{"id":1070,"date":"2008-10-01T16:33:55","date_gmt":"2008-10-01T20:33:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/01\/the-most-imperialist-game-of-the-year\/"},"modified":"2008-10-02T10:20:56","modified_gmt":"2008-10-02T14:20:56","slug":"the-most-imperialist-game-of-the-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/10\/01\/the-most-imperialist-game-of-the-year\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Imperialist Game of the Year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tilted Mill&#8217;s <em>Hinterland<\/em> was released yesterday over Steam. I&#8217;m reviewing it, so I won&#8217;t write my final judgment here, but I will say that this is most aggressive manifestation of Manifest Destiny that I think I&#8217;ve seen in a light strategy game.<\/p>\n<p>The set up pushes you in that direction. You are the leader of a small town, commissioned by the king to beat back the wilderness and make a thriving town. Winning doesn&#8217;t mean reaching a population target or meeting all His Majesty&#8217;s demands for food and gold. Winning means eliminating every sentient being you find outside your town limits &#8211; territory you don&#8217;t expand into.<\/p>\n<p>Sure, there are occasional raids from the Hinterland. But for the most part, those goblins are not posing any threat to you and your farmers. Still, the king demands you kill them all to secure iron or game or fresh water &#8211; all so you can attract more powerful workers so you can kill more powerful bases of &#8220;monsters&#8221; like dark elves, dark dwarfs, bandits and trolls.<\/p>\n<p><em>Sid Meier&#8217;s Colonization<\/em> is an after school special compared to this game. It&#8217;s perfectly in tune with all the fantasy tropes we&#8217;ve been reared on &#8211; humans are good and most non-humans are vermin to be exterminated so you can gather their loot.<\/p>\n<p>Does this make Hinterland a bad game? Not necessarily. But it&#8217;s great that there aren&#8217;t any gnolls and trolls in the real world. Otherwise, the message of taming the wild through murder could be a bit disturbing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tilted Mill&#8217;s Hinterland was released yesterday over Steam. I&#8217;m reviewing it, so I won&#8217;t write my final judgment here, but I will say that this is most aggressive manifestation of Manifest Destiny that I think I&#8217;ve seen in a light strategy game. The set up pushes you in that direction. You are the leader of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[33,100,32],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-hg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}