Irrelevant?

There are lots of reasons to criticize Game Informer, Gamestop's pet magazine.

Subscriptions are often pushed on consumers (It's the world's "#1 Computer and Video Game Magazine" because of its brick-and-mortar discount, not its editorial chops), the reviews are usually quite short and descriptive, and it uses some .25 based scoring system that is even more ridiculous than a one-hundred point scoring system, exaggerating the fineness of their game quality antennae.

Of course, these sorts of things can be said about many magazines. GI is no better or worse than any of the "official" console magazines. Nothing says fair and balanced coverage like the word "official" in your title.

But Kotaku has held up Game Informer's inability to keep up with console naming conventions as evidence that the entire print magazine world is irrelevant. GI calls the upcoming Nintendo machine the Revolution and not the Wii. Therefore, the print world can't keep up with the fast paced world of game marketing.

This implies that it is the job of magazines to keep up to the minute with news and information. Publishing lag means that the print world would have to stay ahead of the news to compete with gaming websites and blogs. Plus, the prevalence of review websites means that readers can find out about the latest games the day they hit the shelves and not wait a month to see what PC Gamer thinks about them.

The tension between the internet and print gaming press has already led to some changes. Computer Gaming World has changed its game review policy, ditching scores altogether, in favor of more detail analyses of particular games. The magazine covers fewer games than it used to, but in greater depth, leaving the mass coverage to its sister site 1Up.com. Some articles refer the reader to the website for the complete story.

PCGamer's website is mostly editor blogs and a place for their user forum. The podcast is an attempt to supplement their magazine. Parent company Future Publishing has recently launched Games Radar as a review site, so it will have an online presence to compete with rival Ziff Davis.

Computer Games Magazine has the smallest online presence, with a website apparently only tangentially connected to the magazine. You can subscribe there and complain about the Vanguard beta codes in the mostly desolate forum.

Each of the magazines offers content that is not available online, but not because it can't be. CGW's editorials and features could be done online, as could those of the other magazines. Still, magazines persist, and they probably will into the near future.

In my house, magazines are still an event. Every month they arrive and the house stops while me or my wife read. Even though it is possible to write a long feature for a website - Gamespot does it regularly - it is still much more comfortable to read them in paper form. We call our internet windows "browsers", but no gaming website is really set up for casual reading. You go there with a purpose, not to leaf through until something strikes you. Magazines make it easier for me to find bylines - there are some reviewers I will read even if I have no interest in the game itself.

Blogs will never replace magazines, especially if they print every rumor that comes down the pike. The peril of infinite space and the demand for constant content makes many of the more popular blogs, including Slashdot and Kotaku, of minimal utility for me. I only visit if Gametab gives me a headline worth clicking on.

Print irrelevant? Not for me.

Any good gaming pod/videocasts?

I love talking about gaming almost as much as I love writing about it. I don't pretend to know all there is about the subject and there are a lot of intelligent people out there with some interesting opinions. And, being a mostly tech literate audience, you would expect there to be a plethora of great gaming podcasts or videocasts out there.

But I can't find that many of them.

Not that there aren't popular ones out there. The 1up Show was recommended to me, and it's pretty good as these things go. Well produced, just about the right length, etc. But there are too many people for me to keep track of, and something like this depends on personality as much as content. A strong show should have a limited cast; following 1up around E3 was a bit of a chore.

PCGamer's podcast is quite good and is also PC focused; Dan Morris is a strong host but his guests and co-hosts vary in ability from episode to episode. The camraderie is clear, but sometimes the inside jokes can take over the conversation.

Some people have suggested the Gaming Steve podcast, but it often clocks in at over an hour - sometimes almost two. I hope the theme song is a joke, because it's terrible. Steve's enthusiasm is good, but I find it hard to keep focused on one voice for so long. The developer interviews are decent, but suffer from the same problem that keeps me from paying much attention to interviews with movie directors or actors; asking people about their work is much less interesting when they are also plugging a project.

I've been listening on and off to the Poweruser podcast. Most of it is tech news I have no interest in, but they've isolated the game segment for listening ease. It's part of the media empire of Stardock's Brad Wardell, so he is a regular panelist though moderating duties are left to someone else. Some people have found a change in quality from the point when the ubiquitous Tom Chick was succeeded by Joel Hulsey. I don't see that. I do think that Wardell is sometimes too dominant a presence in the podcast, and Chick could usually match him - though then the third guy was left aside. My major complaint is one that applies to many podcasts - I have a very hard time telling the male voices apart.

I've dabbled with others, but for the most part the limitations of the form become clear. This sort of thing really depends on personality. It's one thing to read a guy's 1000 word review of a game, but a really different skill to come across in conversation as an interesting person. People need personality and not everyone does, no matter how well meaning or enthusiastic they seem. A lot of chemistry can come across in video, but it's not easy to demonstrate this on a radio program.

Plus, as interesting as games are, if you need to fill forty minutes it's almost impossible to avoid hitting the same topic over and over again. Episode 1: World of Warcraft! Episode 2: Girls in Games! Episode 3: Jack Thompson sucks! Add in an annual E3 episode and you have your schedule for the year.

I've often joked that we need a gaming Siskel and Ebert, or even better, McLaughlin Group - put some strong opinionated people in a room, give them an outline of what's being covered (too many podcasts seem improvised) and see what happens. Maybe not Derek Smart strong opinionated, but at least people interesting enough to generate some heat.

Is this too showbiz? Maybe. But few things are as dull as people who agree with each other all the time. You do want people to laugh at each other's jokes. And be professional. But why not put up some topics that gamers really disagree on? Is the Action-RPG a step back in game design? Is World of Warcraft actually bad for the industry? Is innovation dead? Is PC gaming?

These topics could get tired, too. And maybe somebody has covered them and I missed the debate. But have game developers ever been asked really interesting questions on these shows? Gaming Steve is so big on Spore that he mentions it every chance he gets - his interview with some of the Spore people was short on really interesting stuff that we couldn't figure out from the movies.

So help me. Help me find a podcast or video cast that I could listen to weekly. Because I can't believe that there's nothing great out there.

Rise of Legends Packaging

I'm still trying to suss out the nuances in Rise of Legends. I've been told this is a game for RTS wonks, which I used to be but haven't the time for now, so my initial impressions are mixed.

Since I have no intelligent commentary on the game for the moment, I'll talk a bit about the box.

First, DVD cases should have DVDs, especially if they don't have room for four CDs. Three were stuck on the spindle of the box and a fourth was in a paper sleeve tucked behind the manual and reference card. And the sleeve protected one wasn't the play disc, either.

Second, I love the artwork on the box. Stylish lettering, nice drawings. But the screenshots on the back of the box are much too small. The words "real time strategy" are on the front of the box, but someone taking this box off the shelf could still have little sense of what this game looks like or how it plays. The back of the box is taken up with literary descriptions of the three factions, each one getting a tiny a little screenshot that shows next to nothing. The Vinci one is drawn from the campaign, I think.

Third, the box says that Rise of Nations was "The 2003 Game of Year". It was? Where? The AIAS gave the PC Game of the Year title to Call of Duty. Rise of Nations didn't even win PC strategy game of the year; that went to Command and Conquer: Generals.

Rise of Nations was Gamespot's Game of the Year for 2003, so this must be what they are referring to. Makes sense. Gamespot is the biggest gaming site, so their choice has a certain cachet to it. And I agree with the choice, actually. But the label "2003 Game of Year" sort of suggests that this was some official decision by some official body like the Oscar people.

But it's still a very pretty box.

Turn based is not the same as smarter

Bruce Geryk gets the Matrix Games newsletter, and I don't. If I did, I probably would have written what he did, but it would have had more insulting words in it and a vague reference to Thermopylae.

I wrote a defense of the RTS a while ago, so you can compare our notes and see that we are in agreement on this. But check out Bruce's post first. As prone to old-fogeyism as I am sometimes, I'm not so vain as to think that my games are better than somebody else's games, or that they are testimony to my superior intellect.

The Perfect Strategy Game?

GameSetWatch has published a design blurb for the "perfect strategy game" as envisioned by IGDA co-ordinator Michael Lubker. His vision has the usual "more, more, more" approach to game design that would be a beast to implement and probably very difficult to design a clear interface for.

Lubker's strategy vision has elements from a bunch of other games cobbled together with no real sense of how the game would actually play. You have vehicles with riders like Act of War, custom units like Galactic Civilizations II, units requiring training and equipping like many RPGs, weather like Empire Earth II...there is not any real sense of what the goals would be, let alone the setting. This is a laundry list of features and not really a game idea properly understood. Lubker's design looks like a standard RTS in many ways (resources, vehicles, tech trees) but it's clear how the training of workers into soldiers would interrupt the flow. I know that I hate sending peasants into buildings in the Cossacks games just so I can get a guy with a gun.

Lubker is not alone, of course. If you ask people what their perfect game would be, most think of a game that lets them do everything that they want to do. But games are really about limits. You need boundaries. Structure. Rules. And throwing a bunch of different cool things into a game design means that you need a lot of structure to make sure that everything fits together properly.

Even Will Wright's magnum opus in the making, Spore, is structured in discreet units. You won't always be evolving a new creature. Once you get to a certain point, you stop evolving (biologically speaking) and the game rules shift. Now you are building a city. Then a civilization. Then you do interplanetary exploration. It looks like a game of everything, but its really not; it's a series of different games that just happen to take place in the same general setting.

GameSetWatch is looking for more descriptions of "perfect games" and you can send your vision to them at editors@gamesetwatch.com

I want my game

I ordered Rise of Legends over a week ago from GoGamer. It was on sale for 35 bucks (I love 48-Hour Madness) so I snapped it up.

Then, like an idiot, I chose the the cheapest delivery option. So my game is still not here.

And this just when the reviews are starting to hit. Brett Todd's review over at Gamespot got some Rise of Legends fans upset even though, from where I stand, the review is well-reasoned and comes out with a recommendation.

If it's not here by Saturday, I'll be very upset.

Europa Universalis III updates

The official Europa Universalis III forums have a weekly development update that tends to dangle little delights in the form of screenshots and brief commentary from lead programmer Johan Andersson. This week's was a modest shot of the monarch info screen, but the post describes how the nation tag system has been replaced by something much more friendly to modders.

The amusing thing about the official forums is that the fan hopes for the game are so eager and enthusiastic in light of the obvious fact that the game is already very far along. All the hopes for a Victoria style POP system, trade route economy, or guerrilla warfare are being expressed against the backdrop of a game that is less than a year away and already in beta. Most of the basics have already been established and I doubt that many major socioeconomic, military or political mechanics have yet to be resolved. So these threads are mostly wishlist things, but on a higher order than those threads that complain about the shorter time frame mostly because Byzantium won't be available.

So is this sort of thing pointless? Of course not. Vain wishes are part and parcel of the anticipation. The discussions encourage enthusiasm and, since the developer interference in discussions is minimal, these aren't expectations being encouraged by the designers - so disappointment will be kept to a minimum.

I'll admit to being a sucker for Paradox based almost entirely on Europa Universalis. Sure, I love Crusader Kings, but it's not like Victoria and Hearts of Iron are familiar friends. And the less said about Two Thrones, Crown of the North and Diplomacy the better. And I'm not alone. The Europa Universalis II forum has more threads than any other of their games, and more than HoI2 and CK added together.

Like all official communities, the EU forums are best handled in small doses. Threads can degenerate into debates over which Balkan tyrant controlled what tiny province in 1600. Sometimes there is too much being made of too much historical minutiae - a single anomalous case being held up as justification for a major change in game mechanics. But the loyalty to the developers is mostly thoughtful, the fanboyism mostly held in check, but the enthusiasm entirely genuine.

The Black Hole of E3

E3 is the biggest gaming event of the year even when nothing happens. So when two new consoles are introduced, its gravitational pull is enough to obliterate all other gaming news in the immediate vicinity.

Take the release of Big Huge Games' Rise of Legends, one of the games that I've been most looking forward to playing. It was released earlier this week, so the net should already have half a dozen reviews. I should know what Jason Ocampo and Dan Adams think of this new game.

So what do we have?

Tom Chick's opinion at Yahoo Games. Sure, he's a valuable opinion (even though, in this case, the text and score don't quite match up for me) but so far the only one.

You'll notice few other reviews or analysis outside of the E3 coverage. Actually, precious little analysis inside the E3 coverage for that matter. There's no point in complaining, but it does make me wonder why anyone would release a AAA title this close to the convention. Early buzz can make a huge difference in game sales and, despite its provenance, Rise of Legends hasn't dominated discussion boards the way that Oblivion did. So it could certainly use the push of positive reviews from Gamespot, Gamespy or IGN.

Even though I've never been to E3, I'm fairly sure that it deserves blanket coverage of some sort. Very little of the coverage so far has been much beyond reporting what has been seen and said. The sensory overload of blaring speakers, crowded display floors and still quite a bit of flesh doesn't provide an environment conducive to serious thinking about what is going on. It must make it that much more difficult to focus on things outside the convention altogether.

Even the good ones can go wrong

It's not often that Wargamer's Jim Zabek makes some major errors, but I guess E3 brings out the worst in everyone's fact checking, as his E3 preview of Europa Universalis III makes clear.

The game does not "cover...the Middle Ages"; 1453-1786 is the early modern period. And "Defender of the Faith" was in the previus EU title; it is not an original EU3 contribution to religion in the game.

The preview is otherwise uninteresting except for some new screens, including some gigantic and ugly soldiers.

Harpoon sets sail again

Matrix Games has announced that it will be publishing Harpoon 3 Advanced Naval Warfare. Advanced Gaming Systems has been keeping the Harpoon flame alive for quite a while now, but H3 has been in "community beta"status for a while. The big deal about Harpoon 3 is that it has multiplayer.

The original Harpoon was the first game I got heavily addicted to. It remains the gold standard for naval simulation games. Matrix has now resurrected Harpoon from obscurity (though it isn't quite the same as getting Harpoon 4) and also been working on updating the Norm Koger epic game Operational Art of War.

So, kudos to Matrix for making me a very happy wargamer. The more people who play this, the better for naval sims in general.

E3 PC Strategy Game Lineup

Here's a preliminary list of the strategy and wargames on display at next week's E3.
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Aggression: Europe 1914 - real time strategy game from Buka Entertainment that covers the years 1914-1945. Battle for Atlantis - fantasy real time strategy game from Play Ten interactive set in pre-classical Greece
CivCity: Rome - Firefly and Firaxis team up on on Roman city builder. Civilization IV: Warlords - The highly anticipated militaristic expansion to last year's best game. Command and Conquer 3: The Tiberium Wars - highly anticipated sequel to one of the RTS world's most recognized series.
Field Ops - genre blender (FPS/RTS) set in the war on terror brought to you by Freeze Interactive. Medieval 2: Total War - Creative Assembly goes back to the Dark Ages to maintain their bright future.
Pacific Storm - another World War II game that tries to blend RTS and flight sims. Buka Entertainment. Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War - the demo is already out, so I'm not sure what's left to show at E3.
Sid Meier's Railroads - Sid Meier returns to model trains

Spore - Will Wright's genius made manifest. Again.

Star Trek Legacy - real time tactical space combat in the Star Trek universe

Star Wars: Empire at War Unnamed Expansion - you knew that this was coming

Stronghold Legends - Yet another castle building sim from Firefly with three legendary campaigns.

Supreme Commander - Total Annihiliation is many people's favorite RTS. This is it's pseudo-sequel.

Warhammer: Mark of Chaos - you can't trust screenshots, but if this is half as good as it looks, I may finally appreciate the Warhammer universe.

Old Games Journalism at its best

Now that E3 is around the corner, we can expect a lot more bloggish criticism of how the game media does its job. And where E3 is concerned, there are a lot of valid issues. The coverage is often shallow, focused on glitzy presentations and chasing the same two or three stories.

These reports will blend into a call for greater analysis of games - some want more business stories, some want developer interviews, some want cultural critique and others want more personal insights about game culture from a gamer perspective (so-called New Games Journalism).

Me? I'd be happy to read an article like this once a month (hat tip to Bruce Geryk). Chris Farrell plays a lot of boardgames and has a lot of opinions on them. But his articles aren't just the typical good/bad stuff you find on most blogs (including my own from time to time). And this article on card deck size and what it tells you about game design has one brilliant insight that too many game critics ignore.

Many game design decisions have nothing to do with game design.

Finding that a wide range of games from the same publisher have decks of the exact same size, Farrell writes:

I would consider it a monumental coincidence if all 10 of these games, from two-player single-deck games to two-player individual-deck games to multi-player games, covering conflicts from the Reformation to the Cold War, with game lengths running from 3 to 20 turns, all just happened to have worked out such that they really required 110 cards to work properly. I find it far more likely that the designers were told, "you've got 110 cards to work with on the press sheet", and they used all these slots up by picking their 110 favorite events from the period and figuring out how to express them in game terms.



This type of observation has major consequences for the utility of certain cards, player learning curves and information management. Too many cards that do too little can make a game drag out too long or stick one player with an underpowered hand. On the obverse side, what ideas are unexplored because of a hard limit on deck size.

See how easy it is? Only it can't be that easy, since this sort of obvious insight can be applied to computer game criticism but often isn't. And I'm as guilty as the next guy/gal - my commentary on the level of this single piece is few and far between. This could not have been a difficult item for Farrell to write, but sometimes I think that this basic design analysis gets lost in writers' efforts to make things look more complicated than they really are.

Most of Farrell's blog is good, and is useful even if you don't play boardgames. His design comments are top notch and have given me things to look for in computer strategy games.

So maybe we don't need a revolution in gaming criticism; we just need more people to focus on the games themselves at a very basic level.

Developer Interview: Jim McNally

Longbow Digital Arts is a Toronto based developer best known for its arcade games, especially the very addictive Breakout clone DX-Ball. So what do you do next? You make a strategy game based in Ancient Greece, that's what. Obvious, no?

Jim McNally answered a few questions about Hegemony.
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Longbow Digital Arts has focused, to this point, on arcade and light action games. Hegemony looks like a modern historical strategy game. Has this been a difficult adjustment?

I've always wanted to do more historically based games, so most of the adjustments have been with scaling up and developing our new game engine. The transition has been helped by consolidating development in-house and making a number of arcade games to hone our skills. In essence, the arcade games were stepping stones rather than a passion.

Ancient history has been pretty well trod in computer games, and some would say exhausted by titans like Age of Empires and Rome: Total War. What will set Hegemony apart?

I don’t think that ancient history has been exhausted. At the risk of oversimplifying, my take is that action games, utilize ancient history as a skin, the best example is God of War, while mainstream RTS games have their harvest, build, zerg-rush and destroy, then repeat on a new map, formulas. Although these formula RTS games are very popular and successful they still have a tendency to grossly caricature any historical time period they encompass. On the other hand, the more historically researched wargames tend to be niche, and often use outdated 2D technology engines as extensions of proven board-game concepts, or use a simplified strategy-map with battles fought on more detailed battle-maps (e.g. Rome: Total War). There’s still plenty of room for innovation and historical interpretation.

Now assuming that ancient history hasn’t been exhausted, Hegemony sets itself apart by having all gameplay on one big continuous, satellite based, 3D map with a movement and supply system that focuses strategic and empire building decisions as the logical extensions of local geography.

Philip's wars in Greece often play second fiddle to the better known and better documented wars of his son, Alexander. What are the challenges and opportunities this presents?

I started out researching Alexander then discovered that his father Philip had created the army and built the Kingdom from which Alexander launched his campaign. Philip took over a defeated kingdom, on the verge of being destroyed and assimilated by its neighbors. This makes Philip an ideal subject for a rags-to-riches wargame.

A lot of people find hoplite warfare boring. It's just pushing and poking with sharp sticks. What is the appeal of this type of battle to a developer?

There's a lot more to the era than simple hoplite style battles. First you have the somewhat autonomous Greek City-States in a constant state of war. Then you have Philip introducing the Macedonian Phalanx as the core of his battleline. Add in the development of torsion catapults and more aggressive siege techniques, plus Philip’s use of cavalry to aggressively pursue defeated enemies after battle, and you have the basis of logistics, combined arms battles and siege-craft. A less flashy but extremely significant evolution during the 4th century BCE was the increasing importance of light infantry Peltasts for reconnaissance in force and raids. Add merchant shipping, battle fleets of triremes and plenty of piracy based from the numerous island City-States of the Aegean, and as developers, we have plenty to work with. Researching around the origins of modern western civilization is an added bonus.

One screenshot shows a zoomed out view of a mountain pass and a minimap. This implies some sort of strategic overlay. Can you say a bit about the strategy side?

The minimap is always present as an aid to navigating and jump-moving on the game-map. Other than the awe effect, the more zoomed-out view will have map overlay information labels to aid in play.

Philip had a plan to invade Persia, and was setting the stage when he was murdered. Will the player have this opportunity?

Yes, one of the requirements to be declared Hegemon of Greece is for Philip to capture 10 cities of the Persian Empire and control them for 2 years. The Persian Empire controls 35 cities in the game, from the Asian side of the Bosphorus and Hellespont southward to cities such as Cnidus and Helicarnassus and Sardis. The player will be able to take them all, although a sizable Persian army supported by a Phoenician fleet, will enter the fray.

Hegemony has not gotten a lot of advance press, even on sites dedicated to this sort of game. Has it been difficult to get the word of mouth going?

Other than the initial announcement and presentation at the Toronto chapter of the IDGA, we haven’t tried to get any publicity or word of mouth going, and have been pleasantly surprised by the interest that has been expressed.

As it takes time away from development, we've been holding off updating screenshots and videos until we're into full beta-testing.

Has being an independent developer with no history in the strategy arena made it harder to find publishers and distributors?

Although a number of smaller publishers have expressed interest, we haven’t been actively looking for a publisher. We run our own servers, store and credit-card processing, so we’re in a good position to self-publish over the internet. Plus, to facilitate downloads, our new game engine has been designed to be compact and we expect the release download to be in the 80-100meg range.

We’d ultimately like to have a “bricks and mortar” publisher as well, especially for localized versions overseas. This is where proving ourselves first, becomes important to getting the "right" deal for LDA.

To more specifically answer your question, yes, it is much more difficult to find a publisher, and under the circumstances, prior to having a playable, near-finished game to show, we'd likely be wasting our time trying.

Hegemony will be moving into its next beta phase soon. Do you have a release window in mind?

Our release window should be sometime in the fall.

Preserving the Computer Canon

If you don't read Game Politics, you should. Though Kotaku and Joystiq get more hits, Game Politics has become my most important source for information on how government and its citizens respond to gaming as a hobby or culture.

Today's find is a newbyte on the Library of Congress's push to preserve dying forms of digital information. Given the focus on the site, GP's exaggerated focus on the single mention of "video games" in the LoC strategy summary is natural. It does raise an interesting question, though.

If we leave aside the technical emphasis of the LoC project (i.e., keeping old media forms legible and rescuing data from obsolete disks), what do you preserve, and why?

This is quite a different question from the Desert Island Disks question that Computer Games Magazine asks. Ye olde "What games do you take with you to a deserted island?" query is aimed at the individual gamer, and so largely depends on individual tastes. If the island has an internet connection, answers change dramatically.

But if the question is "Which games do you preserve for posterity?" the issue takes a completely different turn. Civilization IV is a much better game than the original Civilization but the original is one most likely to be preserved because of its seminal importance in the evolution of the strategy genre. Similarly, SimCity would be included in any list where Caesar III would likely not.

In its role as curator of America's creative culture, the Library of Congress also maintains the National Film Registry, a list of movies considered central to the development of American society and the film art. There are now 425 protected movies, including material of historical interest like McKinley's inauguration and the Zapruder film. So some of this stuff isn't even entertaining.

What would a computer gaming canon look like? What types of technical and stylistic achievements should be noted for future generations?

Sex and the single (or married) gamer

My occasional indie contribution to Computer Games Magazine continues in this month's June issue. My Alt.Games column covers Space Station Sim, Disaffected and Game Biz.

The issue's main feature covers sex in the computer gaming industry and I highly recommend. Though certainly a titillating subject, the two part story itself by Damon Brown and Lara Crigger (neither of whose work I am familiar with) is a nice sequel to an earlier CGM feature on retro-gaming.

It also comes at a coincidental moment in gaming journalism. This month's Computer Gaming World covers the same issue but different ground as does this week's Escapist. Why the sudden obsession with sex? Given the lead times required for getting this sort of stuff edited and published, something may have been going through the rarified editorial air. But features take a while to put together (one reason I am sort of holding off till the summer to assemble a feature) plus The Escapist makes its issue themes available to the public months ahead. So it's not like a single issue made editors jump up and say that early May is the best month for this sort of thing.

In any case, this is an issue that will continue to pop up for as long as mature people play games. Sex is really a non-issue in strategy games - Cleopatra Spears notwithstanding.