I’m now playing Hearts of Iron 2 for an upcoming review and having some problems detaching myself from the original. Is it possible to evaluate a sequel out of the context of the earlier games? How about out of the context of all similar games?

This is especially an issue with the Paradox grand strategy games because they are variations on a theme more than distinct games. Sure, each period game has different aspects and issues, but the engine is mostly the same underneath, the look hasn’t changed much from the first Europa Universalis and the game themes are almost interchangeable from title to title.

In this way, strategy gamers are a lot like sports gamers. In sports games, the changes in a franchise are gradual. You can’t review Out of the Park 6 without discussing what has been added from Out of the Park 5. The OOTP series is still, to my mind, the best baseball management sim available. But is it worth buying every year? Can’t we make do with last year’s version?

Of course, Victoria and Hearts of Iron are more different than the roster patch/draft tweaks of your typical sports game. But if you aren’t a real afficiando of World War II history and just like the idea of running a country, should you bother having four or five different types of countries to run? Does the tweaking from Hearts of Iron 1 to HoI2 really make that much difference?

Paradox’s first two English language games were Europa Universalis 1 and 2. The sequel was such an improvement on the original that you would be daft to not recommend it. However, it wasn’t as fresh and new as the original was when it appeared, which meant that a lot of the reviews didn’t have the sheer enthusiasm with which people greeted the original EU. I know no one who seriously prefers the first to the second, but go back and read the reviews of each title. The EU2 reviews are more positive, but less frenzied.

And so it may be with HoI2. I’m still finding my way around war-torn Europe, but the sense of discovery just isn’t there yet. I won’t publish my review here (I’ll let you know when it’s done and where you can find it) but a few of my general opinions will become apparent.

And this is my first general opinion: reviewing sequels is harder than reviewing new games. And almost all major games are sequels or franchises in waiting.

OK, so I am waiting for my copy of Hearts of Iron 2 to arrive, and I can’t take it. The thing is, I’m not sure why I am so excited. It’s not like the original was amazing or anything. I mean, it was good for what it was, but the more I played it the less fun I had. I liked it enough at first to give it a positive review at Zengamer, but the quick turnaround time required there led to betray my better instincts. As I played more, it became apparent that the AI simply wasn’t up to the job of managing a world war.

By the sound of things, though, Paradox has fixed a lot of the issues with HoI via a near complete overhaul of some of the games most frustrating parts. I didn’t mind the research tree; I thought it was deep, rewarding and multi-branched. Many others thought it was chaotic and nonsensical. (Parts of it were. Why I had to research tank chassis and guns separately was never abundantly clear.) Air and naval power called for a lot of micromanagement. The industrial scheme was absurd. Et cetera.

But the new and improved HoI2 is supposedly the best thing the Swedish masters have done since Europa Universalis 2. Considering the middling to poor offerings since then, it’s not that high a bar to meet, frankly. Still, I am hearing such good things that I can’t help getting enthused about the thing.

Since I am reviewing it for a media outlet, I won’t post too many comments specifically about it until the review is in the hopper. You will know that I am playing it though, and I may even most a little after action report if I get sucked into a MP game.

For serious gamers like me, it’s nice to have a comprehensive list of everything you own. For stats geeks like me, it’s better to have an actual database.

Now I could make my own database in Access if I had any clue how it actually worked. Or I could use Filemaker, which is more user friendly. Instead, I use Game Collector.

It’s not the most flexible database out there, to be sure. It has limited customizable fields and doesn’t like to track all the information you would want it to track. It is also impossible to have different displays for separate databases. For example, my “all strategy games ever made” database would ideally show different information than my “what I’ve got” database. Can’t do that.

Still, for forty bucks this is a good program. It is fast, user friendly and plugs in the All Game Guide and Amazon databases so you can download a lot of the fields automatically. You can include links to whatever connected sites you want and it has a big field for notes and descriptions. Once you buy it, you can update for free for life, so as the database gets better there is no need to shell out another forty bucks.

Eventually I will have to make my own database, but I can export my Game Collector information to another format, so I should be able to import it to another later. It’s easy, attractive and almost complete. Highly recommended.

The campaigns in 3H real time strategy games have come in a lot of shapes and sizes. If you are doing a fantasy or sci-fi RTS, like Warcraft or Starcraft, it’s not too hard to put together a story campaign based on one or all of the races/cultures/heroes of the game.

Historical (or semi-historical) RTS have it a little tougher. The Age of Empires series tended to put the player in the role of a historical figure like Joan of Arc or Genghis Khan, or, like in the original, simply let them play out episodes in the history of the various cultures in the game. This was, to be honest, unsatisfying. RTS games can’t really approximate history all that well – the Julius Caesar campaign in the Rise of Rome expansion could have been named after Biggus Dickus for as close at it came to looking like his life. Telling me that I am controlling a hero unit called Joan of Arc is not the same thing as feeling like I am the Maid of Orleans, so the effort to put the player into the history is kind of wasted.

The Cossacks games did something similar to much worse effect. Of course, it was a poorer series than the Age series and the historical campaigns were merely poorly strung together battle sequences with a modicum of base building. In American Conquest, the effort to make Spanish contact with the natives a challenge ended up making the whole history laughable.

These campaigns added nothing to the game and I often wondered why developers even bothered designing them. Did anyone every buy one of these games because they heard that the campaign was so good? Starcraft had a really special one, to be sure, but it was the game’s innovations in making three radically different but balanced races that made it the MP hit that it was, and still is in Korea apparently.

There are exceptions. The critically acclaimed Celtic Kings games (which I could not like no matter how hard I tried) had better story driven campaigns than core games, but this was mostly because the AI was so inane in the skirmish maps that it could only provide an “interesting” game when the adventure scripting forced your hero to run around and do stuff. In Praetorians, there is minimal base and unit building and the campaign based around the wars of Julius Caesar was really well done without doing too much damage to history in the process. For the big shots, though, the challenge of fusing a campaign to a 3H model is only now getting some satisfactory resolution.

In Age of Mythology, a nice fusion between fantasy and history, the campaign followed a single hero through the three mythologies that the game covered to good effect. This story approach worked pretty well, in my opinion. You got to play all three sides – unlike traditional story campaigns – and the climax was more than fitting.

Rise of Nations went the other direction by putting the RTS game on top of a Risk like board game that kept you to a certain historical setting. Once you dropped from the “strategic” level down to the usual base building stuff, you were plopped down into a wide range of different game styles. Some were pure defense, others required you to hunt out specific units or buildings. Winning on the RTS level would be reflected in greater resources at the higher level. This was a clever way to bring a little of the TBS magic to the RTS world.

In the upcoming AOE3, the campaign will be a story format again. The player will lead the Black family through the generations as history unfolds around them. This may work a lot better than the tradition historical hero campaigns that Ensemble has used since the hero of the piece is not a familiar character from the past, but a fictitious family caught up in events. Kind of like those old network miniseries from the 80s.

Still, the campaign seems to survive in spite of the fact that it is a mere add-on, even an afterthought, to what the game is all about. Someone must insist on these, but I’ve never met anyone who has. Like the human appendix, it sticks around though it provides no evolutionary advantage and serves little function beyond demonstrating the talent of the creator.

I’ve just added some posts and links that note where I am published – both online and in print. I do this not because I am boastful (well, a little) but because it will keep me from looking for it all later. Besides, some enterprising editor might want to know what exactly I have done to call myself a writer. I am a pen for hire, so I have to get the word out there somehow.

One site I wrote for is not here. I wrote reviews and editorials for Gamersclick a few years ago, before the site up and died for no clear reason. I may reprint some of those pieces here if I can ever find them.