My review of AGEod’s American Civil War is now up at Gameshark. I really like what AGEod has been doing, and this title is a smart pickup for CDV.

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Don’t miss John Harris’s interview with Tarn Adams, the creator of one of the best (and most user unfriendly) city/empire builders in recent memory. Dwarf Fortress is a game that is captivating, addictive and terribly, terribly mean.

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Kotaku is reporting that future editions of DICE and GDC will be going invite only with press registration. Concerned about the growing size of the conference and the vanishing developer culture of the annual event, Jamil Moledina thinks that something has to be done to get GDC back under control.
“It’s meant to be a networking […]

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The always interesting Vic Davis has recently posted about appeasement as an historical tactic and game mechanic.
Appeasement as a strategy is often a bad choice. It can be a catastrophic choice under certain conditions. Perhaps the most famous from the last century is the sad spectacle of the Munich Conference in 1938 and Neville Chamberlain’s […]

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Jason Ocampo has been Gamespot’s in house strategy go-to guy for years. Though I don’t always agree with him, he’s an intelligent commentator and his opinion is always worthy of consideration. Little too mass market in his tastes, but you know, we need people like that on sites like Gamespot. I’ve had the pleasure of […]

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Rob Fermier has posted summaries from many of the GDC talks he attended this year. Lots of great stuff - almost as good as being there.

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Game, Set, Watch has posted a summary of Jonathan Blow’s GDC talk about how we think about game design, and, more importantly, how what we think affects the challenges that face designers.
Read it. I haven’t fully absorbed what exactly Blow is getting at or what the take-away should be for critics and analysts, let alone […]

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Today’s Games for Windows GDC podcast (2/20) has Relic’s Josh Mosqueira and Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor as guests. Lots of time is spent on the present and future of real time strategy and PC gaming in general.
The usual ground is covered. Will RTS games push themselves into a hardcore ghetto? How can you get […]

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In an interview with IGN, Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games makes it clear that he is not optimistic about the future of the PC as a gaming platform, even for such dyed-in-the-wool PC genres like real time strategy.
It’s just a good business decision to have your game of any kind on a console where […]

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My review of the expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2 is now up at Crispy Gamer. I liked it much better than I thought I would. I guess practice makes perfect for Obsidian.
If you’d rather, you can sign up for the Crispy sweepstakes. Lots of big, big prizes which I am not allowed to compete for. […]

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