It's the little things

Let me preface this by saying that I am really digging Civ 4. I still need to get a handle on the new way that specialists are handled (I never used them much before) but for the most part the changes are for the better.

And I don't want to talk too much about the now widely documented technical issues. I've experienced slowdowns, some memory leaks and other technical issues but no crashes to desktop and I got the thing to install the first time. If it doesn't tell me that it detected DirectX 9.0c, I let it install. I trust the little man in my computer to know what he's doing.

But:

1. Why is Disk 2 labelled the Play Disk when it is not the Play Disk?
2. Why am I known as "VALUE 765G-654" whenever I forget to enter my my own name as a Civ leader?
3. Why do all the Wonder Movies suck? They are all the same thing - they show the building being built and then things are placed around it.
4. Why do the games seem so much faster than in other version? I liked Civ games that would go on for seven hours. Not many of those now.
5. Why does the Civilopedia just show pictures of the items and not their names until you mouse over them? Am I supposed to instantly know a galleon icon from a caravel? And the knight is just a dude with a sword. How can I even tell he is mounted?

Stay tuned for comments as they come up. I'm trying to set up a MP game tonight so expect an after action report once my ass is kicked.

Civilization 4 is here

Civilization IV was waiting for me when I got home today. Waiting out in the rain, nonetheless. Stupid UPS.

And I have to get up at 5:00 am tomorrow morning.

There is no justice.

Games and Myth

Sometimes you read a post and it simmers in your brain for a bit. Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog does that to me on a semi-regular basis. As hi-falutin as some of my talk gets, he's all into storytelling, ludology and all that other game design stuff in a much more serious and reflective way than I am. Read his blog thoroughly and you'll see that, like me most of the time, he's often just throwing stuff into the public space trying to come to grips with what he really thinks.

That's why I read him.

His recent posts on myth and games (here and here) got me thinking about what the hell he was talking about. He's obviously not interested in games that tell stories about familiar myths (like the King's Quest games) or that include mythic ornamentation (like Age of Mythology). He's interested in games that can tell transformative stories, even if they merely ape the conventions of the hero's journey. He cites Max Payne as an example of part of what he is getting at, though he concedes that its story is linear and confined, which he seems to think is not mythic.

As a strategy gamer, I feel myth all around me. Gather round children and hear the tale of my epic rivalry with Carthage in Civilization II and how a fortified border led to an arms race and the inevitable war. Or of how an aged general was called out retirement to fight one last battle against a dangerous Carthaginian, won the battle and then died on the next turn in Rome: Total War.

Because most strategy games are entirely devoid of plot, we assign meaning to things that are inherently meaningless. I know people who developed a serious hate for Genghis Khan and the Mongols in Civ 2 even though they were no more cunning or ruthless than any of the other possible opponents. X-Com persuaded you that the soldiers fighting for you were people as they developed skills and specialties.

I guess that part of the reason that RTS story-based campaigns are mostly unsatisfying is that they lack that player-created narrative. And the beauty of a RTS in MP is that each player has their own narrative.

The other night, I engaged a very skilled opponent in a skirmish match of Age of Empires III. This was our third game - the first two had ended in very quick and brutal slaughters. This one, in his opinion, seemed like a real back and forth match. We fought over a trading post for a very long time, taking turns using it to produce Comanche warriors to aid the fight.

I knew differently.

What he was seeing as a hard fought contest between near equals, I knew was not. Not just because he is very, very good, but because I knew that I had aged up too quickly. I had no reserves to back up any real surge and no cavalry to compete with his. (I always neglect cavalry for some reason...) I had no real breathing space and any push by my troops stretched my resources to the limit.

But how glorious that battle was. It was a hard fought contest in the sense that many soldiers died and it lasted much longer than either of the previous matches. I'm sure he was thrilled that the contest was as "close" as it was even though I knew I was a paper tiger.

Both of us saw the same game but from different sides. Even though I lost, my opponent had crafted this narrative of a war where I "almost had him." My narrative was of the plucky underdog hanging on until the inevitable swarm of hussars arrived.

That, my friends, is myth making.

Shattered Union - first impressions

2k Games and PopTop Software have teamed up on this US Civil War game with a twist. There are Confederates, but they have tanks and planes. After a nuclear weapon wipes out the divisive American government, the country splits apart. Europe intervenes to hold on to the capital region, but the rest of the regions set up their own countries with their own armies and aspire to reunite the country by force.

The game is all about wars and rumors of wars. No diplomacy, no trade, minimal economy. You are limited to a single attack per turn, but any troops you use in your attack can't be used in any defense that turn. So if you send everything you have in a stab at conquest, you will lose one or two territories because you didn't choose wisely.

So far I'm liking it. It has the beer and pretzel wargame feel to it that means it should translate well to the Xbox (yeah, I know. A wargame on a console.) Air power is appropriately modelled and anti-aircraft fire can really mess up your plan. The AI seems competent if not brilliant. You would think that it would make better use of choke points than it does, or take out bridges with more regularity.

More opinions as they become fully formed.

Legion Arena Demo

Slitherine's latest ancient warfare game now has a demo. 240 megabytes of spear-chucking goodness.

So far so good. The campaign battles have the typical Slitherine "hands-off" approach to command except now you can give a few orders if your command bar is full. The battle set-up screen seems little different from the one in Spartan. It remains to be seen if the battle-after-battle campaign will have any of the pull that the strategy game of its immediate cousin Rome: Total War does. (Slitherine's serious conquer-the-world campaign is being saved for the next Legion game.)

Simple enough game. The battles are over much more quickly than the battles in Rome, but that might change with the full version and there are more troops on the ground.

Combat Mission 2

The news about Battlefront's pseudo-sequel to their excellent Combat Mission World War Two games has been out for a while. It took me a little longer to decide if I was interested in it or not.

The time and place is Syria in the near future. The US intervenes when a new and threatening dictator topples the Assad government and war erupts. Battlefront says that it wants to make a game about asymmetrical warfare - a major change of pace from the my tank versus your tank battles of the WWII games. Combat Mission: Shock Force will not be Operation Iraqi Freedom redux since the Syrians will have some sort of comventional capability.

The setting doesn't bother me that much. Though many people would have preferred a hypothetical Cold War conflict, Bruce Geryk notes that a robust editor and a good equipment list means that we will likely see modders make a US/Soviet battle before too long. You could also get a lot of Arab-Israeli conflict stuff done, I suspect.

My major concern is the whole "asymmetric warfare" angle. Battlefront says that they don't want a US "turkey shoot" but let's face it - today's US Army can go toe-to-toe with any other army on earth and do better than fine. Put them up against a second-rate army like Syria and it will be over before it starts. Air power wasn't modelled all that well in the Combat Mission games, but it's absurd to have an opening premise in 2007 that the hills and deserts of Syria will have enemy tanks on them for very long. That leaves guerrilla strikes, gunmen popping out of houses, IEDs, house-to-house searches...Not a lot of fun. They say that urban warfare and rough terrain will be the focus, which means a lot more infantry and less armor.

The idea of a story driven campaign is more interesting since they've never tried this. I know that in Combat Mission I almost always generate a random scenario. Stringing battles together with rough plot points can't make for a really compelling story. Will losses carry over from one battle to the next? Will soldiers get experience? Will there be poorly acted cutscenes?

More opinions to come as more news becomes known.

Age of Empires III review

You can find my complete review over at VGPub here. My first big word of warning is in the second paragraph.

"Familiarity doesn’t quite breed contempt, but is does take away a lot of the excitement. Considering that the game is set in the Age of Discovery, you might expect to see some strange new worlds. Instead, it’s almost as if Columbus sailed the Atlantic and found everything pretty much as he expected."

I still give AoE 3 a very high score (8.5) because I would be lying if I said I wasn't having a lot of fun playing it. Like some people, I am alternately bewildered and enthralled by the game, but hours spent are hours spent. AoE 3 has won me over despite all the objective complaints you can raise about its originality, lack of options and even backward trajectory in some respects.

Judging from the chat rooms in these early days though, there could be some trouble with the hardcore crowd. The lack of formations has some people really upset. More than once I've seen people type "I'm going back to AoK" - which is just silly since there are at least a dozen better RTS games out there now.

People who love Age of Kings should be happy with AoE 3 in many respects. It has a simple rock-paper-scissors mentality, the factions are mostly the same with some cosmetic differences, you can build town centers wherever you like...this game is a retreat from the brilliant stab at innovation that Age of Mythology was.

But Ensemble has made an excellent game in spite of themselves. The early game has a nice rush to it as you scurry to get the resources necessary to Age-up to a point where you can defend yourself and kill your enemies. Early fortifications are cheap but effective, so you can lag behind just a little bit and still make a go of it.

But the campaign...ouch. I sort of enjoyed the campaign in Age of Mythology. It wandered the globe, gave you a chance to play all the cultures and had a relatively interesting story about a possible revolt against the gods. The AoE 3 one has terrible voice acting, a hokey plot about the Fountain of Youth and it is never really clear why you are playing the British in one scene and the Germans in the next. It is a very long campaign with a few very difficult missions. A couple of times I had to reduce the difficulty to easy just so I could get on with the nonsense. I always wonder what kind of people play these things, but then again, I always play the story campaigns myself.

I recommend Age of Empires III not because it is great but because it is very good. These are masters at work and the game demonstrates just what money and experience can provide.

Empire Earth II Gets Bigger

Mad Doc Software has announced that they will develop an expansion for Empire Earth II.

Of course they will. When PCGamer gives you a 94% and tells everyone that it is one of the best RTS ever, how can you not?

Empire Earth II: The Art of Supremacy (another terrible name full of the usual strategy game cliches) will have three new campaigns (does anybody buy a RTS for the campaigns?), new civilizations (French, Russian, Zulu and Masai) and "native tribes" to join or assimilate.

I wasn't all that impressed with EE2. It was an average game at best and seemed to miss all that has happened in RTS since the original Empire Earth.

The funny thing is that Age of Empires III (review forthcoming) has many of the same issues but is a much better game. It certainly helps that the Age games have had a clearer temporal focus, but it also demonstrates that excellent designers can still mine value out of the exhausted veins of historical RTS if they have the sense of style and panache that Ensemble does. Both games have the feeling that they have been hiding in caves since Age of Kings. Whatever lessons EE2 draws from Rise of Nations or Age of Mythology it bungles. AoE 3 mostly pretends that none of that stuff ever happened and casts aside some of the improvements it had already made to the formula.

As you can guess, I am not exactly excited about an expansion pack for EE2. Despite the respectable reviews in the press, it hasn't survived as a buzzworthy topic. The gaming afficianadoes that I talk to are still more interested in Warcraft 3 or Act of War than the gray world of EE2.

I'll wait for the reviews from people I trust before picking it up but even then I might not bother. A good expansion can make a decent game great. I've never seen one really make me care about something I'd almost forgotten.

What I've Written For VG Pub

Age of Empires III

The Return of DIY

After a long hiatus, DIY Games is up and running again. The site's fearless leader has a picture of his exploding car on the site and that sort of sums up what kind of year he's been having.

I will be returning to work with DIY, partially out of loyalty to Greg - he took a chance on me and it's worked out pretty well for both of us. Mostly because it is a nice conduit into the indie community. Also, I like the atmosphere there quite a bit. The staff has expanded some, and since Jozef Purdes will be back with his excellent indie adventure game column, I see no reason to stop associating myself with such an interesting feature.

Eventually I will have to cut back my pro bono work - time is getting too precious. But DIY will be the last place I cut. Hope you can follow us to the head of the indie website pack.

My Lux review

After a few months of interrupted life, DIY Games is back in business with my review of Lux.

The review really says it all. Part of my reluctant thumbs up is because Lux is a flashy Risk clone and not much more. The price is decent, but for 25 bucks I want a little more than the old Parker Brothers classic with an editor. The fact that AI is unable to even play the game well shortens its life even more.

So why 3 stars instead of 2? Well, it is the best Risk clone out there. The multiplayer game brings back those Saturday afternoons you would play Risk with your friends and brothers - at least before you discovered video games. Or girls.

Mostly video games.

November Computer Games Magazine

This months CGM has my review of Shrapnel's naval strategy game Salvo! and my preview of Civilization IV. It should be on a newstand somewhere near you.

Salvo! is one of those games that gets a few things right, but then promptly loses them in an antiquated interface and a scenario set that relies on volume more than variety. For all the battles and settings and campaigns - and there are lots of them - there isn't much to distinguish one from the next. Part of that is the nature of the subject matter. How much can you do to separate one battle between square rigged ships and another? I would have preferred a game with fewer identical battles and a much more information ready interface.

My Civ IV preview reveals the perils of the print medium. When the article was written, the game was still pegged for a November release, and I say so in the piece. Now we know that we will see Civ very soon.

The screenshots given us don't do much to convey why you should be excited about yet another Civ. They show that the 3D view is much improved from earlier shots, but there's not a whole lot else there. Turn based strategy games don't photograph well in any case.

I walked into the hands-on session not particularly enthused about Civ IV. I was looking forward to it, of course. But like many fans of the Meier idea factory, I was concerned that they were going back to the same old ideas over and over again instead of breaking out and doing a game we hadn't seen before.

By the end, I was a convert. Some of this might have been gaming journalist Stockholm Syndrome. When you are surrounded by developers and other writers, all excited about what they are seeing and doing, it is easy to get all wrapped up in the enthusiasm. This is one reason why I think reviewing games at corporate sites is unreliable and, probably, a bad idea. Previews are a different animal.

I don't think it's all groupthink, though. Civ IV is a major improvement over Civ III. There are new annoyances to distract you - barbarians have cities again, wild animals will eat your workers, etc. - but the old ones that made the game less interesting are gone. No more foreign settlers crossing your land unless you give them permission. Corruption replaced with empire management costs. MP no longer a pain in the ass.

Plus, it looks like it will ship with some historic scenarios - something we had to wait for Conquests to get in Civ III.

Ultimately, I think The Movies (previewed by Cindy Yans in this same issue) will be my number one must-see game of the season. I never got much of a chance to play Civ IV in single player since the whole reason for the visit was to show off what they had done to make it a multiplayer game. There have been stories that have alluded to much greater compression of the later time periods, and I wonder if the openness of the tech tree means that the gunpowder rush will become the only viable strategy. From what I saw and experienced, though, I don't think I will wait till Xmas to send my legions into Tenochtitlan.

Apologies and an Explanation

Sorry for the lack of more frequent updates recently. The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic, as I worked my way through some new software, got ill, and now the worst news of all.

I have a day job.

I will soon return to the classroom to lead AP history and government classes. As I get back up to speed with the new curriculum, the update pace will slow down some. Any new thoughts will find their way here.

What's wrong with wargame(r)s

Gaming journalism's wargaming guru, Bruce Geryk, has posted a new column on why wargames are letting him down. His point, in a nutshell, is that the computer has set a trap for wargame designers by allowing them to design more complex simulations of historical conflicts but not get around the basic design deficiencies that have plagued the hobby for some time. The result is a series of games that either play out as puzzles (with a single best solution) or have such a scattered design component that the player can find exploits after a few sessions.

The point that hit most home for me, though, was the tyranny of the message board.

"But the biggest obstacle to making simpler computer wargames is that a lot of people don’t like simple games, period. Almost the first thing you’ll read on any official forum where a new historical strategy game has been released is someone asking for a patch to simulate some minor detail, without which the poster asserts the game is worthless. When Crown of Glory was released, someone immediately complained that leaders, while they could be killed in combat, could not be wounded. Then someone suggested that leaders not only be wounded, but have variable convalescence periods in the hospital. Then the world exploded."

Leaving aside the semantic debate over whether Crown of Glory is a wargame or not - it's a strategy game in my book because you decide the units you will build and choose who your enemy will be - this kind of complaint has been made about every game that had a remotely historical theme. From the battleship sinking phalanxes in Civ to the absence of slavery in every Age of Discovery game, many strategy gamers are convinced that the closer a game approximates history, the more fun they will have. Love of history is converted to a love of games that are just like history.

(Ironically, many of these same people are in the RTS hating brigade and mourn the death of the TBS game. To my knowledge, Napoleon never moved in turns.)

Of course, this emphasis on kitchen sink accuracy is most renowned among the rivet counting flight sim set. So it's not just the wargamers who mistake detail for fun.

The curious thing in all this is that no historian of any merit really dwells on the details of a situation unless it affects their overall understanding of an event. The fact that the rectangular shield of the legionaries wasn't around in the mid-Republic or that the acceleration rate of the Zero fighter couldn't compete with later American planes are insignificant compared with the generally superior training of Roman soldiers and the crippling lack of oil facing Japan.

I guess that fantasy gamers have a bit of an advantage on us grognards. All the complaints about class nerfing in MMOGs are based on either personal class choices or on theories about how changes to class powers will affect the game in general. Will there be too many druids? How do you persuade someone to play a healer? How do you allocate experience for a party kill? Even when wargamers and strategy gamers discuss how changes would affect game balance or design they pay lip service to history. (Check the Paradox forums for discussions on Muslim sea transport in Crusader Kings.)

I'm not immune to this, of course. My annoyance at elephants that behave like tanks is a theme here. I do love wargames and wargamers. The games are actually pretty relaxing, and my PBEM experiences rank as some of my favorite games. You can trash talk in the emails, debrief after a difficult encounter, get pro-tips from generous superior players as you work your way down the Misssissippi. Wargamers are among those most open to house rules - gentleman's agreements on what tactics are off limits.

My love of the games is the root of my general frustration at times with those who just don't get the whole "game design" thing, those who want to see things happen as they happened. They may be a minority of wargamers, but they flock to message boards and forums like Goths to the bathhouse. I've always held that the most strategy gamers don't frequent message boards, but game companies take these boards seriously. And sometimes good can come of it - for all its occasionaly fanboy exuberance, the Paradox boards sometimes come up with game enhancing suggestions.

And Bruce, if you read this, dibs on what you want to sell on Ebay.

Changing Direction

Black and White 2 is out now. As usual, IGN has the first online review and, as usual, the high score doesn't seem to match the number of misgivings that Steve Butts mentions in the text. Of course, if you are going to have a review that long, it's not going to be easy to keep a consistently enthusiastic tone.

Two things stand out in the review. First, there is a claim that three-quarters of the original B&W's sales were to people who "weren't really gamers". I have no idea what that means or where that data came from. But, if remotely true, it makes me pause as I think about how the news of games gets to the "non-gamer".

Second, Black and White 2 seems a step back from the first game. More RTS elements, less emphasis on being a god that indirectly affects humans and a lot of attention to traditional military conflict.

Say what you will about Black and White - it was different. As a rough fusion of Populous and SimCity, it put the God in god-game. Interface issues and the difficulty in keeping the game fresh meant that the player would quickly understand why the Greek gods were always making mischief for their worshippers. B&W was a great idea that was made into an OK game.

So part of me is very disappointed to hear that the developers of B&W 2 weakened that part of the game to focus on more conventional game mechanics. It's a perfectly understandable decision. Despite the good sales and raving early reviews, it didn't take long for consumers and the gaming press in general to decide that a lot of the positive buzz was evidence that many reviewers were either asleep at the switch or didn't play very far. Likely stung by many of the post mortem criticisms, it probably made sense to tip the game towards the tried and true and away from the "What the hell is this?"

It's probably too strong to say that B&W 2 sold out. After all, the initial game sold millions of copies. Those who felt ripped off by the first one are going to take a "wait-and-see" approach no matter what happens - a new game focus won't be enough to make me buy it in the next two weeks. But instead of finding other ways to make the god-playing compelling, moving to road building and army shuffling seems a slight betrayal of those people who had hope that there was a great and original game in there