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Enhanced Children of the Nile

July 8th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · City Builder, Tilted Mill

If you missed Children of the Nile the first time around, here’s your chance to get it on Steam. If you already have it, it looks like you’ll have to wait a couple of days until the free update with the enhancements becomes available.

I gave CotN 4/5 in Computer Games magazine when it first came out and had I known that I wouldn’t find a better city builder in the years since, I could have added a half star to that. It still had some serious pacing issues and some major bugs, but I think that it stands as a monumental piece of innovation that was almost a dead end. Though Tilted Mill’s subsequent games (Caesar IV and SimCity Societies) both tried to keep the concept of citizen living lives and meeting their needs, neither of those really lived up to the promise I saw in CotN.

I just wrapped up an interview with a couple of Tilted Mill people, and I’ll let you all know when that goes live. (First I have to transcribe the damn thing.) But the promises of these enhancements and the content packs which were announced in late May shows that TM still thinks there is some life in the old girl, yet.

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Ensemble and Console RTS

July 8th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Consoles, Ensemble, RTS

I need to check my blogroll more often since I missed this post from Bruce Shelley about many things. Most importantly, it says a few things about how their RTS Halo Wars will be controlled on the console.

I may have mentioned many blogs ago that we reprogrammed Age of Mythology to be playable with an Xbox controller as a proof of concept. Designer/programmer Tim Deen got to the point that he could play AoM better with the controller than the mouse/keyboard. We are very excited about how the new, built from scratch, control system is working. We know that if we do a good job with Halo Wars, especially the controls, it could encourage a much more rich and interesting genre of console strategy games for the future. Ideally we would like to do for strategy games on the console what Halo itself did for first-person shooters on the console.

I’ve written that Halo Wars could be the RTS to solve the controller puzzle since it is being designed with the 360 in mind. Mind you, a lot of people have said that they solved the problem in their ports of PC games, and been largely wrong. (My review of the 360 Supreme Commander is up at Crispy Gamer, but I’ll more to say on that once I’ve put the 360 Kane’s Wrath through the wringer. Gas Powered Games and Hellbent have done a lot of stuff right with the controller adaptation, but didn’t adjust the scale of the game to the demands of sitting seven to ten feet from what is going on.)

Does Tim Deen really think that the prototype console controls for Age of Mythology beat the mouse? I’d be stunned if this were the case, especially since there is a lot of micromanagment of economic stuff going on in AoM, and this is generally where the console controls start to come apart.

(Post spotted at Game, Set, Watch.)

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Quote? Misquote? Cite?

July 7th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Blogs, Design, Industry

The best thing about the internet is that hyperlinking lets you direct readers to your sources.

The worst thing about the internet is that nobody bothers pointing out their print sources.

This came to mind when I finally got around to reading Chris Bateman’s critique of the Sid Meier bromide that a game is “a series of interesting choices.”

Bateman’s essay itself is fine. Many games we play involve few choices or decisions, but we still call them games. I doubt that Meier’s little epigram has had that much of an impact on game developers, or else we would have not seen the explosion of casual games that use time as the primary mechanic, and not decision trees. Bateman is certainly not the first to point out that the Meier quote is inadequate, so he won’t be the last, and people will keep using the Meier quotation for decades to come because:

a) It is short.
b) It is to the point.
c) It means something to the reader.

But the post sparks the researcher in me, because he refers to the quotation as a “misquote”. Then, in the comments, one reader says that Bateman gets it wrong because the phrase is “meaningful choices”; still inadequate for describing Snake and Ladders, but better for other games.

Bateman never says what his version is a misquote of, though he suspects that the original had “good game” in it as a qualifier. To his credit, he wants a proper attribution. And the commenter never gives a source for his version. Both versions, by the way are listed in the Google.

So, I decided to do my own detective work to track down this quotation. Where does it come from?

Most sources cite Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris’s Game Architecture and Design. And they accept the “interesting choices” version.

It’s likely older than that, since in July 1997, Usenet poster Darren Reid prints the full quotation as: “A good game is a series of interesting decisions. The decisions must be both frequent and meaningful.”

Another version has the quotation as a “great game” being “a series of interesting and meaningful choices made by the player in pursuit of a clear and compelling goal”. This version is tracked back to a Serious Game listserv post made by Noah Falstein in 2006, once again with no clear citation.

Even if this is the proper version, without a proper source it’s not clear when, where or in what context Meier made this statement.

There is always the possibility of multiple versions of the saying. Meier has been interviewed over and over again so the same thought has probably been expressed in many different ways. Given how long this quotation has been around, the observation is either original to a print interview or to an audience at a developers’ conference.

So let’s crack this nut. First person to track down, and post in the comments, the original quotation, with the correct context and source will win my gratitude and save gaming researchers a lot of time citing other secondary source guesses.

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It’s Not “Just a Game”

July 6th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Blogs

I don’t usually read Kotaku anymore, just scan the headlines that Evotab puts out. And most of the time, I don’t bother clicking.

So I missed Leigh Alexander’s June 23rd essay about how saying that something is “just a game” as a response to social or political criticism is a cop out that does more harm to the pastime than good. It stifles debate and reduces games to just what their detractors claim they are – ephemera with no more social meaning or value than a doodle.

Well worth a read, and I may have to start reading Kotaku again. And thanks to RPS for pointing it out.

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Birth of America II

July 5th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · AGEOD

I like surprises, and the July 4th release of Birth of America II counts as a surprise. I have no idea it was even in development.

The feature list isn’t quite accurate. AGEod’s Ludovic Grousset tells me that the first war in the game is the Pequot War (1636).

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E3 Ten Years Ago

July 4th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · CGM, E3, Industry

I was talking to a colleague yesterday about going to E3. He isn’t, and he hasn’t been in a long time. Like me, he’s primarily a PC gamer, so he feels a little bit out of the loop with the new console heavy E3 schedule.

So, just for kicks, I dug out the Computer Games Strategy Plus E3 report from 1998, just for a comparison. Over 280 Games Previewed!

It was held in late May. In Atlanta. And the magazine didn’t squeeze in the coverage until the September issue. Those facts in and of themselves are a fascinating insight into how the convention has morphed over the decade. There was once a time when E3 was an important but not essential time-sensitive story. For a few years, E3 was the biggest event on the calendar. And now, it’s not even clear how important it is, with a lot of the news trickling out in pre-E3 events.

There are probably more PC games in the listing than there are games all told at this year’s E3. You have the usual suspects for the 1998-99 gaming season. Interplay was showing Baldur’s Gate. There were three Civilization games – Firaxis’s Alpha Centauri, Activision’s Call to Power and Microprose’s Test of Time. Heroes of Might and Magic III, Black & White, Age of Empires II, Imperialism II and Diablo II were there.

So were Prey and Daikatana and a half dozen games that never got finished. Conflict of Nations, a strategy game with the giant heads of empires moving around a map. A Babylon 5 space shooter. A Middle Earth MMO from Sierra. Eldorado, an Age of Exploration RTS.

And Duke Nukem Forever.

But there were lots of genres there that you would never find at today’s E3. Jane’s Combat Sims showed off a bunch of flight sims. Talonsoft was there with five different wargames, including the second part of Operational Art of War and Battle of Britain. In fact, wargames and flight sims were all over the place.

The 1998 game list is a nice snapshot of just how different the gaming landscape was ten years ago. Despite all the talk about how Baldur’s Gate “saved” RPGs, there were certainly a lot of good ones in development at the same time. This was the afterglow of the runaway success of Myst, so there are lots of 3D adventure games, too.

You would never know from the coverage that the PS2 was only a couple of years away, and the Xbox the year after that. The late nineties were probably the high water mark of PC gaming development as far as variety and titles being produced.

I don’t want to sound despondent, of course. There is still a lot of PC development going on, and good independent developers can still find places to distribute their stuff. And there are now alternatives to E3, many more friendly to smaller developers than the still relatively costly E3. The Penny Arcade expo, E for All, GenCon and Origins for some genres…Plus, the internet is so widespread that it is much easier for press releases, game trailers and interviews to be readily accessible to anyone who wants them.

I’ll have more to say about E3 when I go in ten days. I’m aware that I’ve missed the glory days of the expo, but I hope that I can find some value added in the event. It’s going to be nice to make some new contacts and meet some of my editors and colleagues for the first time. But I’ll also be working like a dog, writing content and getting it uploaded to Game Shark before it becomes dated.

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