There are a lot of these lists every year, but I always link to Bill Abner’s for personal and professional reasons. His summaries are very brief and He also mixes his 2008 and 2009 games, which you can give him grief for over there. Our tastes generally line up, so he’s a reliable metric for me.
Except Dominion should be number 1 on every list ever.
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This week, Troy, Julian and Rob talk about the limitations and possibilities of story telling in strategy games. Can you have an authorial perspective in a system driven genre? Is the RTS campaign story irrevocably broken? Is there anything on the horizon that might give us hope?
And stay tuned to the end where I ask for feedback for our anniversary show.
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The Stockholm Paradox trip was very short, but the recovery from it may take a little longer. I barely slept on the flight there and arrived to learn that my room was not ready and would not be ready until about 20 minutes before I had to leave for the opening event at City Hall. So, with minimal sleep I stumbled through lunches, presentations, a very meat filled dinner and a little bit of drinking. Full Disclosure: Paradox Interactive paid for pretty much everything.
Then there was the next day with more presentations. This was also the day I woke up to an email from a good friend commiserating with me on the Crispy Gamer layoffs. I had no idea what the hell she was talking about, of course. The long and short of it was that I was at a media event for a company that didn’t even really exist in the same form any more and would not be needing my previews.
There will be previews – Bill Abner at Gameshark agreed to find a place for them – but I still have to write them all up.
The highlight, as usual, was meeting my peers in the media. Evan Lahti from PCGamer, Daniel Shannon from Gamespot, Jeff Haynes from IGN…it’s always great to talk business and compare impressions. Also, gossip, but nothing I can repeat.
Sadly, I did not have much time to see the city. A tour of the Vasa museum was on tap for Saturday afternoon, but I had to fly out that morning.
Little sleep and a seven hour time difference have conspired to make me somewhat dazed if not really jet-lagged. I don’t think you can get jet-lagged if you aren’t in a foreign city for long and you never really adjust to that schedule anyway. I will admit that the 4:30 PM darkness was a little bit freaky – waking from a nap and thinking I had missed the taxi to dinner was unusual. Not as unusual as going to Sweden to eat at a Cajun restaurant and drink at an Irish pub, though.
Once I get the previews written and submitted, I’ll let you know. Now for more coffee.
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I’m still processing the news that the board of Crispy Gamer laid off the entire editorial staff – the two editors and the staff writers/video people. I have no real idea what this means for the future of Crispy Gamer enterprises, but I do know that this is a very sad day for me.
It’s not just because CG represented quite a bit of income for me – not as much as it used to, but still some work – though this is certainly a concern.
The big thing is that some very talented people lost their jobs. I have no real worries about the staff writers, to be honest. Most of them have voices too unique to be silent for long.
But I do want to single out managing editor Elise Vogel and editor Ryan Kuo for special mention. Both stand easily with the best editors I’ve ever worked with.
Though Elise and I would occasionally bicker over content on the site and some editorial decisions, she was a warm and welcoming presence who would always listen to a good pitch. She came to Crispy Gamer with little gaming experience and she was even a little uneasy with the position she was in, I think. Watching her grow in confidence as she took control of the site’s direction was inspiring. Elise has great people skills, marshaled her forces at E3 like a veteran and was the brain and brawn behind whatever success CG has enjoyed over the last couple of years.
I also can’t say enough good things about Ryan Kuo. As a copy editor, he was almost perfect. He would ask for clarifications, he would suggest rewrites, and would admit to when he was simply confused about certain genre conventions. His good humor was always a pleasure as well. He played the ideal straight man for John Teti’s Joystick Master videos. Ryan was also developing his own voice as a writer and I do hope that he keeps writing somewhere.
Thanks for everything, Elise and Ryan. I do hope we can get together next time I am in NY, but, more importantly, I hope we can work together again in the near future.
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This week, Troy and Tom welcome Lara Crigger, Jenn Cutter and Tiffany Martin to the show to talk about the gender gap in strategy gaming. Well, that’s where it starts. It turns into an almost 90 minute discussion of the place of women in gaming, their portrayal in games, the importance of peer groups, more Brutal Legend and the coming demographic shift.
So less strategy wonkery than usual, but you guys can deal for a week, right?
Listen here.
RSS here.
Subscribe on iTunes.
Tiffany Martin’s blog
Tiffany’s thoughts on classes in Borderlands
Lara Crigger on her changing gaming habits
Hire Lara Crigger
Jenn Cutter’s Open Alpha
Jenn Plugs Flash of Steel and TMA and says nice things about me
Rhapsody
Tabula Rasa
Pure Pwnage
Battle for Wesnoth
Cross Edge
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For some reason I’ve been invited to a press junket to Stockholm to see what Paradox has planned for early 2010. I leave on Wednesday for a very quick trip, which I am dreading as much as I am looking forward to. This flight will probably kill me. Full disclosure: Paradox is paying for the air fare, hotel and some meals. I will blog some of the experience for Crispy Gamer, and there will probably be a large preview article.
As always, the real pleasure for me is meeting my colleagues in the gaming media, many of whom I only know as bylines, articles and twitter feeds. We American/Canadians will be drained, but I hope our Euro-peers can keep the party going.
The schedule is tight, and they have a lot they want to show. Other announcements have come dripping in as the “Convention” approaches. Here are some thoughts and questions I have going in:
Rise of Prussia – The next game in AGEOD’s historical series deals with the campaigns of Frederick the Great. It looks like it will follow the Napoleonic Campaigns model. There is one grand campaign and AGEOD is integrating an historical event system into the game. As fond as I am of the AGEOD wargame model, I wonder how often they can go to the same design well and keep the system fresh. I should probably install the Napoleon game on my netbook so I can reacquaint myself with the system before I interact with the new one.
Lead and Gold – This game from FatShark is a Team Fortress Western, I guess. Different classes, different modes of play, different maps. Looks like it could be goofy fun, and I love westerns. Since I’m not a shooter guy by any stretch of the imagination, I haven’t been following this game at all. If I get any hands on time, I expect to die over and over and over.
Mount & Blade: Warband – Taleworlds’ action/RPG is one of those truly great games that just never grabbed me for some reason. I see why other people like it and desperately want to myself. Just never takes for some reason. Warband is the multiplayer expansion that they are working on, but it also adds some political stuff – you can become a ruler or overlord over other players/NPCs. It will be cool to see if/how that works. This will be M&B’s next chance to win me over with its chivalrous charms.
Lionheart: King’s Crusade – Neocore’s first game was a Crusade themed war/strategy game a la Total War, and last year they released the mediocre King Arthur: The Role Playing Wargame. (I’ll probably revisit it sometime next month.) Richard is one of the most fascinating personalities in medieval history, and no game has really captured what made his Crusade such an interesting combination of bravado and lunacy. In any case, I am walking in with very low expectations here. The Neocore battle model has major issues, and King Arthur didn’t convince me that they had much in the way of strategy or story telling chops, either. But the great thing about low expectations is that I can be easily surprised.
Ship Simulator Extremes – I reviewed one of these Ship Simulator games once. Hated it. I find civilian flight sims boring, and these are civilian flight sims without the thrill of your engine going out and you plummeting to your death. But people do buy these – the same people who buy train sets and civilian flight sims, or at least they did when you could find such a thing. I mostly want to ask the people at VStep why they make these to begin with. As a man with my own peculiar interests and affections, I wonder what motivates others.
Victoria 2 – For most of you readers, this is the big one. I really like what I’ve been reading in the Developer’s Diaries over on the P’Dox forum, but, as Rob Zacny pointed out in TMA 47, the challenge here is making peace and economic development as interesting as war. Because the Victorian Age was about small wars for the most part, and limited peace and all that. It’s an age of invention and business, with a lot of domestic political strife. This was partly where Victoria 1 stumbled – it was a mess of numbers and data and very hard to love. Fingers crossed for a game as good as EU3 and Hearts of Iron 3. If this is another EU: Rome…
Paradox has just announced the acquisition of Achtung Panzer: Kharkov 1943, a Ukrainian made wargame that can be played real time or in turns. This trailer isn’t very good at explaining how this actually plays, though the turn based movement could make this interesting for people like me who need wargames they can play with brain surgeons with little time.
Vainglory of Nations has also been confirmed as a late 2010 release, so it won’t clash with Victoria.
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