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Soren Johnson Interview

January 9th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Blogs, Firaxis, Maxis

Soren Johnson is also good for a quote, so it’s only natural for Rock, Paper, Shotgun to hit him up for an extensive interview about the PC market, game design and inspiration.

Some highlights:

On the shrinking range of AAA titles:

[T]here’s still a few blockbuster Triple-A franchises that are still cranking out… but if you look back at 98 or 99 there was a huge range of games available. So if you wanted an off-kilter RTS like Majesty… well, that stuff can’t be made anymore.

On feature bloat in RTS games:

Yeah, you can’t make it without a campaign and scenarios and an editor and cutscenes and all that extra junk. Really, that junk is preventing us from making more interesting games. It’s kind of a paradox. Obviously, people want that junk, and it’s a good thing for those people. And the editors which people make their own scenarios is great… but that stuff all comes
at a cost.

On old computer games:

[T]here’s always a primordial soup thing with the C64. You can see the roots of a lot of PC games there, but if you think of it strictly as PC… you’ll perhaps forget things like Sid’s Pirates, back when it was on the Commodore and whatever else. It was really like a console game. It relied on the joystick. It wasn’t one of the Microprose games which came with a big keyboard overlay… it was a joystick game

On AI:

There’s another level, which is the difference between the good and great strategy games, is that the AI is not only just trying to play the rules smartly – if you really want to take it to the next level, you need to think about whether the AI player is actually making the game more fun for the player.

Go to 2007’s best PC gaming blog for the full deal, and the promise of more on Civilization in coming days.

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Minotaurs in Armor

January 8th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Gas Powered Games

I’m not a huge Supreme Commander fan. It’s a game I respect more than I like, since I get what Gas Powered Games is trying to do though it doesn’t scratch any of my personal itches.

But when their next game, Demigod, has images like this, it would be curmudgeonly of me not to get a little bit excited.

Sure, it could be a bullshot. Early screens from barely announced games inevitably are. But there’s something about an army of minotaurs with warhammers.

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1960: Making of the President

January 8th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · AAR, AAR1960, Board Games

With the 2008 Election For Change now in full swing, the next gaming AAR to hit Flash of Steel will be a play by play of me and Bruce Geryk reliving history. Well, I’ll try to relive it. Bruce will try to stop it. He loves Nixon.

1960: Making of the President is an historical strategy game designed by Jason Matthews (one of the co-designers of Twilight Struggle, our last head-to-head) and Christian Leonhard. Its mechanics are similar to those of Paths of Glory or Twilight Struggle. You play cards with both action points (“campaign points”) and events. You choose which to activate on your turn, though your opponent can spend momentum points to trigger events friendly to him/her. One person plays Kennedy, the other Nixon, and you compete for endorsements, media support and, most importantly, votes from the states that matter. Sorry Iowa.

There’s a lot to keep track of, and I still don’t have a firm grasp on everything going on. So Bruce will probably clobber me again, especially since there seems to be less margin for error than there is in Twilight Struggle. But it’s a solid design and I have more fun losing while I learn than is probably healthy for a man my age.

As usual, we’ll try to explain things as we go and comment on the whole game design in general.

Here’s Turn One.

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January 2008 Strategy Preview

January 7th, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Preview

First month of the new year, and not a lot to show for it strategy wise. January is sort of like December that way; most publishers have either fired their shot or are saving up for the spring rush. Looks like March and April will be full of good stuff.

I am now going to include strategy games for consoles in these monthly previews. The reason for this should be obvious. I’m still overwhelmingly a PC gamer, and will probably never fully convert. But it would be crazy not to acknowledge the growing importance of the console market to strategy developers.

So you’ll see DS or 360 tags from time to time. If no platform is listed, it’s a PC title. It’s not like there will be that many console strategy games to acknowledge, but it’s worth keeping an eye out.

January 21 – Pacific Storm: Allies (Buka/CDV/Lesta), Advance Wars: Day of Ruin DS (Nintendo/Intelligent Systems)

January 24 – American Civil War: The Blue and the Gray (CDV/AGEod)

January 28 – The Sims: Castaway Stories (EA/Maxis), SunAge (Lighthouse Interactive/Vertex 4)

I wasn’t a big fan of Pacific Storm, so I have low expectations of the Allies expansion. I love ACW, but I’ve been playing it for months now; I hope the CDV push garners it the attention it and AGEod deserve.

SunAge is an interesting title. It’s one of those old-school RTS games developed by people who seem to think the genre peaked in 2000. The above release date (from Gamespot) must be for retail space, since you can buy through Gamers Gate and Total Gaming according to the official website. It’s already on its sixth patch, which shows that they are learning something from the pros. Initial reviews haven’t been very positive, and it’s not on my radar at all. Anyone else want to take the bullet for me?

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Steve Bauman’s Top Ten

January 2nd, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Blogs

Though he’s out of the professional commentary game, former CGM editor still knows what he likes. His list has the usual suspects but not in the order you would expect them to be in.

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Content is King: Thoughts on 2007

January 1st, 2008 by Troy Goodfellow · Blogs, Me

Looking back on 2007 at Flash of Steel, it became apparent how important a steady stream of content is for minor blogs like mine. I took a couple of short (a week or so) breaks and traffic dipped. December was an especially bad month since I had deadlines to make plus holiday travel that got in the way of constant updates.

Plus, the demise of CGM had a huge effect. Not only was there less money coming in, but I had fewer opportunities to play games I otherwise would not have, and less incentive to keep at the ones that I acquired but didn’t have a review spot for. Once you start getting paid for writing, there’s not a lot pushing you to play “fair” games for free. I hope to fix that in the New Year, though, by focusing my time a little better. Expect some new on-site reviews in the next couple of weeks.

I spent quite a bit of the summer scrambling to get more writing opportunities. I managed to get low-paying but respectable opportunities at Played to Death Magazine (now also on a hiatus) and Gameshark (so long as Bill Abner edits there, I’m happy.) I’ll soon be updating my portfolio to reflect my recent work. My two Escapist pieces brought some new eyeballs, of course, though I’m jealous that I have none of the skills or accents that make Zero Punctuation the breakout game commentary of the year. Fun fact: I knew Yahtzee when he was just another forum member at Home of the Underdogs, a site I was once very active on.

I’ve also been hired by a new site that will launch in the next week or so. I’m really excited about it, but I can’t say much more until it goes live. It’s clear that I will be the least talented writer on staff. The editor has really high expectations, so I hope it’s a huge success for him.

Traffic to Flash of Steel was heaviest when I spoke too curmudgeonly about a game, irritating certain fanbases, or when a respected game designer links and responds to something I wrote. Interestingly, a post that was picked up by major newsblogs like Kotaku and Game, Set, Watch led to a lot fewer hits relative to their daily readership, confirming my suspicion that a lot of people who read those sites never follow the links.

The Twilight Struggle AAR I ran with my board game tutor Bruce Geryk was a huge success, so we may be doing another one sometime soon. I’d like to do something like that continually, but some games just don’t work so well for that set up because of lack of time or commentary options. Still, if any one wants to recommend a game or opponent, that would be swell.

In fact, I like taking suggestions in general. My contact info is up top, so drop me a line if there’s something you want to see. Some readers are more comfortable just emailing instead of commenting, so don’t worry about bothering me.

I’m skipping the usual run down of how people got here list, except to note a few highlights.

1) A lot of people are curious about why Beyond the Sword doesn’t have Hitler. People want mods, portraits, explanations, and all kinds of other stuff. No one seems to be interested in why Hirohito isn’t there.

2) I mention my friends and advisors Bruce Geryk and Tom Chick too often, because readers end up here looking for them. 95 searches for Geryk, for example, and just over 50 for me. I guess he’s still the star of the strategy/wargaming universe.

3) Reviewing games that no one else does leads to traffic. My reviews of HPS Punic Wars and Pox Nora and links to reviews of Forge of Freedom were very popular. Why? Because people need to use search engines to find coverage.

4) People like lists. “Top 100 RTS” or “Best Games of 2006”.

5) Entitling a post “Gamespot Scandal” was the best idea ever, since that’s one of the top search results for those keywords. People love a good scandal.

6) Some people don’t use bookmarks or their address bars. They just search “Flash of Steel” or “flashofsteel.com” to get here.

7) The most popular homework topic that leads people here is the Age of Exploration. Native/European conflict, colonization of the New World, etc.

8 ) Over half of my visits are from the USA. The top non-English nation was France, placing 5th. Probably related to my AGEod love.

Time to get back to killing some foozles. More proper strategy related stuff in a day or two.

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