October’s Computer Games Magazine has a few things with my name on them. Reviews of Operational Art of War 3, Harpoon 3 Advanced Naval Warfare, Rush for Berlin, Moscow to Berlin, and American Conquest Divided Nation, my Alt.Games column and a brief account of the first Apolycon – a convention of Civilization fans held this summer in Timonium. This explains the surprisingly large check.

Two points on the reviews. The American Conquest review has a factual error blaming GSC for stuff they didn’t do. ACDN is not a GSC game though it looks like one, plays like one and is a sequel to one of their games. It even has the same publisher. My mistake is understandable, but entirely my own and entirely avoidable. It doesn’t take away from my problems with the game – it is still too little new to recommend and too klugey in many ways. It is a CDV game developed by group who operated independently of the GSC umbrella. The comparisons to the GSC series are not unwarranted in my opinion – it follows the formula very closely, too closely in my opinion. But the factual error is there, and I spend much of the review slagging on an innocent group of developers. Who knows what I was thinking at the time. Readers expect better of me.

The Operational Art of War 3 review was done before the recent patch which increases stability of the game, largely by letting you know which scenarios aren’t suited for single person play. The larger scenarios that fail most of the time are really designed for PBEM.

I’ll have more on Apolycon later in the week.

This is the big fall preview issue, so there are a lot of games in there that I hadn’t even heard of, plus EIC Steve Bauman complaining about Metacritics and Gamerankings (and Amazon, too). I highly recommend the guest column by Elisa Romero. It gives me a warm glow when I read about how people get hooked on games.

The big plus for me is William Abner’s enthusiastic review of PureSim Baseball 2007. He was iffy on OOTP Baseball, my poison of choice, but heartily recommends this alternative. With the Nats season almost over (well, you could argue it was over three months ago), I will be keeping the home fires burning with baseball simulations. I have an earlier version of PureSim, but it played too slowly for me. Maybe I should give the new one a shot.