Time to bring back the shareware model?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So a lot of ink has been spilled recently (how long until kids have no idea what that means?) over declining revenues in the gaming industry. I’m not an insider so I don’t know if this is all alarmist press or a real problem, but I do see a lot of news items about layoffs and studio closings.

And I’m part of the problem. Y’know what I play every night before bed? Hill Cimb Racing. It’s an Android game, and it’s free. Their business model is getting you to buy coins. You may be familiar with Temple Run, which uses the same business model. I haven’t spent a dime on Hill Climb Racing. Why? Because the whole point of the game is earning coins to improve your car so you can do better and earn more coins to improve your car. Buying coins is deliberate reducing the ‘shelf life’ of the game for myself. Once I’ve maxed out my car I’ll lose interest.

But “free to play” seems to be where its at these days. The problem is that so few companies seem to get it right.

But free games aren’t a new thing. Back in days of yore we had shareware. You may have heard of some of the titles that started as shareware: Wolf 3D, Doom, Commander Keen… all shareware. You downloaded the game (or got it from a friend, hence the name…not everyone was online in those days) and played it for free. Generally these games were broken up into 3 episodes or segments and you’d get the first one free. If you wanted to play the rest of the game, you paid for it. By the time you finished the first part you knew if it was a game you were going to enjoy or not, and if you enjoyed it you’d be happy to pay for more.

I don’t see why more “free” game devs don’t follow this same practice. In Hill Climb Racing you spend coins both to improve your car and to unlock new locations to race in. I think the developer would’ve been better served to just sell the new locations for $1-$2 and kept the coins (remember, the point of the game) for improving your car.

Xbox Live has its mandatory Trial version of games and that can be essentially the same model as long as the trial is extensive enough, but on the PC and mobile marketplaces the system seems rare these days. Mobile devs will offer ‘free’ versions but they’re generally either full of ads or they constantly badger you to upgrade. With old-style shareware you didn’t feel badgered…during the first section of the game (which was generally several hours of quality gameplay) you weren’t constantly being prompted to purchase something or interrupted with ads; it was a pure gaming experience.

I wonder why it fell out of favor. It seemed like a win for everyone. You got to try and enjoy a game for free, the developers clearly did pretty well selling them (Id and Epic were shareware developers) and anyone who purchased the games knew they were buying something they were going to love.

Gamer ADD & DC Universe Online

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve come to accept and even embrace my gamer ADD. I used to feel guilty about jumping from title to title but y’know, games are for fun. I don’t join guilds so I’m not letting anyone down by skipping out to some other game, so if I’m happy, that’s kind of all that matters.

I’m also easily swayed. At my core, I’d rather love a game than hate a game and I’d rather love a game company than hate it, too. I don’t think I’m that unusual in these preferences, though I think the people who love to hate a game or a company are a lot louder and more vocal online, so it can seem like gamers all hate games and the people who make them.

So this was a tough weekend for me when it came to willpower. SOE was holding its Fan Faire and live streaming some video from it, and Trion did a video feed of the housing in their new expansion. Both events had me wanting to play Rift and SOE games. I always enjoy these videos more for what they tell me about the teams making the games than what they tell me about the games themselves.

To make a long story short, I pre-purchased the Rift expansion and the Planetside 2 starter pack over the weekend. But neither of those are launched yet and I was feeling the itch to try something new, so I finally fired up DC Universe Online, which is set to get a housing expansion pack sometime in the next few months.

Obviously DCUO isn’t a new game and it isn’t even new to me. I played the beta a bit and at some point in launch because when I fired the game up I was surprised to find a couple of characters. I rolled fresh though.

At the time I was downstairs on the couch (Angela and I were watching the livestream from Fan Faire on the living room TV) so DCUO’s controller friendliness was a real point in its favor. I first started it on Saturday and by the time I’d created a character I’d pretty much had enough. Something about the character creation process bugs me; I mean the actual UI and interface of it. It may be that there are just too many choices for the speed that the UI renders. Anyway, I found character creation to be a chore.

But I went back today and played for a few hours, getting my new telekinesis dude to level 6 or 7, and it was quite enjoyable. I still don’t think I’d pay $15/month to play it, but with it being “free” I might dabble in it for a while, and I’m considering buying some of the expansions (they’re $10 or the equivalent in Station Cash and I happen to have a bunch of Station Cash). It just really feels like a ‘lite’game in a lot of ways, and that’s not always a bad thing. Some of the voice acting is real hokey and the character models tend to be pretty low-res, I suppose to keep the speed of the game up. But it’s still a fun comic book superhero world and I just kind of enjoyed zooming around Metropolis and Gotham, beating up on bad guys and tossing them around like rag dolls.

There’s a Halloween event going on and I did that once. I had no clue what I was doing but we didn’t die and the NPC was defeated. You get candy corn for your trouble that you can then spend in a vending machine to get loot. I only got 2 candy corn though so I just saved it.

If you’ve never tried DCUO and have any interest in super heroes, it’s definitely worth the time to download and check out. It starts really slow; like I said, character creation is long and kind of tedious (or can be) and then there’s a pretty long tutorial section that somehow still leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But once you get past that and start flying around the city doing stuff it gets more interesting. As you get a few levels under your belt you find more options opening up and it isn’t quite as directed as the first few levels are.

Aside from the Halloween Event it’s been solo friendly so far, too, and the Event auto-grouped me so I didn’t have to talk to anyone; a big plus when you’re kicked back on the couch playing with a controller and the keyboard is on the other end of the coffee table. 🙂 Yeah, I’m that lazy…

XCOM: Enemy Unknown is couch friendly

Posted on by Nimgimli

I finally got around to booting up XCOM tonight. I decided to give it a try on the living room TV to see how it worked. Turns out it works great.

I bought it via Steam and used Steam’s new “Big Picture” mode to launch the game. Unfortunately Steam can’t solve the issue of Windows User Account Control security pop-ups, but once in the game the only thing I couldn’t figure out how to do with a controller was rename my troops.

The folks at Firaxis went above and beyond the call of duty here. The UI is easily readable from across the room, even to someone with eyes as bad as mine. When you choose Controller as your Input Method, everything changes to support that controller. On-screen prompts match the buttons on your controller and a lot of floaty UI stuff goes away.

Later in the evening I booted up the game a second time on my office PC, using mouse and keyboard and honestly I felt like I was fighting the controls at that point. Maybe it was just because my first hour with the game was done via controller, but for me at least the gamepad controls are superior to mouse and keyboard; I really didn’t expect that.

Unfortunately I couldn’t figure out how to put my save game in the cloud, so I do have to manually copy saves between machines if I want to continue the same game as I move between living room and office. XCOM is supposed to be Steamcloud enabled but… it doesn’t seem to be. Oh well.

Anyway if this is the future of Big Picture gaming I’m all in. It gives you the best of both worlds; the sharp graphics and speed of a fast PC and the comfort of gaming on your couch. Well done, Firaxis!

Pretty quiet here at Dragonchasers HQ

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yesterday Bronte posted a comment asking whether I’d disappeared. It was in the context of my Mistobox post but it caused me to become aware of how infrequently I’ve been posting here recently.

Now I take breaks from time to time but usually those breaks coincide with a break in gaming, and that’s not really the case this time. I’ve been squeezing in as much gaming as I have time for, and sometimes a little more than that. But no posts. Why?

I guess I just don’t feel like I have anything to say right now. According to Raptr in the last month I’ve spent 53 hours in Guild Wars 2, and I’ve spent a couple hours each in Torchlight 2 and Borderlands 2, plus a smattering of other games. These are all titles with more than enough coverage already and I don’t really feel I have much to add. I like all three games quite a bit, but then most people seem to. I’m enjoying the games but I don’t feel like I have a lot to add to the conversation, y’know?

Last spring and early summer I tried to push myself out of my comfort zone and start doing more active multiplayer gaming, and it was fun. But then Angela and I moved from MA to NC at the end of August and now I feel like I’m out of my comfort zone in terms of my job and my living space, so I’ve sort of retreated to my ‘natural’ gaming state. So I play Guild Wars 2 like a single player game that has a ton of really interesting bots, and I’ve only played TL2 and BL2 solo as well.

I also spend a lot of time and energy over on Google+; I find that by the end of a day of web development and writing my ITworld blog and chatting on G+, I just am tired of typing and talking.

One weird thing that has happened is that the dynamics have changed between Angela and I. It used to be that after dinner she’d be on her computer and I’d have the living room TV to myself for playing PS3 games, but these days she’s as apt to be watching one of her silly shows after dinner, so I’m not getting a lot of console time in. When I do fire up the PS3 I find myself gravitating to Netflix or Amazon Prime Streaming rather than gaming. I set up the Xbox 360 in the new apartment and the only thing I’ve done on it is watch HBO Go. I’m really ready for the next generation of Playstation and Xbox!

So that’s where I’ve been.. just quietly enjoying the same great games you folk are. I do miss writing here though and I’m considering that maybe I should cut down the G+ stuff to give myself more time and energy for Dragonchasers. But we’ll see. Thanks for not removing me from your RSS feed!

Mistobox!

Posted on by Nimgimli

My very first Mistobox arrived today.

What’s a Mistobox? It’s basically a gourmet coffee service. Every month they send you samples of four different artisan coffees from around the world. What’s an artisan coffee? Hell if I know; I’m just starting on the long journey of coffee snobbery. I just thought it sounded like a real treat, getting new coffees to try every month.

I haven’t even brewed a cup yet but I wanted to do kind of an ‘unboxing’ thing just to show what comes in the box. (Honestly it’s too warm for hot coffee today so I may have to wait until morning to taste test.) So here it is (plus a bonus photobomb shot):

Mistobox is $15/month which is about the cost of 4 coffees at Starbucks, so I figure it’s a decent value (granted it’s something of an indulgence in the same way Starbucks is). There was a promo code, 5FIRSTBOX, that would get you your first month for only $5, but I’m not sure if it’s still valid or not.

If you take a liking to one of the samples, you can of course buy that style of coffee in bulk from Mistobox.

Color Bind First Look

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peak at Color Bind, a new physics-based puzzle platformer from Finn Morgan of Puppy Punch Productions. (I desperately hope no actual puppies were punched during the making of this game.)

The basic idea of Color Bind will be familiar to fans of puzzle games. For each level you have to get from your starting point to an end point. Easy right? The twist here is that gravity is dependent on color. A blue rock might fall up while a green rock falls to the right. There’s a variety of not only gravity directions, but gravity strengths as well. A dark red rock might fall swiftly down while a light-red rock kind of floats down gently. The little cart that you drive can change color mid level if you pass through a color fountain; this is often a key part of solving a level. Levels often have switches that will change the gravity of one or more colors. Sometimes you can drive into a switch, other times you’ll have to manipulate the environment so a rock hits it.

Controls are simple: drive right or left (more technically, spin your wheels clockwise or counter-clockwise, considering there’ll be times when you’re driving on the ceiling), jump and brake. Again, more technically the jump button just enlarges your wheels explosively which makes your cart hop. If you time it right you can use the inertia of one hop to achieve a larger second hop. This becomes an important part of puzzle solving as you get deeper into the game.

Something that helps Color Bind stand out from other physics-based puzzle games is that eventually it starts to have a platforming element to it. So not only do you have to figure out how to get to the exit point, you might need to practice your driving/hopping skills to actually pull off the solution. One level had me perched on a ball, spinning my wheels to cause the ball to roll, while maintaining my balance on top of it. Tricky! Whether this is a good or a bad thing depends on personal preference.

I certainly haven’t finished Color Bind yet but after a couple of sessions I’ve gotten through the first 20 levels and scored the first achievement. Early levels are almost trivial but by 20 I’m having to drive through the intersections of two color fountains (drive through where blue and red cross and you turn purple, which has a diagonal gravity mid-way between that of blue and red, for instance) and pulling off tricky time-based platforming challenges. The game does a good job of forcing you to constantly learn new tricks and skills in order to advance.

Color Bind is harder to describe than it is to play, so here’s the developer giving a preview of the game:

In addition to the 50+ levels (that figure comes from marketing; you have to unlock levels as you go and I’ve only done the first 20) that come with the game, Color Bind includes a level editor. There are also leaderboards to entice you to re-try levels you’ve already solved in an attempt to finish them more quickly, as well as co-op missions that I haven’t tested yet.

Color Bind is the kind of puzzle game that’s hard to stop playing. Every time you solve a level you think “Well maybe just one more…” It can be frustrating as well, but in that “Gaa! Next time I’ll do it!!” kind of way. The designer claims the game is “Early-90’s hard.” It hasn’t hit that point yet but I’m not even half-way through. I do admit a few levels I felt like I solved as much through dumb luck as through skill; y’know, a lucky bounce off a rock that propelled my cart to the finish point.

Color Bind comes out on Steam on September 24th for Windows; a Mac version should follow soon after. If you’re a fan of physics-based puzzle games I highly recommend you give it a try.

A quick visit to Farmville 2

Posted on by Nimgimli

This week Zynga rolled out Farmville 2. I read a few interviews with people attached to the game saying there was more “game” in Farmville 2 than there is in other Ville games, so I decided to give it a try. I’m always willing to give a company another chance.

You see, I kind of like farming games and time management games. Things like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing or GodFinger. I find it can be fun, for a while, to ‘check in’ on my micro-worlds to see what’s going on and tend to things (though eventually they almost all start feeling like a chore).

So is Farmville 2 more of a game than Farmville 1 is? I’d say yes; I felt like I was making (some) relevant decisions in this title since there are a few interconnected systems.

First is planting. You can plant crops or trees. Trees are more expensive but only have to be purchased once while you need to buy fresh seed for every round of crops you grow. Seeds cost varying amounts, the resulting produce sells for varying amounts and produces varying amounts of feed (see below). So choosing what to grow is a matter of knowing what you want to do with the resulting harvest and how long you want it to take.

In addition to plants, your farm has animals. Animals produce some kind of food-stuff. Chickens produce eggs, goats produce milk (that’s as far as I got). In order to get them to produce you have to feed them. You get feed by processing crops. It seems that any crop can be turned into feed, but for instance Wheat, which takes 4 hours to grow, produces 2 units of feed while a strawberry, which takes 24 hours to grow, produces 10. But strawberries also cost more to plant.

After a few levels you’ll unlock your farmhouse and with it, a kitchen. In the kitchen you can turn crops into more refined products which sell for more. So wheat can be turned into flour. Combine flour with an egg to make dough. Combine dough with apples to make an Apple Cobbler which sells for a goodly amount.

So should you use your wheat for feed? Sell it outright? Use it for flour? These aren’t earth-shaking decisions but they are decisions and they make Farmville 2 feel like a bit more than mindless mouse-clicking.

Farmville 2 is gated by water. Growing crops (including refreshing trees after they bear fruit) requires water. You can store up 20 water initially and more is added to your account over time. Once you get the kitchen unlocked, you get 15 kitchen actions which again, replenish over time. Crops mature according to real world time, as does the cycle of animals producing whatever they produce (for animals it’s time + feed, actually).

If you add friends to your farm neighborhood, once a day they’ll show up at your farm and you can use them to finish some task. This is a great way to get long-duration crops quickly since your friend insta-harvests whatever you point them at.

I was actually having fun playing Farmville 2 until I learned about milk bottles.

You see, when you get a new animal it’s a baby. Before it starts producing you need to grow it to maturity by feeding it milk bottles. Now I told you a goat gives milk, but that bottle of milk the goat gives isn’t considered a milk bottle.

It turns out milk bottles can be obtained in two ways: by spamming your Facebook friends for gifts, or by purchasing them with real money. If you want to play Farmville 2 without bugging friends, you’ll have to pay cash for milk bottles. In other words, pay to win.

I learned this only after I’d scraped and saved a few thousand gold to buy a baby goat. Suddenly I had this kid and no way to grow it up without opening my wallet (I have exactly 1 friend playing the game and I’ve already spammed her to the point where I sent her a message apologizing for it). And that’s when I quit playing Farmville 2.

It’s a shame because as I said, I was having fun and y’know, I’d considered spending real money to get some fancy decorations or something for my farm. I don’t mind spending money on a game I’m enjoying…in fact I think it feels good to support a game you enjoy. But buying milk bottles just flipped my ‘pay to win’ switch; it felt like cheating and it also felt like Zynga was holding a gun to my head. Pay up or don’t make any further progress.

Farmville 2 is a big improvement over Farmville. It plays faster (there’re a lot of convenience features added) and looks pretty good for a Facebook game. Every time you level up everything on a timer finishes at once, causing a huge explosion of awesome on your screen, which is really fun. I still would’ve gotten tired of it eventually I’m sure, but… well I’ll never know.

Thing is, if Zynga offered a stand-alone version of Farmville for $5 or $10 that didn’t require spamming friends or paying to win, I’d be all over it. It’s a fun game to putter around with.

Zynga’s been hemorrhaging customers from its Ville games. You’d think maybe with Farmville 2 they would’ve removed some of the really annoying aspects of their business model in order to try to draw in new blood, but I guess not.

Oh well, on to the next game!

Save City of Heroes!

Posted on by Nimgimli


If you’re a gamer you’ve probably heard by now that NCSoft has decided to shut down Paragon Studios and close City of Heroes, a game that has been running since 2004 and that still has a viable player base. Currently the servers are scheduled to go dark on November 30th, 2012. As expected, City of Heroes community members weren’t happy to hear that news, but they aren’t just crying into their beer. Instead they’re banding together to try to save the game that they love.

At this early stage of the campaign it sounds like they’re still exploring options, from convincing NCSoft to keep the game running to asking them to sell the assets and IP to a 3rd party. For now it’s all about making noise and getting NCSoft’s attention.

So what can you do to help?

1) Sign the Keep NCsoft from shutting down City of Heroes! petition

2) Write a letter to NCSoft. Please follow the guidelines in this forum thread. Quick recap – Be polite and respectful, hand-write the letter, and keep it short. More info at that link.
Here’re the addresses you need:

Mr. Taek Jin Kim, Chief Executive Officer
NCsoft Corporation
1501 4th Avenue, Suite 2050
Seattle, WA 98101
UNITED STATES

In Korea:

Mr. Taek Jin Kim, Chief Executive Officer
NCsoft Corporation
157-37 Samsung-dong
Kangnamu-gu, Seoul 135-090
KOREA

3) Attend the in-game “Unity Rally” on September 8th. This is happening on the Virtue server. Dress as your favorite Paragon employee! Again, details on the other end of that link.

Have more questions? There’s a “Save City of Heroes FAQ” that should help.

If you love City of Heroes or just want to support the gamers who do, now is the time to step up!!

Full Press Release Below

For Immediate Release

Press Release

Gamers Rally to Save City of Heroes

What happens when a virtual world is condemned to oblivion? Dedicated players of the online game City of Heroes struggle for the very survival of their city.

Mountain View CA, September 6, 2012: The online heroes of Paragon City are currently in an epic battle. Not against the forces of crime and evil that they have been facing for eight years, but against the decision of a company that is preparing to turn off the game servers and end a game that has been running since April 2004.

NCsoft, the publisher of City of Heroes, announced last Friday that it is shutting down Paragon Studios, the game development studio responsible for City of Heroes. Operation of the flagship will cease by November 30 due to a realignment of NCsoft’s focus.

To its community, City of Heroes is more than just a game, it is a vibrant, welcoming community. City of Heroes was the first online role-playing game for many gamers, and introduced them to the wonders of flying through the skies and battling epic menaces with friends. City of Heroes has brought together families, offered comfort during troubling times, and inspired charities that have raised nearly $30,000 for children, members of the armed forces, and to fight hunger.

The City of Heroes community quickly rallied and formed a campaign to save the game from virtual extinction. “We’ve been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It’s time to do it one more time,” said Tony Vasquez administrator of the Titan Network, an alliance of City of Heroes fan sites (http://paragonwiki.com), and one of the organizers of the Save Paragon City! campaign.

Through social media outlets, fan web sites, and the City of Heroes official game forums, players have been organizing projects and events to convince NCsoft to allow the game to continue, exploring options including selling the game to another game publishing company or development studio. The “Keep NCsoft from shutting down City of Heroes!” petition initiated by a community member has gathered over 12,600 signatures and continues to grow. (http://change.org/petitions/ncsoft-keep-ncsoft-from-shutting-down-city-of-heroes) In addition, players have begun a letter writing campaign to NCsoft to demonstrate the reach of their numbers and convey the impact City of Heroes has had on their lives.

City of Heroes players have a non-stop schedule of activities to show their support. Saturday, September 8th, players are organizing an in-game “Unity Rally” and Paragon Appreciation costume contest in which players will dress up as their favorite Paragon Studios staff member (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=296768). This event will take place on the Virtue server starting at 5:00pm EDT. Organizers expect that this could be the biggest costume contest in online gaming history. Other ongoing projects beginning this week include a crowd funding drive in which the community has pledged to financially assist acquiring the game from NCsoft and partnership discussions with industry leaders regarding acquisition of the City of Heroes game property.

Diablo 3 Redux

Posted on by Nimgimli

So Diablo 3 came and — for most gamers — went a few months ago. I dutifully pre-purchased the game but honestly I didn’t like it very much. I managed to get a Demon Hunter to level 17 and then moved on.

I really felt like the game was dumbed down from D2. You had to start playing on Normal mode and the entire first act of normal was completely devoid of challenge. Death was meaningless (when it even happened) and character building at low levels was more or less non-existent.

Intellectually I understood that many of these issues resolved themselves further into the game or on higher difficulty levels, but emotionally I just couldn’t bring myself to slog through the newbie-friendly stuff to get at the good gameplay. So on the shelf it went.

Now plenty of people suggested I try out Hardcore mode and I thought about it but I was just too soured on the whole Diablo 3 experience.

Fast forward a couple of months and Tipa has been chronicling her Hardcore Diablo 3 adventures. Her posts intrigued me.

So for the past week I’ve been playing Diablo 3 again, in hardcore mode. I’m approaching it like a Rogue-Like. In other words I expect to die a lot and my goal is to see how far I can get rather than to see the end of the game or whatever. And I took a hint from Tipa and rather than just playing 1 hardcore character, I’m playing a stable of them. That way when 1 dies I don’t have to start over at level 1 again.

Essentially I’m playing the meta-game of Diablo 3 now. My crew can share resources and work together to level up the vault and the blacksmith. Good items are traded back and forth. Also switching characters helps stave off boredom, because much of the basic game play is still dull as hell.

The differences now are those moments of terror when you finally encounter something that can put a ding in your health pool and you’re reminded that it is possible to die, and that dying means starting over. It changes the whole experience for me.

Back in the real world, we’re moving next week so that means evenings have been devoted to packing. I generally wind down at 10 or 10:15 pm and then I’m looking for an alcoholic beverage and something fun to do. As much as I want to play The Secret World it kind of requires too much thinking at the ends of these days, and click-click-clicking and sorting loot in Diablo 3 fits my current situation perfectly.

I don’t know how long that will be the case. And I’m not sure how I’ll react when I actually lose a character. But for now I’m at least getting some value out of a game I’d pretty much written off.

I’m really glad Blizzard lets us share resources between characters. What would make the game perfect for me would be if a character dropped its loot when it died and then a different character could actually go and find that loot. I feel like that would be a nice organic ‘quest’ to do… since a dead character means there’s probably something bad-ass where that dropped loot is.

But you can’t have everything I guess, and while I’m still looking forward to Torchlight 2, for now Diablo 3 is entertaining me, and that’s what gaming is all about.

What happened to PC gaming?

Posted on by Nimgimli

This is one of those “Git offa my lawn!” old codger posts. Be warned!

We’re moving soon. And so this weekend I was packing things, which meant digging through the closet. And in doing so I found a cache of old PC games. At some point I’d taken them out of their boxes and put them in 3-ring binders complete with their fat manuals. Before I shoved these binders in a cardboard box I flipped through them and wow, did that bring back some memories.

And it also led me to feeling a bit glum about the state of PC gaming today. Setting aside the Indie movement (and thank god for them) today’s ‘AAA’ PC games all seem kind of the same to me.

See if any of you old codgers remember these titles (in no particular order):

Myth: The Fallen Lords (Bungie)
Over the Reich (whatever happened to Avalon Hill?)
Talonsoft’s Battleground series (Napoleon in Russia, Bull Run, Antietam, Prelude to Waterloo, etc)
Steel Beasts
Horse & Musket
The Thief series
Vampire The Masquerade
101st: The Airborne Invasion of Normandy
Freespace
Imperium Galactica
Grim Fandango
European Air War
MAX & MAX II
Interactive Magic’s games (Great Battles of Ceasar, Seven Kingdoms, Capitalism)
MissionForce Cyberstorm

None of these are ‘action games’ or ‘shooters’ (though a couple are simulations). OK maybe you could call the Thief series an action game…

But basically strategy games seem to have disappeared, unless you look at ‘fringe’ developers/publishers like Paradox. And bless Paradox for keeping the genre alive but their titles aren’t always the most polished games you can find.

Still, this weekend I started playing their Warlock – Master of the Arcane. It was intended as a ‘light’ diversion to mix in with packing. I didn’t want to play any MMOs because I was afraid of getting too hooked and spending too much time.

Well that didn’t work out so well. It seems turn-based strategy games are my true addiction. I don’t love Warlock.. I have a lot of gripes with it. But I couldn’t stop playing it. Angela suggested I might need an intervention, I was playing it so much. I stayed up so late playing that I got myself sick (well maybe playing with the dog in the pouring rain for a few hours had something to do with that). But yeah, it was opposite weekend with Angela hassling me about playing too much instead of the other way around (I get on her for spending too much time in Everquest 2 fairly often).

I’m often amazed and a little stunned by how much time people I know spend playing MMOs. In fact I find myself “tsking” about it (to myself) …so much time they “waste” in a game. Well now I realize I’m in a glass house; it’s just that MMOs aren’t my addiction. Turn-based strategy games are.

Maybe I should be happy they’re a dying art form.