1up.com has recently completed their list of the essential 50 video games. This is not about the best, but supposedly about the most important.

The whole point of lists is to argue about them, so 1up.com can’t expect everyone to agree with their choices. After all, with all the games out there, choosing the most important ones is neither easy nor obvious.

The list has only four strategy games on it: M.U.L.E., Populous, Herzog Zwei and The Sims. The best selling genre of all time, and only four titles. That’s fine, I guess. There aren’t many sports games on the list, and importance is importance regardless of the genre.

It’s the absence of certain titles that is really surprising. Where is SimCity, the first game to demonstrate that software toys and sandbox games could be huge hits? Where is Civilization, the landmark strategy game that opened up new worlds for so many people?

Even the choice of Herzog Zwei is curious. First, the idea that it is the first RTS is probably debatable. Even more debatable is the idea that “first” is the same as “important”. Warcraft II or Age of Empires had a more lasting affect on the industry simply through their success and are not necessarily descended from Herzog Zwei.

What’s with Dragon’s Lair? Sure, it was a hit at the time, but it has had next to no influence on how adventure or arcade games are made (thank, God.)

And where are the flight sims? Dying genre now, but the bread and butter of the industry for a long time.

Time to work on a counter list – the 50 essential strategy games. Feel free to pitch in.

The Settlers: Heritage of Kings has just been released. Since it is a Settlers game, you can count on it selling millions copies no matter what, right?

Well, maybe not. This is the most realistic looking Settlers yet, and that may not be a good thing. Whatever limited charm the early games had, a lot of it was rooted in the idea that you were building a sim-Smurf village. Your denizens were cartoonish and your city would develop around them as they went about their work. Most veteran Settlers players won’t even recognize it.

As I download the demo and look at the screenshots and unit descriptions it becomes evident that this is not your older brother’s Settlers. They’ve tacked on a sort of plot, included hero units and added buildings straight out of a fantasy setting.

None of this is to say that Heritage of Kings will be a bad game. Like many people on this side of the pond, I never got the appeal of the original games all that much. This might actually be an improvement. But is it Settlers?

In an industry that has become increasingly reliant on franchises and series, it’s kind of disheartening to see a popular franchise title hijacked to buttress the prospects of what is, by all appearances, a completely different city-building game. There seems to be a lot more emphasis on the combat and conquest stuff (always important, but understated) plus the inclusion of magic and heroes on a much larger scale.

So, you have to ask yourself how the Settlers name even got attached to this project. Even when there was a legal battle over who owned the rights to the name Civilization, the games involved all looked like Civilization. (Well, not Advanced Civilization, oddly enough.) Calling this a Settlers game is like making a new Monkey’s Island game that didn’t have any pirates or jokes in it.

The thing is, most of the designers and developers have a history at Blue Byte Software and are familiar with (or even worked on) the Settlers games. Still, they decided to go a completely different route – one not lined with cartoon characters toddling along but one with realistic avatars and dark magics.

It’s their franchise, of course, and they have every right to take it in whatever direction they choose. But you have to wonder what the value of a franchise name is if it just gets attached to a game with only a passing resemblance to what went on before. Settlers is cartoony; that’s what it always has been and always will be for me. Heritage of Kings looks to be another game altogether.

My review of Outpost Kaloki is now up at DIYgames. There are a few grammatical errors in the review, all my fault, but the gist of the review is clear. I love this little game, mostly because it taps in to my sense of humor. This is not ha-ha funny, but it is just silly enough to keep a smile on my face.

There was a time not so long ago when games based on the American Civil War were everywhere you looked. A lot of the Battleground games were set in the Civil War (the rest were Napoleonic) and probably half of the early wargames were set in the great confict that has defined American history.

Lately, though, the Civil War has fallen off the radar of game designers. You can point to Sid Meier’s civil war games as the last great games based on the war. Gods and Generals, a terrible game based on the boring movie of the same name, was probably the last high profile game connected to it.

Why the decline in civil war games? It can’t be because there is no interest in it. Civil war books and TV documentaries are still very popular and I doubt any war is as consistently re-enacted. You can’t argue that there is no more room to mine this particular war for ideas, since that hasn’t stopped anyone from making games based on World War II, an equally familiar and eternally popular war.

Who knows what sparks trends. The explosion of games based on ancient history can be tied to the success of the movie Gladiator and the commercial triumph of Age of Empires, one of the biggest hits of all time. Similarly, WWII became a more popular subject for gaming after the visceral Saving Private Ryan. The civil war hasn’t been in the pop culture radar for a while, even though people still find it fascinating.

In an industry where the success of Grand Theft Auto is interpreted to mean that people want more driving games and the sales of World of Warcraft will be used to justify yet another high fantasy MMOG, the lack of a single recent civil war hit game only retards the desire of game designers to make Sim Chancellorsville or Battlefield: Vicksburg.

Fortunately, MadMinute Games is trying to rectify this with Bull Run: Take Command 1861. This game will probably fly under a lot of people’s radar because it has the History Channel logo on it. So, gamers will just see it as your typical edutainment game with no staying power. The fact that it is being priced as a budget title will do more to limit its appeal to hardcore gamers, most of whom see price and quality as being perfectly correlated. (I’m not denying that most budget titles are average or below average games, but you will find your share of gems.)

I haven’t had a chance to try Bull Run yet. I saw an early build at last year’s GDC and it looked almost finished, though I had serious reservations about the interface. Hopefully this will be the first of many more wargames based on the period.

Just added my latest published review to the archive link on the right hand side. My very negative review of Golemlabs’ Superpower 2 was published in the latest issue. It is also quoted in the 2004 year end wrap up since Superpower 2 was named the fifth worst game of the year.

It’s hard to overestimate my bewilderment with people who enjoy the Superpower series. They certainly have the right to their opinions and it is not my job to tell them what is and what is not fun.

It is my job to tell them that SP2 is a dog’s breakfast of statistics that may or may not matter, improbable movements of troops and diplomacy that seems to be an afterthought more than anything else.

In the right game, none of this would matter. In fact, if Golemlabs’ press releases were the only sources of their hyperbole, none of this would matter. But when you put your claims to realism in everything you do, the world you build better have some semblance of reality. If you keep calling your game a simulation and wacky stuff keeps happening, you are better off just calling it a game.

And for the record, the CIA Factbook is not a classified source. Stop implying that it is.

I recently acquired a copy of Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord, the Battlefront classic tactical game set in Europe after D-Day. Think of it as X-Com with Nazis if that helps. After having spent hour after hour with the more recent Combat Mission: Afrika Korps, CMBO is a real step backward in terms of interface, usability, command options and mission variety. Frankly, once you’ve played CMAK, there is no real reason to go back.

Still, in spite of myself, I am having the time of my life thanks to a couple of friends who also have CMBO. This means multiplayer. And multiplayer is the only way to play wargames.

Every wargame should have a strong single player component, of course. In fact, I would argue that every strategy game should emphasize single player since a single session can take a long time in some games, and even the lunch break type games (like Rise of Nations) need to be booted up without fussing to find a friend.

I have come to conclusion that wargames are something different. And it has nothing to do with the AI.

In fact, the Combat Mission games have pretty good AI. Though a little prone to suicidal charges up hill, it knows how to set and ambush and where to lob its mortar shells. Give it a small advantage and it will put up a good fight. Not every wargame is so lucky, of course, but the limitations of the genre mean that CPU intelligence is not that hard to work out.

I have come to the tentative conclusion that wargames are among the most personal of games. Even if they take place on large battlefields (like some of the scenarios in the Operational Art of War series), the mental space can be quite small. With very little scenery to distract you and limited sound, the war becomes your world. Plop in even rudimentary 3D units, like in Combat Mission, and you *are* there. And there is still limited stimuli around you.

Now you add in a human opponent. I don’t buy that humans are inherently more unpredictable than good AI, at least in wargames. Some of the guys I play have certain tendencies that I can count on. But humans add a mirror to your own involvement in the war game.

And nothing beats the aftermath once a hard fought skirmish is done. It’s like swapping war stories, only you get to have full intelligence. “Yeah, I thought I had you but then your bazooka killed my Panther.” “That was my final rocket, too. If he missed, that would have been it for me.” etc.

This is certainly possible in other genres, but it loses something. The debriefings after an Age of X game often boil down to who should have grabbed which gold mine or whether the tower rush should be banned the next time around. It’s hard to keep up the energy for a multi-week Europa Universalis type of game, so players peter out or choose to throw their lot in with another player, often leading to hard feelings.

In wargames, it’s just you and the other guy. None of the backstabbing that you get in other strategy games. There is a good guy and a bad guy, and you can talk about the battle afterwards like gentleman. It’s two sided. It’s collegial. It’s the only way to play.