I’ve been trying to hammer out an article for the latest Gaming Round Table, but I’m not very happy with how it is turning out. I guess I still have a week, but it’s one of those cases where you have an idea and some witty phrases, but the argument is in that netherworld between “freaking obvious” and “are you high?”.

I’m simultaneously working on an article for The Escapist. There I have a pretty good idea, but I am wondering how bitchy I should sound. It’s a think-piece, and I tend to oversell my points in those. Every year I get more certain that ruthless self-editing is the key to quality work. I have four or five drafts of posts that haven’t seen the light of day even on this blog, and you know how iffy the quality is here much of the time.

I’ve also got two or three reviews in the hopper, including my first one for GameShark. Plus some stuff for Game Squad which is on hold. Not to mention the early stages of a Twilight Struggle death match versus Bruce Geryk over the VASSAL engine. He told me it was a slick translation of GMT’s Cold War game, and he’s right. More on that experience once my Red Hordes finish consolidating their hold on Africa.

There’s also a little more information on the new Civ expansion at IGN and the new Age of Empires expansion at Gamespy.

Meantime, I encourage you to read Tom Francis’s game diary/AAR of a GalCiv2 campaign. It reminds me how difficult it is to pull off an interesting AAR. The two usual routes are humor (like in GFW’s Tom versus Bruce) or role-playing (like in innumerable interminable AAR’s you’ve read on strategy forums). Francis uses some humor, but it’s really a decision tree model of a game diary and I think it mostly works. I wonder if his conclusion is just reading too much into the game’s AI, but part of the game diary experience is rationalizing what your computer opponents are doing.