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CGW/GFW closing up shop

April 8th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · CGW, Media

A little over a year ago I said good-bye to Computer Games Magazine. I refused then to accept the lesson of the closing to be that print was dead or unviable.

So, this really sucks.

Computer Gaming World is the oldest established electronic gaming magazine, and despite the renaming, Games for Windows was an extension of that legacy. A few weeks ago, Kevin Gifford wrote that “this issue of GFW is convincing me that the mag is turning into Computer Games in all the good ways”, a sentiment that gave far too little credit to Jeff Green, Shawn Elliott, Sean Molloy, Ryan Scott and the rest of the GfW crew. They’ve been trying to find a way to make print important in today’s media environment and after the failed experiment with “essay” reviews, the move towards stronger features and interviews was not only logical; it was something that many of them had advocated for some time.

I’m glad to hear that Green and company will continue to work to pump out PC content for 1up, but the site is still, well, not very user friendly. There’s just too much on the front page. Plus, the magazine had Bruce Geryk’s wargame column. And Tom versus Bruce. And Infinite Lives. And Greenspeak. And all in one place.

And as much as I appreciate all the work and content in PC Gamer, it was nice to have an alternative. And now there isn’t.

More than print being dead, however, this is all about the perceived decline of PC gaming as an industry. EGM limps on, after all.

All the core content providers will remain with 1up, so there is no great diaspora of writers struggling to find work like there was at the freelance heavy CGM. And hopefully they will redo the 1up PC page to make it easier to find stuff I am interested in instead of seven or eight different boxes to follow.

But this is a great loss for the media community and a blow to PC gamers like myself.

Thanks for all the good work you’ve done, guys. CGW was my first gaming magazine. It will be mourned.

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Demigod Finds A Publisher

April 7th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Gas Powered Games, Stardock

With Sins of a Solar Empire being an even bigger hit than anyone imagined, it makes sense for Stardock to seek out and publish other games. They now have, after all, thousands and thousands of consumers who may have not even tried Galactic Civilizations.

Today, Stardock and Gas Powered Games announced their publishing partnership for Demigod. The game has slipped to 2009, but that wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Demigod is one of those games that has me immediately fascinated, almost completely because of how it looks. But the look means an inevitably bulky install. This will be the largest game Stardock has ever published, to be sure. Supreme Commander is ten times the size of Galactic Civilizations II.

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Mad Doc Swallowed

April 7th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Industry

Rockstar Games has just acquired Massachussetts developer Mad Doc Software for an undisclosed amount of money. Given how poorly most of the gaming world responded to Mad Doc’s most recent efforts, Empire Earth III and Star Trek: Legacy, the nasty side of me snidely wonders if this is a poison pill to deter EA’s buyout.

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Caesar series (1993-2006)

April 4th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Ancients, City Builder, Feature:Anc, Retro, Review

The Caesar series is easily the most successful ancient themed brand in the gaming world. 2006 saw the release of the fourth game under that title. It also spawned a legion of other Impressions developed city builders set in Greece, Egypt and China, a legacy that spawned two new studios – Tilted Mill and Firefly.

Like many great successes, Caesar‘s was less about radical innovation than it was about being the right game in the right time. The early 1990s saw a burst of brilliant and novel strategy games, including entire genres being “born”. The 4x game. God games. Real time strategy. And, with Maxis’s still-fascinating SimCity (1990), the city builder was born.

In an email conversation, Firefly’s Simon Bradbury, lead programmer and co-designer of the three Impressions Caesar games, was very open about the game’s debt to SimCity.

SimCity was only recently out and had both David [Lester] and I enthralled. We both had an interest in Rome and the ancients and so the rest, as they say was history! Of course we couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) do a straight copy of SimCity, as by its very ‘simulation’ nature the basic mechanics were always going to change. We also had to introduce the ideas of empire and conflict which was going to make our game very different. One more goal we had, was to put a little more ‘game’ into the thing, with missions and a slower learning curve.

(And Caesar wasn’t alone. 1993 also saw the launch of the Settlers games, a classic resource chain city builder series that has, unfortunately, fallen on hard times in recent years. Moving the basic SimCity into the past seemed a natural step.)

Caesar changed things by not embracing the [Read more →]

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Annoying Headline of the Day

April 2nd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Industry, Media

Neverwinter Nights developer shuts

If that headline popped up in your news reader, you could be a little confused since you would have heard the wailing of a million voices if Bioware disappeared. After all, almost no one remembers or thinks about the 1980s Neverwinter Nights game (a proto-MMO) that the now closed Stormfront co-developed with AOL, SSI and TSR.

Why not make a more recent and relevant reference, like their work on Eragon?

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Asian Dynasties Patch

April 2nd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Ensemble, Patches

I can’t say that I expected a new patch for Age of Empires III: Asian Dynasties, but there it is. It’s a balance patch with some major alterations to every single race in the game.

Well, almost.

FRENCH

No change

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