Welcome to the Home of Game Strategies and Stories
19 Mar 04
I'm continuing work on the news section. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Of particular interest to me are things that you find unclear. If something doesn't make sense, please let me know. If it's confusing you it's probably confusing someone else. I can either fix it or explain it and add to the FAQ. I've also added a News email address. If you'd like to see something posted on the news, but don't want to give up your lurker status, send it to the news address and I'll put it up.
Today I wanted to talk briefly about realism vs. fun. Games are an abstraction. Even if they model a real activity (say war for a wargame), the only accurately model some parts of the event, ignore others and change still others. While there are a few people who'd like every gory and boring detail, most gamers do want a healthy dose of fun in their games.
For instance, if flight simulators (that clearly lean toward the realism side of the scale) did either shorten distances or compress time, few people would even have time to play them. If I have a six hour play block, I'm not going to spend most of it watching scenery go by from 30,000 feet. I want to do the stormy take off, fight to get above the storm, avoid the worst of the up and down gusts and low pressure, then enjoy the sights as I turn in to land in San Francisco.
On the fantasy side, let's go back to Steel Battalion. Here's a realistic sim of a machine that doesn't exist. Beyond that there's even a healthy dose of fun injected. The weapon speeds are slowed down to let evasive maneuvers work. In a real war, it's unlikely that the green rookie would be the one who racks up all the kills and completes mission objectives. However, it give you the opportunity to be the hero. That's fun.
My rule of thumb is balance toward the side of fun. Errors in realism will always creep in to any simulation, but fun rarely gets there by accident. Even Simcity had giant robots and alien attacks. Some people are determined to nitpick every breach of realism. If that's how they get their fun, more power to them. Me, I like to keep my fun in the game.
Today's game doesn't seem very realistic at all, but it does seem to have great potential for fun. It's Ballerium (official site) by Majorem. Ballerium is being developed in Israel. It's an attempt at a MMORTS. Majorem plans to have everyone (up to hundreds of thousands) playing in the same persistent world. The world always exists. You can have the AI continue your last instructions as you leave or you can pack up your units and hide them in a sanctuary. They also seem to be mixing in some RPG elements including quests and unit development. They don't plan to keep things light on the strategy side by offering generals with leadership styles, group formations and even overarching strategies implemented by the individual AI as to how you wish to approach the battle.
There are plenty of cities for player avatars to take over. They can lead groups of heroes. There are seven races to choose from and they wax and wane in power according to cycles of the suns. If you're interested in taking on the world, check it out.
Jason
18 Mar 04
Ok. I'm officially opening the news section. It should now show up on your navigation bar. Let me know what you think. I should point out that if you register you get a selection of themes to use when browsing. If you don't like the default, please check out the others. If I understand everything correctly, when you submit a news item or review, it goes to a holding area for editing. Then I or another administrator can look it over to see if it's appropriate and make any editorial changes before putting it up. If anyone is interested in helping with the editing duties, let me know. Everyone should feel free to submit news that they think would interest the community.
You might want to check out the forums as well. Raydude has put up another After Action Report. This one is his first covering Combat Mission: Afrika Korps. He keeps claiming to be an amateur, but comes up with very strong showings.
I want to go off on a little gaming tangent. It has more to do with business strategy than an actual game though. While Microsoft (MS) has made no official announcements, some reports claim that the XBox 2 will not have a hard drive. It would probably use some sort of flash memory system. Now that's a fairly tried and true system for consoles, but it's hard to reconcile with everything MS has told us about the superiority of having a hard drive.
My concern is that the business models for memory cards vs. hard drives are very different. The actual technology is not that important. Memory cards are supposed to be small. They're easy to transport and should be able to hold saves for several games at a time. The goal is to get users to buy several over the lifetime of the system.
Hard drives are supposed to be hard to fill. They have more space than you need for save games. This gives you the option to cache game data, store your music soundtracks, download extra content and even patches if necessary. I know some people are yelling that consoles don't need patches that's what makes them superior. Well, I've played games that could have used a patch on a console, but I just had to live with it because there was none coming. Especially now, as games go more online, there's a greater chance for unforeseen problems. These could require sizeable patches depending on the problem.
Now MS could split the difference and go with very large memory cards. They didn't go for top of the line hard drive performance in the Xbox, so the loss for moving to flash wouldn't be too bad. Caching might be out, but with high speed readers and/or more memory that wouldn't be too worrisome. The failure rate should be lower as there aren't moving parts in the flash memory. You've likely lost the additional revenue from selling multiple memory cards unless MS can get developers to start producing large amounts of downloadable content. It will be interesting to see what happens.
In honor of Raydude, today's game is Combat Mission: Afrika Korps (Battlefront site) by Battlefront. The Combat Mission series has set the standard recently for turn based 3D war games. This version moves the series to the Mediterranean, North Africa, East Africa, Italy and Crete. I could say more, but I couldn't top this line from the website:
"Meticulously researched vehicle and uniform models, paint schemes and even sound effects help to bundle Combat Mission: Afrika Korps in a package that is a joy for the eyes, ears and mind to behold."
Don't forget to check out the forum thread on simultaneous actions for turn based games as well.
Jason
17 Mar 04
Happy St. Patrick's Day. I've been working on the news part of the site. Please excuse the late updates. If you want to preview it, click here. I'm really thinking I need someone with some artistic talent. I like keeping the site simple, but a little style wouldn't hurt. Most of my artistic attempts have turned out poorly if they stray beyond very simple. If anyone would like to volunteer, please let me know.
I want to talk briefly about backlogs. I know people say that there aren't as many good games out there as there used to be. I'm not so sure. I do know that my backlog keeps growing. Eventually most games get transitioned into the tradable category, and some leave that way. Even when I trade 2 or 3 to 1, my backlog still grows.
I've mentioned before that I'm not a passionate advocate of any one platform. I just like games. If you look at the releases for Gamecube, PS2, Xbox, Gameboy Advance, and PC, that can be quite a lot of games. Even if you just want the best exclusives and best multiplatform, plus the best games in you favored genre, that's still more games that most people have time to play all the way through. Perhaps that's why I don't finish that many games.
I try always to give a game a chance. Some games hook me right away and I want to play nothing but that game. Most games I'll play an hour or two a day for two or three days. If it hasn't caught me by then, it usually moves to the backlog. I suppose I should try to prioritize my backlog to help get through it. The problem is that I never know what I'm in the mood to play when I want something different.
Of course, some games don't have a finish point. When are you done with Simcity? I tend to like clearly defined single player campaigns. It gives me a clear goal. Then again, I'd say that most of my backlog is made of games that do have single player campaigns.
I think my real problem is that I like experiencing games that make people passionate. When someone talks (or posts) about a game with passion and fervor, I want to experience that game to see if it has the same effect on me. Quite often it doesn't. That doesn't mean it's not a good game or worth experiencing, but it does often mean a long wait on the backlog for that game.
It might not be a perfect way to select games, but it does reduce buyers regret. I think back on my game purchases and realize that most of my mistakes have been games I got excited about due to hype not player reaction. Pool of Radiance: RoMD comes to mind. Experiencing games that people are passionate about always teaches me something about game design. It's one of the things I enjoy thinking about, so that's never a loss.
Today's game is the sequel to a game that cause many passionate reactions. It's Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich (Irrational site, FF site) by Irrational Games. You might want to check out 1Up and CGW's article on this game as well since Irrational hasn't put much information up yet. In case you missed it, Freedom Force was a real time (with pause) tactical game featuring comic book superheroes and villains. It handled an amazing number of powers and skills and managed to keep it all fairly well balanced.
This time the Freedom Force is going to be sent back in time to fight the good fight against the Third Reich. Many a Nazi super villain will appear along with some new members of the FF team. I'm personally looking forward to fighting the Italian villain, Fortissimo, the evil opera singer. The inclusion of military vehicles and weapons should make the campaign interesting. There's also going to be robust multiplayer support (missing from the original). Start warming up your rockets this fall.
Jason
16 Mar 04
I've been reading an interesting book lately. It's Killing Monsters by Gerard Jones. Jones' theory is that the action and violence that kids choose to watch and play are not randomly chosen or foisted upon them by greedy corporations. He demonstrates that kids choose those items from the media to help them play with concepts that frighten them or they find lacking in their lives. Even kids acting out those fantasies after watching or gaming are responding in a healthy way.
Perhaps his most interesting argument is that researchers already believe that violent media causes violent children. They set up their studies to prove it without asking any other questions. And even with this bias, the studies can't prove a causal link.
Of course, there are some caveats. Entertainment should still be age appropriate. Parents should talk to their kids to find out why they enjoy that type of media. It's important to distinguish between kids who understand the difference between fantasy and reality and those just learning that difference.
I guess the real impact is what gamers have been saying all along. Gaming can be a healthy release. Gamers are able to do things in games that they could never do in real life. In short gaming can be a good thing.
Today's game is Jagged Alliance 2: Wildfire (Strategy First site, ideal site) by I-deal game studios. You've got to admire this. A series once considered dead, a victim of the demise of both Sir Tech and Interplay. Now a community member, Serge "Wildfire" Popov, has resurrected this game. It includes both the original JA2 plus a new, more realistic Wildfire campaign.
The emphasis on realism isn't just token. Building were remodeled after their real life counterparts. Weapons are more realistically modeled (in addition to many new weapons). More cover is available for advanced tactics, but watch out that cover might hide a mine field. AI has been revamped to be more deadly. If you're looking for a challenge, check it out.
Jason
15 Mar 04
Wow. Thanks to Bill and Gone Gold for the mention in Friday's Night Call. We've had more visitors since Friday than the month of February. Welcome to everyone who's visiting for the first time. Hopefully some of you will want to join the community here.
I need to do a quick mea culpa here. Webmaster is a misleading term. It implies that you know what you're doing. I'm still learning. Please bear with me. I thought it would be a neat idea to add a news functionality to the site and have it so users could contribute. Postnuke (official site) was highly rated, so I thought I'd check it out. Well it's pretty nice, but I wanted to see how unified user logins would work. There's a handy utility for this called PNphpBB2. It works, but I messed up all the forum links in the process of installing it. I think I've corrected them all, but if you see any broken links, let me know.
I'm still playing around with the heart of Postnuke, but I should be able to get it going shortly. If you're interested in posting strategy or tactical gaming news for the site, please let me know. I imagine that it would mostly be links to news articles on some of the larger gaming sites or publisher's sites with a brief summary.
If there are any other things you'd like to see around the site, shout this direction as well. Part of being a community means being responsive to the members of that community.
Today's game is Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX (official site) by KOEI. I love KOEI and their bizarre strategy games for the consoles, especially the PS2. As you can tell, RoTK is a well established series by now. It is a kingdom simulator set in early China. Your goal is simple: unify the nation under your rule. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees with your agenda. You have to run you cities, raise armies, select generals and tactics, select administrators, and keep the treasury full. If you like deep strategy games, check it out.
Jason
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