<< Portico: April 2005

4/30/2005

PC strategy games at E3

Here is a list of the strategy games confirmed as being showcased at next months E3, with publisher and developer. This list has been compiled from a number of websites, primarily a master list of games on display from Gamespy.

American Conquest: Divided Nation (CDV/GSC)
Black and White 2 (Electronic Arts/Lionhead)
Blitzkrieg 2 (CDV/Nival Interactive)
Codename: Panzers, Phase Two (CDV/Stormregion)
Ghost Wars (Hip Games/Digital Reality)
The Guild 2 (JoWood/Deep Silver)
Heroes of Might and Magic V (Ubisoft/Nival Interactive)
Hotel Giant 2 (JoWood/Game Factory)
The Movies (Activision/Lionhead)
Pacific Storm (Buka/Lesta Studio)
Panzer Elite Action (JoWood/Zootfly)
Rollercoast Tycoon 3: Soaked (Atari/Frontier Dev.)
The Sims 2: Nightlife (Electronic Arts/Maxis)
Spellforce 2 (JoWood/Phenomic Game Development)
Star Wars: Empire at War (LucasArts)
Tycoon City: New York (Atari/Deep Red)
UFO: Aftershock (Cenega/Altar)
Untitled RTS (Deep Silver)
War Front: Turning Point (CDV/Digital Reality)
War Leaders: Clash of Nations (CDV/GSC)

Stay tuned for updates. Both Civilization IV and Age of Empires III are expected to be exhibited.

4/29/2005

The night of death

Against my better judgment, I accepted a challenge to play Act of War: Direct Action against a fellow writer/reviewer. He thought that I was giving the game's skirmish play short shrift and should play more of it. So I reinstalled the 6 GB beast and got ready to rumble.

It was a massacre.

With some genres I am a slow learner, and RTS is one of those. I eventually become very good, but mostly I like building the stuff and killing things at a leisurely pace. My opponent had a much different philosophy. He is very good at most games, it seems, and he should be considering how many he plays. Once he gets an edge he never lets up, and an edge in Act of War is all it takes.

In the end, the experience didn't sour me on Act of War - I still think it is a good game that people should certainly play - but I was not convinced that the MP or skirmish play was more than average. If a tipping point is reached, a player can begin rolling over his opponents. There is only one resource - money - so there is no way to compensate for a lack of one resource with an alternate plan. An edge in banks or oil fields is absolutely decisive. My infantile skills aside, a single misjudgment over the size of a scouting force effectively cost me the game - or at least cost me the game more quickly than it should have.

And though there were no stalemates in the games we played, I remain convinced (based on skirmish play versus the AI) that the way the game plays out with this single resource means that two equally resourceful players would find themselves at a deadlock, primarily based on the power of the defence and the low cost of infantry.

One thing I did underestimate was how devastating the end game weapons could be in the right hands. My rival rained destruction from above in such a scary manner it was like all four horsemen showed up and galloped over my spine with spiked horsehoes. The weapons in Act of War make the god powers in Age of Mythology seem like toys.

I clearly need some practice.

And I think that Jim of Bastard Numbered is going to kill me in Laser Squad Nemesis.

And this, my friends, is why single player games will never go out of fashion.

Rome: Total War expansion

Gamestop is already listing an unnamed expansion for my favorite game of last year, Rome: Total War. What will the expansion be?

Well, if Total War forum dwellers can be trusted (and the poster is referring to a recent issue of PC Zone magazine), it will be titled Barbarian Invasion and will focus on the late Roman Empire as it heads towards collapse. Huns, Vandals, Sassanids, a divided empire and all that.

The official announcement will likely be made at next month's E3.

4/27/2005

New demos, old games

Gamespot has just posted new demos from the ancient war buffs at Slitherine. Is this a demo of the anticipated indie war game Legion: Arena? Nope. In fact, the demos are of games a couple of years old - Legion: Gold and Chariots of War.

Why release demos of games that have already been out for a while? The most likely explanation is to expose Slitherine to a wider audience and build some anticipation for Legion: Arena. Get people playing games that they most likely missed and get them talking about the next big thing. I've been anticipating it for a while, but I tend to be a sucker for anything in a leather skirt.

As a marketing plan, it's got some problems. Neither Legion nor Chariots are just average games, though both can be entertaining in small bursts. Second, unless the people announcing the new demos make the explicit connection between the old games and the new ones, the connection might be lost. Third, the new game is purely battles with no strategic map of any sort, so judging the potential value of Legion: Arena based on demos of the strategy games would be a serious error for any gamer.

I'm not sure how often this is done. I can't immediately recall any game that had a demo introduced so long after the game itself had fled shelves and memories.

But if I am right and this is a marketing tactic to drum up interest in Legion: Arena, it is good news. Because that means that the game must be close to release.

4/26/2005

News Flash: Strategy game makers run out of titles

Supreme Ruler: 2010 - We had Supremacy: Four Paths to Power this year. Supreme could be the new extreme.

War Leader: Clash of Nations - If only it were Rise of Nations. Instead, another WW2 RTS.

Throw in recently played Act of War, Knights of Honor and Tin Soldiers and you have the trite title all star team.

This is, of course, unavoidable. Strategy games can't have names like Duke Nukem or Serious Sam. The names have to have appeal to some sense of grandeur or desire for power but the English language is only so big. How many variations on "power", "empire" or "conquer" have there been in the history of strategy gaming? And, as the library of world conquest games grows, there will be fewer and fewer instantly recognizable concepts.

If you call a game Gettysburg or Napoleon's War then there is no doubt that the gamer knows what is in the box just by looking at the name. Civilization was a tantalizing title for a game simply because the word is so big that my early nineties mind was boggled at the possibilities.

But try a name like Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. What is a Kohan and why does it have an immortal king? And the sequel Ahriman's Gift doesn't improve the name at all. If you do fantasy strategy you have to use recognizable constructs like War + Craft or Hero + Might + Magic. No real shocks there.

Children of the Nile is a great name for a very good game. You instantly know that it is a strategy game set in Egypt. (It beats the pedestrian Pharaoh as a title.) Pax Romana is such an obvious title that it's surprising that it took so long for someone to use it. (Too bad the game was so bad.)

But for the most part, strategy gamers will have to accept that there is a limited vocabulary for the games they like to play. But remember - sports game fanatics have it worse.

4/25/2005

Strategy in short supply at E3

This news post at Gamesutra shows that very few exhibitors at E3 have strategy games in their top ten titles on display. A paltry five per cent of the titles listed were considered strategy games by the exhibitors, a number completely dwarfed by the action/adventure, roleplaying and sports/racing genres. Considering the wide range of games that can be considered strategy titles and the enduring popularity of this type of game, the number of titles in production is pretty small, it appears.

With no previous numbers to judge by, it's not clear if this marks a significant drop or if it is par for the course. The number seems small, but it bears mentioning that strategy games have yet to make a huge splash on the console scene; there are a few out there, but no one seems to be pushing the strategy envelope in that arena.

There will be some huge strategy games at E3. Few other genres can compete with the combined star power of Civ 4 and Age of Empires 3. But beyond these two, I am hard pressed to think of another title that has me on the edge of my seat. There are certainly no original strategy games that have me excited.

The genre is too popular and cost effective to be doomed. There have been a lot of cookie cutter RTS games in the last year or two, and there is probably some hesitancy on the part of publishers to invest in another failing RTS in an already saturated market. But they are still investing in MMOs and I can't figure out how many new players there are in that field.

4/22/2005

So much for realism...

Sparta: Ancient Wars, which has been selling itself as a realistic approach to ancient warfare - unlike all those other games out there - has released new screenshots. This one, of a scythed chariot manned by a spearman, could undercut their whole realism angle.

Since the game is being set in the high point of Spartan power - the era around the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars - there shouldn't be any scythed chariots. This was an Eastern weapon designed for the wide plains of Asia. They would of be little use in wooded, hilly Greece and were never used (so far as we know) by any Hellenes before the death of Alexander. The mainland Greeks probably never saw a scythed chariot until the failed attempt to put Cyrus on the throne of Persia (outlined in Xenophon's Anabasis).

Is this that big a deal? Of course not. Pedantry is not my stock in trade. But if you claim that your game will be more realistic than, say, Rome: Total War, then you lose your high horse of history if you make game choices like this. Now the game will be judged as all games should be - am I entertained?

Turn-Based Games at E3

Computer Games Magazine has a brief summary of the turn-based strategy games to be unveiled at E3 2005. All sequels, though.

I guess this makes sense. The real-time strategy subgenre has been improved to the point that there are so many game design options out there that you would be swimming against a strong tide to release a turn-based strategy game (wargames excluded). The growing popularity of multiplayer games means that there is also little interest in developing games that require you to wait until all of your opponents have emailed their turns.

I'm most excited in Civ 4, but the announcement of a sequel to Galactic Civlizations is great news. The resurrection of the Jagged Alliance series is good news, as well.

But the ever slimmer pickings each year reveal how far the turn-based 4X game has fallen. Paradox has proven that 4X can be done in real-time and Black Seas' Knights of Honor is a real-time 4X game that moves at the leisurely pace of turn-based games. So long as Civ is a cash cow for Firaxis, turn-based games will never die. But they may fade into irrelevance as a subgenre.

4/21/2005

American Conquest sequel announced

CDV and GSC have announced a sequel to their Cossacks companion series American Conquest. The sequel's name - American Conquest: Divided Nation - makes the central subject matter pretty obvious. In this iteration of the series, the American Civil War looks to be the central conflict, though GSC also promises conflict based on the Texan War for Independence and the War of 1812.

The game will be premiered at next month's E3.

4/20/2005

More on Age of Empires III

With every preview and interview, I find myself wanting this game more and more. And the scary thing is that I am being impressed more by the game's obvious beauty than by any obvious references to gameplay innovations.

Not that I want a lot of innovations from a studio as well situated to make a great gaming experience as Ensemble. The home city stuff sounds interesting, though the screenshot of a late 19th century locomotive in an Age of Discovery game makes me think that either the US will make an appearance somehow or the guys at Ensemble are taking their usual wide liberties with history. Fine with me in either case.

New Political Game

Positech has released a demo of its just released political sim, Democracy. You can find the demo at any major gaming site.

A friend was unimpressed by the demo's apparent focus on current hot-button issues (stem-cell research and gay marriage) since he was more interested in a general government sim. "Those issues have always followed us through the decades," he said sarcastically in reference to the "fad" topics.

Whether this concern for timeliness is carried over into the final product remains to be seen, but too strong a presence of the present was one of my criticisms of The Political Machine when I reviewed it. An emphasis on letting the players run their country/campaign in the here and now sacrifices the chance for the player to run their country/campaign into the past or future. Running abortion ads against Teddy Roosevelt just feels wrong, and having to revisit the running sores of this political moment time and time again has to get old fast.

Still, it's great to have a political game that tries to move beyond the "win the election" part of politics. The election is the easy part, after all. Running a country that can talk back to you at any time is where all the work is. I'll post my comments on the final version once I get my hands on it.

4/18/2005

Review update

My review for Act of War: Direct Action has been posted at Game Method. Not much to add beyond what I said a couple of days ago.

Don't let the final score fool you. Most of that is because of the game's poor replay value. The campaign is first rate, but most gamers expect a RTS to be great in multiplayer and skirmish. When most developers are making multiplayer and random map replayability the entire point, Eugen Systems goes out and breaks the mold by making a campaign that is much better than the actual gameplay merits. It's a game I recommend you pick up, just so you can see a campaign done properly. Movies and all.

4/16/2005

The Politics of Strategy Games

Having just finished my review of Act of War: Direct Action, it strikes me that this is as good a time as any to throw out some thoughts on the place of politics in strategy games.

Except for games about politics itself (Political Machine, Hidden Agenda, etc.), most gamers see little red-meat politics in their games. Sure the player gets to control politics. All good grand strategy games (Hearts of Iron, Europa Universalis) and some of the bad ones (Superpower) allow the player to tweak their ideology or domestic policies to one end or another. But political control for the player is not the same as having the politics of the designer in your face. Even the political sims, like Political Machine, are generally value neutral even if its developer is outspoken about his/her personal politics.

Act of War posits a near future in which high oil prices are manipulated by evil foreign corporations in bed with terrorists. Eco-terrorists are referred to as if they pose a real threat to American security and the bad guys are armed with Russian and French weaponry. These bad guys strike at the civilian heart of America and are actively working to bring the US to its knees.

I don't want to give away the rest of the plot, because it is actually pretty good for a real time strategy campaign. It's certainly not the first game to craft a "proud to be an American" campaign, but it does it with such skill (and forbids you to play the campaign from the other side) that certain elements are worth noting.

One early campaign scenario has heavily armed terrorists blend in seamlessly with anti-oil, anti-corporate protestors at a global summit. Are we to assume that they are linked somehow? The campaign begins with the capture of an Arab terrorist leader before quickly transitioning to the main plot. Is there a connection between the one and the other? The installation process features a mini-debate between a European energy exec and an American executive with the US rep accusing his rival of a conspiracy to keep oil prices high so he can make money off of alternative energy options. Since the American exec quickly becomes a target of the terrorists, what are we to make of his charges?

Some of this stuff is made clearer as you make your way through the campaign. But the fact is that the plot makes you wonder whether there is a political motivation behind the design of the campaign. Since the best part of the game is the campaign, and more energy was apparently put into it than into the skirmish game, it is reasonable to infer that the campaign is, in many ways, the point of Act of War.

Whether or not you agree with the game's politics (or possible politics), it is refreshing to find a game that makes you think that the developers might have point of view on something beyond game design. Alpha Centauri had a political perspective (the planet was alive and sensitive to exploitation) and SimEarth was a textbook on the Gaia Hypothesis and other environmental theories. We never ask if business or building sims have a political opinion, though they tend to endorse traditional ideas of economic growth and development.

Act of War may be something different. The politics may seem clear on the surface, or there may be more going on beneath its B-movie beauty. Either way, Act of War has engaged parts of my brain that most strategy games never touch.

4/15/2005

Revisionism in Game Design?

Wonderland has posted an interesting complaint about the upcoming Age of Empires 3 game. The native population in the game will be mostly allies of the players, and not the targets of genocide, displacement or sport hunting as was often the case in history.

The writer notes:

I have a quote in my head that I read, probably in Edge years ago, that goes along the lines of, "the majority of kids in the U.S. who know what a 'trebuchet' is learned it from Age of Empires". Can't dig it up, of course (grr), but .. if this revisionism is true - and it's only reported at the moment - I'd say that this could do a lot of harm.

I have to disagree with him, even though the issues are real. As I wrote earlier, there are serious problems with using strategy games to teach anything. No WW2 games ask the player to liberate death camps, and no American Civil War game deals with the ugly facts of slavery in the south. But, I would wager, most people know about the death camps and understand that, at some level, slavery was a major part of America's history. There is quite a bit of difference between learning what a trebuchet is and learning about the major events in our nation's history. Historical trivia and historical themes are not the same thing.

However, this does not get Ensemble and Microsoft of the hook. The tension between natives and the European colonists should not be included just because it is historically accurate (when, after all, have the Age games been about historical accuracy?) but because it would make for a better game.

There has been no shortage of games about the colonization of the Americas and they have all tried to deal with the issue of European/Native antagonism differently. Conquest of the New World had a native nation with weaker tech and different victory conditions, but also random Indian villages that produced goods, helped the player or hindered him/her. Seven Cities of Gold, based as it was on the Spanish exploration, made the Indian towns people to exploit or too conquer.

No game did it better than Sid Meier's Colonization. It is an average game in many ways, but it got the dynamic between history and gaming just about right. First, in most cases the native tribes would be welcoming and helpful. If good relations were maintained, they would supply you with goods for trade and you could plant missions in their villages. These outposts of Christianity would be greeted either well or poorly, depending on past relations, but could produce new citizens for your towns as Indians slowly converted to the new religion.

As you and your European neighbors expanded, though, many of the tribes would grow wary and there would be isolated attacks against settlers who strayed too far away. You were faced with an entirely logical choice of maintaining good relations (and maybe using your friends as a buffer between you and the Dutch) or razing the villages to keep the investments alive.

More often, however, you would burn an Indian village because it was near a silver vein, or surrounded by tobacco. The Aztecs and Inca had cities of gold and were targets because you needed gold to win the game.

Here, the game forces the player to make historical choices, even if it is in a cartoon world. If you let the Aztecs be (because you are moral), you have to also protect them from your rivals so that they don't profit from your mercy. If you arm the Cherokee with muskets and horses so they can survive, you are also setting up a potential problem if they ever turn against you - or you against them.

This is brilliant game design that doesn't flinch from history. It also doesn't shove the players' faces in the fact that this process was brutal in many cases. It treads the line between fact and fantasy, but all historical strategy games do.

4/14/2005

Over 200 thousand people buy crappy game

GSC Game World has announced that it has sold 200,000 copies of Alexander outside the former Soviet Union. This is for a game that has a 54.9 score at Gamerankings. The notable outliers are a 77 from PCGamer (US) and a 7 from IGN (which is like a 5 when the exchange rate is taken into consideration.)

The complete and total failure of the Oliver Stone movie it is based on would lead one to believe that there is no way that the movie could have driven sales. It did make a profit, thanks to worldwide sales, however. Could the vast foreign markets for Hollywood films (and Hasselhof albums) also make a bad game a hit?

You have to remember that GSC also developed Cossacks - the huge hit in Europe that made a minor splash over here. They have an audience of loyal followers, many of whom likely heard that Alexander would premiere the new Cossacks II engine.

Is 200,000 a lot of people? It's ten times smaller than the Cossacks sales, but is a lot of people. I'm not sure if they were given the rights or if they had to buy them from Stone and company. Since the engine was already underdevelopment, all that was really needed was some skinning and making some campaigns, so the development costs should not have been sky-high.

I haven't met anyone yet who thinks that the game was good, let alone great. But a lot of people (presumably the GSC core Euro-audience) bought it. Which leads to me to believe that a lot of the non-English language gaming press might have been nicer to it; they could hardly have been more cruel. Since I know that there are Europeans reading this blog, I wonder if they can help solve the mystery of a bad strategy game based on a bad movie garnering more than respectable sales.

4/13/2005

Cossacks II Gold

Cossacks II: Napoleonic Wars has gone gold. The first Cossacks series sold over two million copies, according to CDV. This is an amazing number for any strategy game, let alone a game series that is about formations, musket fire and little else.

But almost all those sales were in Europe. Cossacks barely made a dent in the American sales charts. I was one of those benighted colonials who never quite got the appeal of the first series and I'm not exactly excited about the prospects for a sequel. (Though American Conquest is better seen as the first sequel to the Cossacks games.) There were a lot of reasons for my disappointment, but more on those when I get my hands on the new version.

The new game, like the old, is selling itself with screenshots that are crammed with soldiers, all in tidy little rows. But as much as I played Cossacks I could never get my screen to look like theirs. Formations were confusing to make and the AI would often just send a trickle of troops into your empire where it would get overwhelmed even by undisciplined masses.

Cossacks II has a "conquer Europe" type game that looks vaguely like the one in use in Rise of Nations - still the best history themed RTS on the market. It works in RoN because of the way the basic RTS is integrated with the overlaid strategy game. Resources, wonders, ages, and all that are stuck on top pretty seamlessly. It remains to be seen how Cossacks II will do that.

My fear is that it will be a lukewarm Medieval: Total War type thing. You build up provinces and then fight with armies when you move from one to another. That didn't make Medieval fun (it was the other stuff), so they need to do more than that to make me enjoy the sequel to an overrated RTS.

4/12/2005

Sparta: Ancient Wars interview

A new interview with Ingo Horn of IMC is over at Computer Games Magazine's website. Though the interview is still in fractured English, it's the most we've heard about this game so far. And what have we learned about Sparta: Ancient Wars?

Not much.

Horn still won't divulge who the developer is, though Torsten Hess of Settlers fame is confirmed. Horn constantly assures John Callhan, the interviewer, that the game will have an emphasis on historical reality. In a not so subtle dig at his perceived competition, Horn states that most ancient themed RTS games to date are "not even correct games in terms of game play, historic time line or playability."

This devotion to realism can be admirable, but I want to see what he means by real. The game will focus on an historical campaign, probably surrounding the Spartans. There are two unannounced factions, but a reasonable guess would be Persians and "other Greeks". If this means no magic, I'm fine with it. If it means no elephants running like Panzers through the front rows of a phalanx, I'm really down with it.

But I wonder if Horn is putting the cart before the horse. Realism, though a worthy goal in a wargame, works less perfectly in RTS - a genre with established conventions that can only be replaced by reimagining the gameplay. There are next to no hints as to how the game will play, though we are promised well-animated farmers and a connected campaign, whatever that means.

What is the average strategy gamer to make of a statement like this?:

"And for a game with a historical background it is very important to spend much time for correcting the pre programming stage – otherwise every gamer will laugh about the story of a game, that has nothing to do with history he leant in school!"

The grognards wouldn't be happy if Leonidas himself designed the shields and cloaks, but saying that every gamer would be upset if the game's story didn't match history is simple madness. Do people even learn about Sparta in school anymore? If they do, it's not about the Messenian War, the Helot Revolt or the revolution of Cleomenes. At least not until they get to university.

More worrisome is his apparent surprise at being told that there are a lot of other ancient themed games out there. Since the beginning of 2004:

Battle for Troy
Coliseum (maybe)
Nemesis of the Roman Empire
Rome: Total War
Spartan
Tin Soldiers: Alex the Great
Alexander: The Heroes Hour
Alexander
Gates of Troy
Children of the Nile

Not all RTS to be sure. But look on the horizon - Legion Arena, Rise and Fall, Strength and Honour...surely Horn must have played most of the released games if he is so enchanted with the ancient world. Only World War II has been a more constant theme for historical games in the last few years.

Many of these games are probably being lumped into his "not even correct games in terms of game play, historic time line or playability"catch-all, though I have no idea what he means by correct game play or playability. Children of the Nile doesn't really fit any of his criticisms, but, of course, it's a city builder and not a war-heavy game.

Of course, my confusion is being filtered through Horn's poor command of the English language. A lot of what he has said is no more puzzling than the PR double-speak that some American firms put out when a game is at the early stages. But it is puzzling to see a developer give an interview with a major magazine this close to E3 with nothing to show or reveal beyond "We are building an ancient game that will be very realistic."

4/11/2005

Origins

Isn't it funny how things get started in the strategy game world? Before Age of Empires II came along, could your average gamer tell you what a trebuchet was? Or what it looked like? Or how it worked?

Now it seems that every strategy game set in the MiddleAges (or that has a Middle Age moment) has a trebuchet in there somewhere. Ensemble Studios found something cool and now everyone has one. In fact, I am hard pressed to think of a single Medieval strategy game in the last five years that doesn't have a trebuchet in it.

And so, one hit game from 1999 has now cemented the place of an obscure siege engine into the hearts of gamers.

I note this because Knights of Honor (review forthcoming) seems to borrow a lot of terms and unit names from other, more famous games. Not that the more famous game invented the name or term, but when I say hobilar or ghulam cavalry, chances are you have a creatively assembled game in mind, if you catch my drift.

4/09/2005

The Amazing Growing Games

My copy of Act of War: Direct Action arrived yesterday. In a rush to get to the gaming goodness, I cracked the seal and turned to the technical specifications to see how much space I had to find on my hard drive.

Six gigabytes. On a forty gig hard drive, that's a lot of real estate.

Why such a small hard drive, you are obviously thinking. A real gamer should have hundreds of gigs at his disposal. Certainly a game reviewer should. And you are absolutely right.

My primary gaming machine is my laptop - it's plenty fast, has a decent video card and has a nice screen for gaming. But, like many laptops, there is little space. So I have to pick and choose what stays and what goes.

But why should *any game* take six gigabytes? I suspect that most of Act of War's byte hogging is a result of the elaborate cutscenes. It can't be the standard game graphics, because Half Life 2 was only a little over four gigs, if I recall, and it is certainly the height of prettiness.

Even recently installed Knights of Honor, a rather old schoolish grand strategy game, takes a full 1.2 gigabytes that I can't fully account for.

I can see Rome taking up 2 gigs. And Pirates! has earned its one-plus gigs. In fact, a gigabyte footprint is pretty standard these days. I was actually relieved when Children of the Nile took up a meagre 800 MB.

Some of it is certainly the improvement in graphics and a greater emphasis on the music, voices and sounds that draw many gamers into the virtual world they are in. There is also a growing resistance among gamers to CD/DVD reading in the middle of a game. They want play to be smooth and uninterrupted and accessing the CD/DVD drive for the sound, movie or map takes up valuable seconds.

In the gaming arms race, beauty and brains and hi-tech imagery has led to a space race as I try to decide which games will be less painful for me to reinstall in the next two months. Because you know that in six weeks time I will likely remove one of these recent purchases to make room for the next box to show up.

4/05/2005

Where are the Women Game Journalists?

For all the chat in gaming circles about the perceived lack of female gamers out there, there is an even more glaring gender imbalance in who covers games. I was going to do a statistical study of gaming sites and print publications to see how many women were writing game reviews - especially on sites that don't specifically advertise themselves as sites for women - but I ran into some trouble when I found only three on the first two dozen websites I checked.

Now, I am talking about writers here, not PR directors or Marketing specialists. There is a chance that the video game journalism scene is the new sports beat; it's a journalistic subculture that focuses on stereotypically male things and is perpetuated by the males that write about it. Fortunately, almost every major sports page in the country has at least one significant female sportswriter (and they aren't all covering ice skating.)

I'm not going to pretend that women game in equal numbers as men do, at least not in the sense that gamers usually mean. (I don't want to belittle Bejewled or Solitaire, but when we speak of the gaming industry, these aren't the products we have in mind.) There are woman gamers out there, and I know many of them personally. The proprietor of old games haven Home of the Underdogs is a woman of high intelligence and excellent taste in games. (And a killer at Literati.) But, Sims 2 aside, most games skew heavily male. And, even more shocking, game forums are almost exclusively the preserve of males.

Do woman gamers in general not think about the games they play, and therefore have no interest in writing about them? Highly unlikely. Female gamers are just as judgmental and cranky and prone to disillusionment after anticipation as males are. Women write about film, women write horror and sci-fi; in other words, women can be nerds too, since the nerd stamp on gaming is just too indelible to be removed quickly.

But the heavily male world of gaming journalism fits naturally with the male world of gaming. Most developers are male, game magazines and websites run game heroine pinup shots, games celebrate your typical male fantasies of conquest and sporting triumph, Sims 2 is derided in chat rooms and forums and 2 kewl 4U editorials that can't appreciate a game where none of the repetitiveness involves disemboweling. Mind you, I know plenty of women who would enjoy a good disemboweling.

What is the effect of having fewer female gamers on the staffs of major (and minor) gaming publications? It could be huge, it could be small. There is no clear way of knowing until it is done. I'm not a big fan of standpoint theorists who argue that it is prima facie impossible for me (as a white male) to understand the perspective of someone different from me. But I must concede that there is a distinct possibility that games are not offering half of the world what they want. I have no way of knowing for sure, though, since there aren't enough women on publishing staffs for me to see if there is, in fact, a difference.

If gaming ever intends to become a mainstream hobby (though I am sure there are plenty of journalists and gamers who relish the nerd chic of a niche pastime), it needs to not just attract more women, it needs to get the opinions of more women. The gaming journalism world is an incestuous one, of course. Most of my writing opportunities have come from being the right place at the right time - my smidgen of talent just keeps me there. The almost total absence of female gaming journalists can't be a coincidence.

Look at the big three American computer game print publication. None of PC Gamer's writing staff is female, though a behind the scenes staffer is occasionally asked for a comment. Computer Gaming World rarely runs a review or preview article by a female writer.

Computer Games Magazine has a tiny permanent staff, but the Features Editor, Cindy Yans, has a regular column, a couple of previews and the occasional review article. This sounds great - and Yans is a good writer with good insights in MMOGaming - but it's a lot from a single female voice.

As an establishment, we should certainly do more to encourage female gamers to write their opinions; to let them know that their opinions are taken seriously. It would certainly help, of course, if every female on a gaming message board wasn't swarmed by A/S/L messages...

I'll confess to not doing as much as I can. I have referred male friends to editors, but no female friends. Because, naturally, they had written nothing I could base my opinions on.

Age of Empires 3 previews and news

Bit by bit, tempting chunks of information about Age of Empires 3 is being released by Ensemble Studios. This month's Computer Games Magazine has a lengthy preview and news sites around the 'net are doing stories on what is probably the most eagerly awaited RTS for 2005.

Once again, each civilization will have unique units and attributes. Six have been announced so far (Britain, Holland, France, Germany/Austria, Portugal and Spain) with intimations that a Native American nation will be playable, largely because focus groups wanted to play Indians. (There are no United States Americans.)

For the most part, natives will be a resource that the player can use to improve their armies through alliance with the aboriginal populations. As in almost all of these Age of Discovery games, the French will have an advantage in sucking up to the residents of the New World.

The home country of your settlers seems to play a larger role in this game than in other strategy games of this type. Your home city will "level up" as you progress through the "Ages", giving you access to more power and tech, and, through the factory upgrade, a steady flow of certain resources.

Most RTS games with military formations see combat devolve into a messy melee situation, making the formations pointless. Cossacks II will ascribe serious penalties to troops not in formation, but Age of Empires III will almost insist on formations for combat to be meaningful. Some formations will give the units in it special defensive bonuses or resistance to certain types of attack.

There's a January preview at Gamespot that is worth checking out and the aforementioned seven page preview in May's Computer Games Magazine.

4/03/2005

Video Games a top tech breakthrough

A CNN survey of experts has concluded that video games are the 15th greatest technological breakthrough of the last 25 years. This tops remote controls (21), biometrics (16) and cloning (22).

Nice to see that I'm not the only person who takes this hobby way too seriously.

New Games Journalism in the New York Times

Today's New York Times catches up to two months ago with a brief story about New Games Journalism. (registration required.)

There is not much new in the article. It rehashes the argument made by Kieron Gillen that NGJ is a new way to write about games, implies that it is a superior way, etc.

What surprised me though, was the reference to Tom Chick as "one of the field's rare American practitioners." I think Chick would be surprised to find himself considered a New Games Journalist, especially since he's been writing stuff like Shoot Club for years before the term was coined. I think he would be more surprised to find himself considered a rarity in American gaming journalism based on how he writes. (The really rare thing about Chick is that he makes a living doing this as a freelancer.) He's one of my favorite writers (and a killer in War: Age of Imperialism) but what he writes about isn't as distinctive as the craft with which he writes about it.

In fact, his half of the "Bruce (Geryk) versus Tom" articles in Computer Gaming World is an excellent example of NGJ, which means that Geryk is a new games journalist, too. After all, these action reports are all about the experience of multiplayer games between friends. And Geryk always loses, it seems.

If you look the "unmissable examples" list, one is by Gillen and another by Shanahan - the coiner of the term and one of the seminal authors. It looks like NGJ is rare enough on the other side of the pond, too, if they had to include examples from these two fine authors. In fact, of the ten examples, three are from members of the jury (Gillen, Shanahan and Jim Rossignol.)

As I said in an earlier post on this subject, I don't see the big break between NGJ and old games journalism. There have always been articles in gaming magazines that were not reviews/previews and interviews. A lot of columns and editorials could qualify as NGJ if they wrote about the experience of gaming.

What the Times mention means, though, is that we haven't seen the last of this meme.

4/02/2005

What I've Written For Game Method

Template change

As you can see, I've changed my template so I could make more use of the real estate on screen. I'm using a template I found here, but this means that all the old comments are nerfed and I still have to work out where I will put all the links and everything.

I will probably move to a new comment system, especially one that will let me keep track of new comments right here on the blog main page. I've been getting quite a few new eyeballs poking around my archives and leaving comments, but there was no way to notify viewers that they were there. Haloscan was great for leaving comments, but tracking them was a pain.

Please bear with me through the transition. Anyone who knows more about CSS than me is welcome to pitch in with advice.

4/01/2005

They Came From Hollywood

It looks like progress is slowly being made on the long anticipated movie monster smash-up They Came From Hollywood. New screenshots show rampages in amusement parks and the developers report that some of the cities will be set in non-modern settings - one in the 50s, one in the 20s, etc.

Beyond the very cool screenshots and very amusing website, there are still a lot of questions about TCFH. Will it keep the player coming back once they've crushed everything? The screens seem to keep track of property damage and people killed, but how does this work into gameplay? Do you need to kill a certain number to move on? Is there a campaign at all or is it just freeform destruction? Does your monster have goals?

For my interest, is this a comedy-action game or is there some strategy involved?

Some people have been following TCFH for a long time - it's the Duke Nukem Forever of independent gaming. (You can find old screenshots on its website dated April 2001). It only has a two person development team and small teams means long development times. Some people are getting impatient.

Not me. Though I look forward to They Came from Hollywood, I'm past the point of excitement. I just want a good game that unleashes my inner killer robot.

Sparta: Ancient Wars

Another ancient themed game on the distant horizon (2006).

Being an unbiased and tolerant guy, I'm trying not to laugh at the fractured English in the press release but if you want gamers and gaming "journalists" to take you seriously in the English language media, you really have to do better than:

"Such realistic and pitiless battlefield scenarios have only been shown in Hollywood movies until date."

or

"Everyone has heard of the storied legend from the war against Troy, where hero Achilles fought a great battle. But someone might know more details from history or Latin at school, than from the movies."

or

"
But not only these cut scenes provide an impressive background. Also unpredictable events provide sudden changes, contradict existing missions and require complete new tactics."

Anyway, despite promises of a new physics engine and "
bloody injuries and killed units that are left behind", this is not one that will go on my want list. At least not until I have a little more information.