With no major strategy releases due by the end of the month, this is as good a time as any to unveil my picks for the three top strategy games so far in 2005. It has been a pretty uninspiring start to the year, with all the big goodies waiting until the fall and winter.

Two of the big yawns of the year were Empire Earth II, a mediocre seen-it-all-before RTS, and, apparently, Imperial Glory. I haven’t played IG yet, so it wouldn’t make my list anyway, but the reviews have persuaded me to wait a little. You’ll get more from me on it when the time is right and I have devoted some time to it. Shame, because I really liked the demo.

The rules are simple – it has to have been released in 2005 and I must have played it. It also has to be a strategy or war game.

Number 3: Bull Run: Take Command 1861 (MadMinute Games/Activision Value) – If this isn’t the best budget strategy/war game in five years, I’m hard pressed to think what else could be. It rewards patience and moves the player from the omnipotent commander to just another officer. You stumble in the dark a little, have encounters almost by accident and somehow a big battle happens – sometimes. The interface isn’t great and it is much too easy to get lost. The beautiful scenery looks out of place with the blobby soldiers and choppy animation. But this is one great battle game that has me anxiously anticipating their next game.

Number 2: Act of War: Direct Action (Eugen Systems/Atari) – Who’d have thunk it? A stylish B-movie with lots of things that blow up real good as well as an excellent game. The skirmish mode has grown on me, but I still think the real strength of this game is its campaign missions. Leaving aside the hammy acting and politics, the city battles are tense and exciting. Each side’s best units can really destroy a world, so much of the skirmish game is a rush to get there, but I can think of no game which brings Bruckheimer to life the way that Act of War does.

Number 1: Darwinia (Introversion) – Small, charming, a little repetitive but probably the most tightly designed and immersive strategy game out there so far this year. I sometimes wonder how much of the design is due to practical constraints (you can only have so many “programs” running at once) and how much of it is derived from the setting (a computer world that looks like virtual fantasies from 15 years ago). There is no complicated research tree, and, yes, a lot of the game’s appeal comes from the style of the art. But art and function meld beautifully here. I gave it 5 stars over at DIYGames, and I don’t regret a single one.

Wow. No sequels. No remakes. Two indies.

Somehow I think my end of year list will have all sequels and remakes from major players – this is going to be a huge Xmas for strategy gamers. But pick up each of these three games before the giants return to the field.

I’ve spent the last few days working on my book and finishing up a review for CGM, so I haven’t been updating here. I notice people keep coming to read, so I feel kind of guilty every time that there isn’t anything new.

What gaming I have been doing has been returning to a comfortable old friend.

What is it about Civilization that keeps me coming back? If you spend a lot of time on message boards (and I do), you would get the impression that Civ 3 was disaster of epic proportions – it has cheating AI, ridiculous resource requirements, broken diplomacy and a predictable path every game out.

All of this is true, but it works anyway. The Conquests expansion is probably one of the most remarkably excellent expansion packs in recent memory and makes a very good game nearly perfect – in spite of all the obvious criticisms.

I tend to play on Warlord or Regent level – not the higher levels – because the AI cheating is less noticeable and I can enjoy the game at its best. Civ is about the exploration and the conquest. Finding new resources, building the perfect city, making all quake before you. Though I can win on the higher levels, they are less fun – largely because the AI shuts me out of the diplomatic horse-trading. And when an entire aspect of the game design is closed to you, there isn’t a lot of incentive to keep going.

With the Conquests expansion, you can play one of the historic scenarios they have or you can play an ordinary Civ game with one of the custom unit sets for the game. The new cultures are OK and the new units aren’t great (though I love the Numidian Mercenary unit), but the new wonders and automation shortcuts improve things noticeably.

Civilization IV is still many months off, and you can find a lot of news about it on your favorite gaming sites. I don’t like the look of it very much, though the design ideas seem to be going in the right direction. With Civ3 still entertaining me, I can wait.

The Gamer’s Quarter has recently made its second issue available. It’s a free download and a long PDF – over 100 pages – full of nice pictures, mediocre cartoons and lots of text. This is a New Games Journalism magazine.

Which apparently amounts to talking about games that no one plays any more.

I kid, but a lot of the analysis is pretty focused on memories of games that are long past. So it isn’t journalism so much as it is criticism, but I think the writers would admit to that. This is about gaming like the New York Review of Books is about literature.

Only the NY Review mostly talks about books that people can buy. Most of this magazine is about stuff that is either barely remembered or completely inaccessible.

There is an interesting article in “defense” of New Games Journalism that, I think, goes too far in attacking “Old Games Journalism”, but it is probably designed to ruffle feathers. Calling reviewers who get free games or industry access “pets” is as silly as calling Ben Brantley a pet of Broadway because he gets to see the shows for free. There is certainly a difference between most journalism and entertainment media (’cause that’s what we are), but credibility depends on more than the fact that reviewers and previewers can get early access to bits and bytes. Because, unlike political journalists or the guy covering city hall, when an entertainment reviewer praises a piece of crap, the gamers know it. Too bad more of them don’t pay attention to bylines.

Anyway, this magazine is not a bad thing. If people want to understand gaming as a cultural and social phenomenon, they have to move beyond the preview/review/cheats format that typifies game writing. And I think that gaming blogs and dedicated zines like The Gamers’s Quarter are doing this.

But the magazine has also confirmed in my mind the lack of commercial appeal for this sort of thing. The thing about gamers is that they don’t take their hobby all that seriously. (I loved the GQ article on “Pongism” because it was so irreverent.) But media criticism does, to some extent, require that you take a long hard look at your medium. Plus, gamers who read magazines are also the type who tell you that you are a pompous ass on the Internet.

I would love for The Gamer’s Quarter to take on some more current games or at least place more of the nostalgia in a context that young gamers can understand. I’ve been at this a while – I get where they are coming from. But just as this discussion of summer movies posits a time when blockbusters did not rule the earth, good criticism should bring past and present together.

I will keep reading, though.

Here’s the 20 best selling games for the week ending June 4.

1) Guild Wars – NCsoft
2) World Of Warcraft – Vivendi Universal
3) Star Wars Galaxies: The Total Experience – LucasArts
4) The Sims 2 – Electronic Arts
5) The Sims 2 University Expansion Pack – Electronic Arts
6) Half-Life 2 – Vivendi Universal
7) Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords – LucasArts
8) Empire Earth 2 – Vivendi Universal
9) Lego Star Wars – Eidos
10) Stronghold 2 – 2K Games
11) Zoo Tycoon 2 – Microsoft
12) Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 – Atari
13) Sid Meier’s Pirates – Atari
14) Rome: Total War – Activision
15) Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: Century Of Flight – Microsoft
16) The Sims Deluxe – Electronic Arts
17) Warcraft III Battle Chest – Vivendi Universal
18) Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic – LucasArts
19) Doom 3 – Activision
20) Sim City 4 Deluxe – Electronic Arts

The most surprising thing is that three MMOs rule the list. Anyone who says that a game has to have single player to be successful are clearly behind the curve. And it’s nice to see Guild Wars on top for a change.

What surprised me was the continuing strength of sims and strategy games. Three Sims titles, Rome, Sim City 4, Stronghold 2, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Zoo Tycoon 2, the Warcraft III set and, shockingly, Empire Earth 2. Ten of the twenty – half – are strategy or strategy lite games. None of them are available on a console.

A more worrying note: Excepting Guild Wars, all the titles on the list are sequels, remakes, franchise knockoffs or games using licensed properties. This is not that different from any console list, which will usually have a good proportion of sequels or franchise titles, but it is certainly harder to point to AAA PC games with no progenitor than it is to point to God of War, Mercenaries or Katmari Damacy – all of which will likely become franchises.

So, everything old is new again.

In keeping with my obsession for ancient history (sorry, WW2 buffs – Panzers just don’t do a lot for me), I want to introduce my readers to a small European project that has me really excited.

Imperium: Rise of Rome is a tiny operation. And it has been in development for a couple of years now. But it could be everything that Pax Romana should have been but wasn’t. The lead designer, Michael Akinde, has a deep interest in ancient history and has made army sets for the Hoplites card game.

I was involved in testing an early version of the battle system, and it was pretty rudimentary. But it was user friendly and clearly on its way to something better.

Like Pax Romana, Imperium will have the Roman player deal with the vagaries of Republican government, but Akinde has wisely chosen not to make the player do this every year. This is ahistorical, for sure, but it is an intelligent concession to a player’s desire to deal with those sorts of things every few years instead of being a constant pressure on decision making.

Akinde is hoping to give the Romans a different feel from the merchant oligarchy of Carthage or the Successor Monarchies of the Hellenistic World. Game characters will have certain expectations and traits that will affect how well they respond to player orders or offers.

It remains to be seen how much of this ambitious design can actually be implemented. As progress has been made, the revealed design has become clearer and less pie-in-the-sky. I don’t often champion games that haven’t been finished yet, but, as a champion of independent strategy games, I couldn’t let this project remain undiscovered.