Computer Gaming World’s Ryan Scott is taking Sierra to task for its recent adventure game compilations. To summarize the sins:

1) The games aren’t XP compatible,
2) The packaging is unimpressive,
3) The compilations are far from complete, and
4) No special goodies beyond the games themselves.

No “Making Of”; no interviews with Roberta Williams, Al Lowe, or any of the other original game designers; no cool bells ‘n’ whistles. Even the old collections of these games had all that stuff. Not here.

Clearly, this is not a compilation pack aimed at fans of the Sierra Adventures. It can’t be. If it were, it wouldn’t just give players stuff they already had. I have the old King’s Quest Collection set and it includes the other adventure games that Scott mentions in his post. Without adding XP compatibility, it’s not clear if this is targeting new users either, those gamers who grew up in the afterglow of the Sierra games that set the path for the genre (for both good and illl) for so long.

You want to hear the sick thing, though? In spite of Ryan Scott’s post, I still want the Space Quest compilation pack. Because those games were mostly good and I don’t have them. And here I get them all in one place for only twenty dollars.

And for twenty dollars you really can’t expect a hell of a lot of chrome. This isn’t a fifty dollar Total War: Eras or Command and Conquer: First Decades. Each series had a different team behind it, and some have moved out of the industry altogether.

So I feel Scott’s pain and sympathize with his memories not being given the proper respect. But I’ll also squirrel away some money for Space Quest, thereby sending Sierra the wrong message.

I’m complicated.

To gear up for Caesar IV (which I haven’t gotten yet), I reinstalled Tilted Mill’s last game, Children of the Nile. I do this from time to time for both review and remembrance because it is a good way to get a handle on a developer’s feeling for the material and to refresh your memory as to what in a new game is actually new. Before I reviewed Magitech’s Takeda 2, I replayed the original Takeda and Strength and Honour. Every new Ensemble or GSC release is preceded by at least a few hours of intense revisiting of earlier titles, either for good (Age of Mythology. Yay!) or ill (Cossacks II. Boo!). This is probably not normal practice, and I’m not even sure I recommend it. But it does give me more opportunities for blog posts.

It’s been about a year since I last played Children of the Nile in any serious way. In my February 2005 Computer Games Magazine review I wrote that it was “a daring attempt to rethink the entire city-building genre” and that “never has a city seemed so alive, its citizens so lifelike.”

Once you break yourself of the mindset that trade is about money and that taxes are for a treasury, you find this new way of playing much more satisfying. When your Pharaoh dies, has his organs ripped out, and is stuffed in a cedar box, he can rest easy knowing that he has presided over the kind of of kingdom gamers have been waiting for.

I settled on a 4/5 score because of some path finding and economic problems, fixed in the subsequent patches. It’s still too slowly paced for some gamers.

The more I play it, though, the more I love it and the less inclined I am to speed it up. Children of the Nile is, in many ways, like Sid Meier’s Pirates!. First, it’s a very leisurely title that encourages you to sit back and enjoy all the visuals. In Pirates, it’s stuff like the dance moves and ships sailing in the distance. In Nile, it’s mourners carrying a sarcophagus to a nearby tomb or monkeys running in the streets. Second, just like in Pirates, it’s quite hard to reach a fail state. If your economy collapses, it will eventually get going again. Your kingdom’s health is inextricably linked to the flooding river, so as long as there are seasons, there will be an Egypt. In both, success is defined by the player as much as it is by the scenario goals. Third, and most importantly, it is a convincing representation of what it purports to be.

Let me unpack that for you. Pirates is about pirate movies and carries off that conceit brilliantly. Cartoonishly acrobatic swordfights, beautiful girls, revenge for a separated family, treasure buried all over the Caribbean…all pirate movie stuff and Pirates makes it work.

Children of the Nile, more than any other historical city builder, feels historical. More than that, it feels 4000 year old historical. Beautiful temples rub shoulders with laborers huts. Life is tied to the seasons. The gods are deeply important to your people, but more important when things start to go south. Your wealth is measured in status and prestige and the size of your educated court, not in how much money you have.

Is this an accurate description of Ancient Egypt? Not sure. I’m more of a Greek and Roman guy. But it is a world so distant that it has to play differently than all the other Impressions games which become one big theme in my brain. Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom didn’t play that differently from Pharaoh or Zeus or Caesar III. It could have been about the Aztecs for all the difference the theme made.

The slow pace works in this alien world. The Nile is timeless, the seasons move on and your Pharaoh will eventually move to the land of Anubis. If it feels like the game is taking forever, it’s OK because the game is about forever; the eternal rhythm of society that drove early civilization. There is little upward mobility; farmers may eventually become nobles, but their hut won’t have a series of renovations like in the three Caesar games or Glory of the Roman Empire. Ancient Egypt is a society where roles are assigned and then carried out. This game is about the Pharaoh – his prestige and his legacy. But all is built on the barley and wheat surplus.

Expansion packs for strategy games can be tough to evaluate. Most do little more than add a few new factions or units, maybe additional scenarios or maps. They, by definition, expand a core game – not reinvent it. Actually, the first expansion packs for the Civilization series, designed for Civ 2, were merely scenario packs, the Multiplayer edition excepted.

Warlords‘ best aspect is its scenario pack. Though a couple (the Roman and Peloponnesian ones) aren’t especially creative, and one (Omens) doesn’t really work at all. The remainder are crafted to make the most of the customizing potential of Civ IV. Take the Mongol scenario for example. Genghis Khan gets a special “camp” unit that spawns new units automatically. There is no way to choose what unit pops out, but you can change the odds a little by parking the camp on specific terrain types. Technological advancement comes through vassalizing your neighbors, each of whom has a specific tech you can grab once they in your orbit. Combat is promoted by the clock that ticks down your victory points and tocks up to the end of the game.

The other Asian themed scenario, the Unification of China, is also a keeper. Ideally it ends in a diplomatic victory with everyone bowing to your inheritance of the Mandate of Heaven. Mostly, it is a tight struggle to eliminate or vassalize the weak so you can focus on wearing down your rivals. Since everyone starts on an equal footing, recognizing who to pick on first is part of the challenge.

What about the additions to the core game? New traits, new buildings, new leaders, new Civs…nothing really amazing here. Though it’s always nice to see my old enemy Shaka, the Warlord unit and the new military traits (Protective, especially) seem like the afterthoughts that military expansion has tended to be in Civ IV. The Warlord theoretically encourages early aggression, but the Civ IV design really doesn’t mesh well with Bronze Age combat in most of the races. Sure, the Aztecs and Romans are given an even bigger reason to go nuts with the pillaging and annihilation. The Egyptians, even with their new leader Ramsses, are still better off pushing for a cultural war.

The reviews for Warlords have been mostly glowing. Raving even. I find it more than a little amusing that three of the four lowest scores (Gamespy, Computer Games Magazine and Eurogamer) come from three of the most reliable strategy game reviewers in the business. But it’s mostly eights and nines and talk about how cool all the scenarios are.

But so much of Warlords is great because Civ IV is great. This isn’t an expansion like Civilization III: Conquests, which took a very good game to an entirely different level. And any serious Civ fan already has Warlords.

If you like Civ IV but aren’t married to it, the question remains though. Is it worth shelling out thirty dollars for some new nations and scenarios? If we begin by accepting that the Great Wall wonder itself is worth five dollars – it is seriously cool – then I’d encourage people to pick this up if only to see what Civ IV‘s open architecture makes possible. Now, Conquests demonstrated you could do a hell of a lot with Civ III, but Civ IV’s design is exposed to the world of mod makers, many of whom are doing some really amazing stuff right now. Some people might doubt just how different it can possibly be and Warlords answers that.

(Disclosure Time Again.)

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts revealed its first ever Video Games Awards winners.

The strategy winner? The much maligned, but, in my opinion decent, Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War. The Movies won for simulation. Of course, the strategy nominees were mostly silly and Football Manager was nominated everywhere. So this is more like the People’s Choice Awards than the Oscars.

And congrats to both the beautiful Shadow of the Colossus, which picked up two prizes, and Psychonauts for winning best screenplay.

Scott Jennings has written a great post about official game forums and the problem/potential they have for developers. It sums up a lot of things I’ve alluded to before but in a much more elegant and amusing way.