Fantasy mish-mash Dominions 3: The Awakening is now gold. It will be available on October 2 for the low, low price of $54.95.

That’s right. $54.95. For five dollars more, you can buy both Civilization IV and its expansion. You can get Rise of Legends for less. You can pre-order Caesar IV, which will be out a week sooner. Money isn’t everything, but that’s a AAA price for a game with pretty low productions values and historically inadequate documentation. This better be good.

From what I’ve seen of it, Dominions 3 will not disappoint anyone who loved Dominions 2. There’s more of everything and it is a little bit easier to deal with it. I was a huge fan of Dominions 2, though it took me forever to really figure out what was going on. I never had the courage to engage in the epic multiplayer wars that filled my favorite gaming forum.

As I noted in my published preview, the Dominions games don’t so much reward study as demand it. This a rich, rich world with so many possibilities the mind aches when it considers how quickly more agile intelligences put winning strategies together. I don’t have as much time to study games as I used to, so here’s hoping that things are a little more transparent this time around.

I know that many of the Dominions groupies out there don’t like it when people say that. Mastery of a game as deep and multifaceted as Dominions gives some people a sense of being an initiate in a special cult. This is a sense of belonging not borne out of arrogant refusal to see the present (like people still devoted to text based adventure games) but borne from a shared sense of exploration and “By Jove He Got It!”. The more transparent the game becomes, the less skill it will take to fathom the mysteries of the system. For a lot of people, the exploration is half the fun.

Then there’s the other half. The actual playing. As mysterious as Dominions 2 looked, it’s real beauty was in the game play itself. Proper recognition of where the threats were coming from, or knowing when to leave a powerful neutral as a buffer state, are the decisions that ultimately decide whether a game is good or not. Exploration is sweet and all, but Dominions is a game about destroying heathens and becoming a god. It’s about wielding the magic, not studying it. It’s about raising armies, not making charts to compare them. And the easier it is for new people to appreciate the strategy in the game, the better Illwinter will do in the sales department.

And the better Illwinter does in sales, the better it is for Shrapnel, an important supporter of independent strategy games that could use a huge hit.

No, I haven’t gotten a good look at Medieval 2: Total War, but I’ve been following the previews and interviews quite closely. The first Medieval was a great game once you overlooked the psychic AI on the campaign map and Rome stands out as, to my mind, one of the finest real time/turn based hybrids ever made. Fusing the pageantry of the Middle Ages with the shiny new Rome engine is a no brainer.

Computer Games Online has published a two part interview with Creative Assembly’s Bob Smith. A good response to a simple question [Read more →]

Game Daily’s Media Guy takes a shot at recommending how game bloggers can become “immortal”. In other words, how do you get people interested in what you have to offer? The anonymous author offers a lot of little bits of advice.

There is, of course, no reason to do all of them. For each suggestion I can think of good blogs that don’t do it. The suggestion to Digg and Slashdot yourself is more than a little cheesy. Lots of friends have told me I should market Portico/Flash of Steel better, but I would never think to submit my own stuff to these large places. Strategy games aren’t quite niche, but I have a specific interest in a specific type of game so that’s what I mostly write about. (MMO blogs are also pretty specific, but have a much larger range of issues to deal with, I think.) [Read more →]

Octopi Games has developed an interesting little hybrid game. Intrinsically a card based strategy game, Pox Nora takes the RPG “levelling up” mechanic seriously and allows your cards to accumulate experience with which to buy new skills. You and an opponent square off on a grid map and fight a turn based contest to eliminate the other person’s home base. Your card deck is shuffled and unveiled a few at a time, limiting play to the cards you can see and you can afford – playing a card drains from your “nora” reserve.

As an aside, I’m not sure why games [Read more →]

As I sort through two years of posts, trying to organize them into categories that make sense, I thought I’d go through the logs of Portico and see what brought people to my corner of the internet to begin with. You can learn a lot about people from what they search, if those leaked AOL logs are to be believed.

The most common searches were, naturally, people looking for me. Many of them students trying to find my AIM name so they could harrass me. Many from a regular reader who apparently doesn’t know how to bookmark a website. At any rate, those kinds of searches are quite boring.

Like Gaul, Portico searches are divided into three parts. [Read more →]