From Worthplaying:

“Immerse yourself in the intensity, carnage, and chaos of the war that divided a nation! Experience history brought to life in the first ever first-person action game based on the Civil War.”

How soon we forget.

Tom Chick has reponded to Game Daily’s Greg Atkinson’s list with his own top ten list of the best RTS ever, or at least the ten best RTS you can probably still find at EB.

Chick’s list is heavy on the present, so it is immediately apparent that he is evaluating “best” by games he would prefer to play at the moment. There is, I think, a distinction to be made between “best RTS” and “most important RTS”. (Maybe “greatest” would be some combination of the two?) But it does show the peril of lists of this nature, one nicely sidestepped by just focusing on sales.

I, however, am steeped in the past. The history of gaming fascinates me and, even though Galactic Civilizations II has made it very unlikely I will ever reinstall Master of Orion, it’s just as unlikely that it would supplant MOO2 on a list of “greatest strategy games”.

Cross era comparisons are tough. Almost pointless even. You can’t begin with a ceteris paribus even over the last five years since the industry changes so rapidly. So sometimes a list trapped in the now like Chick’s is the only easy solution to what is a really stupid problem.

If you move to “most influential” or “most important” then you are in a tough spot, too. Age of Empires II is humungous in importance, largely because of its shocking MP success, not so much in influence. Dune II is really the cornerstone of the RTS world but, frankly, it’s not that great or interesting a game. I didn’t like it at the time. (For the record, I think Warcraft II‘s quality is highly overrated as well.) By paying attention to what is Important, we lose the little quirks that lead us to read reviews and opinions in the first place. Telling me that Age of Empires III is an improvement on Age of Empires isn’t, frankly, shocking or even interesting. Tell me why you think Age of Empires III is a major step forward or surprising or better than Act of War and we can have a conversation. Try to diagnose why the Age games are so much better than any other historical RTS out there and we can have a very interesting conversation.

Anyway, here’s my list of five real time strategy games that don’t get the respect they deserve. In no particular order.

1) Empires: Dawn of the Modern World – For all the fuss people make over Empire Earth, this was Stainless Steel’s best game. It had pacing, it had variety, it took its time in letting you kill things with every unit you had.
2) Praetorians – This is a very unusual game with a unique approach to building units. Terrain mattered a lot as did combined arms. Only three factions, but a decent historical campaign in a genre with too few decent historical campaigns.
3) Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns – A great game that would have sold a million copies and been a genre transforming title if it had a name that was a little less stupid. Or was a movie tie-in.
4) Majesty – As much a city builder as an RTS, it remains the very model of “hands-off” game design.
5) Settlers II – Usually lumped in with city builders, you can make a very strong case that the territorial and resource control aspect of this game makes it more an RTS. Don’t let the cartoon look fool you. There is a lot going on here.

New AOL acquisition Gamedaily has put up yet another list of all time great RTS games, and it’s terrible. Not only does it commit the cardinal sin of throwing the largely turn-based Total War games into the mix, it is a crime against writing and editing – ironic considering Gamedaily editor Chris Buffa’s recent plea for better writing in games journalism. Let us count the things in Greg Atkinson’s article that made my head spin. [Read more →]

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts now has a gaming division and they’ve announced their nominees for the British Academy Video Games Awards (October 5).

The strategy nominees are:

Age of Empires: The Age Of Kings (Nintendo/Majesco Entertainment)
Football Manager 2006 (Sega Europe/Sports Interactive)
Medieval II Total War (Sega Europe/The Creative Assembly)
Rise And Fall: Civilizations At War (Midway/ Stainless Steel)
Sid Meier’s Civilization IV Warlords (2K Games/Firaxis Games)
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (Ubisoft/Red Storm Entertainment)

Note that a sports management game was nominated in this category (yay!), as was, Medieval 2, which hasn’t even gone gold yet (boo!). So was a first person shooter. Plus we have one handheld turn based game, one expansion to a great turn-based game and your typical real time strategy game. Who says strategy games are all the same?

(Football Manager 2006 is also nominated for best simulation and sports game.)

All kinds of little curiosities here, as there is for any award nomination list. How does a sequel (We Love Katamari) get nominated for innovation? Isn’t a category like “gameplay” kind of like nominating a song for “sounds best”? Can Guitar Hero be stopped?

Longbow Digital Arts programmer Rick Yorgason has uploaded his account of the Toronto Independent Games Conference to YouTube. It has a little bit of new footage of their hoplite strategy game Hegemony: Philip of Macedon.

YouTube has become the new local cable access. It is easy for small companies or wannabe TV stars to get themselves on screen and then market their material all over the place. YouTube has become the rally point for all kinds of viral video stuff as well as self-promotion, so if you can make the self-promotion viral in nature, you save a ton in marketing costs.

As for the game itself, there isn’t enough in the footage to tell whether it will be good or not. The battles seem to take place independent of any larger strategic concept, but that is supposed to be one of the draws of Hegemony. As noted in the previous post, it is an entrant in the IGF competition, so a very advanced build must already be out there. Maybe future updates will give us a greater strategic sense than merely flying the camera by a chasm or zooming in from Mount Olympus.

The 2007 Independent Games Festival competition entrants have all been posted at the IGF website. There is the usual mix of casual fare and serious games with development time measured in both months and years.

The list demonstrates just how big the indie scene is and how difficult it is for me to single out three games every month for my Alt.Games contribution to CGM. A lot of these games are just out of my radar, since I learn about games the way most people do – word of mouth, developer marketing and serendipity.

I doubt you’ll see much coverage of Press the Spacebar 2000 anywhere. City of Greensville looks very cool. A lot of the stuff looks cool. The already well known (in indie circles) Kudos and Gibbage are there. And Slitherine has two entries.

The strategy game entries seem to go on and on. Bugs of War. Clones. Hegemony: Philip of Macedon.

The IGF winners will be announced at the 2007 GDC (March 7-9) in San Francisco. (I’ll do my best to be there and blog live from the floor.)