Welcome to the Home of Game Strategies and Stories
30 Jan 04
First off, I need to make a pitch for people to join the forums. While I'll try to keep the rest of the site fun and informative, the community aspect is missing without you. If nothing else, I'd like to get people to join and put up their game list. That way people can find someone who likes a game they play. They'll know these are people interested in a serious game and an looking to get feedback on their strategies. Besides, it's really the best place to make fun of the webmaster.
Anyone heard anything about Naval Ops: Warship Commander? I've only seen a brief press announcement. It's a strategy game for the PS2. I know some of you are moaning, "Why is he going on about a console game?" Well, the short answer is that I've played some great console strategy games. Now, I'm not a grognard, but I've enjoyed some lite wargames. Heck, the first wargame I played was Kampfgruppe on an old Atari personal computer. It took me half a day to decipher how to move a unit. Anyway, my point is that I've also enjoyed games like Kessen and Dynasty Tactics on my PS2.
Warship Commander is the follow up to Warship Gunner. The first was more of an action strategy game. Commander sounds like it's more of a fleet sim. You get to design ships and assemble battle groups before sending them into battle. Unfortunately that's about all I know. I know some people really loved Warship Gunner, but I haven't picked up a copy. It was kind of a tweener for me. Interested, but not willing to pay full price. I haven't seen it on sale. It'll probably go really rare and cost a fortune on ebay soon. Commander, on the other hand, sounds more like my kind of game. Of course, that often happens when you're working on so little information. Still, if there are some good reviews, I'll probably pick it up.
If there are any quirky games like that you'd like to evangelized, drop me a line. If someone here is interested, it's worth my time to put up a blurb and a link. I don't know if I'll always be able to do that, but right now the site is so small, I still get excited at every hit. Heck even if they probably wouldn't like the site, point your friends this direction. You'll be making at least one person happy.
Finally, a little business. Thanks to 1 and 1's great offer, I've been able to make this site. I kind of feel that I owe them, so when they sent me a thing about their affiliate program, I figured the least I could do is put up an ad. Unfortunately, all their banners are animated, so I'm putting it at the bottom. I realize that's not as effective, but it is less annoying. I've got to put the people first. This could generate some money for the site, but please don't feel obligated. I'm not much of a salesman am I? Here, I'll try. 1 and 1, besides offering the great start up offer, has been very easy to use. They offer all kinds of helpful tools and downloads to help you get a site up and running. From redirecting my domain to updating the site, I've had no problems. They give me all kinds of fun charts and graphs to see how many people and pages have been served. I can't speak much about their support, other than to say I haven't needed it. I like reliability. Sorry, sometimes you've just got to take care of business. Thanks for all your support.
Jason
29 Jan 04
If you are interested in making submissions, please read the update on the games page.
I need to put out a little clarification. While the CGW articles helped with the inspiration for this site, they are not the one, pure and only template for submissions here. There are single player games strategies that are interesting to read. Console strategy or tactical games can often fall in here. They usually have great depth, but very limited manuals. Seeing how someone else succeeded can be quite helpful.
Next we need to keep in mind the difference between a walkthrough and strategy suggestions. I know guide makers like to label their works strategy guides. But here I'd like to focus on decision making. If in a game corridor only one door opens, you're really not making much of a choice to open the door. Walkthroughs tend to give you one path or a short path without discussing the pros and cons of other choices. Strategies must, at least, acknowledge the other options and have reasons for choosing what they did.
There is a reason that the focus might seem to fall on head to head battles. AI is a tricky business and often gets the short straw in development. Reweighting units is a fudge not an AI improvement. Often the full depth, beauty and balance of strategy games are only found in multiplayer matches. The other reason is that AI doesn't write stories about its games. It's hard to learn when the other side refuses to talk. Since this place is "Talk Strategy," we need contributors that aren't afraid to talk. In the end, here at least, it's not the winning or losing; it's the war stories. Jan 04
Well, we're just starting up. Please forgive the mess. I'm still learning all this. So it'll probably be a while before
everything is running smoothly.
So what is Talk Strategy all about? It's about a community sharing their stories and schemes picked up from their
favorite games. While the focus is on the strategy genre (including the tactical genre), don't get caught up in semantics.
Really the idea is to share what makes games great. It's about your interactions with games and your interactions with
others through games.
The original idea came from talking strategy with my friends. We'd discuss the game we were all playing, and describe
things like build orders, unit combinations and overall strategy. Combine those thoughts with certain game reviews. I'd
often find that my favorite parts of reviews were the descriptions of battles and challenges and creative solutions the
reviewer came up with to overcome them. Finally, after reading Computer Gaming World for a while, I realized that my
favorite part was the head to head Tom vs. Bruce battle descriptions. Some of them were good, but some were great. I
noticed that almost all the great ones were strategy games. Suddenly the light came on. Every strategy game battle was a
story. If only I could get the authors to put it on paper.
That's why this site is here. I want to help gamers write those stories and provide a place for others to read them. So
here you can find someone to play a game. Then you can come back here and each write up a description of how you
thought the order of battle went. Then others can comment on the strategies used and hopefully offer suggestions to
improve or just other methods to try. Clearly there are many different strategy styles out there. Most of them can
work if well executed. It's not really about judging the strategies used as it is about sharing the experience and helping
others enjoy a game as much as you have.
Drop me a line if you have some thoughts on how to make that dream a reality here.
Cheers,
Jason
Talk Strategy 2004
