I couldn’t sleep last night, so I stayed up and caught Hour of the Gun on one of the local TV stations. It’s a middling retelling of the Wyatt Earp story starring James Garner and Jason Robards. It has accusations of rustling, shady lawmen, a few gunfights. And through it all, I thought “Gee. This’d be a nice setting for a game.”

Lots of people think this. Saying “I want a Western game” is like saying “I want scary games.” It’s one of the basic calls of the disgruntled gamer. And it’s not like no one has tried. Last year’s Red Dead Revolover met with some praise, but wasn’t a huge hit. Gun is just around the corner.

In the strategy arena, we’re left with the mostly forgotten America, a game with a tin-ear for social niceties and game play. Set in the West as seen through 1930s Hollywood when viewed by German game makers, America was full of racial stereotypes, clunky gameplay and very imbalanced factions. We’ve been spared the once planned America 2.

I still think that a good Western strategy game can be made, but it can’t be in the RTS mold. America already did that, and had a lot of trouble keeping the game from being offensive. Not Command and Conquer: Generals offensive, but native rain dances and hard drinking banditos are probably out of any sane game design. Not that a clever designer couldn’t differentiate the factions without being offensive, but so long as we are building on what Hollywood has given us, we have to understand that we are treading on boggy ground.

So here are three Western designs that should amuse and entertain:

The Clantons – The Sims has started getting clones, but they are all pretty much the same. They are usually sexed up takes on modern life (Playboy Mansion, Singles) and offer nothing new in setting or motivation. So why not a Sims-like game set in the West? Control a little town as seen by its inhabitants, satisfy their gun-toting needs and climb the ladder of ranching success.

Gunslingers – In another total ripoff from another game, Pirates! could be redone with a Western theme. Sid Meier always said that his game was done with pirate movies in mind, so why not go all the way and make a gunslinging game? Fight shootouts in the street to redeem your honor, or join a posse to hunt down a wanted man. Accumulate wealth through ranching, mining and stagecoach robbing.

Tombstone – An Old West city-building game. Organized like the Caesar games with scenario goals and a campaign, you develop you little town(s) through the phases of Manifest Destiny. Start with a small outpost successful enough to attract settlers and finish by building the capital of a brand new state. Cities would be rated with the usual combination of lawlessness, profitability and amenities, plus you could have the US Cavalry protecting you from raiders.

Shootout – Take Laser Squad Nemesis and convert the tactical combat game to a Western theme. Have guys with shotguns and rifles and six-shooters blast away from saloons and balconies and corrals (of course). Horses could give increased movement, but decrease accuracy. If this hasn’t been done yet, it should.

So there we have it. Four perfectly reasonable – and completely derivative – models of strategy like games set in the Old West. All are perfectly reasonable and now belong to the internet.

Gaming has gone Hollywood. Just like the movie studios hold their big Oscar guns until the last couple of months of the year, the September to December period sees a lot of big game releases. The summer months are full of small gems or underappreciated titles, but, for the most part, gaming houses hope to persuade us to stuff a stocking or two with their games.

The holiday rush is four months instead of four weeks like the movie business, and this fall season will be a glorious one for strategy gamers. Some titles I am watching (all release dates are tentative and may conflict with other sites):

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Winter Assault September 20
Sims 2 – Nightlife September 14
Rome: Total War – Barbarian Invasion September 28

Three big expansions for the upcoming month. Warhammer was a tasty morsel, but not very filling. The Sims 2 and Rome are dinner table discussion in my home.

Shattered Union October 5
Black and White 2 October 5
Age of Empires III October 19
Diplomacy November 2
The Movies November 9
Civilization IV November 15
Star Wars: Empire at War December 28

In AoE, Civ and Star Wars you have three critic proof franchises. In Black and White 2 and The Movies you have two games by Peter Molyneux which could be either amazing or disappointing or both in equal measure. Shattered Union is also being released on the Xbox and Diplomacy will be the first Paradox game that looks nothing like Europa Universalis.

Even spaced out over a few months, this is a lot of strategy goodness. I’m not even including games from independent publishers like Battlefront, which has Down in Flames coming out in a couple of weeks, or Matrix Games, which lists a bunch of games as “coming soon”, which could mean anything or a bunch of other strategy titles which I am not excited about (Earth 2160, American Conquest: Divided Nation, etc.).

In the May to August 2005 window, you had no must have big name strategy games released. The OK Supreme Ruler 2010 and the very disappointing Imperial Glory were the closest things. Maybe the Codename Panzers sequel.

Yes, outside my own little strategy fiefdom you had two huge releases – Battlefield 2 and GTA: San Andreas. But this fall will also see Quake 4, Call of Duty 2, City of Villains, Serious Sam II, Fable and the already controversial 25 to Life. A fine lineup of games in demand that, if not the one-two punch of BF2 and GTA:SA, can hold its own many other games.

And I can’t buy them all in a four month period. Even if I could, I doubt I could play them all. As much as gamers of my generation love to lament that games aren’t any good anymore, each year there is no shortage of stuff for me to catch up on.

You want to know how bad it is? I haven’t even gotten around to Warcraft III.

Yeah, a lot of my time is used up looking for full time work and writing about the latest obscure Shrapnel offering in breathless prose, but I know I’m not alone. Except for those few people blessed enough to make playing games their primary source of income, no one in my generation can really afford to game the way we used to, and by cramming all these promising games into one four month period we may not get around to them until they are old news.

I guess it shouldn’t matter that they are old news, but there is something to the community sense of discovery when a major game is released and everyone plays it together.

“Have you tried x?”
“Why did they do it that way?”
“I hate this!”
“I love this!”
“Monster closets!? In Civ?”

I’d love to have the dog days of summer as full of great world conquering toys as the Christmas season is. Everyone wants to get new games at Christmas – it makes me very easy to shop for – but is it so hard for publishers to spread around the joy? I don’t think I can wait three more weeks.

You can find my interview with Doug Lowenstein, the President of the Entertainment Software Association, in October’s Computer Games Magazine. The interview itself ranged over a few topics, but the edited version in the magazine focuses on Mr. Lowenstein’s reactions to the “Hot Coffee” controversy and the possible industry response to it. The interview is in a sidebar to Steve Bauman’s thorough summary of the “crisis” and the issues it raises for game developers and gamers.

This is, by the way, my first non-review contribution to the magazine.

I haven’t discussed the Hot Coffee episode here at Portico, mostly because I had nothing to say that hadn’t already been said by a few thousand other people in a few thousand other places. I found the reactions from all sides to be a little overblown and think that a lot of the doomsayers predicting the decline of mod-friendly gaming are a little overexcited. It’s really too soon to know what the fallout from Hot Coffee will be. I doubt it will be very severe.

(This month’s CGM also has Bruce Geryk’s review of Crown of Glory. He gives it 3 stars and echoes some of my concerns about the game. 3/5 is an “above average” score at CGM, and is a little higher than I would have given it. The text of the review is spot on, though.)

Wargamer.com, the website of choice for discerning grognards, has reviewed Crown of Glory. Bill Gray liked it a lot more than I did. Admittedly, he left a lot of the decisions to the AI, including economic development and diplomatic activity. Maybe if I had made more use of the virtual viceroys I would have enjoyed it more, too. It seems a bit like cheating to just let the computer handle everything that isn’t all interesting, especially in a review. Did Gray understand the economic system before ceding control? Because a lot of it still puzzles me.

I don’t begrudge anyone who likes a game more than I do, especially a marginal title like Crown of Glory. Bill Gray knows what Bill Gray likes, I know what I like. And I wanted to like Crown of Glory more than I did. Gray doesn’t address the utility of a lot of the functions and his review is largely a six month play of the 1805 scenario. The mid and late game is really where the game breaks down, in my opinion, and I am curious as to what happened to Gray later on in the game. Six months in, he says that his people are clamoring for food but he’s happy in his victory. Let’s see him deal with the revolt factor and then proclaim a win.

Gray is right on that this game will provoke different reactions from different audiences. I wouldn’t worry about the “Arcadians” as he calls them; the glitz and glamor brigade haven’t heard of this game. I disagree that this is a game that would appeal to a mainstream wargamer; I even think that a lot of grognards will be annoyed by it, especially if they don’t trust the computer to make their decisions.

As always, though, the review is well written even if the conclusions are quite different from mine. I agree with Gray that Crown of Glory is a classy game. I just think that it needs a little more than that.

Got my first comment spam today. Something about mortgages.

Anyway, now you have to do that word recognition thing to comment. There are only a few of you doing it, but I hope this extra step doesn’t discourage you.

One more reason to move to Word Press.

A recent thread on a gaming forum I frequent turned to the question of whether there are some actions in games that you refuse to take on principle. Do you refuse to beat up the prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto? Do you always take the good options in role playing games? I posted that:

“Murdering children in Crusader Kings has always been hard for me – especially my own. Sometimes you get a dud heir and want to manipulate things so a better son climbs the succession ladder, but killing one of my own sons because he is a hair-lipped hunchbacked halfwit who steals from his playmates and doesn’t believe in God has never been an easy call.”

I almost never played the police state or the fundamentalists in Alpha Centauri; in fact, I usually headed for the Hive first, and never in peace. These things change, of course, and are never consistent. I never used to raze cities in Civilization until Civ III made corruption and waste such nuisances that the game forced me to virtual genocide. My Sims generally live happy and well balanced lives and I refuse to torture them, but what’s the fun in building a Sim City if you can’t throw a bunch of plagues and natural disasters at it?

Strategy and war games encourage behavior that we would abhor in our presidents and generals because the “people” involved are not real. We are desktop gods, smiting who and where we please. Nukes are dropped willy-nilly, civilians are legitimate targets, conflict is assumed to exist and there can only be one winner.

Still, there are things I hate doing in strategy games even though they obviously work. My Crusader Kings son is not my real son, and his death at the hands of my spymaster is assured. Why not knock him off in favor of a better son? Why don’t I treat the bastards in my court like pariahs? Still, I murder infertile wives.

Like I’ve said, I’m complicated.

Feel free to fill the comments with your own ethical lines, from across the gaming spectrum.