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War Plan Pacific Review

February 18th, 2009 by Troy Goodfellow · Gameshark, Shrapnel, Wargames, WW2

I like it. A lot.

There are certainly problems with the game, and it is far from being a perfect wargame. It suffers from the fact that, as a computer game, you can play it so many times that you learn what the AI is trying to do, spoiling the long term value of the scenarios.

But while you are playing it and learning the best possible approaches to cutting off Japanese oil supplies or rushing to isolate Australia from Allied assistance, you get that tick-tock feeling in your head as you plan out your next step.

And I can’t overemphasize how useful the manual is. It gives you detailed information on which ships become available when, so you can really set yourself up for prolonged pressure on the enemy. It has lots of good history and alternate design choices. KE Studios did a great job with it.

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Dawn of War II Interview

February 17th, 2009 by Troy Goodfellow · Interview, THQ

Having written a column last week that said the RTS was dead, Tom Chick now has an interview with THQ’s Jonny Ebert that addresses how some developers are trying to rescue the genre through re-design.

We decided if we continued on our current course, we weren’t going to succeed. RTS sales had plateaued and are actually declining. We need to expand our player base or eventually we’ll lose out to other genres and die out. So right at the end of Dark Crusade, we sat down and started comparing RTS to other genres. Some of the things we started to come up with were pretty obvious and shocking at the same time. Most genres, like first person shooters and massively-multiplayer and free-to-play games, the ones that are experiencing strong growth, were constantly working to simplify themselves and make themselves more approachable, where RTS is going in the opposite direction. It seems like each one was more complicated than the last. The other genres were having constant breakthroughs in pacing, reward structure, drawing players systematically into the experience, whereas RTS had stayed the same across the board. To us, it felt obvious that we were falling behind for a reason.

Like all great interviews, it’s about asking the right questions and getting out of the way of the answers. I now have to order my copy of Dawn of War II.

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New Game From ProSim

February 16th, 2009 by Troy Goodfellow · ProSim, Shrapnel, Wargames

The ProSim line of wargames is one of those series that I love to play for a month or two before I move on to something less intense. These are serious wargames for people who like serious real time action, assuming you define action as icons moving on a satellite map.

So it’s great news for me that there is a new one. Battle Group Commander: Episode One takes two modern armies and sticks them on Salisbury Plain. Why there? Who knows.

The game is designed by Gary Bezant, the man behind the earlier ProSim game, The Falklands War: 1982. (The Shrapnel press release calls the Falklands game “controversial” and I have no idea why that would be true.) It also goes for the very low price of fifteen dollars.

The publisher promises a more “noob friendly” game than the previous titles in the ATF/AATF line, and here’s hoping that’s the case. I think this is a developer that could use more exposure and a wider wargaming audience than it has had to this point.

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Robot Entertainment

February 13th, 2009 by Troy Goodfellow · Ensemble, Industry

The Ensemble exiles have officially named and announced their new studio.

Details on the studio’s current projects are unavailable, and it’s unclear whether Robot Entertainment will maintain a focus on the PC realtime strategy genre in which the Ensemble team specialized, or try new arenas.

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RIP HotU

February 13th, 2009 by Troy Goodfellow · Industry

EDIT: Since this post still gets a lot of traffic, I thought I should direct people to the new HOTU. May they prosper.

All the notice we had was a February 9 Twitter from the proprietor.

“Home of the Underdogs webhost went bankrupt T_T.”

And with that sad note from Sarinee Achavanuntakul, one of the most enduring (if illegal) tributes to gaming history came to an end.

The site attracted a global community and, for a while, had a very active and knowledgeable forum. I used to spend a lot of time there. Other so-called “abandonware” sites are out there, so nothing has really been lost in a material sense, unless you include the site’s thorough cataloging by theme, publisher, genre, sub-genre, etc. For a while, HotU was a key part of my professional development, letting me fill in the gaps of my gaming history.

Sadly, the site hadn’t been updated in years. Achavanuntakul decided to put her Harvard degree to good use in championing noble causes in her native Thailand. Sustainable development, fair markets, small business, that sort of thing. So her long labor of love fell into disrepair, though the files were all there. Given her new interests, I don’t think it’s likely there will be any revival of HotU from Achavanuntakul.

So drink a toast to one of the finest intros to great, good and crappy games of the past. It was nice while it lasted.

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Expertise, Enthusiasm and Game Reviews

February 12th, 2009 by Troy Goodfellow · Media

Part Two of the Shawn Elliott sponsored game review symposium of the stars is up at his blog. More thoughts once I digest it all.

A nugget from John Davison:

On both PC Player, and PC Zone back in the UK, I found that it was our strategy guys more than any other that wielded significant influence over the audience of their niche within a niche. These guys had an encyclopedic knowledge of historical warfare, were extremely comfortable with hex-based war games, and could tell you things about individual weapons (and whether the game employed them correctly) that would make your head spin. Not only did we use them because they knew their stuff, but we also used them because — let’s face it — you have to be wired up a certain way to be that into something like that, and other people on the team just couldn’t tolerate these kinds of games. We knew there was a portion of the audience that was equally nerdy about such things, so we put the war game guy on the war games — and everyone was happy.

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