{"id":420,"date":"2006-09-05T16:18:11","date_gmt":"2006-09-05T20:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/09\/05\/october-cgm\/"},"modified":"2006-09-05T16:26:10","modified_gmt":"2006-09-05T20:26:10","slug":"october-cgm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/09\/05\/october-cgm\/","title":{"rendered":"October CGM"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>October&#8217;s Computer Games Magazine has a few things with my name on them. Reviews of <em>Operational Art of War 3<\/em>, <em>Harpoon 3 Advanced Naval Warfare<\/em>, <em>Rush for Berlin<\/em>, <em>Moscow to Berlin<\/em>, and <em>American Conquest Divided Nation<\/em>, my Alt.Games column and a brief account of the first Apolycon &#8211; a convention of Civilization fans held this summer in Timonium. This explains the surprisingly large check.<\/p>\n<p>Two points on the reviews. The <em>American Conquest<\/em> review has a factual error blaming GSC for stuff they didn&#8217;t do. ACDN is not a GSC game though it looks like one, plays like one and is a sequel to one of their games. It even has the same publisher. My mistake is understandable, but entirely my own and entirely avoidable. It doesn&#8217;t take away from my problems with the game &#8211; it is still too little new to recommend and too klugey in many ways. It is a CDV game developed by group who operated independently of the GSC umbrella. The comparisons to the GSC series are not unwarranted in my opinion &#8211; it follows the formula very closely, too closely in my opinion. But the factual error is there, and I spend much of the review slagging on an innocent group of developers. Who knows what I was thinking at the time. Readers expect better of me.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Operational Art of War 3<\/em> review was done before the recent patch which increases stability of the game, largely by letting you know which scenarios aren&#8217;t suited for single person play. The larger scenarios that fail most of the time are really designed for PBEM.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll have more on Apolycon later in the week.<\/p>\n<p>This is the big fall preview issue, so there are a lot of games in there that I hadn&#8217;t even heard of, plus EIC Steve Bauman complaining about Metacritics and Gamerankings (and Amazon, too). I highly recommend the guest column by Elisa Romero. It gives me a warm glow when I read about how people get hooked on games.<\/p>\n<p>The big plus for me is <a href=\"http:\/\/sportsgamer.blogspot.com\/\">William Abner&#8217;<\/a>s enthusiastic review of <em>PureSim Baseball 2007<\/em>. He was iffy on OOTP Baseball, my poison of choice, but heartily recommends this alternative. With the Nats season almost over (well, you could argue it was over three months ago), I will be keeping the home fires burning with baseball simulations. I have an earlier version of <em>PureSim<\/em>, but it played too slowly for me. Maybe I should give the new one a shot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>October&#8217;s Computer Games Magazine has a few things with my name on them. Reviews of Operational Art of War 3, Harpoon 3 Advanced Naval Warfare, Rush for Berlin, Moscow to Berlin, and American Conquest Divided Nation, my Alt.Games column and a brief account of the first Apolycon &#8211; a convention of Civilization fans held this [&hellip;]<\/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":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-6M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420"}],"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=420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}