I love the anticipation part of gaming. Waiting for the game, consuming all the news, checking forums and screenshots. All this stuff is what separates the serious gamer from his casual friends.

Sometimes things take a long time, though, and my attention is drawn to a shiny new bauble. Or disappointing news comes out and the zeal wavers.

Take Legion: Arena for instance. I had expected this to be released this spring, but it now looks like fall is more likely. With Legion II also in development, the late release of Legion: Arena makes it more likely that Slitherine will miss the Xmas target for its grand strategy game.

And then you are hit with the news that Legion: Arena will only come with Romans and Gauls and that there are no immediate plans to expand the army list.

I understand the reasons, but I don’t have to like them. Yes, lots of wargames are released with limited army lists, but the idea of improving my Roman army by beating on the same hapless barbarians time and again isn’t exactly inspiring. The “hundreds of missions” sounds great, but if the only reward for beating back Helvetians is that you get to beat back more Belgae, it will be hard to keep going.

Legion: Arena has the potential to be one of the most original and creative wargames out there (obvious similarities in look to Rome aside) but the army customization will only be a huge draw if you get to customize more than just some Roman shields.

The Mcneils are champion tabletop wargamers who could put their DBA/DBM skills to use in making that world of historic gaming alive in all its variety. Instead, new armies will depend on the reception of Legion: Arena. A practical decision, but still disappointing.

Ron Gilbert has an interesting post (leading to interesting comments) over at Grumpy Gamer.

The gist of it is that complexity and immersion – hallmarks of games designed for the hardcore audience – are not the way to go if you want to bring in the casual gamer.

It brings to mind a conversation I had with a casual gaming colleague. A World War II buff, I recommended Hearts of Iron II to him. He’s a smart guy (though lots of idiots play Hearts of Iron) and Paradox did a great job making the interface and manual user friendly. Recent patches (or “enhancements” as Paradox has taken to calling them in an Orwellian twist) have made it a better game in some ways, though the focus on finding more portraits is misplaced. But I digress.

I showed him my review in CGM and told him a bit about the game. The first question he asked, though, was “Is this one of those games that takes four hours to play?” I meekly told him that, yes, four hours would be a minimal investment. And that it would take him a while to figure it out, because as user friendly as Hearts of Iron II is, it involves a considerable rethinking of priorties from the flight sims that were the staple of his diet.

Maybe I should have steered him towards Combat Mission – a first rate war game that really gets battle right and is pretty easy to understand – but I do want to share my love of grand strategy with people who I know would love it too.

If they could find the time.

One reason I don’t play shooters is that I am terrible at them. I appreciate the lighting and the pretty pictures, but the skills required to actually be good at them have advanced to the point that the idea of me picking up Half Life 2 and playing through it without using God Mode is absurd. Or maybe they haven’t. But all the talk about strafing, back tracking, puzzle levels, real physics and the like is hardly encouraging to a guy who just wants to run down hallways and kill things.

Fighting games are all about combos, and MMORPGs encourage power-gaming and a serious time investment. Who has time for this once they have a house and kids?

Not every game can be Tetris, but the distinction between complex and complicated has been blurry for a while now. Some gamers rejoice in the “leetness” required to be a good gamer and have no real desire to see the hobby move out of the niche that caters to their interests so well.

But a lot of innovation can come from stepping back and deciding what the core of your game is all about. There is a discipline in simplicity and user friendliness that I think is being lost in the rush to make the next super toy for the hardcore.

Hardcore strategy gamers don’t mind micromanagement. Flight sim nuts like realistic controls. But both genres will find themselves on the margins forever if they don’t take steps to move beyond their core audiences.

Many gamers sneer at The Sims though it is the best selling game in history. There we have innovation, player control, non-linearity, customization…all the stuff that gamers say they love. But it was too simple, too repetitive and too girly for the “real men” who play computer games.

I’d trade the next five WW2 RTS games for a single game as open and free as The Sims. And there is an audience for that kind of simplicity and joy. But, instead of welcoming these new PC Gamers with more games that appealed to their not-hardcore tastes, we got a series of new shooters and MMOGs.

Look at the recent E3 coverage. Almost all the big stories were about the technology – technology which seemingly only serves the purpose of making things look pretty when they explode. Almost every tech demo on the Xbox 360 or PS3 was about killing things, outracing things or watching men furrow their brows in determination. The Killzone 2 movie seemed to be about all three.

Meanwhile, mass market hits like Age of Empires and resident geniuses like Will Wright had to struggle for coverage. Part of this is the decline in the PC share of the market relative to consoles, but some of it was likely due to the same-old-stuff in the Age series – though you rarely hear a similar media complaint about Madden Football – and the just plain weirdness of Spore. Give gamers what they say they want – innovation – and the coverage is minimal. Give gamers what they buy – predictable formulas – and they yawn. But show them a machine that will allow more immersion (i.e., photorealism) and more things shooting at them as they run and its front page news everywhere.

This is a bit of a ramble still fuelled by my friend’s trouble getting a huge hit to run on a standard laptop not designed with gaming in mind. But the fact that games in general have still not made the entertainment section and are stuck in a weekly tech section of major newspapers (and otherwise never seen) means that gaming is now and will remain a hobby for the young and idle.

And as an aging gamer with ever more committments, this really bugs me.

One of the great might-have-beens in gaming history is Sid Meier’s Dinosaurs. Meier has an amazing track record of innovation and creativity, but lately Firaxis has been dipping into the wayback well a bit too much for that reputation to stay golden. But, shortly after Firaxis was formed, Meier and company said that they were working on a game that would allow the player to control a race of dinosaurs. The concept was original, the development house fresh and over the next four years information was leaked to press on an irregular basis.

Then production stopped with next to no information about why.

It died the way the lived – a mystery.

The first developer diary comments on Dinosaurs came out in late 1999. Apolyton has archived at least some of the information if not the diaries themselves. As you read the summaries, it becomes clear what one of the big issues with Dinosaurs was – uncertainty.

The idea of controlling a race of dinosaurs is, on its face, intriguing. But I struggle to think of how this gets turned into a game – or at least a game that looks like a Firaxis game. The concept of controlling a race automatically leads one to think Civ-like turn based gaming or Age of Dinosaurs real time. But you can’t have tech research, can you? Do you use evolution or resource management as expansion and improvement routes?

By February, the thinking was that the player would control the dinosaurs and try to help them survive in a hostile environment. Does this mean that the giant lizards would become pets of the player? What would “winning” look like?

After the demise of Dinosaurs, Meier showed three different versions to an audience at the Game Developers Conference in 2002. One was turn-based, another real-time and the third – of all things – a card game. He confessed that though each of the game designs had merit, none of them were very fun for very long.

Dinosaurs is a curious object of study because its end was unexpected. There is a certain confidence in the Meier name – that he can make anything fun if given time and the team to do it. And Meier never said that Dinosaurs was dead forever – he says that the original design for Civilization wasn’t very fun other. But there are no signs of it being revived.

Dinosaurs is, in many ways, testament to the power of the human imagination and how our abilities to translate our imagination into a product or game. All frustrated artists know how this works. The picture on the canvas never matches the one in our heads.

It’s not that Firaxis didn’t have any ideas of how to make a Dinosaurs game. They had lots of ideas. But there wasn’t a single idea that Meier and his team felt worked as a good game.

Every bad game I have ever played has had some idea why it was supposed to be fun. Even my own personal bete-noire Superpower has enough of a glimmer of live to make me think “I know what they are trying to do here.” Firaxis got to the point with Dinosaurs, it seems, where they weren’t sure what they were trying to do. They wisely stopped production in mid-2001.

So it went on the back burner, and we got Sid Meier’s SimGolf, Civilization III and Pirates!. Not a bad trade.

But a piece of me wants to see Firaxis dare to fail again. Remaking classics has some risks, but the Civ franchise is a license to print money. I will buy Civ IV the day it comes out. I think I’d rather have a T-Rex in their somewhere.

Check out CivAnon, a support group for those of us who get too addicted to Civilization every time a new one comes out.

Don’t forget to click on the “Civil Unity Group” banner on the bottom left for some fun at our President’s expense.

It’s a clever little marketing site that earns nothing but goodwill from the users, and yet makes very few clear claims about Civ 4 itself.

Will Wright’s latest big idea now has its own website. You can see a cute Flash movie and some screenshots at spore.ea.com.

The screenshots all look very interesting, though it is quite hard to figure out what the hell is going on in most of them. We have a city, a creepy-crawly bug thing, a global view and something that looks like it was snapped with a microscope.

Hopefully some helpful hints will be coming out soon.

I don’t toot my horn often, but I’ll do it here.

Your lonely strategy scribe was referenced in a LA Time Online piece on gaming blogs and their reactions to the goings on at E3. Specifically, they referred to the pieces done here and at Gaming Politics on Doug Lowenstein’s speech.

Now that the ESA has made Mr. Lowenstein’s speech available, expect further commentary once I’ve had a chance to digest it.