Ask anyone who knows me and the adjective “Patient” will likely be one of the top five that they use. It’s mostly accurate, too. I am patient with people to a fault and will forgive many faults. I don’t hold grudges, don’t get angry at service people, etc.

But when it comes to games, I find myself getting more and more impatient with poor interfaces. The increasing power in computers has meant that designers can put more and more information in easily accessible places so that there are few mysteries about how you do anything in a game.

But now that I am playing Crown of Glory, which has been in development since the late 90s, I find myself getting irritated with the lack of clear information sheets, absence of most rollover tooltips, menus on top of menus on top of menus….

The thing is, I never used to be like this. I used to love plumbing the depths of menus until I could fine tune my economy or military as I liked. The epithet “spreadsheet game” has likely been around as long as there have been strategy games, but I didn’t mind it all that much.

I’ve been spoiled, of course. There are more games out there for me to play and less time for me to play them all so I lean towards stuff that either gets me up to speed very quickly or just reuses mechanics from title to title. There must be left select and right move, the right mouse button should be alternately used for information panels, there should be graphic overlays to reveal territory attributes, and lots of icons.

Interface has become a major factor for me in how much enjoyment I get out of a game. But technology has also allowed designers to put more stuff into a game, so my plea for more intuitive interfaces comes head-to-head with a push to make deeper and deeper strategy games. Sometimes the struggle results in a tasty nut that resists cracking (like Crown of Glory) but as often it ends up being a conflict between my “need to know” side and my “not that badly side” (like Supreme Ruler 2010).

The sad consequence of this is that I find myself drawn more and more towards real-time strategy resource harvesting games. There is a default interface that everyone uses, what you see is generally what you get and the goals are pretty obvious. It helps that there are a lot of good RTS games out there and that this similarity of interface does not mean that every game ends up feeling exactly the same.

But the deep and rich strategy and wargames that I love so much require more study than I find myself willing to invest these days. (Of course, if the title is for a review, I put in the time. It ends up being less than minimum wage, if I get paid at all, but there is a professionalism to this sort of thing.)

Being the kindly person I am, I will be patient with myself and see myself through this long, dark teatime of the soul. Somehow I will figure out the relative importance of diplomats in Crown of Glory and be able to keep my struggling French economy going. But it sure could use a tutorial. Or big flashing arrows.

I installed Western Civilization Software’s Crown of Glory(published by Matrix Games) yesterday afternoon, and, as usual, jumped in without reading the manual. I was impressed that I could figure out as much as I could without perusing the 90+ page PDF document, but there is a lot that is pretty confusing even after looking it over.

The economic system could use a better interface (and maybe a couple of overview screens) and some rollover tool-tips. The lack of the latter is a constant complaint of mine, especially when they are so easy to do in this day and age.

The game itself is kind of like Europa Universalis: Total War. Everything is about the conflict and the battles. Unlike EU, diplomacy depends on beating people up and showing what a big dog you are, and forcing elaborate treaties on defeated opponents is part of the fun. Like the Total War series, the grand strategy game is pretty basic but it tends towards the Byzantine more through interface issues than through the things that need doing.

I hope to play some PBEM games this coming week. Stay tuned for further impressions and, if I find a publisher, an official review.

G4’s annual award show has announced its nominees. The voice performance categories are – as usual – dominated by B-list celebrities instead of by the everyday voice actors who bring a lot of character to everything they do without breaking the bank. Sure, it could be the only time that Brooke Burke ever wins anything, but there’s a principle here.

My main grievance is with the total absence of any strategy games whatsoever. There is no strategy game category and there are zero nominees in any of the others.

Could it be that the awards are for console games only? The presence of World of Warcraft and City of Heroes would lead you to think that PC Games are invited to the party. But since they are the only PC exclusive titles there, apparently not.

The Entertainment Software Association reports that strategy games are by far the most popular genre on the PC. They almost triple the share of consumers that role-playing games do. Of course, strategy games are almost completely absent on the console scene, though older strategy titles are finding their way onto handhelds.

So, no Rome: Total War. No Sims 2.

The PC’s declining share of the market has led to some disrespect from G4 – serious disrespect. I can think of a half-dozen PC games released in their eligibility window that deserve to be on that list. But PC games are apparently not cool or hip or edgy or whatever. Of course, it was the same last year, but with the MMO world showing that there are still cool things that you can’t do in front of your TV, you would think that G4 would think outside the console box.

Of course, this is the same network that brings you video vixens and lets on air personalities moderate console product launches. But it is also the televised voice of gaming. And except for Screen Savers, there’s not a lot of computer stuff going on.

Ever wanted to play a game based on Shakespeare? How about Melville?

Well now you can! ” Great Books Games aims to develop gaming franchises centered about rich stories contained in the Great Books.” And they will start with Dante’s Inferno.

This isn’t real, but it should be. A game based on Red Badge of Courage? Don’t we have that with Sid Meier’s Gettysburg? How would you capture Hamlet in a game? It’s like a grand love letter to overambitious game designers around the world.

I love how they trumpet the educational value: “GBG games will have great educational value: as long as kids/teens are shooting/flying/racing, why not expose them to classical art and literature?”

Hilarious.

I can imagine the Inferno game now.

“YOU ARE IN A ROOM OF RIGHTEOUS PAGANS. WILL YOU SMITE THEM?” YES
“SORRY. THEY ARE ALREADY DEAD.”

If they borrow from Daikatana, you’ll probably get killed if Virgil gets stuck on a doorway. And what exactly will you be doing here? I know I asked for religion in games, but medieval Catholicism isn’t quite what I expected.

(Thanks to Josh over at Cathode Tan.)

This list at Review Outpost suggests that the next six weeks will be pretty bare for PC Games in general and strategy games in particular. In August we get Stalingrad and Clan Wars as well as a new tycoon game. Battlestations: Midway is billed as a strategy game, but most of the screens seem very action oriented. After August, things pick up. But it could be a dry summer.

Thanks to Matrix Games and Shrapnel Gmaes, though, there are other options.

Crown of Glory has just gone gold. It is the first of three Napoleonic themed games that Matrix has in the hopper, with Empires at Arms and Black Power Wars. Crown of Glory will be officially released by the end of next week, but no dates on the others.

Shrapnel looks to be having a busy summer. The Falkland Wars: 1982 is now shipping. Based on the Armored Task Force engine/ruleset, it could be as impenetrable as Raging Tiger is to me. But the fierce infantry combat of that recent war should make the game a must have for serious modern warsimmers. Salvo has gone gold; it’s another Age of Sail type game that seems like it will sacrifice graphic beauty for historical options. A fantasy strategy game called Land of Legends is targeted for release next month, as is the next segment in the Horse & Musket series. The latter title, dubbed Prussia’s Glory, looks like it will cover much of the same ground as Dragoon did.

The big problem for these indie online publishing houses is getting the word out. Though Wargamer can be counted on to review almost every single major release from both Matrix and Shrapnel, most publications skip the coverage altogether. Dragoon has four reviews listed on Gamerankings. Matrix’s two Tin Soldiers games do better but no review from Gamespot or Gamespy and none from Computer Gaming World. IGN reviewed the Caesar variant, but not the other. (There may be magazine reviews of the Caesar game in the hopper; PCGamer reviewed the Alexander one.)

So if you rely on official release dates from online sources, you could miss some stuff. Gamespot has a listing for Salvo, but not Land of Legends or Falklands War. Gamespy has Falklands but not Salvo or Land of Legends. Both have listings for Crown of Glory.

Most serious strategy gamers know about both Matrix and Shrapnel. Both are important to the indie strategy community, and, like strategy publishers since time immemorial have published as many cubic zirconiums as they have diamonds.

Thanks to them, I might be able to get through the summer with a stream of worlds, old and new, to conquer.