezed, distilled and poured into the mold of a video game. Computers were magic to young Bravura as is, but seeing so many tanks and planes and troops and boats and MECHS stomping about on the screen of my hand-me-down laptop sparked my love of strategy games-one that persists into the modern day.

Mount & Blade

If playing through World of Warcraft every night in high school didn't cement me in my stereotypical nerdiness, then I have no doubt this one did it. But I did not regret one bit of it. This one introduced me to the emergent self-perpetuating stories an open-ended game like this could create, and it holds a strong place in my heart for it even as aged and clunky and messy as it is.

...Which had no small part in leading to my interest in...

Crusader Kings II

Mount and Blade started my interest in the rags to riches tales I could spin, and CK2 took it further. A bigger world, more characters, more options, more beautiful, beautiful chaos.

The added layer of multiple generations and a whole lineage to cultivate means you never know what waits around the corner. You can be the wisest, most stewardly magistrate for the Emperor in existence, building a grand war chest for five hundred years...and then lose it all when you fall off a balcony and it's all inherited by your drunkard Satanist son who immediately proposes throwing a massive BDSM orgy in the local parish as soon as he ascends to the throne. Despite being a 4X game, you can just throw yourself into the flow like watching ants in a terrarium and see what happens. And it is fun.

If you do play it, highly recommend the music packs. The metal is part of the joy!

Simcity 2000

At the end of it all, though...Simcity 2000 remains in my brain as the one that started it all. Young Bravura stumbled across his mother's copy while looking around the office, barely knowing how to make a computer do things, and fell in love. I didn't know how to play. I didn't know what I was doing. But I had fun doing it. And then I kept going back to it. Little by little, I got older, so did it, and I learned a little more every time I played it. No matter what happens to Maxis, no matter what EA does, those memories will remain. And they come back everytime I boot it up on my overpowered Windows 10 PC.