Though it’s not an expansion pack, there is a new patch for Rise of Legends
Meanwhile, just as I get back to competence in Company of Heroes
Meanwhile, Creative Assembly still hasn’t released a second patch for Medieval II: Total War
Patching News
April 26th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Patches
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Ancient Wars: Sparta
April 26th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Ancients, RTS
In my effort to be a full service hub for marginal games related to ancient history, Rob Fahey recently reviewed Ancient Wars: Sparta
So, you amass your army, at long last, and you charge for the enemy stronghold – hurrah! Except, there’s really not very much you can do on the way, as a strategy game player. A shocking number of levels in the game are actually completely linear pathways, which see you moving a single large force through a pre-defined path taking out opposition on your way. Each enemy force you come across is dealt with by simply running headlong at it and hitting it until it falls down. The whole combat experience has all the finesse and grace of a drunken tramp falling down the steps of a rapidly braking double-decker bus.
I was to review this for CGM and received a late beta. The final review version would have been on its way. So I have to keep that in mind. But it was very clear that little could be done to save Ancient Wars. I can’t do a real review with only a beta, but Fahey’s problems were problems that I saw in my week with the game, too.
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Gamer’s Bookshelf: Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World
April 23rd, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Gamer's Bookshelf
As every game journalist knows, nothing gets eyeballs like a list. Ten most important this. Fifteen least appreciated that. Fifty sexiest. Hundred scariest. So it’s sort of right and proper to pay homage to one of the first big “list” books, the one that earned its otherwise negligible author eternal fame.
Sir Edward Creasy was an Oxford History professor and Imperial functionary in Ceylon who, in 1852, compiled a book accounting the fifteen most important battles in world history. The list itself is not particularly remarkable. It has few surprises for the amateur historian; let’s be honest – how many lists actually astound us with their conclusions? Like any list, it tells as much about the listmaker as it does about the putative subject.
Let’s get the battles out of the way. In chronological order, Creasy chose: [Read more →]
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AgeOD’s American Civil War: Tutorial Tirade
April 21st, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · AGEOD, Civil War
Memo to developers: When you create an ingame tutorial, do everything you can to help the player.
Telling me to move my troops to a region “three to the west” isn’t very helpful when the number of possible routes to the west is greater than one. It doesn’t hurt to highlight the key region, or at least make the place names really large since using county names for regions is a bad idea. They generally don’t match the big city, which will be the first thing novices notice. Unless of course the city name is blocked by the troops you have sitting there.
And if success in the tutorial requires me to follow specific steps, don’t let me continue until I have actually completed those steps. Having a tutorial box say “You have detected a Confederate Army” when, in fact, I haven’t because I missed a step, is just confusing. The tutorial boxes have a lot of very small print, so it’s easy to miss something. In short, don’t tell me what I am supposed to see on my screen, tell me what I do see.
Still, I’m getting that Birth of America feeling. And that’s a good thing.
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Explaining the Pause
April 21st, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Board Games, MMO
The lack of updates in the last couple of days has been mostly because my gaming time has been consumed with two things.
First, I puttered around with the Lord of the Rings Online open beta. It’s cute, but probably not cute enough to hold me any longer than World of Warcraft did. Which means that I probably won’t subscribe unless I get a compelling professional reason to do so. It’s fun running around as a hobbit hunter with a feathered cap, sure, but a tiny piece of my nerd brain resists the idea of a 300 hit point halfling regularly schooling two or three full-sized men at the same time, not to mention all the spiders and wolves I killed. The hobbits of Tolkien’s books are not adventurous, in any case, and seeing a few dozen of them running and jumping around me is a little silly.
Yeah, I know. Never let literature get in the way of gaming. After all, I have no problems with a Middle Earth RTS. But “stumbling” upon a Nazgul Rider on the road to some Shire village is just too much of a reminder that the literature is happening in this very same world. On that note, it’s one thing to have a persistent world where the player can’t make radical changes to the environment, but the constant references to Bagginses and Dark Lords and the like keep reminding me that Carbo of the Harfoots is a side character in a book I’ve read that will never be finished in this world. In LotRO, Frodo can’t get to Mount Doom – it would spoil the game for everyone.
Second, for much of the week I have also been playing Paths of Glory, the GMT board game oft mentioned in the comments of my recent post on World War I and gaming. Seizing the initiative, Bruce Geryk and I loaded up the cyberboard version of the game and, using the automated card tracking system through Warhorse Sims, I quickly learned the basics and remembered why I like GMT games so much.
We didn’t really “finish” a game. The teaching game led to my Russian army getting obliterated, so Bruce, always a good sport, called a mulligan and we began a real game. It ended in the second month when my opponent carelessly moved two strong German armies too far into Russia, and I cut off their supply in the final round. I had a clear march to Berlin at this point, and with the West still mostly intact, we agreed to end the game. I think we both have a lot to learn, in any case, as we kept forgetting to do things like Mandated Offensive rolls. Thank God for both Skype and searchable PDF rulebooks.
Next up is For the People, though if I can figure out why Ageod’s American Civil War isn’t installing properly, I might get busy fighting on another front.
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Soren Johnson leaves Firaxis
April 18th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Firaxis, Industry, Maxis
First reported on Apolyton by webmaster Dan Quick, it has been confirmed by Firaxis programmer Scott Lewis that the big brain behind Civilization IV is moving on to work with EA/Maxis. I guess he likes companies that end in -axis.
How big a blow this is to Firaxis fans like me depends on how seriously you take Johnson’s earlier claims that he was working on a very exciting new game. Sid Meier always has a half-dozen prototypes competing for attention, and in spite of the misstep with Railroads, the company is full of great talent.
The Civ series will continue, in any case, of course. It has had four different leads in its four different phases, so it makes sense that a Civ V would have someone else take over. But having spoken with Johnson on many occasions, he has a real gift for understanding both what makes the series popular and what kind of risks needed to be taken to move it forward.
Good luck in California, Soren. Try not to get in the way of Will Wright’s robots.
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