My review of the budget indie RTS Trash is now up at DIYGames.

It’s games like Trash that make reviewing indies such a trial. It’s only twenty dollars, so it’s pocket change compared to most games. It’s not as good as any large commercial RTS, and for obvious reasons. Money can’t buy you a perfect game, but it buy you a lot of almost good-ness. Trash is a very good indie RTS.

So do you evaluate it based on its “objective” qualities, comparing it to all other RTS on the market and available to consumers, or do you just compare it to all other games with similar budgets and resources? Should an indie review site be like the minor leagues, pushing and promoting small developers through encouragement or should it be an advocate for the consumer – twenty dollars is almost half of a AAA title that will almost certainly have more replay and more options?

I settled on 3.5 stars because Trash is good for what it is – an old school RTS made on the cheap with a sense of style. But it wasn’t an easy call.

Let me preface this by saying that I am really digging Civ 4. I still need to get a handle on the new way that specialists are handled (I never used them much before) but for the most part the changes are for the better.

And I don’t want to talk too much about the now widely documented technical issues. I’ve experienced slowdowns, some memory leaks and other technical issues but no crashes to desktop and I got the thing to install the first time. If it doesn’t tell me that it detected DirectX 9.0c, I let it install. I trust the little man in my computer to know what he’s doing.

But:

1. Why is Disk 2 labelled the Play Disk when it is not the Play Disk?
2. Why am I known as “VALUE 765G-654” whenever I forget to enter my my own name as a Civ leader?
3. Why do all the Wonder Movies suck? They are all the same thing – they show the building being built and then things are placed around it.
4. Why do the games seem so much faster than in other version? I liked Civ games that would go on for seven hours. Not many of those now.
5. Why does the Civilopedia just show pictures of the items and not their names until you mouse over them? Am I supposed to instantly know a galleon icon from a caravel? And the knight is just a dude with a sword. How can I even tell he is mounted?

Stay tuned for comments as they come up. I’m trying to set up a MP game tonight so expect an after action report once my ass is kicked.

Civilization IV was waiting for me when I got home today. Waiting out in the rain, nonetheless. Stupid UPS.

And I have to get up at 5:00 am tomorrow morning.

There is no justice.

Sometimes you read a post and it simmers in your brain for a bit. Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog does that to me on a semi-regular basis. As hi-falutin as some of my talk gets, he’s all into storytelling, ludology and all that other game design stuff in a much more serious and reflective way than I am. Read his blog thoroughly and you’ll see that, like me most of the time, he’s often just throwing stuff into the public space trying to come to grips with what he really thinks.

That’s why I read him.

His recent posts on myth and games (here and here) got me thinking about what the hell he was talking about. He’s obviously not interested in games that tell stories about familiar myths (like the King’s Quest games) or that include mythic ornamentation (like Age of Mythology). He’s interested in games that can tell transformative stories, even if they merely ape the conventions of the hero’s journey. He cites Max Payne as an example of part of what he is getting at, though he concedes that its story is linear and confined, which he seems to think is not mythic.

As a strategy gamer, I feel myth all around me. Gather round children and hear the tale of my epic rivalry with Carthage in Civilization II and how a fortified border led to an arms race and the inevitable war. Or of how an aged general was called out retirement to fight one last battle against a dangerous Carthaginian, won the battle and then died on the next turn in Rome: Total War.

Because most strategy games are entirely devoid of plot, we assign meaning to things that are inherently meaningless. I know people who developed a serious hate for Genghis Khan and the Mongols in Civ 2 even though they were no more cunning or ruthless than any of the other possible opponents. X-Com persuaded you that the soldiers fighting for you were people as they developed skills and specialties.

I guess that part of the reason that RTS story-based campaigns are mostly unsatisfying is that they lack that player-created narrative. And the beauty of a RTS in MP is that each player has their own narrative.

The other night, I engaged a very skilled opponent in a skirmish match of Age of Empires III. This was our third game – the first two had ended in very quick and brutal slaughters. This one, in his opinion, seemed like a real back and forth match. We fought over a trading post for a very long time, taking turns using it to produce Comanche warriors to aid the fight.

I knew differently.

What he was seeing as a hard fought contest between near equals, I knew was not. Not just because he is very, very good, but because I knew that I had aged up too quickly. I had no reserves to back up any real surge and no cavalry to compete with his. (I always neglect cavalry for some reason…) I had no real breathing space and any push by my troops stretched my resources to the limit.

But how glorious that battle was. It was a hard fought contest in the sense that many soldiers died and it lasted much longer than either of the previous matches. I’m sure he was thrilled that the contest was as “close” as it was even though I knew I was a paper tiger.

Both of us saw the same game but from different sides. Even though I lost, my opponent had crafted this narrative of a war where I “almost had him.” My narrative was of the plucky underdog hanging on until the inevitable swarm of hussars arrived.

That, my friends, is myth making.

2k Games and PopTop Software have teamed up on this US Civil War game with a twist. There are Confederates, but they have tanks and planes. After a nuclear weapon wipes out the divisive American government, the country splits apart. Europe intervenes to hold on to the capital region, but the rest of the regions set up their own countries with their own armies and aspire to reunite the country by force.

The game is all about wars and rumors of wars. No diplomacy, no trade, minimal economy. You are limited to a single attack per turn, but any troops you use in your attack can’t be used in any defense that turn. So if you send everything you have in a stab at conquest, you will lose one or two territories because you didn’t choose wisely.

So far I’m liking it. It has the beer and pretzel wargame feel to it that means it should translate well to the Xbox (yeah, I know. A wargame on a console.) Air power is appropriately modelled and anti-aircraft fire can really mess up your plan. The AI seems competent if not brilliant. You would think that it would make better use of choke points than it does, or take out bridges with more regularity.

More opinions as they become fully formed.

Slitherine’s latest ancient warfare game now has a demo. 240 megabytes of spear-chucking goodness.

So far so good. The campaign battles have the typical Slitherine “hands-off” approach to command except now you can give a few orders if your command bar is full. The battle set-up screen seems little different from the one in Spartan. It remains to be seen if the battle-after-battle campaign will have any of the pull that the strategy game of its immediate cousin Rome: Total War does. (Slitherine’s serious conquer-the-world campaign is being saved for the next Legion game.)

Simple enough game. The battles are over much more quickly than the battles in Rome, but that might change with the full version and there are more troops on the ground.