Great big issue this month with three reviews and one column by yours truly. Two of the reviews are bundled in the same spot, mostly because the two Armored Task Force wargames are pretty similar. The column is in the “Revisionist History” (now with PC games!) spot and waxes eloquently about the brief life of SimTex, the makers of the original Master of Orion<\/i>. I’d like to thank my editor for some of that eloquence.<\/p>\n
The big feature piece is on the union between board games and computer games. Bruce Geryk writes about how board games have made the transition to online play and Brett Todd contributes a companion piece on computer games that have found their way to cardboard and plastic. Well worth looking at.<\/p>\n
There’s an interesting pre-review of Civilization IV<\/i> – not final because the game wasn’t final when the piece went to press – but it describes how much Civ<\/i> love I am feeling at the moment. It’s interesting because the review format is Steve Bauman and Tom Chick engaging in a dialogue about the game. You don’t just get a great sense of the game, you also get a very good idea about the subtle differences in these two gamers. Both come to the same conclusion – Civ IV <\/i>is great – and mostly for the same features. But both also come through as people looking for different ways to love a great game.<\/p>\n
It bears comparison with the “Bruce versus Tom” multiplayer reports in Computer Gaming World<\/i> – reports that also serve as secondary reviews or even mini-strategy guides. (It may be the most consistently funny thing in the gaming press today – or at least the most consistently intentionally funny.)<\/p>\n
Two voices on the same page actually works very well for conveying information and impressions, probably for the same reason that a well-run internet forum is more informative than a web review. For all its thumbnail sketches, Ebert and Roeper<\/i> works as a movie show very well more because of the dialogue and enthusiasm than the thumbs and movie clips.<\/p>\n
The original Gamesdomain is lamented for many reasons, but many people miss the “Second Opinions” pieces that some games would get. Dialogue and exchange is a natural part of evaluating any media product and I think that all of the major publishers and venues would be better served by doing it more often. PCGamer<\/i>‘s podcast is an excellent example of gaming discussion done well. (I don’t have G4TV, but what I have seen hasn’t made its acquisition a high priority for me.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Great big issue this month with three reviews and one column by yours truly. Two of the reviews are bundled in the same spot, mostly because the two Armored Task Force wargames are pretty similar. The column is in the “Revisionist History” (now with PC games!) spot and waxes eloquently about the brief life of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-4r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}