Bruce Geryk has just posted the first part of his interview with Lars Thuring, the lead developer on a computer version of Advanced Squad Leader.

Before long, we’ll be inundated with the end of year wrap-ups, and I’ll post my 2006 strategy retrospective in a couple of weeks. If I had a podcast, I’d try to do a roundtable thing, but in lieu of that, feel free to email me comments or opinions.

Of course, some people take the opinions of their readers seriously and solicit their responses to polls. But even in a large poll with a dozen choices for each question, annoying things start to pop up.

1UP’s poll, for example decides that beat-music games, life sims and flight simulations have so much in common that they can be put in the same category. “Which is better? Elite Beat Agents, Nintendogs or Microsoft Flight Simulator?” Sure, we do this all the time when we choose an ultimate winner, but this is a genre vote. It just becomes a huge catchall category – which shows how far the flight sim has fallen.

And what about those times when a multi-platform game is noticeably better on one than another? If you think that FIFA 2007 was great on the PC but forgettable on a console, you still have to vote for the full package. And how come Armadillo Run doesn’t make the puzzle list?

The biggest curiosity is in Gamespy’s categories. The learned editors there decided to break strategy games into RTS and non-RTS categories. Fine. Except Rise of Legends is in the non-RTS category. By their definition, it’s a “hybrid” I guess because of the campaign game. But let’s not be crazy. This isn’t like the Total War games, where the campaign is inherently turn-based with serious city and army building; in the Rise of Legends campaign the story is just moving from one RTS encounter to another. They might as well toss in Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War because its campaign has an adventure/shooter part. And the only chance for a flight sim to win is in the Overall PC Game of the Year category.

Not only am I mostly flummoxed in the gift search for my wife, I go to Gamespot this morning to find a PC Game based on Deal or No Deal sitting at number 3 on the sales list.

Look, America, Deal or No Deal is not a good show. The game requires no skill beyond keeping your greed in check and it can be played in ten minutes instead of being dragged out to an hour. Howie Mandel should grow his hair back, too. And now you want to play it on your computer screen? You realize that with twenty index cards, a calculator and a bored friend you can do the same thing, right?

And you know it’s Christmas because of the four Sims 2 titles on the list. OK, that happens every week. But one of them is a holiday pack.

If you haven’t read the transcript of the latest Gamasutra podcast (or listened to the podcast), do so. Editorial reps from Gamespot, Ziff Davis and PCGamer discuss why Gamerankings is silly, and the problems that come from expecting too much from your readers. Or something like that.

I hate game pirates. I’m mostly an ethical person who thinks that taking without paying isn’t nice. It’s not an issue of anyone being hurt, but an issue of propriety and manners. I’m very Canadian.

But this letter to Game Developer reminds me of my own youth. Well, my college days. I turned old when I hit 19, so it’s not quite youth.

About a third of my social circle had computers of their own in their dorm rooms and all told, bought maybe five or six games a year. We played about five dozen. Piracy was rampant, naturally, and this was Fredericton, New Brunswick, not exactly black market central. Bulletin Boards were full of cracked software, all with the ghastly ASCII art of the cracking team.

I played pirated versions of Harpoon, F-19, many Sierra adventure games, Hardball, etc. The copy protection schemes back then were mostly code wheels and manuals. Starflight II had a shiny map with tinted stars you had to identify, constantly confounding my color-blind friend. But most of the time you could open a hex-editor and take out all the stuff that stood between you and the game.

And the love affair with gaming hasn’t stopped. I now buy every game I play (well, at least the ones I’m not sent review copies of) and appreciate that what I was doing back then was wrong. But I wouldn’t give those years back.

As we count down to the release of Europa Universalis III, the after action reports from the beta testers will be coming quickly. And the newest one is great.

What makes it great? The stuff in green. Those are explanations of all the mechanics at work. It’s not just a role playing exercise in “here’s the game I just played, but told through the eyes of a noble family that likes cheese.” It’s a near complete explanation of how decisions are being made. Why the Holy Roman Empire matters. The choosing of National Ideas. The long term consequences of picking certain advisors.

This is just the hook I need to get over any lingering doubts about pre-ordering the Collector’s Edition.