Unexpectedly Fond of FUBAR
by SealWyf, HSM editor
I’m really not much of a fighter. I’ve already established that I don’t get along with shooters. And I had assumed this aversion would apply to any military game. So I was not all that enthusiastic when FUBAR appeared in Home.
In the first place, the name was borderline offensive. (In the real world, FUBAR does not mean “Fight Until Blood and Ruin”, and if you said it in the Hub, the first word would be replaced with asterisks.) And the little I had heard about the game sounded rather violent — another place for little boys to play soldier in Home. But I’m willing to try anything once, especially if the basic game is free. If nothing else, I could get an article out of it. I’m always on the lookout for stuff to write.
My reaction became more positive when I learned that FUBAR was a tower defense game. I’d had lot of fun with PixelJunk Monsters, although I was never very good at it. So I downloaded the game and gave it a try.
I have to admit that addiction set in quickly. Before my first session was over, I had visited the in-game store and bought a bundle of “War Bucks”. You can play the basic game for free points, but to really explore its possibilities, you need to go the freemium route. I’ve never regretted spending the money.
FUBAR may be Home’s best approximation to a Facebook game. It’s simple to play, without any attempt at realism. It’s heavily weighted toward social interaction. And you can’t do very much on any given day, so you don’t have a chance to get bored. The short daily sessions leave you wanting more. This formula has worked very well for Facebook, and it seems to work equally well in Home.
The first thing I do when I log into Home these days is head over to FUBAR, visit my friends’ bases and play the daily tower defense exercise — a total time investment of perhaps twenty minutes. At that point, the day’s play quota has been reached, so I continue to my other activities. If I feel like spending more time, I can re-play the exercise, or tweak my base layout. But I’m rarely there over an hour.
It definitely helps that the game was created with a truly engaging sense of humor. This is a slightly satirical look at war, in the same way that Paradise Springs is a slightly satirical look at casinos. The most serious thing about FUBAR may be the music that plays over the yellow load screen. It’s well worth listening to the whole piece, which evokes mental images of dogged marches through dusty places, expanding horizons, struggle and triumph, then a return to the tedium of the march. It’s an excellent piece of movie music, and would be at home in a serious war film.
By contrast, the base itself is somewhat cartoon-like, and can usually only be viewed from high above, as if it were a miniature model. There is a rare glitch that deposits you in the base, surrounded by waist-high buildings. I love when this happens, and always run around snapping pictures before navigating away to try again. You can see examples of my screen caps in the illustrations for this article. I wish this was the normal way to view the base — the details show up so much better close up!
The buildings are well rendered, and can be truly hilarious in their implications. What other military base would have a squad of cheerleaders from Wisconsin, or its own strip club? (One hopes that none of the cheerleaders are moonlighting in the strip club. However, since the strippers don’t have a barracks of their own, that’s probably exactly what is happening. So much for our wholesome farm girls!)
The commentary of your fellow soldiers is a bit off-center as well. You’ve already seen their images on the loading screen, and you get to know them well over the succeeding days as they pop up on text panels to make remarks. They are General Oxtail, Major Tatum, and Private Beauregard. However, sometimes their images are assigned different names and ranks, which definitely contributes to the surreality. Through their comments, you learn that the base has occasional Jello-wrestling contests, that you gave the General the last pudding, and that you got the top score on the driving test. Additional remarks are displayed at the bottom of the defense exercise screen. They are apparently the comments of anonymous soldiers, and they are amusing enough to distract you from the mission in progress.
The social aspects of the game are engaging as well, and very much in the tradition of Facebook games. Every day you can visit the bases of up to three of your friends — five, after you upgrade your Helicopter Pad to a Helicopter Building. You can leave your friends free gifts, train their soldiers or attack them — all in the spirit of friendship, of course.
All of these actions are absurdly simple. They are not even mini-games. Training, for instance, consists of three reaction speed tests: just hit the X button when the target silhouette appears. Attacking a friend’s base displays a progress bar, then announces the victor. It’s apparently a coin-flip — no input is possible.
You receive small numbers of points for completing these activities, and you receive points when friends visit you. You also receive their presents, which are small decorative items to use around the base, such as plants, metal flooring, and cargo pallets. Some of these can be sold for additional points, but others can only be destroyed if you have a surplus. At the moment, my base is being overrun by worthless cargo pallets, and I’ve been ruthlessly deleting them.
Decorating and arranging the base is a major preoccupation, at least for me. It’s equivalent to apartment decoration — a useless, but entertaining Home activity. I seem to have some virtual OCD about maintaining a tidy base, and I enjoy seeing how other people have set theirs up. What, for instance, do they do with all their surplus cargo pallets? How do they arrange their trees? Do they cram their barracks close together, or leave some breathing room? How many morale-boosting buildings have they added?
You can also send your soldiers out on exploration missions, which are represented by dots on a map. In this case, you don’t even have a status bar. You simply come back after the mission is over — minutes, hours or even days later — and collect the points awarded for its successful completion. I have never seen a case where the mission failed.
But the main activity in FUBAR is the tower defense game. You get one exercise per day. You can replay it for practice, but the number of points awarded drops dramatically, so it pays to ace it on the first try. This is pretty easy on the early levels. I’m currently at Level 7 (Sergeant Major), and I rarely have any difficulty. But I’m sure the missions will get harder as I rank up.
As you play, you devise strategies for each of the standard road maps. I like to set pairs of machine guns opposite each other, effectively stopping all foot soldiers in their tracks. I also like to place weapons where the road makes a hairpin bend, so the passing soldiers and tanks stay in range longer. There are also places where roads are close enough together that one weapon can cover both. I start with machine guns, then add some mortars to stop the tanks, and graduate to rocket launchers and snipers, and the occasional expensive mech droid. It’s a surprisingly satisfying little exercise.
As the game progresses, you slaughter truly prodigious numbers of soldiers and tanks, all marching gamely into your line of fire like the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death. (Cannons to the right of them / Machine Guns to the left of them / Elite Snipers to the front of them / Volleyed and thundered.) If this were a realistic war game, the slaughter would be unbearable. But the enemy soldiers are cardboard figures gliding along the road, carrying their health bars above them. They are as abstract and mindless as the cutout rabbits in a shooting gallery. When they die, they obligingly vanish, leaving the road clear for the next wave of doomed attackers.
Somewhere around my third time playing the tower defense mission, I realized that I was really, really enjoying this. I started re-playing the missions, not just for practice, but because they were so darned fun. It was satisfying to set up an elegant combination of weapons, then sit back and watch tanks and soldiers march into them and vanish in puffs of cartoon smoke. Since the difficulty of the game advances slowly, I could usually get it right the first time. And when I couldn’t, I could tweak my strategy a bit — economize on early machine guns to add an extra mortar here, another rocket launcher there, and a couple of Elite Snipers guarding the base entrance. Those snipers are terrific, by the way. Once I unlocked them, I’ve been using them for everything.
At first I was frustrated that we could only play the current day’s mission. But now I can see the value of that. It’s part of the Facebook game philosophy. In many Home games, you keep plowing through levels, ranking up until you get bored or max out the game. That’s what I did with Novus Prime, and I’m sorry now I didn’t pace myself. It’s good to have a game that will last, especially one as fun as this one.
I’m not alone in my enthusiasm. A few nights ago in the Casino, I watched two avatars chatting while they waited for a poker table.
“Thanks for leaving me a present,” said the female avatar. “And thanks for the attack. I’ll visit your base later tonight and attack you back.”
The male avatar remarked that it was funny having a woman thanking him for attacking her. They both laughed.
“You know,” she said, “I’m really addicted to that silly game. I’m amazed. I really didn’t expect to be.”
Neither did I. I know exactly how she feels.
December 26th, 2012 by SealWyf_ | 5 comments
SealWyf is a museum database programmer, who has been active in online communities since before the Internet, and in console gaming since the PS1. In games, she prefers the beautiful and quirky, and anything with a strong storyline. She is obsessed with creating new aesthetic experiences in PlayStation Home.
So! Now I know what a Facebook game looks like? OK, that’s informational.
I love FUBAR not that it’s realistic after all who would attack a friend or ally. Come to think of it, it sounds like the real world.
The base is cartoonish but yet realistic enough I guess as to my experience in the mid 60s.
Base defense I use machine guns if soldiers are attacking and generally mortars for vehicles although I’ll use the fancier weaponry if I think I need to or just for fun.
It doesn’t take much time to play per day and can be done with just a few friends or I suppose even none. Friends are necessary to get certain objectives it seems.
For people starting out I would advise playing with friends at the same level although I’ve beaten high ranks than me which is 9 I think (Warrant Officer).
Some of the players have put in roads and such which adds a certain amount of realism and reminds me of what was but myself I jam all the buildings I can and toss out the trees and bushes and clutter. I’m not saying I’m right in strategy. And maybe I like a messy base.
FUNAR (sic) is one of my favorite games.
I also have the private space which is good for roller skating and little else but I decorated it anyway. Don’t try to put the Deluge Rain item in it though. It looks crummy.
I don’t care for the apartment either. It’s a fun place to play with the Heavy Water Surveillance Helicopter, and a few fog machines add a certain atmosphere. But it’s not worth the money.
Surprisingly to me, I love playing FUBAR as well. For all the reasons you mentioned in the article. A few days ago, I was finally treated to the “walk around the base” glitch. What simple pleasures!
It’s ironic that developers keep investing so much time, money and risk into increasingly more complex games for Home. Inevitably, they’re ridden with bugs, trashed for their cost and pale in comparison to the disc-based games they try to emulate. Home may just be better suited to Facebook-style mini-games like FUBAR.
And, yes, the personal space is sadly lacking in value. I was very disappointed that it was not more like the glitched game-base, allowing the avatar to roam around the buildings. It was the first Home purchase that actually prompted me to contact Sony’s customer service to seek and receive a refund for the $5. It’s not a lot of money but I wasn’t going to pay for that piece of rubbish.
I like this game as well. I go there each day at some point and do my duties so I can advance slowly but surely with it. I purchased a few warbucks to add roads and a few buildings to my encampment, but for the most part it is an easy to play pastime and the game is fun to master. It does get harder as you go up in levels too.
it is a nice game.
but there’s too little content, stressed over a too long period of play-time. sadly.
(Editor’s note: this comment has been edited to remove unnecessary personal invective.)