So what do you do when your guest doesn’t show and your schedule for the rest of the week is shot to hell? You go ahead, press record and make it up as you go along.
A beloved friend of the show is on his deathbed and no doctor is in sight to save it. Tom calls Section 8 “the shooter from the Kohan guys” and fights with Julian over whether or not the game is very good or just good.
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Talks like this are why I hate missing GDC. Even an Austin GDC.
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While not totally unprecedented in gaming, it is quite rare to find a WW2 game that offers a German campaign to players. While apparently not taboo to allow gamers to light up American troops with an MG-42 in Return to Castle Wolfenstein’s multiplayer, it’s not as common to have full-fledged campaigns detailing the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe’s struggle for survival.
From Play.tm’s Jennifer Allen:
Order of War offers something new from the second the player chooses which campaign to play: the ability to play from the German perspective. It’s not a feature exclusive to Order of War, but it is something that is rarely seen and the game shows a great depiction of what many see as the ‘other’ side in the conflict.
The modern and perhaps slightly daring approach with Order of War can be found in the scope of its campaign, which does not simply settle for being grand in scale, but offers a look at events through the eyes of the German war machine. While Order of War is not the first game to offer a German campaign, it is certainly among the best attempts to be found in the genre.
Judging from the reactions of these reviewers, the idea of playing a WW2 campaign from the German perspective is rare and daring, something that hasn’t been done often or done well.
And they’re right, if you don’t count Panzer General, Blitzkrieg, Codename: Panzers, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, Panzer Command, Men of War, Close Combat, Sudden Strike, Desert Rats vs Afrika Korps…
Feel free to add any of the dozens of other games that let you play Germany in a campaign. Of the many uninteresting things about Order of War, the fact you can play the Germans has to be the least interesting.
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A blogging heads up for my readers. Assuming someone hasn’t stolen my fingerprints and set me up for a bunch of armed robberies in Missouri, next week will see me begin a long term substitute teaching position at a local public school. With the freelance market slowing down and other things affecting our family income, I can’t turn down the opportunity to make some extra money. It’s only nine weeks, but that’s nine weeks of solid 7 to God knows when workdays.
What this means is that blogging will be even more sporadic. The podcast will continue, but will likely be uploaded Tuesday evenings instead of Tuesday afternoons.
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An English farmer with metal detector recently stumbled upon one of the largest hoards of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever found. The find is being compared to uncovering another Book of Kells insofar as its importance in understanding Anglo-Saxon art and culture.
I love the idea of archaeology and treasure hunting. As my colleague Brett Todd – a man with real dig experience – would surely inform me, most archaeology is pretty unglamorous stuff. You carefully excavate a few dozen yards at a time, keeping every shard of pottery and looking for changes in coloration in the soil. I find this sort of thing exciting, but I’m super weird.
But I think that an archaeology sim would be a great way to teach ancient or medieval history to middle or high school students. There’s an old Microplay game called Sea Rogue that let you salvage historic wrecks. Why not take a model like that and build a strategy/educational/business sim that dealt with digging for buried treasures (historical and jewel-encrusted) or discovering lost cities?
The educational side would mean that the player would have to do research to know where to dig or explore. They would have to hire experts in a variety of fields to get the most out of their dig. There could be metal detecting stuff at the very beginning as sort of a tutorial level – how to know where to explore and how to assess the value of goods. It could teach the art of dating materials, assessing how various cities or civilizations were related, even how populations moved or evolved.
I’ve often thought about this design idea, but I have no game design skills beyond the usual “wouldn’t it be great if…” stuff you can find on any blog. But if anyone can tell me why this is a terrible idea, I’d be happy to hear it.
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Via Darius Kazemi‘s Twitter.
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