I’m pretty far behind in my podcast listening. I haven’t listened to the PC Gamer podcast or the Games for Windows ‘cast in a while.
The Gamers With Jobs podcast is still a weekly listen, though. And this week’s broadcast deals specifically with strategy gaming. Maxis’ Soren Johnson sits in and talks about Civ IV, World […]

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RTS evangelist Tom Chick devoted his most recent column to a celebration of Rise of Legend’s second anniversary. He talked to Big Huge Games head honcho Brian Reynolds about the game - why it worked and why it wasn’t the huge success it deserved to be.
This exchange capsulizes the prevailing thinking on why the game […]

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I wish I had time to dwell on all the dud Roman themed games that have passed in front of me. The half finished Pax Romana and Great Invasions, the laughable Legions, the boring Hannibal: Master of the Beast, Haemimont’s Roman city builders, Haemimont’s RTSes. Most of these games aren’t very interesting as reflections on […]

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In the life sim Kudos, your perpetually broke tosser had the option to buy a lottery ticket. My characters rarely had enough scratch to do it, but every now and then they’d drop a few bucks on the ticket. I didn’t expect game breaking piles of money, but an extra fifty pounds here or there […]

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While trying to use propaganda posts in Sins of a Solar Empire last week, I started thinking about cultural control in strategy gaming, how culture assimilation is an either/or proposition, how an homogeneous culture is assumed to be better than one with spillover from neighbors, how rival cultures bring nothing with them but trouble.
Then I […]

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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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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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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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Neil Sorens has written an interesting article for Gamasutra about the place of stories in “sandbox” games. I’m not sure that I would put grand strategy games like Civ and Europa Universalis in the sandbox category, but that’s a semantic distinction I don’t want to dwell on for the moment.
Like many observers, he pays homage […]

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Don’t miss Kieron Gillen’s interview with Blair Fraser, lead designer of this month’s addiction, Sins of a Solar Empire and Stardock’s Brad Wardell.
Highlights from the interview:
On why they focused on what they focused on:
I can’t count how many times I’ve looked at that list during a game purchase only to be disappointed that bullet point […]

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