It has been a chaotic year in a lot of ways, and the podcast and my writing work – as great as they’ve been – have not always helped.<\/p>\n
As I look back through 2010, I see a couple of dozen games that I wanted to play or play more. The podcast schedule often meant that I would have to focus on other stuff or revisit games that I played a long time ago in order to know what the hell I was talking about, and writing meant that I was playing things for work in great depth than I would usually spend.<\/p>\n
So here is a short list of things that I regret from strategy gaming in 2010:<\/p>\n
1) Men of War<\/strong>: The year isn’t over yet, so I will make more time for this highly praised RTS. But for some reason, I couldn’t get past the opening few scenarios. I liked what I saw, but then something else came up and that was that. Never got back to it. This is professional malfeasance of a pretty high degree, I think.<\/p>\n 2) Neptune’s Pride<\/strong>: Rob Zacny played it<\/a> and, to be honest, did not make it sound very appealing. I think we could do a show on it, but I know that Rob and Julian would gang up on me, Bruce would sit in his isolationist corner, Tom wouldn’t show up and I’d be stuck looking for an ally like Bill Abner who would end up screwing me because he pressed the wrong button.<\/p>\n 3) Conflict: Reign of Nations<\/strong>: Worst name ever, and a game that I played enough of to know that I would never get very good at it. I love the setting, though and it is reminiscent enough of Knights of Honor for me to want to give it another hearing.<\/p>\n 4) Minecraft<\/strong>: I’m not sure if dwarf architecture and zombie killing counts as strategy, but there are enough Sim-like elements here to make me pause. I’ve resisted the siren’s song this far even though everyone I know is either playing it or thinking about it. Everyone.<\/a> Why have I resisted? The fear, mostly. I think this low tech game could consume me like Dungeon Crawl does sometimes.<\/a><\/p>\n 5) Console treats<\/strong>: I consider myself a platform agnostic since I really don’t think one platform is necessarily superior – I just hate gaming in my living room. It feels weird to me. But with so many good light strategy games on the XBox and XBLA, I really need to shake myself out of that feeling. Maybe get a TV for my office and move the machine. Because I am missing a lot of stuff.<\/p>\n I could go on. Star Ruler, Neocore DLC and expansions, more Starcraft 2 multiplayer…<\/p>\n Fill the comments with your own misses and regrets. Don’t let me wallow in self pity by myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has been a chaotic year in a lot of ways, and the podcast and my writing work – as great as they’ve been – have not always helped. As I look back through 2010, I see a couple of dozen games that I wanted to play or play more. The podcast schedule often meant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"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":[21],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-Jh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2807"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2809,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2807\/revisions\/2809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}