Time for "Dad Games", maybe

 

When people here the term "Dad Game" they may be thinking I'm talking about games about Dads.  You know, shit like The Last of Us or those non-greek God of War games, but that's not what I'm talking about, instead I'm talking about games FOR dads.  Depending on how old you are you may think dad games are things like Power Wash Simulator or some kind of job simulation type thing but in my mind there is no genre that suits the descriptor of "games for dads" better than Grand Strategy 

Before I continue actually, I have address the fact that I have no idea why I associate grand strategy with stuffy dads.  Maybe its because presented almost entirely by maps and dry numbers and also usually about simulating actual history rather than being about anything fictional.  But I've never actually known any dads who fit that bill.  When I was younger my dad wasn't like that, none of my friends dads were like that and none of the dads I know now are like that.  If anything, the one dad I knew in my younger days who was a gamer was playing Tomb Raider and Counterstrike and if you suggested that he play a grand strategy game he might have glassed you.  Despite that, if I close my eyes and imagine "dad game", I imagine a guy aged somewhere between 40-65 sat at a PC playing something like Hearts of Iron or Victoria

 Now that I am a father of two I feel like it may be time for me to revisit the genre.  The only genre of game alongside sports that I have actively avoided up until this point.  Not that I've avoided it as hard as sports, I have at numerous points in my life attempted it.  When I was in high school I had a friend try to get me into Hearts of Iron and I just couldn't figure it out.  The most complicated thing in a similar style I could say that I had any kind of skill was was maybe Civilization Call To Power or a Total War game but Hearts of Iron was way denser and way more complex than any of those games.  Hearts of Iron is the kind of game that makes Civilization look like a babies toy and so I ran away to play more JRPGs.  Later, after moving to Japan, I managed to get my hands on some of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games from KOEI and the gameplay was so complex and the language barrier so high that I put them in a cardbox box and they've been sat in a storeroom for about 10 years at this point.

But then I stumbled on a video from a YouTuber called KBash about Nobunaga's Ambition, the Japanese history version of the previously mentioned Romance games, also made by KOEI.  Watching his gameplay I had no idea what the FUCK was going on at any point but also the way he recants his experience of the series made me want to sit down and give it a proper, concentrated effort.  In his video, he played as the Chosokabe clan and historically, these are the guys that unified the Shikoku region of Japan and that's what he managed to do.  But the game didn't end there, he went on to fuck up the rest of the country, even going as far as killing Oda Nobunaga himself and in his simulated version of history it was the Chosokabe clan that unified the country.  Accurate history simulation that also allows for player input changing the course of events is immensely cool and just the idea made me want to go dust off some games.  I'm also going to assume that games like Hearts of Iron that cover things like World War 2 also allow for things like that.  Accurate to actual history but could allow the player to rewrite events if their knowledge of game mechanics are deep enough

So despite not being in the 40-65 year category just yet I think its time to break out some grand strategy.  Sengoku era Japan interests me far more than the second world war so I think I'm going to start with a Nobunaga game.  I actually got one for free with my PS+ subscription a long time ago.  I remember it blowing my mind because the discount on the store page for that month read "12,000→0" which for a subscription that was costing me 5000 A YEAR is insane value.  Its a pain the ass to have to hook up the system again but these games are 50 quid a pop on Steam so I'm going with the free choice just in case I bounce off again.  

I actually have one other backup game if I end up bouncing off the historical sim called Gemfire

 It's another KOEI thing but instead of being a stuffy historical sim its that style of game as a fantasy strategy game.  If Nobunaga beats my ass yet again then maybe Gemfire will be the gateway drug I need to assume my full dad form.  I also know that Pokemon Conquest exists but you can fuck off with that.  Either way, time to take up my seat in the ivory tower and strat crafting some strategems.