I’m assuming that this insane story about advertisements stuck on the front covers of magazines is a parody of people saying that print media has sold out or that it’s on its last legs or something.
Because I can’t believe Tim Rogers has never seen this before. I’ve been complaining about fake covers for years.
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I was playing Kane’s Wrath with a friend a couple of weeks ago and mentioned that I thought Command and Conquer 3 was the best AAA strategy game of 2007. Like a lot of people, he thought I was crazy, at least until I mentioned that I wasn’t including expansion packs. Let’s face it – last year was not a great year for original strategy titles.
Not that CnC3 is really “original”. But it delivers a frantic madness that has gone out of fashion in the RTS world.
So it’s a shame that Kane’s Wrath is only OK. The core game is still great, and the “conquer the world” more adds a few new twists. But if this came out last year, it wouldn’t even make the top 5 expansion pack list. Maybe we’ve been spoiled by expansions that add entirely new factions (the sub-factions here aren’t different enough to count) or that mix the game up a little.
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Matrix Games has released War Engine into the wilds of the internet as a celebration of tax day. The only reward I need is the security that my money is being well spent on a well-managed war that makes America safer from its enemies. But since that’s not happening, I guess this will have to do.
Features include:
* Highly tactical – watch your tracks, destroy key terrain, find the objectives!
* Seven full games in one
* Individual scenarios as well as linked campaigns
* Move your army from one battle to the next!
* Weapons, terrain and units are all fully configurable
* Use our graphics or your own
* Excellent AI performs well under the wide variety of situations.
Apparently you can make your own armies and units and battlefields. So I guess I’ll have to experiment a little, though I’m much better at telling people when their designs don’t work than I am at coming up with my own.
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Every time someone tries to make something of the Atari name, it just tarnishes what was once a truly important brand. Does “Atari” even mean anything any more?
Besides, if Infrogrames changes their name they will lose their awesome anthem.
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If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if champion gamers were given a chance to design their own game, then you should probably take a look at Slitherine’s games. Iain and J.D. McNeil are competitive DBA/DBM players, with Iain winning a world championship in 2001 and both regularly placing in the top ten. Slitherine is a partner in an alternative miniature wargame rule set called Field of Glory.
Legion and the Slitherine games that followed are also further testimony to how timing is everything and how a more popular and better financed series can set the terms of discussion. Legion had the great misfortune to come out the same year that Medieval: Total War did and months before Rome: Total War was announced.
Legion is an empire building game with a tactical battle engine. You improve and conquer territories, engage in diplomacy and raise troops to fight your battles. “Citizens” were the key resource; you had to staff every building with people and the more people you had, the more effective the building would be. Mines, universities, embassies…every one depended on regular population growth.
However, troop recruitment also required [Read more →]
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I recently submitted my Europa Universalis: Rome review, and I hope it will be online sometime in the next couple of days. A lot depends on my overworked and understaffed editors, but I’ll let you know when its up.
I’ll be honest and say that I’m happy with maybe half of what I wrote, primarily because I tried to keep the review to 1500 words or so. I could easily have gone on and on about what I liked, what I didn’t like and how hard it was to come to a final conclusion about how I felt. I could have easily spent 2500 words on it. It’s not a great game. It’s good, but…I’ll say more when the review is up.
All of which reminded me of the illusion that the internet gives you unlimited space. I started writing as if I could keep going and going and going. But then I sobered up, cut paragraphs, reorganized and dug out an illustrative anecdote to open things.
One of the great things about getting the chance to write for a print publication is that there’s no pussy footing around about scroll bars or adding another virtual page. My editor at Computer Games Magazine was certainly open to a plea for bumping a review from one word count category to the next, but you had to make the case.
There are two problems with internet games writing; it is either too short or its is too long.
First, there is a tendency to underestimate the reader and deliver everything in 200 word soundbites or news entries, since that allows the reader to get on with the commenting or, more importantly, to move on to the next story which means more hits and more ad impressions. This means that nuance is largely missing, and what nuance is there is often missed by an audience routed to the story by Digg.
Then there is the problem with the potential infinite canvas of being online. Even if most online reviews don’t top 1500 words, a lot of them could be shorter and most take forever to get to the point. Where the physical limitations of a page confer conceptual limitations on the writer, there is a great risk that the perception of unlimited room leads to unfocused and undisciplined writing.
This is where good editors come in, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with great editors in the past and to be working with very good editors at the moment. Not that I’m usually heavily edited; I have been but it’s not the normal course of thing. But the recognition that there are smarter people than me keeping an eye on my semicolons (I love semicolons) puts a brake on my most florid excesses.
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