Even though the score translates as average, so far, I’m the big, bad Hun when it comes to evaluating Haemimont/CDV’s Glory of the Roman Empire. I found it much too easy to be interesting, and too boring to be worth playing for longer than I had to. CDV says that it is targeting casual […]

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The great hope for Civ IV was that its open architecture would lead to a lot of creative and unusual mods, taking the basic design of the game in interesting directions. For the most part, Civ mods have still emphasized adding more historical units, people fitting in their own countries as major civilizations, or adding […]

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Next Gen has an interesting story on what they see as the ten greatest years of gaming. I won’t spoil their story by listing the punchline here. You can click on your own. Warning: It’s been Slashdotted.
Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh proceeds chronologically, freeing him from the burden of ranking all these years in some sort of […]

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It’s been a good six months for strategy games. So good that I’ve had a hard time winnowing my list down to the top three of the year. I helped myself by excluding expansion packs from qualifying unless they introduced major new gameplay elements. This knocked both Hearts of Iron: Doomsday and Rome: Total War […]

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Only a Game has released some of the results from a survey they took of gamers. The intent of many of these question is to establish whether gamers who prefer certain genres approach games in different ways. Judging from the results, strategy gamers tend to enjoy messing around in a game world, whether or not […]

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I was at Firaxis yesterday, mostly tagging along with a fellow scribe as he worked on a preview of an upcoming game. He had a chance to talk to Mr. Meier about a wide range of things. One of the topics touched on was how nice it would be to just plop a disk into […]

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I’ve been listening regularly to the PC Gamer Podcast for the last month or so, and it is getting a lot better. The addition of a single female voice helps a little in distinguishing which male is which, and since the voice is the learned Kristen Salvatore, even better. There is a better sense of […]

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I’m an admitted Firaxis fanboy. Though I will often take shots at the company for resting on Meier’s past triumphs, I can’t deny that the re-imaginings and revisions of his classics are irresistible and addictive.
If you want some insight into the company, they have a podcast now. I mean, why not? Everyone else does. It’s […]

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I recently noted that Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War has some of the best RTS naval mechanics around. And, considering the dearth of good naval simulations out there, it’s nice when anyone pays attention to that military arm that Mahan considered the sine qua non of real power.
To that end, my latest developer interview […]

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The last exam taken, the last form submitted, the last tearful farewell from a student and my year of teaching has come to an end. I had a lot of fun, learned a lot about myself and my tolerance for bureaucracy and public school expectations.
But I can’t say that I’m sad that it is over.
Plans […]

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