Gamespot has a nation preview of the Persians for Midway’s upcoming Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War, Stainless Steel Studios’ final game.

So they go through the units and the heroes and something is a little off. Well, more than a little off.

Persia, like all the nations, gets two heroes. Theirs are Nebuchadnezzar and Sargon II. Two great rulers. Conquerors, diplomatic masterminds, both builders in their own way.

Of course, neither is Persian. Nebby is the great Babylonian king who hauled Judah into exile and promoted the prophet Daniel as his right hand man. Sargon is considered the most important of Assyrian kings.

The rest of the article makes reference to Persia’s wars against Greece and Macedon, so they know who Persia is.

Is this just a nitpicky point that doesn’t really affect the game. Sure.

But it’s not like there is a dearth of great Persians to choose from. Where’s Cyrus the Great, the builder of the Achaemenids? Darius who reformed the administration and suppressed the Ionian Revolt? Stick a Sassanid or two in there. But a Babylonian and an Assyrian? Both of whom died before Persia was even an empire?

Things like this bug me. Not enough to write off the game, but enough to make me roll my eyes once or twice.

There are lots of reasons to criticize Game Informer, Gamestop’s pet magazine.

Subscriptions are often pushed on consumers (It’s the world’s “#1 Computer and Video Game Magazine” because of its brick-and-mortar discount, not its editorial chops), the reviews are usually quite short and descriptive, and it uses some .25 based scoring system that is even more ridiculous than a one-hundred point scoring system, exaggerating the fineness of their game quality antennae.

Of course, these sorts of things can be said about many magazines. GI is no better or worse than any of the “official” console magazines. Nothing says fair and balanced coverage like the word “official” in your title.

But Kotaku has held up Game Informer’s inability to keep up with console naming conventions as evidence that the entire print magazine world is irrelevant. GI calls the upcoming Nintendo machine the Revolution and not the Wii. Therefore, the print world can’t keep up with the fast paced world of game marketing.

This implies that it is the job of magazines to keep up to the minute with news and information. Publishing lag means that the print world would have to stay ahead of the news to compete with gaming websites and blogs. Plus, the prevalence of review websites means that readers can find out about the latest games the day they hit the shelves and not wait a month to see what PC Gamer thinks about them.

The tension between the internet and print gaming press has already led to some changes. Computer Gaming World has changed its game review policy, ditching scores altogether, in favor of more detail analyses of particular games. The magazine covers fewer games than it used to, but in greater depth, leaving the mass coverage to its sister site 1Up.com. Some articles refer the reader to the website for the complete story.

PCGamer’s website is mostly editor blogs and a place for their user forum. The podcast is an attempt to supplement their magazine. Parent company Future Publishing has recently launched Games Radar as a review site, so it will have an online presence to compete with rival Ziff Davis.

Computer Games Magazine has the smallest online presence, with a website apparently only tangentially connected to the magazine. You can subscribe there and complain about the Vanguard beta codes in the mostly desolate forum.

Each of the magazines offers content that is not available online, but not because it can’t be. CGW’s editorials and features could be done online, as could those of the other magazines. Still, magazines persist, and they probably will into the near future.

In my house, magazines are still an event. Every month they arrive and the house stops while me or my wife read. Even though it is possible to write a long feature for a website – Gamespot does it regularly – it is still much more comfortable to read them in paper form. We call our internet windows “browsers”, but no gaming website is really set up for casual reading. You go there with a purpose, not to leaf through until something strikes you. Magazines make it easier for me to find bylines – there are some reviewers I will read even if I have no interest in the game itself.

Blogs will never replace magazines, especially if they print every rumor that comes down the pike. The peril of infinite space and the demand for constant content makes many of the more popular blogs, including Slashdot and Kotaku, of minimal utility for me. I only visit if Gametab gives me a headline worth clicking on.

Print irrelevant? Not for me.

I love talking about gaming almost as much as I love writing about it. I don’t pretend to know all there is about the subject and there are a lot of intelligent people out there with some interesting opinions. And, being a mostly tech literate audience, you would expect there to be a plethora of great gaming podcasts or videocasts out there.

But I can’t find that many of them.

Not that there aren’t popular ones out there. The 1up Show was recommended to me, and it’s pretty good as these things go. Well produced, just about the right length, etc. But there are too many people for me to keep track of, and something like this depends on personality as much as content. A strong show should have a limited cast; following 1up around E3 was a bit of a chore.

PCGamer‘s podcast is quite good and is also PC focused; Dan Morris is a strong host but his guests and co-hosts vary in ability from episode to episode. The camraderie is clear, but sometimes the inside jokes can take over the conversation.

Some people have suggested the Gaming Steve podcast, but it often clocks in at over an hour – sometimes almost two. I hope the theme song is a joke, because it’s terrible. Steve’s enthusiasm is good, but I find it hard to keep focused on one voice for so long. The developer interviews are decent, but suffer from the same problem that keeps me from paying much attention to interviews with movie directors or actors; asking people about their work is much less interesting when they are also plugging a project.

I’ve been listening on and off to the Poweruser podcast. Most of it is tech news I have no interest in, but they’ve isolated the game segment for listening ease. It’s part of the media empire of Stardock’s Brad Wardell, so he is a regular panelist though moderating duties are left to someone else. Some people have found a change in quality from the point when the ubiquitous Tom Chick was succeeded by Joel Hulsey. I don’t see that. I do think that Wardell is sometimes too dominant a presence in the podcast, and Chick could usually match him – though then the third guy was left aside. My major complaint is one that applies to many podcasts – I have a very hard time telling the male voices apart.

I’ve dabbled with others, but for the most part the limitations of the form become clear. This sort of thing really depends on personality. It’s one thing to read a guy’s 1000 word review of a game, but a really different skill to come across in conversation as an interesting person. People need personality and not everyone does, no matter how well meaning or enthusiastic they seem. A lot of chemistry can come across in video, but it’s not easy to demonstrate this on a radio program.

Plus, as interesting as games are, if you need to fill forty minutes it’s almost impossible to avoid hitting the same topic over and over again. Episode 1: World of Warcraft! Episode 2: Girls in Games! Episode 3: Jack Thompson sucks! Add in an annual E3 episode and you have your schedule for the year.

I’ve often joked that we need a gaming Siskel and Ebert, or even better, McLaughlin Group – put some strong opinionated people in a room, give them an outline of what’s being covered (too many podcasts seem improvised) and see what happens. Maybe not Derek Smart strong opinionated, but at least people interesting enough to generate some heat.

Is this too showbiz? Maybe. But few things are as dull as people who agree with each other all the time. You do want people to laugh at each other’s jokes. And be professional. But why not put up some topics that gamers really disagree on? Is the Action-RPG a step back in game design? Is World of Warcraft actually bad for the industry? Is innovation dead? Is PC gaming?

These topics could get tired, too. And maybe somebody has covered them and I missed the debate. But have game developers ever been asked really interesting questions on these shows? Gaming Steve is so big on Spore that he mentions it every chance he gets – his interview with some of the Spore people was short on really interesting stuff that we couldn’t figure out from the movies.

So help me. Help me find a podcast or video cast that I could listen to weekly. Because I can’t believe that there’s nothing great out there.

I’m still trying to suss out the nuances in Rise of Legends. I’ve been told this is a game for RTS wonks, which I used to be but haven’t the time for now, so my initial impressions are mixed.

Since I have no intelligent commentary on the game for the moment, I’ll talk a bit about the box.

First, DVD cases should have DVDs, especially if they don’t have room for four CDs. Three were stuck on the spindle of the box and a fourth was in a paper sleeve tucked behind the manual and reference card. And the sleeve protected one wasn’t the play disc, either.

Second, I love the artwork on the box. Stylish lettering, nice drawings. But the screenshots on the back of the box are much too small. The words “real time strategy” are on the front of the box, but someone taking this box off the shelf could still have little sense of what this game looks like or how it plays. The back of the box is taken up with literary descriptions of the three factions, each one getting a tiny a little screenshot that shows next to nothing. The Vinci one is drawn from the campaign, I think.

Third, the box says that Rise of Nations was “The 2003 Game of Year”. It was? Where? The AIAS gave the PC Game of the Year title to Call of Duty. Rise of Nations didn’t even win PC strategy game of the year; that went to Command and Conquer: Generals.

Rise of Nations was Gamespot’s Game of the Year for 2003, so this must be what they are referring to. Makes sense. Gamespot is the biggest gaming site, so their choice has a certain cachet to it. And I agree with the choice, actually. But the label “2003 Game of Year” sort of suggests that this was some official decision by some official body like the Oscar people.

But it’s still a very pretty box.

Bruce Geryk gets the Matrix Games newsletter, and I don’t. If I did, I probably would have written what he did, but it would have had more insulting words in it and a vague reference to Thermopylae.

I wrote a defense of the RTS a while ago, so you can compare our notes and see that we are in agreement on this. But check out Bruce’s post first. As prone to old-fogeyism as I am sometimes, I’m not so vain as to think that my games are better than somebody else’s games, or that they are testimony to my superior intellect.

GameSetWatch has published a design blurb for the “perfect strategy game” as envisioned by IGDA co-ordinator Michael Lubker. His vision has the usual “more, more, more” approach to game design that would be a beast to implement and probably very difficult to design a clear interface for.

Lubker’s strategy vision has elements from a bunch of other games cobbled together with no real sense of how the game would actually play. You have vehicles with riders like Act of War, custom units like Galactic Civilizations II, units requiring training and equipping like many RPGs, weather like Empire Earth II…there is not any real sense of what the goals would be, let alone the setting. This is a laundry list of features and not really a game idea properly understood. Lubker’s design looks like a standard RTS in many ways (resources, vehicles, tech trees) but it’s clear how the training of workers into soldiers would interrupt the flow. I know that I hate sending peasants into buildings in the Cossacks games just so I can get a guy with a gun.

Lubker is not alone, of course. If you ask people what their perfect game would be, most think of a game that lets them do everything that they want to do. But games are really about limits. You need boundaries. Structure. Rules. And throwing a bunch of different cool things into a game design means that you need a lot of structure to make sure that everything fits together properly.

Even Will Wright’s magnum opus in the making, Spore, is structured in discreet units. You won’t always be evolving a new creature. Once you get to a certain point, you stop evolving (biologically speaking) and the game rules shift. Now you are building a city. Then a civilization. Then you do interplanetary exploration. It looks like a game of everything, but its really not; it’s a series of different games that just happen to take place in the same general setting.

GameSetWatch is looking for more descriptions of “perfect games” and you can send your vision to them at editors@gamesetwatch.com