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Nile Online

October 29th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · City Builder, Tilted Mill

Tilted Mill is having a busy year. An expansion for SimCity Societies, an expansion for Children of the Nile, Hinterland, Mosby’s Confederacy and now Immortal Cities: Nile Online, a browser based city builder that will probably be a prettier and more sophisticated version of Travian or Ikariam. Like Ikariam, Nile Online is about resource trading. In order to build everything, you will need to make deals with other players.

I’d tell you more about it but I can’t log in to my beta account for some reason. If there’s an activation email post registration, I haven’t gotten it yet. (EDIT: Working now. May have been a problem on my end.)

It’s not surprising that a mid-range developer would move into this browser builder space. They have to overcome the big problems with the free games named above – how do you keep players invested in the game once they’ve seen everything and how do you deal with conflict, if you included military forces.

If and when I can access my beta account, I’ll let you know how it looks.

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“A Lost Ludology”

October 28th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Board Games, Wargames

I just returned from a seminar discussion at the University of Maryland led by Dr. Matt Kirschenbaum of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. The topic was advertised as “A conversation about the long history and seemingly unlikely combination of warfare and gaming” but ended up being a discussion that had the usual unenviable academic position of dealing with people very familiar with wargames, people whose gaming experience was limited to Halo and people who were really new to the entire topic.

So the fact that the discussion stayed interesting throughout is quite remarkable.

Kirschenbaum went through a nice thumbnail history of tabletop wargaming and took the opportunity to show off his copy of Afrika Korps, and ended his opening statement with the observation that the popularity of these sorts of games in the 1960s and 1970s (AK apparently had a print run of 100,000 copies) is a “lost ludology”; that so many people interested in the academic study of games and game space are focused on the virtual and electronic worlds, missing this big chunk of time in the Cold War when this sort of simulation was, if not mainstream, at least more widely available.( I’ve written about this sort of thing before, but from a different perspective.)

I’ve spent the last week interviewing employees at a certain game studio where the founders all connected decades ago over war and boardgames, and I think that fact informs both how they think about gaming and how they run their business. There was a generation where there was some serious overlap between tabletop wargames and computer game design. Avalon Hill, after all, was one of the earliest non-tech companies to invest in the new medium.

One interesting question raised from the audience was the role of cooperation in tabletop gaming. Where the multiplayer team aspects of so many popular video games are obvious, there was a bit of a struggle to think of cooperation in the more intimate and confrontational board game space. Kirschenbaum did note the important cooperative exercise of learning a game, something that requires some unity of purpose, especially if people want to play it correctly and fairly.

It was a fine way to spend an hour plus of my afternoon.

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I want to be a mutant, too

October 27th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Me

I glanced at a map of the territory covered in Fallout 3, and immediately noticed that my neighborhood of Metro DC is not there. Once again, Prince George’s County, Maryland gets the shaft, with not even the University of Maryland getting any love. Once again, it’s all about downtown DC, northern Virginia and Montgomery County, MD – the city and the posher suburbs.

Yes, our schools are terrible. And our county government is constantly being investigated for corruption. And the police force is on intimate terms with FBI civil rights investigators. And the UMD Terrapins aren’t much good at basketball anymore. All of which would make College Park, Greenbelt, New Carrollton and the environs a great place to spawn villainous mutants.

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Red Alert 3 Interview

October 27th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Electronic Arts, Interview, RTS

If you have any interest in EA’s upcoming Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, you should read Chris Remo’s interview with Amer Ajami and Greg Kasavin over at Game, Set, Watch.

On the separation between the Red Alert and Tiberium branches of the Command and Conquer franchise:

AA: Red Alert 2 was the game that said, “You know what? This is our own branch. It’s not related to Tiberium or C&C except in name.” In that sense, Red Alert 3 is a continuation of that tone, rather than of RA1.

GK: And it lends itself overall a feeling to the game that is pretty unique. There are plenty of serious war games out there that are heavy, whereas something like this has much more of that graphic novel, over-the-top action feel to it that pokes a little bit of fun at itself, but in hopefully a pretty clever way. It’s just more distinctive, and hopefully will be more memorable to players than another serious World War thing that weighs on them.

It’s great that EA has been able to differentiate the franchise in this way, though the games are fundamentally the same. The tone is different and the units are different, but the game play doesn’t really change from one side of the C&C brand to the other. Both series even had two factions until the third game – the Scrin and Rising Sun factions. So Ajami’s use of “branch” is the right word choice.

I am modestly interested in the upcoming Red Alert game. I’m still not convinced that this is the type of game that can work well on the Xbox 360, but from what I saw at E3 it is the same fast paced game that I loved when it was Kane and GDI running around to collect magic crystals.

I’m in the middle of a conversation about RTS campaigns with a friend. I’m pretty dismissive of the entire idea of story based campaigns, but he correctly pointed out that a lot of people still think about the campaigns in Starcraft, Warcraft III, Command & Conquer, etc. It’s interesting that these games are all from Blizzard and EA; it’s had to think of other studios that have really managed to make the RTS campaign story an integral part of the experience. (Myth doesn’t count because it’s all story, and is almost a mission based wargame.) The Red Alert videos are really over the top, which is fine with me since I love over the top, and they are all really invested in getting you to identify with characters from the story, and, through them, the factions. So the Russians aren’t the side with the bears and zeppelins, they’re the ones with Tim Curry.

But with only Fallout 3 and Fable 2 on the immediate play list, I’ll be able to free some time for Red Alert 3, and be glad to do so. It hasn’t been a really great year for the RTS, Sins of a Solar Empire aside. And it’s not like I’m expecting some grand revelatory experience from RA3. But things will blow up and there will be robots.

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Empire Campaign Video

October 23rd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Creative Assembly, Preview

The third of five Empire: Total War videos can be found here. It has a little more information about the campaign mode, but not much.

Which I suppose is to be expected. The campaign stuff doesn’t make for stirring video. Moving armies, clicking buttons, reading menus…This is not gameplay you would pay to see.

We do get quick looks at the maps, including the American and Indian theaters. It’s hard to judge province size, but we get a good peek at the Northeastern US at :57, the Southeastern US at 2:40 and India at 2:41. The big story is that economic warfare will play a larger role, so attacking and defending resources should be an integral part of strategy. There are agents (again) who will apparently challenge fancy wig wearing guys to duels.

I’m always glad to see more shots of the battle engine. The battles look enormous and thrilling, the sort of thing that Creative Assembly does well in its trailers. One of the best things about Medieval 2: Total War was that it took much less time to get to epic sized battles because the recruitment system was streamlined – you could recruit up to three units per city at a time instead of one. I hope they move further forward with that.

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Games Media Awards 2008

October 20th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Awards, Media

Everyone likes prizes. Even the silly ones like “Best Mainstream Magazine Games Writer, Sponsored by Ubisoft”. Yes, the British Games Media Awards are still sponsored by the people that the media covers.

Congrats to Tom Francis of PC Gamer UK who picked up Best Specialist Writer – Print Division, i.e., “best writer who works for a dying media form that is only about games”, and Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson who won the online division. They even have a Rising Star award, which is a polite way to say “Nice career choice, buddy.”

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