So it’s just a lovely Japanese winterscape. In Shogun 2, that basically means don’t leave armies parked in hostile territory. Save that for the other three turns in a year. But I couldn’t help but notice a little touch Creative Assembly placed over a river wending through some useless mountainous terrain:
So nice.
And speaking of so nice, if you’ve been playing Creative Assembly’s game as long as I have, you’re probably to ignoring the multiplayer button. Who could blame you? But don’t do that if you’re playing Shogun 2. I implore you to click on that Avatar Conquest button. Yeah, that’s a pretty terrible name for whatever feature is lurking behind that button. It’s a particularly terrible name given what an awesome feature is lurking back there. But if one of Creative Assembly’s Total War games ever had a shot at fostering a meaningful multiplayer community, it’s Shogun 2 with its horribly named Avatar Conquest.
“This is why I bought this game.”
That LBP2 commenter’s review is one of the quick bits of description you see as today’s level loads. I have a lot of things I’d like to say about this level, but I think I’ll just let that little review do the talking for me when it comes to Essence of platform – still alive.
My name is Adam and I have a confession. I’m addicted to using two weapons in RPGs. I will always take the dual wield option. It doesn’t matter what type of game I’m playing, how bad the build is, or how much more I could min/max my way through with something else. I am going to use two weapons, usually swords, and hack and slash things into virtual oblivion. I have done it throughout my gaming life, and my neurosis runs so deep that after taking one dual wield character to level 85 in World of Warcraft, I started another dual wielder of a different class and am leveling him up. Why? Because he dual wields bigger weapons. Yes, that actually happened.
After the jump, Dragon Age 2 satisfies our hero’s bloodlust Continue reading →
I’m a guest on this week’s Jumping the Shark podcast, which I basically used as a platform to hold forth about how good Rift is. Lucky for me, those guys are way too polite to cut me off!
The Nintendo 3DS is right around the corner. March 27, people! Pre-order yours for only $250! Plus the price of whatever games you’re going to get. What else are you going to do with your tax refund check? Upgrade your PC?
Oh, wait, come to think of it, they have 3D on PCs (Pictured? Is that supposed to be Just Cause 2?). Today Nvidia hopes to remind you of that fact by dropping the price of the Nvidia 3D Vision from $200 to $150. This is basically a pair of battery powered glasses that work with special drivers to make almost any game play in 3D. I used this thing pretty extensively for a review about a year ago.
After the jump, I’ll tell you if the Nvidia 3D Vision is worth it. Continue reading →
There is something very comforting about a bunch of square pieces of cardboard on a hex grid. For someone who grew up at a certain time and frequented hobby stores, an oval inside a rectangle above two numbers separated by a dash has only one meaning: if you put them on a cardboard square, with some luck, you might be able to move them all the way to Moscow.
I can say with the certainty of imperfect memory that War in the East is the first time I’ve gone to a book to help me play a wargame. I pulled my thirty-year-old copy of Manstein’s Lost Victories off the shelf because I couldn’t figure out the best way to use 41st and 56th Panzer Corps to approach Leningrad. Was I supposed to stay completely west of Lake Ilmen? What did a real panzer general do? That’s something I’ve never done, because up until now the game and the history were thematically linked but conceptually separate. Sure, I knew what happened historically, but that wasn’t helpful when trying to line up 42 combat factors for a 3:1 attack. War in the East channels the past straight to my bookshelf in a way The Russian Campaign never did. That statement is blasphemy in this household, but it is pretty much true. Please excommunicate me now.
A long time ago, I wrote an article about the difference between realism and detail in wargames. It ended up being required reading for a course at the U.S. Army War College*. For those of you who skipped class that day, the point was that if you want your game to reward good decisions, it makes no sense to incorporate a level of detail the player is incapable of managing. If things are happening at a level below that of what the player can reasonably affect, there’s no reason to include, except for show. Or “chrome” as old wargamers would say.
*Actual, non-ironic fact.
After the jump, War in the East breaks these rules but keeps on winning Continue reading →
Spoiler: gravity wins. That’s me about 5 minutes into DCS Warthog. It happened as I was turning. Or rather, it happened as I was trying to turn, when suddenly the A-10 fell out of the sky like several tons of bricks. See, as I mentioned in the last installment, the last modern sim I played was Falcon 4.0, which is based on the F-16 fighter. The F-16 is a very nimble aircraft. You can roll it 360 degrees with a flick of your wrist. You can zoom up into the sky and do loops and other acrobatics with ease. This means my instincts for flying the Warthog are all wrong. I tried to bank the A-10 over and pull back on the stick to make a tight turn, just as I would in the Falcon and, well, turns out there’s a reason why one of these planes is named after a graceful, deadly bird of prey, and the other is named after a pig.
After the jump, my introduction to the game is followed shortly by my introduction to the ground. Continue reading →
So that happened.
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