My interview with Brian Reynolds for the Civilization Chronicles project is now going up at a few gaming websites. Other preview and promotional material may find its way online soon.

It is up at Gamers Hell and Shacknews. Civ Fanatics gives the interview the gold treatment with screenshots and a URL link to this blog at the bottom.

The Reynolds interview is great because it underlines just how useless I was to this project. I sent Reynolds a few questions and he went to town with some great insights, long paragraphs and some interesting background. My job was just to give him something to hang his memory on and give a tiny bit of structure to the thing. This one was entirely Reynolds’ show.

Judging from the demo Left Behind: Eternal Forces is an unusual game in many respects. It purports to be an instrument with a religious message, but happily lets you play the forces of darkness. Music is the big weapon of faith-sapping, with rock musicians destroying your will to serve God and hymn singers bolstering your desire to defeat Satan. Each civilian has a biography that talks about what terrible things they’ve done until they are converted to God’s side, in which case the bio gets trimmed of sin. Forgive AND forget! I could go on and on about the convoluted unit production system.

But, from what I can see so far Left Behind is also one of the few strategy games to stake out a clear gender based stance on what a unit can do. Historic games can, of course, point to history, though Rome: Total War decided to stretch history to the breaking point and give us batallions of screeching barbarian women, female Scythian riders and topless Indian archers in the Alexander expansion. Most strategy games either pretend that there aren’t female civilians or soldiers, or will have half of the peons generated be women. But this distinction is more one of function than sex; peons collect resources and build things and a woman can pick berries as well as any man. In fantasy games, you will often have female heroine units or the cleric/mage types can be female. Not many Amazon princesses kicking butt.

Left Behind continues the numbers imbalance. There are about two boys for every girl (maybe The Rapture took more women?), but everyone starts as a civilian. They will assume whatever roles you assign them. Convert random dude on the street and he can become a soldier. Or a builder. Or a singer. Or a preacher. Or a medic. It’s actually a nice idea to be able to customize your units in this way and retrain them if necessary.

The women you convert have much more limited horizons. They can become medics. That’s it.

Strategically, it makes females a rare commodity but not a flexible one. A monopoly on women civilians means that your opponent has to turn some of his men into healers, but it also eats up valuable population points on units with a single function. But it’s the social commentary here that reveals how peculiar this world is to me.

Now you can make a case about traditions of warfare and not wanting women to be able to become soldiers. I may disagree, but you can have the debate and talk about physical limitations, killer instinct, social conditioning etc. and it need not end in a shouting match.

But this is a spiritual war and women are being forbidden from taking the spiritual fight to the enemy by being shut out of preaching – the instrument of recruitment – and singing.

I am aware that many evangelical Christian denominations take a strict stand on female leadership in the church. Men lead, women follow. Very Epistles. Still, this is the last stand of God’s followers versus the United Nations/Science/Beelzebub. Why can’t women go out and share their faith? Sing of the glory of Jesus shining on them?

The forces of darkness are only available in multiplayer and I have yet to find a soul brave enough to try the MP demo with me. I am curious as to whether the gender assignments continue on the other side of the fence. Are fallen women allowed to be builders? Is Jessica Simpson a tool of the devil? Amy Grant, too?

I play a lot of games. I know how hard they are to make and that even the bad ones are designed by very talented people, certainly more skilled than I am.

So why is pathfinding so hard?

You would think that this problem would be solved by now. And in many games it seems to be. The best RTS of recent years have had negligible path finding problems and even made it possible for larger units to move seamlessly through crowds of smaller units. There are exceptions. The cavalry pathfinding in Age of Empires III leaves a lot to be desired – all the pretty horses run around crazily if a selected group of them is interrupted in its most perfect path. By and large, though, the Ensemble people have no real problem in making sure that your units get where you want them to go.

But I’m playing a RTS now that has some major issues. Vehicles won’t go through infantry, and won’t take an alternate route if the viable path they are rejecting is shorter. Units won’t shunt to the side to let other units pass, and I’m not talking about crowded routes here. There is daylight between the units – enough room for things to move through, I would think.

It’s easy to say that of course the bigger budget games do this well because they are bigger budget games, but since so many of the smaller titles have embraced stuff like physics engines why not look into finding a better pathfinding routine? Am I missing something?

It looks like Company of Heroes is shaping up to be the game of the year. With most of the major online publications having rendered their verdict, the Relic RTS is running a high aggregate at Gamerankings and has earned three 10/10 scores, including one from the usually stingy Eurogamer. And I haven’t even tried the demo yet. Too busy.

It’s not just that I’m busy, though. It’s that I have some of the same feelings that Kieron Gillen addresses in the beginning of his review.

It’s got to the point where we feel as if we’ve done it all before. How many times have we crawled up the shingles of Omaha beach? If you added up all my virtual deaths in those bloody shallows, it’s entirely possible that I’ve lost more lives than were lost in the real assault. Turn to the comments thread in any World War 2 game preview, and you’ll see a string of people shrugging. Bored now! Bored now! Seen this before! What’s next?

I’m not a huge World War II buff, but I love a good WW2 game. Combat Mission is one of my Desert Island disks. But I’ve just about reached a saturation point with Axis/Ally RTS games. I’ve played the terrible War Times. The decent Rush to Berlin. The very good Blitzkrieg 2. I was one of those who thought that Desert Rats vs Afrika Korps wasn’t all that bad. But I’m full. I can’t have another bite.

Now Gillen and Dan Stapleton and Allen Rausch are telling me that I must have room for dessert. Look at all the chocolatey goodness!

So I guess I’ll have to try it. I’ll have to drop the fifty bucks on a game that I wouldn’t pick up otherwise because so many people are saying good things. And not simply “good.” These are enthusiastic raves. Even if review scores don’t matter, a well written plea for me to try something out can still touch my cold, black heart.

The recent announcement that the Game Developers Conference will double in size has some people drawing the conclusion that this will be the new E3. More floor space, an entire convention center, more expo style booths for new product and a Game Demo Theater.

I’ve been to one GDC (2005) and I really enjoyed it. I had a chance to [Read more →]