Now that the two big Paradox reviews are out of the way, I have to turn my attention to the things I have been neglecting. And it’s a long list to catch up on.

1) Crown of Glory: Emperor’s Edition: Gil Renberg, the co-designer, has been after me to give this game another look. I wasn’t too fond of the original, and he promises improvements. There are naval battles now, which should be fun since we will be podcasting about this before too long. And the map and economy are clearer. Still has some UI issues that are bred in the bone, I think, but I need to spend more than a couple of hours on it to get up to speed.

2) AI War – Fleet Command: Tom Chick wrote about this game in his recent Crispy Gamer column and it’s been sitting on my hard drive for a week or so untouched until a couple of days ago. I may have to rethink my bias against space based games. Though not as grand as Sins of a Solar Empire, it has some of the same vibe.

3) Theatre of War 2: I had some major performance issues with this when it came out, so I put it aside. Given how poorly ToW 1 worked with dual core machines, you would think they would fix that here. At least the original had an option to tell the computer to use only one core for the game. I can’t find that here, but, to be honest, I haven’t delved into the official forum for help. The very helpful Battlefront PR guy was unable to give me a solution, but this isn’t his job. I was really enjoying what I saw but I need to give it more time before I feel I can comment.

4) Battlestations: Pacific: I need a game pad for my PC before this makes any sense whatsoever for me. Flight sims were never meant to be played with a mouse. Though I do remember flying my F-19 over Libya with a keyboard. That was in 1990, though.

5) Cities XL Beta: Scratching that city building itch. Lots of content here, but it’s the type of city builder you really need to invest time in. And I haven’t had much time.

6) Rock Band 2: Have it, have barely touched it. Needs more Sondheim.