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Galactic Civilizations 2: Dark Avatar

February 22nd, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Review, Sci Fi, Stardock

My review is now up at Gamesradar.

The long and the short of it is that this is a good expansion to a great game. A lot of other reviews have, I think, oversold how much is truly new and original here, but there is no denying that this is a must have expansion in many ways.

The AI’s inability to sniff out a good deal at the trade table is my biggest complaint. If you have a decent research infrastructure, you can discover all the extreme colonization techs, even though you only ever need a couple of them in a given galaxy. You may not have any radioactive planets at all. Still, the dopey Drengin will pay through the nose for the useless technology that lets them settle worlds that don’t exist.

But complaints aside, Stardock has done it again.

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Vox Populi

February 21st, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Gamers, Media

The “user review” is standard at gaming websites now. This means you don’t just have an “expert opinion” argued by one of their writers or freelancers, you get a rating derived from how an army of gamers evaluated the game and a few brief reviews from some of these same people. 1up, IGN, Gamerankings…all have some way of getting into your gaming brain. Using this rough metric of popularity, by the way, Gamespot is clearly the number one gaming site. It has ten times the user votes for Battle for Middle Earth II that IGN has. Some games only get a few dozen votes, but those popular ones that have thousands of votes, make them as close to “public opinion” as you can get in this hobby.

And you know what? According to Gamespot, reviewers are too hard on games.

Mind you, I only looked at the sixty strategy games that Gamespot reviewed in 2006. So this is probably not a representative sample or anything like that. My SPSS license expired years ago, anyway. But, until I start seeing box scores in the Washington Post again, this will have to do to sate my stats fix.

The average user score was almost a full point higher than the Gamespot score. The biggest difference (UFO: Aftershock) was over three points, and there were over 500 user submitted scores. Rise of Legends had over 2000 user votes and the people think that Gamespot’s reviewer missed it by a point. The combined wisdom of 773 voters agrees with me that Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War is an underappreciated title.

Of these sixty strategy titles, only ten had user scores lower than the official one (usually not by much) with Dominions 3 being the bigger loser (7.6 from the people, 8.2 from the corp) but with only 89 votes. 3500 people think the official ruling on Galactic Civilizations II was a tiny bit too generous.

These votes are a great way to find out who is playing what (or who is claiming to be playing what). The three most voted on strategy games from 2006 were Empire at War, Company of Heroes and BfME2. There were more votes for The Apprentice than for Birth of America, Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege or Brigade E5.

You also learn that some people will like anything. 4 voters consider Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege to be “great”. 19 people think Left Behind: Eternal Forces is “perfect”.

What about the user reviews themselves? They range from fanboy blather to anti-fanboy hate, but barely ten per cent of voters bother to submit reviews. You can see that the much maligned 7-9 scale is still strong with the people, since a 5 or 6 score is often tied with a few words lambasting a game – “overrated” seems to be the most popular word. But by and large, over the long run, fans seem to write more than detractors. The short term seems to be the opposite.

The big business question is who pays attention to these numbers, besides armchair pundits like me? There are hundreds of user reviews for Company of Heroes, and I’m not going to read them. Do developers take solace from the fact that most users think that Gamespot was too hard on Joint Task Force? Do Gamespot editors scan the user reviews looking for the next Jason Ocampo? On all these sites you can vote for reviews or reviewers you find useful, but is this any more than ego stroking? Does this democratization of opinion prevent us from having the net cluttered with fly-by-night gaming websites competing for eyeballs?

They’re great, don’t get me wrong. Anything that lets users feel like a part of your site is something to be applauded. And they can, I suppose, point friends to their reviews. But I wonder if the website managers think that these votes and user opinions are part of the community.

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Big Huge Role Playing News

February 20th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Big Huge Games, RPGs

Big Huge Games is moving away from the strategy genre for a while, it seems. Next Generation is reporting that Bethesda Softworks veteran Ken Rolston is signing on with the RTS masters to make a role playing game.

A console role playing game, by the way. They haven’t said which console, but considering the company’s past with Microsoft (Rise of Nations, Rise of Legends, Settlers of Catan for the 360) odds are that this won’t be a Wii game.

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Space Games Analyzed

February 20th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Sci Fi

Tea Leaves writer Peter Berger is starting a series of articles on space conquest games.

Up for consideration this week are Delta Tao’s Spaceward Ho!, various iterations of Master of Orion, Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations 2, Reach For the Stars! from SSG and Matrix Games, and Space Empires V from Malfador Machinations and Strategy First. I’ll be covering each of these in their own articles.

I’ll post any comments on his comments in his comment section. Unless I think they need a bigger answer.

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Gamer’s Bookshelf: The Song of Ice and Fire

February 19th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Design, Gamer's Bookshelf

I don’t read a lot of fiction. And I read even less fantasy literature, Tolkien excepted. But I thought that some good fantasy reading would make a nice Christmas gift for my geeky wife and everyone I asked – everyone – recommended the same series: George R. R. Martin’s still-in-progress Song of Ice and Fire. I took the first book in the series with me on a recent business trip and then quickly raced through the next three.

People were right about these books. I will now try to write about them without spoilers. There will, necessarily, be some larger plot references made, so if you are a purist about this sort of thing, you’ve been warned. No shocking reversals will be laid out in any specificity.

The series, so far, is about a civil war. The ruling house of the Seven Kingdoms is a usurper, having deposed the last mad king of the dynasty that unified the continent. The death of the king and doubts about his successor tears the kingdom apart and the noble houses must take sides. Meanwhile, an unearthly supernatural force is stirring in the North. Will the Seven Kingdoms be strong enough to face it? The plot is your typical War of the Roses showdown, with some wonderful passing looks at the devastation caused to the peasantry. Bandits, cults and robber barons rise to fill the hole that sovereignty left. The series is Hobbes’ state of nature in action.

Well, this is what the series is supposedly about. It really isn’t. The book is [Read more →]

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Empire Earth III on the way

February 16th, 2007 by Troy Goodfellow · Mad Doc, RTS

The first preview of Empire Earth III has gone online at PCGamer UK’s new home. I’ll probably have more to say about this later, but the reaction in comments all over the internet are decidedly mixed, with a large helping of surprise. Empire Earth II wasn’t that long ago, after all. The Art of Supremacy expansion was released in February 2006.

More information as it becomes available.

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