How Monaco is eight times better than any other heist game

As we all know, asymmetry makes all game designs better. Which is one of the reasons chess isn’t very good. The only asymmetry they had invented back when they made chess was which side goes first. Weak. If I made chess, only white would get bishops and only black would get rooks. The white queen would be able to take two turns in a row once per game. The black queen could resurrect the king once. Also, I would include more than one map with the game.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/05/01/how-monaco-is-eight-times-better-than-any-other-heist-game

I wrote this off because singleplayer looks boring. Unlike Tom, I'm rarely interested in score chase and leaderboards. I'll keep it in my back pocket for emergent 2-player co-op shenanigans.

Single player is actually pretty fun. I haven't had a chance to hop into multiplayer yet. There's plenty of challenge in SP, too. Probably moreso, actually.

Do you think it would work on the Vita? The screen size might be an issue...

Any news about the XBL version??? Running out of muliplayer coop games...

Same. Score chasing and leaderboards don't really matter to me. And co-op is always a little dubious; things are always better when you are experiencing them with people you like. From the coverage, it seems like this the "Indie game of the year (that everyone is supposed to like)".

Yeah. Multiplayer means more people to get discovered or screw up in some way, and it means sharing charges on the tools (in the sense that coins only credit towards charges on the player who collects them), but it also means more unique abilities in play, a helpful hand to resurrect you (maybe), and more places you can be at once. This makes singleplayer a very different and equally compelling experience, especially if you replay with other characters to see how they'd handle a given level's challenges.

And I don't care about scores or leaderboards in the slightest.

Check out today's podcast, which will be posted shortly!

My initial impression is that this wouldn't work well on the Vita's small screen. But then again I would have said the same thing about that retro GTA game whose name escapes me. Retro City Rampage, right? Isn't there a Vita version of that? Does that fit well enough onto a Vita screen?

Well, you appear to have inspired roughly 1.2 billion reactions with this review, so grats. ;)

I feel the thing that makes the single player great is twofold. Because you can't always execute the same plan (guard patrols change, locations of loot changes) success is a lot more exciting. It's more frequently a skin of the teeth ad-libed proposition. Which just feels good. Plus when you fail the chases are, for the most part, exciting. There's a few areas in the game though where there is just no way out and you end up dying slowly and that's a bit frustrating.

Yeah. Only played the demo of that, didn't like it. Don't know if it had anything to do with it being compromised though, I'm leaning towards no.

Bobby *Fischer*.

I’m not sure if this should go here or in an Invisible Inc thread.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/papers-stolen-in-a-daring-israeli-raid-on-tehran-archive-reveal-the-extent-of-irans-past-weapons-research/2018/07/15/0f7911c8-877c-11e8-8553-a3ce89036c78_story.html?utm_term=.4ec8e87aba9a

I’m guessing they used the Hacker, the Locksmith, and the guy with the monkey. But a six and a half hour run? Ugh, terrible. I bet I could beat that easy.

-Tom

It’s not Monaco unless every two minutes they set off an alarm and ran around in a panic trying to find somewhere to hide.

I’m thinking

Covert Action was so good. It’s a shame it didn’t get more traction - I’d love to have seen different designers do their spin on the formula ala Civilization. Or even just a shinier remake like the Pirates one.

Sid Meier himself criticizes Covert Action for being a mini-game collection that didn’t work (as opposed to Pirates). If I remember right, he feels that Pirates has a core strategic game that all the arcade mini-games contribute to, while Covert Action is sort of all the mini-games glommed together with each other. Also, the sneaking and stealing mini-game takes too long (that I can agree with, I think).

But I love Covert Action, too. Okay, it’s no Pirates. And tailing cars felt half-baked to me (but so did sneaking into towns in Pirates!). But the cryptography? And the following leads and finding clues, trying to march your way up the criminal ladder to the mastermind? Some of that was sublime, once you saw how all the parts fit together.

Not to mention the fact that he basically figured out a way in the 16-bit era to create a procedurally generated mystery. Yeah, none of the content is actually meaningful–it’s not that kind of mystery solving. But there’s all this information and it’s just fragmented into a million pieces and you never know which piece you will stumble on from that wiretap or photographing those papers in that safe.

Sid’s probably right, ultimately, but there’s still a lot to like in Covert Action. He (or someone) should take a stab at an updated version, like you say. What’s Brian Reynolds up to these days?

Help me out here, did Covert Action involve submarines at all, or am I confusing it with another game?

I don’t recall any subs, but maybe I didn’t get far enough. I don’t think I ever won.

I wish they’d make a remake of this. I liked Covert Action so much more than Pirates.