I don’t want this place to become a Firaxis fanboy zone, but there is an interesting interview with Sid Meier on Gamespy. He went to GenCon to check out the games there and had some interesting things to say about the game industry in general.

Meier confirms that Firaxis is going to start designing more games for the console. Though the Pirates! transition seems to have been relatively smooth, Meier recognizes that most console games require the player to be able to just jump in and do stuff. Pirates! is that kind of game, and, I think, so is Civ. There is, in fact, no reason that a TBS like Civ couldn’t be done for a console.

Meier’s statement that board games and video games are competing for the same audience seems a little out of date. When video gaming was a niche hobby, there was probably a lot of overlap in the audiences; both have this geek aura that also explains the dominance of comic book/sci-fi nerds in both camps. I was never really heavy into serious board gaming, mostly because of my birthplace and roots – neither of which supported the kind of frivolity that 60 dollar board games represented.

The video game audience has changed to the point where people need to have hexes explained to them, and to the point where Settlers of Catan is not common knowledge. It is nice to hear that his son (who is as good as his father at Civ IV) is being raised with proper geek cred, including an interest in RPGs, but I think that he is a rarer case than he would have been five or ten years ago.

The whole thing does make me want to check out GenCon next year.

Gamespot has an excellent interview with Firaxis’s Barry Caudill on some of the changes coming in Civilization IV. My own preview will be coming out in print in a few weeks, so I’ll save most of my comments until it is published and you’ve all had a chance to read it. For now, my opinions are still on the CGM dime.

One part of the interview did stand out as unusual. In a discussion of the new and improved combat model, Caudill said:

“The main change is that we brought back a system similar to firepower from Civ II. That system was a bit too complex and many people struggled to understand it; so, like many other things in Civ IV, we decided to streamline the process.”

How dumb do you have to be to find the combat system in Civilization “too complex”? In Civ II, units had hitpoints and firepower and the combat result was a function of those, taking into account fortification, terrain and veteran status. By and large, new tech beat old tech in most cases, so you didn’t have to be a math whiz to know that your archers would have some trouble taking out that musketeer fortified on a mountain. The manual even had a nice little example and a formula.

Have we gotten to the point where even casual strategy gamers want to know the precise odds before they take an action?

Apparently so. Civilization IV lets you know what the fortification bonus for your unit is. It lets you know what the odds of victory are. It lets you add +1 or +2 bonuses here and there to improve your chances.

Generally, openness is good in a game. Players shouldn’t stumble around wasting units because they don’t know what will happen. But Civ is one of the most intuitive games around. Even the much celebrated “phalanx beats battleship” experience was a once or twice a game thing – and no one made you attack that mountain phalanx. Generally, modern trumped ancient with some confusion in the middle stages.

Fortunately, Civ IV incorporates all this new information in a very user friendly and unobtrusive manner. But more on that later.

I’m starting to feel a little left out.

I live in a console free environment, mostly because I don’t have enough entertainment hours to play all the PC games I love or enough entertainment dollars to really justify more games anyway. There’s also the issue of being not sure what console to pick (and Xbox so I can play Jade Empire? A PS2 so I can play Romance of the Three Kingdoms? A Gamecube so that at least one person in my circle of friends has one?).

Plus, strategy games are making tentative steps onto the console mat. Shattered Union will be released on the Xbox and introduce a whole new audience to the beauty of the hex map.

And now there’s the Next Generation crap.

I understand passion for gaming, but passion for hardware is beyond my ken. Fans of all the systems are slavering over the tiniest hints about the Xbox 360 or the PS3 or the Revolution. You get the usual concomitant declarations that, this time, PC Gaming is finished or that we’ve been through all this before or that there aren’t any titles worth getting excited over, yet.

And I completely don’t care.

Here we have a major gaming industry moment coming up and I will have no position on it whatsoever. What’s the point of blogging if I can’t hold forth on why one console is clearly superior? Or, like many blogs, not state my opinion on this issue of importance, but skew all my commentary and links to one side or the other.

The good news for me is that the new machines should drive the old ones down in price and I can begin to catch up on a few years of gaming. But, regretfully, I will sit the Next Generation out for now.

As I browsed my collection last night, I thought it would be fun to reinstall Trade Empires. This historical business sim from Frog City via Eidos never grabbed me, but I hadn’t played a business sim in a while and just wanted to control some camels.

It still doesn’t grab me and will probably be off the hard drive by tonight. I have to install some Falklands War thing, anyway.

For a while I wondered whether it was the lack of real combat in the game. The multi-family scenarios aren’t especially cut-throat. The AI doesn’t seem to have much interest in cornering the ivory market and there are always lots of open towns that will buy my goods. The difficulty level for scenarios seems based on little more than how far apart the resources are.

The Railroad Tycoon games, on the other hand, are business sims with bite. Machiavelli/Merchant Prince, too. In the former you have aggressive rivals who think nothing of buying up any free stock and forcing you into early retirement – without a Golden Parachute, to boot. The latter had mercenaries you could hire to force open recalcitrant towns. You could murder rival politicians.

Most of the lighter Tycoon fair doesn’t thrill me. Your only real opposition is the ornery crowd of consumers who are never happy. In short, I need my business sims to play like wargames. Everything must be to the death.

I suppose this is a flaw in my character, or another gaming blindspot of mine. The accumulation of wealth for the sake of wealth means nothing to me. I need to use that wealth to crush people under my foot.

Except in city-builders, where I prefer the whole sandbox thing with no goals or necessary end state.

I’m complicated.

History is complicated, but, if we are going to have historical strategy games, it has to be grappled with in one way or another. Game designers always say that when history and fun collide, that fun will win. This is not an unreasonable statement, but it does leave open the question of which sacrifices are made and for what reasons. The game design approach to history can take three forms – dismissal, simplification and embrace. [Read more →]

PureSim Baseball 2005 has been signed by strategy clearing house Matrix Games. You can download a fully functional shareware version of PSB 2005 from the PureSim site. It gives you thirty activations before it stops working.

I love baseball sims. The action sports games don’t impress me very much, but give me a good baseball management sim and I’ll be happy for months. Baseball sims get me through those long winter months when the diamonds are quiet and, more importantly, let me relive the days of my youth when we didn’t worry about steroids. Yeah, there was cocaine, but the extent of its use didn’t break for a few years.

I prefer the Out of the Park Baseball series to PureSim. It’s a little more intuitive and has the fine tuning that you would expect from a series that is now going on its seventh version. Both allow you to import historical seasons from the Lahman Baseball Database, but I was less satisfied with PureSim’s replay of the 1982 season (the first I followed really closely) because Andre Dawson hadn’t hit a single home run by the end of April. That wasn’t my Hawk.

PS2005 is available for $29.95. The latest version of OOTP (6.12) is ten dollars less, though the expansion pack is another ten, wiping out the savings.