Greg Costikyan has posted a comparative preview of Slitherine’s upcoming WW2 grand strategy game, Commander: Europe at War. Greg analyzes some of the design decisions in Europe at War in light of other attempts to model the conflict.
It’s a brief essay on the mechanics of various games and how they mirror either good design or […]

[Read more →]

This month’s guest blog is from A.B. Harris. With a professional background in engineering, his early interests were in game design academia. A.B. now offers the occasional Op-Ed piece on gaming culture. (Rumor has it that he’s also hard at work on a weekly radio program that will feature game music and soundtracks).
The article may […]

[Read more →]

It looks like we’ll be getting a novelization of Command and Conquer 3. I’m sure it will be as full of literary goodness as the novelizations of Baldur’s Gate, Halo and Warcraft. If it approaches the almost readable Alpha Centauri novels, it will be a freaking miracle.
This week’s Games for Windows podcast has a long […]

[Read more →]

Though it’s not an expansion pack, there is a new patch for Rise of Legends. You can read the details of the 2.5 patch at Big Huge Games. This gives me an excuse to load the game again. It’s been sitting there unused for a few months.
Meanwhile, just as I get back to competence in […]

[Read more →]

In my effort to be a full service hub for marginal games related to ancient history, Rob Fahey recently reviewed Ancient Wars: Sparta, and, from my time with the game, his final evaluation seems to have hit the nail square on the head. I disagree with him on some of his specific comments, but we’re […]

[Read more →]

As every game journalist knows, nothing gets eyeballs like a list. Ten most important this. Fifteen least appreciated that. Fifty sexiest. Hundred scariest. So it’s sort of right and proper to pay homage to one of the first big “list” books, the one that earned its otherwise negligible author eternal fame.
Sir Edward Creasy was an […]

[Read more →]

Memo to developers: When you create an ingame tutorial, do everything you can to help the player.
Telling me to move my troops to a region “three to the west” isn’t very helpful when the number of possible routes to the west is greater than one. It doesn’t hurt to highlight the key region, or […]

[Read more →]

The lack of updates in the last couple of days has been mostly because my gaming time has been consumed with two things.
First, I puttered around with the Lord of the Rings Online open beta. It’s cute, but probably not cute enough to hold me any longer than World of Warcraft did. Which means that […]

[Read more →]

First reported on Apolyton by webmaster Dan Quick, it has been confirmed by Firaxis programmer Scott Lewis that the big brain behind Civilization IV is moving on to work with EA/Maxis. I guess he likes companies that end in -axis.
How big a blow this is to Firaxis fans like me depends on how seriously you […]

[Read more →]

The early turns in PBEM Civilization are murder. You’ve given your workers orders, have your cities producing and decided what to research. Next turn.
And it will be “next turn” for the next little while, too.

[Read more →]