I am now writing a preview for a major winter release and am getting bogged down in review speak. As I write about the game, I have to resist the urge to pass judgment on it. It’s not done yet, there is still a lot of tweaking to do, I didn’t get a chance to play a single game the whole way through…all kinds of reasons for me not to say how good/bad this game will be in three or four months time.

But, as is often pointed out, previews are usually just lists of features and some glowing summary statement about how this game will cure cancer in small rats. I have some good quotes and a few screenshots provided by the developer. I have my hands on experience, which will find a way in somehow. So how do I avoid the preview praise trap and still make the article compelling reading?

I have a few things in mind, and it is certainly a nice change from the reviews that have been my bread and butter for a while now. But let no one tell you that previews are easy. If you want them to be good, they aren’t.

Barbarian Invasion, the expansion for last year’s hit Rome: Total War is now available for download at Filefront. The demo has the original game’s tutorial done with new units and two “historical” battles – one with a pseudo-historical King Arthur (following the Artorius hypothesis popularized in last year’s movie) and the other the crucial Battle of Chalons, where the forces of the Western Empire faced down the Scourge of God, Attila and his Hunnic hordes.

The demo will sway no one. If you love Rome, the new units, night battle and new formations will do nothing to change your impression of the game. If you were unimpressed by Rome, the demo shows nothing that will fix your opinion.

Strangely enough, I have neither of the expansions for the first two Total War games. I can get both cheap now, and probably should fix this oversight, but neither the Mongols nor the Vikings really grabbed me. To be honest, the late Roman Empire is not one of my favorite periods either. I love Rome with a passion that neither Shogun nor Medieval instilled in me, though, so I will certainly get Barbarian Invasion.

It’s only a few hundred megabytes, so it’s worth a look I guess. But don’t expect any revelations.

Western Civilization’s Crown of Glory is one of those games designed with people like me in mind. It is grand strategy set in a compelling historical period. It has numerous diplomatic options, detailed battles and a basic economic system that doesn’t require lots of micromanagement. It keeps its eye on the big picture and wants players to do the same.

The original design document for this Napoleonic simulation must have been huge. Most projects get trimmed down over the course of development, and Crown of Glory has been in development for six or seven years. And it’s still huge. You play as one of the major powers of Europe in one of four historical settings. In 1792, France has to count on a miracle as the crowned heads of Europe decide to gang up on the fledgling republic. In 1805, Napoleon is creaming every army sent against him, but he has a lot of enemies. Each setting has new challenges for each country.

For the player, the biggest challenge will be trying to understand the interface. Crown of Glory shows its age in the way that information is presented. All of the information you need is there, but it can be hard to find at times and you are never really sure what information you need in a given situation.

There is so much in Crown of Glory that I sometimes had to pause to ask if it was even needed. Take the 1805 setting. The priority for everyone fighting France is to smack Napoleon down ASAP. Therefore, it makes little sense to invest in infrastructure. The diplomatic options are many and varied, but I never saw much point to asking for a Royal Wedding or Feudal Reform – they seem to be little more than fancy names for bribes. Diplomats have almost a dozen separate activities, but are much less effective than a big army.

Napoleon reportedly said, “God is on the side with the bigger battalions” and that is very much reflected in this game. A well-led smaller force can win if it has a technological advantage, but it can’t fight off larger forces for ever.

This is especially true in the “detailed battle” option. If two large armies encounter each other, the player has the option of dropping to a hex-map wargame where he/she controls the battle. It plays out very slowly – it’s almost like the designers thought that if you had the patience for a grand strategy game, they could test you further with two hour battles with disorganized units, terrain bonuses, flanking, movement, rallying…all the stuff that you usually get in a wargame. This shift from large strategy to battle control works in games like Knights of Honor or the Total War series because the battles themselves play out pretty quickly. If you could separate the wargame component and make it a distinct MP option, you could justify its inclusion. As it now stands, it’s unnecessary and will rarely – if ever – be used.

Even the game designers must recognize that there is a lot of stuff in the game that you don’t really need. It comes with two PDF manuals – the long one with all the details (and some errors) and a “tutorial” manual that often tells you not to worry about one thing or another.

In MP, there are a lot of bugs that should have been caught. Whoever has the final turn in a round sometimes gets to make all kinds of important decisions for other players. In one game, I got to choose all the tech advances for my opponent. It’s a good thing I’m a nice guy. There are a lot of exploits available in the diplomatic game – even in single player – that make house rules important in many cases. The AI easily forgets slights and can be bribed pretty easily to forget important strategic alliances in favor of being your thrall.

Crown of Glory, like the Little Corporal, has ambition bigger than its execution. It tries to capture the flavor of diplomacy and war fighting in the early 19th century but it never really holds you as a game. As the game progresses, you will sometimes feel like you are in the middle of a long retreat from Moscow, constantly asking if you are near the end of the journey. It is an average single player game at best, and mostly broken in multiplayer. Some of its problems can be fixed with patch, but others required someone to prune a feature or three at some point in the development process.

Today’s Washington Post has a great story about a free video game academy in Washington DC. Targeting the city’s African American and Latino youth, the organizers aim to get more of this video gaming demographic interested in the design and programming of games.

The story quotes a survey done by the IGDA that highlights the racial and gender imbalances in the game development field. In a survey of 2000 industry workers, only 2.5 per cent were identified as black and 3.5 per cent as Latino. Among male game players, blacks and Latinos are 18 and 17 per cent, respectively. (Only 1 out of 8 development workers are women, by the way.)

The fact that the Urban Video Game Academy is free really sets it apart from the high-cost summer gaming camps that many universities and technical schools run. The high cost of game development software means that many low and middle income families can’t encourage their technically inclined children to experiment on their own time. This month-long academy has already been in Baltimore and will be moving on to Atlanta soon.

The article notes that minority women are almost totally absent and that black and Latino males are either athletes or gangsters. White protagonists run the gamut from space marine to serial killer to little Italian plumber. Even in role-playing games, the default skin tones for most races is a rosy or pinkish hue – orcs and drow seem to be the only exceptions.

Will a more diverse group of developers lead to more diverse portrayals of heretofore underrepresented populations? Maybe. The industry has a lot of tropes and cliches that are targeted at the large suburban male gaming population, and so many traditions will die hard. The profit margins for major games are much tighter than those of movies or television – both of which have strong African American content, but still mostly segregated from the mainstream.

It certainly can’t hurt to have more blacks and Hispanics in the industry – or in gaming journalism for that matter. While the debate over the representation of women in games has been raging for years, the race question has been avoided for the most part. The Asian American population is well represented in both the press and development sides of the equation, perhaps obscuring the fact that the industry is not as diverse as its audience is.

The latest edition of the gaming blog round-up The Carnival of Gamers is up at Unfettered Blather.

Nothing from me this time around, but I’ll make the next one.

That’s the question asked by consultant Hugh Bowen over at NextGen. In a survey of over 500 gamers, about a third suggested that they found games to be an emotionally compelling medium. He seemed to accept a very wide definition of “emotion” since both “competitveness” and “frustration” appear in the list. This probably explains why 39 per cent of gamers thought that “fighting games” were emotionally powerful.

Though the study is interesting in many ways, it really does very little to help clarify the question of what makes a game emotionally provocative.

While playing Rome over the weekend, I had my own personal Metaurus. My Carthaginian invasion of Italy was stalling and I needed major reinforcements to finish the thing. So I built a huge army in Carthage and decided to sail it to Rome to meet the armies already in the vicinity. I had naval superiority, but a blitzkrieg of Julian and Scipionic fleets ambushed my navy and wiped out the entire reinforcement force.

Did I react emotionally? You’re damned right I did. A huge investment in time and manpower was eliminated through my own foolishness – an underpowered fleet and no escort. These are the moments that make strategy games great; unexpected failure and determination to play through. Never reload. Well, hardly ever.

But frustration and a desire to overcome are native to all games. I get pretty jazzed up playing Literati too, though I’d hardly describe it as an emotional experience. If we want to understand what in a game makes us laugh and cry, or identify with the electronic images in front of us, it doesn’t help to consider the usual frustration of competition or adrenaline pumping of shooters as the emotional equivalent of the death of Aerith in Final Fantasy VII.

The fact that gamers at large ranked the hobby low in the list of emotionally powerful media shows that most of them think that there is a qualitative difference here, too. Movies, music and books all trumped games though none have that competitive element and I’ve never been frustrated by a book.

To answer Mr. Bowen’s question, yes, games make me cry. But only on the inside. And mostly when it’s my fault.