Despite the confusion over the release date in the final paragraph, Jeff Haynes’ preview of the highly anticipated Supreme Commander should further whet the appetites of Total Annihilation fans.

The highlight of the preview is the confirmation that you can zoom out to a global level, see every ongoing battle and give orders from this God-view. A developer of another RTS has said that if you make this sort of thing too useful, then all the best players will just use this angle since more information is always better than less. So, a lot of people won’t spend a lot of time with the units on ground level. I’m sure that Taylor has thought of this pitfall and will find a way around it. After all, if you can just control everything from the vantage point of a deity, why watch your little metal toys at all?

Total Annihilation is one of the big gaps in my strategy gaming pedigree. It came out at a time when my discretionary income was spent mostly on second run movie theaters and good Chinese food. I haven’t picked it up since, though I should probably look around for a copy. This means that I can’t get all wrapped up in the energy surrounding Supreme Commander.

I’ve written earlier about how science fiction is really not my bag. I like a good sci-fi movie or TV show. Babylon 5 is a personal favorite in spite of the crappy final season. True, Galactic Civilizations II is one of my favorite games of the year so far, but that’s an aberration since it’s so damned good.

I write this as a bit of a confession that there won’t be all that much Supreme Commander news, then until it comes out in early 2007. I have no investment in its success since I never played the first one and the subject matter doesn’t grab me as much as, say, the next great historical war game does. But I encourage you all to read the previews, follow the interviews and point me to stuff that I should know before I can comment intelligently on Chris Taylor’s new RTS. I am willing to learn.

I like new terminology that helps me convey just what is going on when I game. Last year, I was introduced to the phrase “gaming blindspot“, a handy term to describe what happens when mechanics don’t meet expectations or play style.

The September Computer Gaming World has another one that I like. Expanding on his 1up review of Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War, Tom Chick refers to the action hero part of the game as “noble junk”.

The principle: Underneath some games exists a solid design that could have improved the genre or introduced some cool innovation or just made a memorable game. But somewhere along the way, for whatever reason, the actual design process hit a snag…finally resulting in junk.

Though Tom and I disagree [Read more →]

Manifesto Games, the brainchild of gaming Cassandra Greg Costikyan and former Computer Gaming World editor Johnny Wilson, has been unveiled to the world. Based on the principles of the Manifesto, Manifesto Games is meant to breathe life into dying genres and give a new portal to indie games that need wider distribution. Seeing Costikyan and Wilson put their money where their mouths led them was a heartening development for an industry with too many doom-sayers and too few get-off-their-ass-ers.

So what great treasures are unveiled for us strategy gamers? Strategy First’s back catalog, apparently. Chariots of War, Jagged Alliance, Gates of Troy, Disciples II…Where are the games that the industry has been ignoring? An industry “run amok” gave the OK to all these titles, but here they are again. How mainstream. Not an auspicious start to breaking down walls.

Well, that’s a little harsh. The “Committee Choice” (this gets more Communist with every reading) is a non-violent RTS I’ve never heard of called Mudcraft. They are also giving a home to the delightful Outpost Kaloki and the interesting A Force More Powerful. So there is some indication that they are scouting around for underappreciated indie games. Then again, they have one of Jeff Vogel’s RPGs, Genefore 2, and Nethack. Yes, they have the free, open source Nethack on their catalog.

Good luck to Costikyan and Wilson, but I’d advise them to steer clear of the Strategy First stuff. They went bankrupt, you know.

Not sure how I missed this news, but Matrix Games’ Crown of Glory won the 2006 CSR prize for Best Pre-20th Century Era Computer Wargame, beating out fellow Matrix title Tin Soldiers: Julius Caesar, Shrapnel’s Prussia’s Glory and HPS Campaign Waterloo. Considering how much I enjoyed Tin Soldiers and Prussia’s Glory relative to my mostly unsatisfying experiences with CoG, I’m a little surprised.

Crown of Glory is a bigger animal than both of those, of course. It has greater ambition than to be a miniatures game brought to life, which is essentially the Tin Soldiers and Horse & Musket model.

Congratulations to both Western Civilization and Matrix Games.

All the winners can be found here and the full nomination slate here.

The Slashdot headline for the Gamasutra story in my most recent post is:

Real-Time Strategy Games – Too Many Clicks?

Maybe someone should tell them that Civ isn’t a real time game. Or to read the article.