Everything must get bigger, better, more advanced, more efficient, simply more. The model for the Anno games is progress itself, technology, industry, sheer civilization, Moore’s law in macro. What’s going on is the universal appeal of progress. What is going on here that my butt is this numb? I just ride and ride and ride, one building at a time, and suddenly it’s light out and I never did my dailies in Guild Wars 2, or booted up the latest Assassin’s Creed, or watched this week’s Walking Dead, or checked to see if the cat wanted in. But the Anno games just gallop apace, and there’s no slowing down, much less getting off. I have a pretty low threshold for when it’s time to move on to something else. There aren’t many games I find myself playing for this many hours at a time. Better boost my moon production.Īs with the previous Anno games, it’s borderline obsessive (I’m only writing “borderline” in there to feel better). Of course executives needs bio-enhanced limbs to become investors. Of course people of a certain socio-econimc strata demand those bio-enhanced limbs. Of course your moon factories are assembling bio-enhanced limbs to ship down to your cities on Earth. But once you’ve played Anno 2205 long enough - an easy proposition given how addicting it is - the economy starts to stop not making sense. It doesn’t matter so much that the techno mumbo-jumbo is just a new name for the advanced goods in any production chain game. Really, it doesn’t matter so much what the stuff is called. I must - must! - piece together this production chain of stuff to make better stuff to make better stuff to make better stuff. Because if I can’t harvest or build stuff, I’ll have to buy it from the friendly local space marketplace. Who am I to question that? To paraphrase Selena Gomez paraphrasing Woody Allen paraphrasing Emily Dickinson, the people want what the people want. What are quantum computers and replicators? It doesn’t really matter. Before you know it, you’re making qubit processors for your quantum computers and multi-spec prisms for your replicators. It’s not too far removed from there to mining a little deuterium for the fusion power cells you’re building on the moon. It’s not too weird when you start making fake eyeballs called neuro implants or microchipped clothes called IntelliWear. Now harvest algae for some sort of special drugs. Then make some fruit plantations so they can have their orange juice. First you have to feed your people rice and give them water. You’ll get there when your cities start to sprawl a bit, when you’ve started to care a bit more. You have to work your way up to the techno mumbo-jumbo. Because, really, you can’t just go straight to anti-grav compensators, bio-enhancers, and qubit processors. The sleek future world of Anno 2205 doesn’t start as nonsense. Beware the allure of Ubisoft’s Anno series, more powerful than ever in Anno 2205.Īfter the jump, you have been warned. You must link together an interconnected chain of sci-fi gobbledygook. You must do it in the same way you must do the bidding of some mysterious master when you’re in his thrall. But “you must” in the sense that you are driven to do it. “You must reach the end of the level in Super Mario Bros” or “You must repair the water filter in Fallout” or “You must gather ten bear hides in World of Warcraft”. Not “you must” in the sense of “the player must blah blah blah” as a tedious description of a game. A chain of interconnected sci-fi gobbledygook that you must link together: iridium, finance calculators, tidal power stations, synthcell incubators. That word soup, which makes complete sense to me, is Anno 2205 in a nutshell. I need some iridium so I can put finance calculators on the tidal power stations I had to build for all my new synthcell incubators.
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