While I putter around in Vae Victis to decide what I really think about, check out Typealyzer, which claims to identify what Meiers-Briggs category your blog falls into.

Flash of Steel is ENTP - Visionary.

The charming and trend savvy type. They are especially attuned to the big picture and anticipate trends. They often have sophisticated language skills and come across as witty and social. At the end of the day, however, they are pragmatic decision makers and have a good analytical abilitity.

They enjoy work that lets them use their cleverness, great communication skills and knack for new exciting ventures. They have to look out not to become quitters, since they easily get bored when the creative exciting start-up phase is over.

Clever, charming and easily bored. That sounds about right.

Don’t know about the trend savvy thing.

Dan Hsu has an interview with Dave Pottinger and Graeme Devine at Crispy Gamer. It has the now standard “yeah it sucked but we’re going forward” non-comment on the closing of Ensemble, but, most importantly, lots of juicy bits about the upcoming console RTS Halo Wars.

Devine adds this bit of development chronology that I’m not sure I knew:

We didn’t start this game off as a Halo game. We started off wanting to make a console RTS experience. We spent the first 12 to 18 months just on that, with no [intellectual property] … there was no concept of it being a Halo game. In fact, we started off with the Age of Mythology engine. Microsoft saw what we were working on and asked if they could use it [for Halo], and of course we said yes.

Ensemble had said earlier that they had done an AoM console interface as a proof of concept, but I had no idea that they had worked for over a year on a game with no IP attached. That suggests that the studio was already well along in cracking the console RTS nut before they got the Halo Wars project. Still, they’ve already missed at least one target, presumably because they realized that Spartans don’t chop wood.

Pottinger says:

On the PC, I could put my buildings anywhere, and some people thought that was important to the strategy aspect. And you know what? It’s not. The choice is to make the building

I’m not sure I entirely agree with this, but his general point is sound. If I’ve decided to go naval in Age of Empires III, I will need to build a dock. Where the dock goes isn’t that important. When I choose to build a mill is more important than where.

But placement can matter, especially in games that have durable structures or maps that have chokepoints. In Age III, for example, many native American tribes have buildings that can defend themselves - barracks and even houses. There is no “Will I build I barracks?” decision that has any uncertainty, but knowing how close you can build to the friend and whether or not you can use a structure offensively can be significant.

Still three months till Halo Wars arrives, so there will more Ensemble updates to come.

So do we learn anything about East India Company from this video that we couldn’t have figured out from the game’s title?

Shacknews has uploaded part one of two part interview with Ensemble Studios about Halo Wars. Today’s portion is Dave Pottinger talking about where things are at.

The headline opens with Age of Empires Dev Ensemble Speaks Out on Studio Closure which is true only in the most narrow and literal way. Pottinger says nothing that wasn’t already known or assumed. The closure of Ensemble was a surprise, was done for Microsoft’s own reasons, and Age of Empires will still remain a brand for MS. Pottinger spends most of his time on that topic talking about the dedication of his colleagues, most of whom decided to stick around and see Halo Wars out the door instead of bolting for the exits.

So this isn’t speaking out in any meaningful sense, nor could it be given the fact that he has to wake up every morning and finish Halo Wars. It’s not “no comment”, but it’s a professional statement of regret and little else.

The good news for Halo fans is that Pottinger says that the team was very keen on the Halo franchise and was excited to be working on the MMO version.

Ensemble has been wanting to make an MMO for a long time. That was in production for a long time. The Halo IP was a great IP to launch an MMO with. Microsoft… hasn’t had the best track record with those.

And we worked on it for a long time–we had staffed up an almost-40 person team. And then there was some reorganization at Microsoft, and the new bosses thought it wasn’t the best idea anymore. It had actually been green-lit, and then it got cancelled after that.

The rest of the interview will up tomorrow.

I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that there will be a new Tropico, the celebrated city building/person managing game series. Neither of the Tropicos were great games, but they had a spark of innovation and cleverness that the genre generally lacks. The banana republic themed first one was great because it was so new, though tyranny was a lot more trouble than it was worth. (Maybe Socrates was right.) The pirate themed second one was also pretty clever, and it had pirates. A new Tropico game should be reason to celebrate.

Which brings us to the bad news. It will be developed by Haemimont Games, a studio that hasn’t been able to make an enjoyable Roman themed city builder even though they could steal from a lot of other games out there.

Crispy Gamer underboss Elise Vogel pointed us to this article in which CG is toasted as a top video game site for gamers who don’t drool.

This is the niche that EIC John Keefer wanted to be in, and the list is pretty good company. From Killingsworth’s intro:

All five of the websites/blogs I am about to mention are adding valuable insights to the discussion and offering informed critiques of the latest games.

Because nothing is sure to draw readers like promising valuable insights.

There are 40 new screenshots of the long in development Histwar: Les Grognards here.

Pretty, but it looks awfully dark. Is it always raining in Europe? Or in a state of permanent twilight?

Quick question for AgeOD, a studio whose games I’ve championed for the last few years:

Why in the name of Mercator would you do a wargame with the continent of Europe as the centerpiece and have the map turned 70 degrees? I thought I could deal with this since a) I’m not a moron, and (b) there are (allegedly) performance reasons that mean the map can run better on lower powered machines if they make it more tall than wide.

In fact, this is harder for my old brain to handle than I thought. Part of the problem is that you don’t usually see the entire map when you are moving your units. So it feels a little unnatural to move your units in an unexpected direction, especially in the Balkans. Yeah, in the great scheme of a dimensionless universe there is no up nor down. But you tinker with conventions at your own peril.

As for World War One itself, print out the manual and have it readily available. There is no way you will figure this out by going through the Click To Proceed tutorial or by jumping in. And the manual itself is only a couple of dozen pages with generous screenshots. Somehow, I think this is not going to be enough.

I spent the last week writing an article that, it seems, won’t see the light of day for another few weeks. But it consumed a lot of my time, so I haven’t had much of a chance to look around. Until now.

And there is a lot to see.

AgeOD released World War One: La Grand Guerre. Ludovic Grousset was good enough to send along a review copy, so I’ll be getting to this very, very soon. If anyone else out there has a copy and wants to explore it in multiplayer, drop me a note.

HPS Simulations has released two new games, one from their Squad Battles series (Spanish Civil War) and another from their Modern Air Power line (War Over the MidEast). I’ll probably buy one of these, but not both. I hope to do a lot more wargaming in the next month or so, mostly because I’ve been slacking in that area and no one else out there is picking up the slack.

Paradox Studios has been continuing its weekly development diaries for both the upcoming Vae Victis expansion for EU:Rome and Hearts of Iron 3. So far I have read nothing about either of these that makes me especially excited.

Storm Eagles Studios has announced that Jutland is coming out - soon. This is one I am very much looking forward to. I liked Distant Guns, their Russo-Japanese War game. It’s not clear how different this will be, but the Kriegsmarine versus the Royal Navy…what’s not to love?

I was lucky enough to get an early look at Rob Smith’s Rogue Leaders, a history of LucasArts. It’s available for pre-order at Amazon and is linked on the scrolling ad to the right.

It’s a big book with lots of inside stuff and documents from the Lucas archives. Never before seen concept art, design docs…if you are looking for a lot of inside dirt or a summary of which games were good and which games were bad, look elsewhere.

Smith and Chronicle Books do a great job of integrating images and text, and I highly recommend Rogue Leaders.

I do not recommend Max Payne.