When Good Software Goes Bad

For a couple of years now I have been using Game Collector to organize my games collection. This small bit of software was a little pricy, but it's ability to import data about a game from online sources made it a lot easier to use than simply making my own. Sure, I couldn't add many new fields, but most of the important stuff was there. My own Access or Filemaker database would have worked fine, but I had neither the time nor the desire to make my own. I would have ended up manually inputting tons of information on my hundreds of games. It's not the best piece of collection software out there, but it is easy to use and has access to all this online information to make my inputting easier.

Well, it used to.

A few months ago, the program developers were told to stop using the online database of All Games Guide as a source. It is still not clear to me if Collectorz Software ever had permission to use the AGG database in the first place (it is an excellent resource, by the way). Apparently, Game Collector used to have access to Mobygames, but were told to stop using that, too.

Automation was the entire reason for me buying this software to begin with. Now the only online source available through the program is Amazon - a rather poor choice for a game collector. All the info has to be entered manually now.

Since I don't get more than three or four new pieces of software every month, manual input is not a huge deal at this point. Many of my games are indie titles that AGG didn't have data for anyway. But can you imagine my fury if I had bought this software immediately before the relationship with AGG had ended? The website still advertises that it can access online databases for collection information, but this isn't really true.

There is now talk of Collectorz Software maintaining its own database of game information. Until they do - or can work out a relationship with a major online database - I won't be recommending it to anyone.

Reviews update - and a bit on scoring

Three new reviews from yours truly. Game Method has posted the Cossacks II review I did for them, and you can find my Computer Games Magazine review of the same game in their September issue. My CGM review of Supreme Ruler 2010 is in the same issue.

If you compare the Cossacks II reviews, you will notice that I gave it a 65 at Game Method, but 2.5 stars at CGM. This is not an error or a change in opinion or editorial meddling with my scoring. Despite what Game Rankings would have you believe, you can't always directly compare a star scoring system to a percentage ranking. Each site or publication has a definition attached to a scoring range. For both Game Method and CGM, I ranked Cossacks II where it belongs - squarely in the low side of average. Game Method's official definition of the 60s range is "flawed".

We can go round and round comparing scoring systems. I prefer to work in a star system because there is a prevailing image of the percentage grade of games as comparable to a school grade. This leads to what one colleague derisively calls the "7 to 9" scale - almost every game will fall in this gap. As a writer, all I can do is fit my impressions of the game into the prevailing editorial system. I'm not about to wage a one-man revolution against people giving me a chance to write about something I love. If asked, I'll voice my opinion.

As for Cossacks II, it's pretty dull. The battles are nice enough, but once again GSC has made the game nearly impossible for newcomers. Over at Eurogamer, Kieron Gillen called it a RTS that wasn't because effective play required a lot of pausing as you got your troops lined up. The strategy game has little to recommend it, and once again I fail to grasp the popularity of a European success story.

Supreme Ruler 2010 is workmanlike. It's very deep and Battlegoat seems to have avoided all the pitfalls that made Superpower and its sequel completely unplayable - at least without a strong drink. Supreme Ruler is, in many ways, a promising start. It's not there just yet, but I eagerly anticipate their next project.

Rise of Legends Campaign Info

Gamespot has a preview of the campaign story for Big Huge Games' upcoming RTS Rise of Legends, coming to us via Ike Ellis and Paul Stephanouk. The plot sounds like what you would find in any RPG. Person on periphery of power is thrust into position of Grave Responsibility and must navigate the Treacherous Waters of politics and diplomacy. In other words, there will be a lot of fighting.

Having just finished reading John Sutherland's essay on story-telling in games, it looks like BHG is following all the rules. I like how the design of the campaign will attempt to link role-playing choices (like party composition and character upgrades) to a strategic plan (who you trust and who you kill). The challenge of bringing open-ended gameplay to a story based campaign cannot be underestimated. Truly open play would allow you to lose a battle, or even a city, and still progress through the campaign. Losses and retreats in most RTS story campaigns are scripted ("You are outnumbered and must hold off the enemy until 12 Foozle-slayers successfully leave the map.") even though a good strategy game - and even a good story - should allow you to recover from a loss.

This is why I love emergent story-telling in games. Don't tell me that Civilization or Europa Universalis don't have stories. Any game you can tell a stroy about has a story. I'm currently absorbed in the tiny roguelike Dungeon Crawl, and the only plot elements that are given is that there is a dungeon and some McGuffin I have to get. But I can tell you lots of deep stories about how my moronic characters have died.

But, the "campaign" game has become de rigeur for RTS, even though most do it very poorly. Rise of Nations had a decent campaign game, and the expansion made some great additions. Even the scripted stories in Age of Mythology and Act of War were above average. But all these games are designed with skirmishes and multiplayer flexibility as the major game elements. Still, there is an insistence that there be a campaign mode, though I know of few gamers who point to the Joan of Arc campaign as a big plus for Age of Empires II.

BHG is spending quite a bit of time on the character development, and the screenshots show a beautiful and foreign landscape, quite unlike anything we have seen in other RTSes. Rise of Legends is still my number one must-have game for the new year, and the tiny game designer me grows a little more intrigued with each preview.

Rise and Fall of Egypt - An Early Look from Gamespot

Gamespot has posted the first profile of a culture in Stainless Steel Studios' upcoming Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War. The Egyptians get the star treatment and there is quite a bit of information about what we can expect from them.

The game has hero units as the major new innovation, and SSS has gone to the obvious choices of Cleopatra and Ramsses the Great. Historically speaking, Cleopatra was a ruler with more ambition than actual success, but name recognition is important. Telling a player that he is now controlling Hathepsut or Thutmose III just doesn't have the same instant appeal.

I do note that Cleo is wearing a dress that exposes her midriff - just like Isis did in Age of Mythology, and like no one who wasn't a dancer would have at the time period in question. And that's a very short skirt. I think I can see the Nile Delta. The priestess isn't dressed much more modestly. The Britney-ization of computer women is not limited to The Sims or RPG fantasy anymore.

The priest, healer, and architect advisors emphasize the commonplace understandings of ancient Egyptian society. They were religious and they built stuff, just as we have learned from Cecil B. DeMille movies and Civ 3 (where Egypt was Religious and Industrious.) The military looks to be your standard computer game melange of Ptolemaic armies (elephants and cavalry) and the Pharaonic armies of Ramsses (charioteers and swordsmen).

I should do another article that compares how various games have seen various historic cultures. I think that there is a lot of subtle education going on that reinforces both traditional and legendary understandings of what made certain cultures tick.

As for Rise and Fall, it still hasn't climbed into my gotta-have-it list despite the pull of the period for me. The naval battles look like a real change of pace, and I think that SSS's Empires: Dawn of the Modern World was an underappreciated and tightly paced jewel of a game. Stay tuned to Gamespot (and here) for more updates.

A brief hiatus and a small challenge

I appreciate all the regular traffic from regular readers, but a minor interruption will prevent me from updating regularly for the next week or so. The recent drop-off in content has been because I am preparing for guests on holiday. So, I will be playing the host for a week or so.

In the meantime, enjoy the archives, conquer new worlds and suggest domain names for me. I am considering moving off Blogger and onto a domain of my own so I can use fancier blogging tools. Feel free to fill the comment box with domain name ideas. And if you can suggest a reliable host, even better.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

The strategy genre has not made much of a dent in the console world. Though older classics like Age of Empires and Europa Universalis are now finding their way to handhelds, console strategy has, for the most part, been left to planning out your franchise moves in a sports game or choosing which card to play in Yu-Gi-Oh. That seems to be changing, with a number of new strategy games on the horizon for the PS2.

One consistend exception has been the Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. KOEI has been making these epic strategy/role-playing games since the late eighties. The original could be played on the NES. The new one, now number ten, is for the PS2 (as were seven, eight and nine) and it is getting rave reviews.

There was a time when KOEI made games for the PC. The games were, in many ways, precursors to the Total War series. Your leaders are much more important than they are in the Creative Assembly games, and you, as the player, take on a specific character and not a nation or faction. This means that there is a role-playing element beyond the simple conquer-thy-neighbor mechanic.

As a console-less person, I can only rely on the word of people whose opinion I trust. And they tell me that RoTK X is a great game. There has been some discussion of whether or not KOEI should try its hand at a Western historical theme. In their PC days, they took on Napoleon and the American Revolution, but have stuck with the great Chinese sagas for the most part.

Here in the US, certain historical subjects sell better than others and certain play styles sell better than others. Though a new KOEI game based on the Revolutionary war or the time of the conquistadors might sell better than the unification of China, it is often the battles themselves that seem to fascinate American history gamers. There are exponentially more games, for example, on individual Civil War battles than there are grand strategic games on the war. (This mindset could explain the durability of homemade war games and the comparative dearth of larger strategy titles.)

I just wish they would publish this game for the PC. I suppose that I can get a PS2 cheap in a year or so. Until then, I guess I'll just cede this one piece of gold to my strategy deprived console brethren. After action reports and further comments welcome in the comment section, as usual.

Legion: Arena in final stages

Slitherine has announced a final round of beta testing for their Roman battle game, Legion: Arena. This one is aimed at testing the multiplayer component of the game. Sign up at Strategy First's website.

Generous people

Much to my surprise, a courier showed up at my door with a copy of Great Invasions, the latest grand strategy game from the mind of Philippe Thibaut. I was officially in the beta test, but I did a poor job of it since it coincided with a billion other things in my life. I think I made two posts on the beta forum and I haven't played the game in six to eight months.

But, just the same, I get a copy of the game. In French.

Well, the box is French and the manual is French, but the game itself is installed in English. No word on any official US release for Great Invasions, but you can order it direct from its website or wait for it in British stores on August 5.

Legion: Arena interview at IGN

There is a new interview with Slitherine's Iain McNeil at the RPGVault on IGN. It's very informative on what we can expect from this title.

McNeil writes that Legion: Arena battles will be "over in two to 10 minutes, depending on the size of the forces involved." This will make for very short battles, but is much longer than a typical Slitherine battle. In Spartan and its predecessors, you might get one to drag on to two minutes, but most ended pretty quickly.

The linearity of the campaigns is a little disappointing. A dynamic campaign that would allow you to meet the challenges of the mini-campaigns in slightly different ways depending on the results of the previous battles would be more interesting, but admittedly more difficult to program. Making multiplayer a "match game" sounds like fun, but is more likely bowing the fact that the individual battles themselves are so brief.

Even though the campaigns will only be Celtic and Roman, the availability of campaign opponents ranging from Spartacus to Carthage almost guarantees that their will be unofficial player created campaigns using these units before long. I give Legion: Arena two months before unofficial content starts popping up.

The presence of this interview on the RPG section of the site is a little surprising. Beyond the upgrading of units and possibility of customizing units, the step-by-step nature of the linear campaign means that there will not be all that much role-playing as traditionally understood. McNeil's comparison to Diablo is intriguing, but I doubt that enjoying one will have much to do with whether one enjoys the other.

Legion: Arena should be available in the third quater of 2005. The decision of Slitherine to return to the Strategy First fold means that there is at least one SF game that I am guaranteed to buy this year.

Europe - the stronghold of historical strategy

Of my three favorite strategy games so far this year, the top two were European. Darwinia is a British product and the flag waving Act of War is French. They are representative of a continuing trend in the genre. Europe is increasingly the source of our strategy games and the genre seems to be in decline in American development houses.

There is still, of course, the Microprose diaspora of Ensemble, Firaxis and Big Huge Games, but beyond the big three, there is Stardock, Stainless Steel Studios and little else. Mad Doc Software has done a bit of everything, including the recent Empire Earth II. Blizzard has put so much into the MMO basket, that there is little talk of another Warcraft or Starcraft. A quick browse of the E3 strategy lineup shows a major dearth of American talent.

Look at Europe. In the UK you have both Creative Assembly and Slitherine, both of whom do strategic games with a battle engine attached. The Germans tend towards economic development games and resource management titles (the Anno series, the Patrician games, etc.) Sweden has the reigning kings of grand strategy in Paradox Interactive and Eastern Europe has become the source of all kinds of resource driven RTS titles, led by Ukrainian GSC Gameworld, makers of the Cossacks series.

This coming year, German publisher CDV will publish Blitzkrieg II from Russian Nival Interactive and Codename Panzers: Phase II from Hungarian Stormregion. 1C has assumed the publication of many historical strategy games, becoming to Europe what Strategy First was for Canada, only with a much wider global reach. 1C has secured the European rights to Age of Empires 3 and will be the international distributor for XIII Century and Cuban Missile Crisis.

There is still a strong American presence in the wargame community, but the decline of that subgenre from the retail shelves means that its power in the strategy community is on the wane. You will be more likely to find a cut-rate Romanian WWII RTS or Anno 1703 at your local EB than the next large scale D-Day simulation.

The historical strategy genre is thriving in a dozen small houses in Europe and isolated to a few pockets here in the Americas. The consolidation of the game publishing industry in the US has meant that many publishers aren't as willing to take risks on marginal developers in what is still seen as a niche genre (in spite of the huge mainstream sales of the Age and Civ series). If a US or Canadian publisher does want to take on a strategy title, it will usually be from a European developer where the costs are much lower than here.

Europe also appears to have a stronger market for these types of games. In spite of their blandness or finicky rulesets, both the Anno and Cossacks series have been huge hits in the Old World. Paradox first released Europa Universalis to huge audiences in Europe before trying the US market. Canadian developer Magitech has already found publishers for its Strength and Honor in Italy, Spain and Russia but has had little success in America.

Strategy games are still the biggest selling genre in America, according to the ESA, but that data includes The Sims - which is more simulation than strategy - and a plethora of tycoon games that really don't fit into the historical strategy camp that grabs me. Without access to NPD data and similar data collection from around the world, it is hard to tell just how much of a market there is for my beloved subgenre.

Children of the Nile a museum piece

On the Children of the Nile main page, Tilted Mill has announced that the city-builder will be included in the traveling Tut exhibit, Tutankhamen and The Golden Age of the Pharaohs.

This is great news for what was one of my favorite games from last year. I'm surprised that this announcement from Myelin Media hasn't gotten more coverage, since it appeals to the whole "Games As Serious Stuff" thing that so many gaming pundits and journalists say they want. The Myelin deal with MTV over a poker game was deemed more newsworthy by IGN or Gamespot than the inclusion of a game in the most anticipated museum event since the first Tut exhibit.

How will the game be integrated into the museum display? That remains to be seen. (Any of you in LA able to help with this?) Most museum displays are little more than piles of stuff laid out on pedestals or behind glass, so a screen running Children of the Nile should blend in fine as just another artifact.

I hope that they do more with it than just have it running in the background and give this game the attention it deserves. A good friend complained that the lack of cartoony stuff (like Zeus had) made him less interested in the drab and "serious" looking Children of the Nile, and, as I noted in my review, you have to cast off a lot of your ideas about what a city-builder is all about. If you haven't played it yet, Children of the Nile is available very cheaply from a number of online distributors and is more than worth whatever price you pay.

The Escapist - another online magazine

Not so long ago, I wrote my impressions of Gamer's Quarter. It's a very long, very text heavy and very interesting attempt to make a "new" gaming magazine. No reviews (at least as traditionally understood) and a little heavy on the first person side of writing. Is it New Games Journalism? Is it just traditional media criticism? Whatever it is, it made quite a few people sit up and take notice.

Now we have The Escapist. Also available on PDF, it is much easier to browse online. People who follow this sort of thing should have already heard of some of the writers (including Kieron Gillen, the "father of New Games Journalism").

Each issue will address a specific topic in the gaming world and a publishing schedule is already available. They are accepting submissions for future issues.

My impressions from this first issue are mostly positive. There isn't a lot here that hasn't been said before in one form or another. The question of what being a gamer really means, the effects that the mainstreaming of gaming will have on the hobby/industry, and the Demuzio Law are all well trod paths. All are exceptionally well written, and this alone makes The Escapist worth a quick browse.

But making every issue a "theme issue" will probably separate The Escapist from the pack. If there are different contributors every month or so, the reader will be served by a variety of voices exploring different sides of the same issue. (We game bloggers will trying a variant of this in a Gaming Roundtable that is currently in the works.)

The thing about the Internet, of course, is that there is room for a lot of online zines, though probably not enough dollars to make more than a couple commercially successful ventures. At this point, neither The Escapist nor Gamer's Quarter are ready to make that leap, and it's not even clear if they would choose to.

It does mean that there are now multiple professional looking online magazines for people who prefer to have serious gaming criticism that has been edited. Even though I blog, and consider myself a fair to good writer, the importance of good editing cannot be overlooked in quality control.

I hope that both The Escapist and Gamer's Quarter find consistent audiences.

Gamerdad interviewed

Josh over at Cathode Tan has a great interview with Gamerdad himself, Andrew Bub.

If you're not familiar with Gamerdad, it's a website devoted to assessing the suitability of games and other entertainment for children. But this isn't a bluestocking site. Andrew is one of the better freelance game reviewers out there, and really knows his stuff. But, as a father, he also has some idea of what is suitable for his children.

And he doesn't just look at the big hits and tell you the obvious (Doom 3 is not for kids), he also looks at some of the stuff targeted to children and looks at how good it is. So Andrew provides a dual service - is this stuff any good, and how good is it for your children?

He's not alone. He has a lot of good writers on staff and a very active forum. Gamerdad has become an essential site for me, even though I have no children of my own. Andrew provides an important service that complements the meagre efforts of the ESRB and the hysterics of the anti-gaming lobby. Gamerdad is a voice of reason and sanity in an environment with too little of both.

Supreme Commander and scaling

Despite another hopelessly bland title, Supreme Commander hopes to give strategy gamers a "spiritual successor" to much admired Total Annhilation. The recent Gamespy preview by Dave Kosak spends a lot of time talking about the scale of the units, a factor much in evidence in the screenshots provided. There is talk about some units dwarfing others and how some can only be grasped by zooming way out.

Visual scale in RTS games never bothered me all that much. Sure, the catapults in the original Age of Empires looked a little goofy because they were so huge. The houses were all tiny and could never fit a family of Age-sized citizens. None of this got in the way of the fun.

In the move towards greater technology, sharper resolution and better interfaces we've had a simultaneous push towards greater realism, a realism that often manifests itself in the sizes of the units that we are given. Take Rise of Nations, a game that gave wonders a wondrous scale compared to all the people that built them. Though you couldn't really make out all the details from a distant zoom, you could tell who your light infantry were by little graphical details and every other unit scaled appropriately.

Supreme Commander will emphasize its scale through the production of huge super units, like the giant spider crawling around on the first page of the preview. The still distant Rise of Legends will take the steps of its predecessor even further, as the buildings seemed to have ballooned in size to meet the epic scale of the campaign. Even Age of Empires 3 has taken the size thing to heart. None of this stuff will make for a better game, in my opinion, but it might contribute to that ever elusive immersion thing that gaming pundits keep talking about without ever defining.

The other scaling train that Supreme Commander seems to be riding is a push to scale down the micromanagement. Where Empire Earth II gave you wood, gold, tin, food, oil, iron and God knows what else to harvest, Chris Taylor is going to run SC on just two resources - mass and energy. It sounds very ninth grade science, but by directing the player towards efficient paths, the plan is to make a lot out of a little.

Supreme Commander is not alone. Act of War had, in effect, one resource - money - that could be collected in a few ways. I suspect that it is easier to balance unit cost with fewer resources than it is with many. Balancing cost is the often undiscussed side of unit balance but is, in the long run, more important than attack/defense values. With a single resource, you can make unit power directly relate to cost and not have to worry about the relative availability of resource points.

I think RTS games have reached a point where they can't have more resources added. The balancing becomes impossible to the point that min/maxing is inevitable and a lot of work goes for naught. Rise of Nations was pushing it with five or six resources, but mitigated the confusion through brilliant design and management tools. I think that any more than three can make the economic minigame a chore that deters casual players from getting up to speed.

I, like most strategy gamers, am looking forward to Supreme Commander. And for more than its scale. I have no idea what it means to be the "spiritual successor" to a game, but it has vaulted to near the top of my must-have list for 2006.

Age of Empires Online

Planet Age of Mythology is reporting that Ensemble is looking for people who have experience in developing and servicing massively multiplayer games.

The MMO world is the next big frontier for strategy gamers. I fondly remember playing empire conquest type games on a BBS in college, but it was turn based and heavily weighted in favor of those who had been around the longest. Joining a game as a new country or empire generally meant that your survival depended on the willingness of the big dogs to let you live.

Planet AoM is reading the tea leaves, though, and coming away with the impression that this will not your typical Ensemble RTS. Why would a strategy game need specialists in bone animation? The implication is that this will be some sort of RPG/RTS hybrid.

With Stardock working on Society, it won't be long before we see how developers plan to use the MMO world to expand the reach of strategy games. The trick is to keep a player's empire an active entity even when the player is offline. If Bob's Klingons are my big threat, I shouldn't have to wait until he's online before I take them out. And since, to this point, all strategy games have been PvP in the multiplayer environment, anyone who deigns to bring a MMO strategy game into the world will have to deal with all the baggage that that brings to the table.

Of course, to this point we have no evidence that Ensemble's big gamble will be strategy at all. Blizzard made its name with RTS games and a very light hack-and-slash RPG. And now they are the king of the MMO mountain. The campaign game in Age of Empires 3 will center on a single family, so there may be a role-playing element here that hasn't really been present in any of Ensemble's other offerings. (Yes, Age of Mythology had a character based campaign, but it was more adventure than role playing, at least as traditionally understood.)

For the unfiltered word on the project (or lack thereof) check out the jobs section for Ensemble.

Carnival of Gamers IV

The fourth Carnival of Gamers is up at Cathode Tan. The holiday seems to have meant fewer submissions, but they are all pretty good. I especially recommend the two from The Game Chair, a site that is experimenting with "progressive reviews".

Rome: Total Modding - my first homemade battle

Last night I decided to try my hand at designing historic battles using Rome: Total War's editor. After seeing all the neat historic battles on Time Commanders and noticing that the game files include reference to some of these battles, I am annoyed that, first, they didn't include Pharsalus or Tigranocerta and, second, that the historic battles they did include are far from historic. (Trasimene was an ambush along a coast line and doing Raphia with the pharaonic Egyptian army is just crazy.)

For my experiment, I chose the Battle of Paraitacene (317 BCE). It had a lot to recommend it. There are a lot of troop types so there's some variety, the battlefield itself is just a flat plain, and the ancient historian Diodorus gave a pretty good description of what happened. Also, the Great Battle of History Collector's Edition included Paraitacene as one of their battles so I have a pretty decent order of battle to work with. Plus, one of Rome's great sights is long lines of phalanxes coming to blows.

It is also attractive because the two generals are fascinating characters. Antigonus, Alexander's viceroy in Phrgyia, led a Macedonian army against Eumene's, Alexander's personal secretary. Eumenes was enforcing the right of Perdiccas to rise to Alexander's throne, Antigonus was opposing that right. Eumenes proved to be a great general, and he was ably assisted by the veteran army he inherited, though some of the soldiers were likely well-over sixty years old.

The big problem I ran up against was the 20 unit limit that Rome imposes on each army. I wanted command and control, so using allied armies wasn't going to cut it. Second, there is a max of 300 soldiers per unit, so there would be a lot of math involved in getting the scaling right. Eumenes (who I put in charge of a Seleucid army, since he had the Silver Shields in his service) had about 35,000 heavy infantry to the 28,000 Antigonus had. Antigonus had more light infantry and cavalry.

Then there's the elephants. Rome has them, but not for the Macedonians (though you can use mercenaries) and they are grossly overpowered. Put in default units of 12 across the same frontage as Paraitacene would lead to havoc up and down the line.

The elephant problem was easy. Reduce the unit size to five and you get reasonably fragile but still menacing troops. Plus you can have the refused flank thing that both armies had.

The math was more difficult. I needed to cut the number of units plus find the right proportion for each one. I tried dividing historic standard unit numbers by ten, but then I ended up with Antigonus having too many men since he had more distinct units. Then I found that (naturally) there is quite a bit of confusion over how many men Eumenes actually had. (This link gives him ten thousand fewer than his opponent.)

I finished the battle, though, and gave it a spin. Not bad for a first try, I wager, and if you want to give it a try, drop me a line. The battle played out very well. The computer (Antigonus) actually skirmished for a while, using its archers, peltasts and archer-elephants to harass my troops. I replied in kind. The cavalry stayed out of things (good for me) and then the phalanxes started moving towards each other. The AI (as usual) moved one line too far out so I flanked it and slowly rolled up the whole line.

It does need some fine tuning, but I think that the editor is much better than I had initially given it credit for. It needs more options for armies, and the terrain editor is too unwieldy. But you can place troops quite easily and line up fairly historical options. I may do Eumene's last stand at Gabiene next or I may move on to a Roman battle and give Pompey his due.

Impatience and Interfaces

Ask anyone who knows me and the adjective "Patient" will likely be one of the top five that they use. It's mostly accurate, too. I am patient with people to a fault and will forgive many faults. I don't hold grudges, don't get angry at service people, etc.

But when it comes to games, I find myself getting more and more impatient with poor interfaces. The increasing power in computers has meant that designers can put more and more information in easily accessible places so that there are few mysteries about how you do anything in a game.

But now that I am playing Crown of Glory, which has been in development since the late 90s, I find myself getting irritated with the lack of clear information sheets, absence of most rollover tooltips, menus on top of menus on top of menus....

The thing is, I never used to be like this. I used to love plumbing the depths of menus until I could fine tune my economy or military as I liked. The epithet "spreadsheet game" has likely been around as long as there have been strategy games, but I didn't mind it all that much.

I've been spoiled, of course. There are more games out there for me to play and less time for me to play them all so I lean towards stuff that either gets me up to speed very quickly or just reuses mechanics from title to title. There must be left select and right move, the right mouse button should be alternately used for information panels, there should be graphic overlays to reveal territory attributes, and lots of icons.

Interface has become a major factor for me in how much enjoyment I get out of a game. But technology has also allowed designers to put more stuff into a game, so my plea for more intuitive interfaces comes head-to-head with a push to make deeper and deeper strategy games. Sometimes the struggle results in a tasty nut that resists cracking (like Crown of Glory) but as often it ends up being a conflict between my "need to know" side and my "not that badly side" (like Supreme Ruler 2010).

The sad consequence of this is that I find myself drawn more and more towards real-time strategy resource harvesting games. There is a default interface that everyone uses, what you see is generally what you get and the goals are pretty obvious. It helps that there are a lot of good RTS games out there and that this similarity of interface does not mean that every game ends up feeling exactly the same.

But the deep and rich strategy and wargames that I love so much require more study than I find myself willing to invest these days. (Of course, if the title is for a review, I put in the time. It ends up being less than minimum wage, if I get paid at all, but there is a professionalism to this sort of thing.)

Being the kindly person I am, I will be patient with myself and see myself through this long, dark teatime of the soul. Somehow I will figure out the relative importance of diplomats in Crown of Glory and be able to keep my struggling French economy going. But it sure could use a tutorial. Or big flashing arrows.

Crown of Glory first impressions

I installed Western Civilization Software's Crown of Glory(published by Matrix Games) yesterday afternoon, and, as usual, jumped in without reading the manual. I was impressed that I could figure out as much as I could without perusing the 90+ page PDF document, but there is a lot that is pretty confusing even after looking it over.

The economic system could use a better interface (and maybe a couple of overview screens) and some rollover tool-tips. The lack of the latter is a constant complaint of mine, especially when they are so easy to do in this day and age.

The game itself is kind of like Europa Universalis: Total War. Everything is about the conflict and the battles. Unlike EU, diplomacy depends on beating people up and showing what a big dog you are, and forcing elaborate treaties on defeated opponents is part of the fun. Like the Total War series, the grand strategy game is pretty basic but it tends towards the Byzantine more through interface issues than through the things that need doing.

I hope to play some PBEM games this coming week. Stay tuned for further impressions and, if I find a publisher, an official review.