You lost me right here...

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You can change the maps around and introduce new monsters and weapons, but for this to make any sense it has to be within the context of a story.

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This is a very funny, very entertaining article. Hats off to Bruce!

However, I don't think it does a great job of describing _why_ Odium is really any better than Shadow Watch.

In fact they both end up sounding pretty lame. :P

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

p.s. The best example, I thought, was having to walk your guys back to the entrance after the level is over.

"Hats off to Bruce!"

No kidding. The guy's got this article posted the same day as his new Strategic Therapy is up at Gamepen. I have this mental image of Bruce writing his column with left hand, a flight sim review with his right, while he's got his cure for cancer cooking in the test tubes in his lab, which he's monitoring with his, um, eyes. And he wonders why I'm afraid to have a beer with him.

I wonder how Bruce manages to find time for all this? Bruce, do you get a chance to do some writing while you're doing lab work? Does the lab routine involve some downtime while you wait for a fungus to grow or something?

One of my favorite writer stories is about Glen Cook, the guy who penned the Black Company series. I may have posted this story before, so my apologies if I did. He worked at the Chrysler auto assembly plant and he had 60 seconds

Oh, and I neglected to mention that Bruce also has a huge, new feature on the history of RTS games posted on Gamespot today. Bruce, why don't you just admit that you've cloned yourself and get it over with?

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That's baloney. Games do not need to be created within the context of a story. Some of the greatest games of all time are those that have zero story including just about every classic arcade game. If this is your criteria, the rest of the column is pretty useless to me.

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Bruce, do you get a chance to do some writing while you're doing lab work? Does the lab routine involve some downtime while you wait for a fungus to grow or something?

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"If I can generalize just a little bit, here, I think the thing that most gamers like to
get some kind of (however sick) "sense of accomplishment" out of games."

I think this explains as well as anything else I've seen why I really don't give a hoot for the skirmish mode in RTS games. In even the best of them, the AI opponent is pathetic compared to a human opponent, and without the hook of furthering the story or getting more stuff, there simply isn't "a sense of accomplishment" in winning.

"As far as creative rules and dynamic play, let me tell you something: the game mechanics of Shadow Watch are a poor cousin to some 1970s tactical combat games, like Sniper or Firefight. If you want to enjoy really creative rules, boardgames such as Tikal, Die Hanse, Euphrat & Tigris, El Grande, and a host of other games have computer games beat so badly that it's not funny. Try one some time if you get a chance. "

BWOOP! BWOOP! BWOOP! Dork alert! ;)

"If I can generalize just a little bit, here, I think the thing that most gamers like to get some kind of (however sick) "sense of accomplishment" out of games. Beating a really hard level in Jet Grind Radio, getting the high score in Banjo Tooie, finishing all the side-quests in Baldur's Gate II, defeating the aliens in X-COM -- whatever. An "epic" game like MOO or Civ is long enough that simply winning the game is an accomplishment. Simple tactical exercises don't satisfy most gamers because that kind of "thought combat" is best done against another player. That's where short, elegant, thought-intensive games work best. Which is why in that area, boardgames kick computer games' ass."

Actually, you know what? I think you're completely wrong about this. Most gamers are looking for a game where they can simply.. win. People are stymied in so many other ways in their life; they're looking for an entertainment outlet where they can run roughshod over whatever fantasy obstacles are put in front of them.

In other words, I don't want a game that's difficult, I want one that is relatively easy. Half the fun is just getting there-- not doing the save/reload cycle fifty times to complete a jumping sequence or what the fuck ever.

Stated another way, blowing shit up is its own reward. For guys anyway. For everyone else-- and for men who like to press wildflowers-- there are the building games like the SIMS or RCT. No real concept of "winning" there.

People don't _want_ to be challenged. They simply want to be free. To me, that's the cornerstone of gaming. I think Dave Perry said it best when he was asked what the ultimate game was. His answer was brilliant: of course, the ultimate game is simply reality-- sans restrictions. Want to rob a bank? Be my guest. Want to become the world's most famous movie star? Bam! Want to have sex with Morgan Fairchild? She's yours.

I dunno. Food for thought. But I would give a year's salary to play the above game. That Morgan Fairchild is a hottie.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Bruce: If I can generalize just a little bit, here, I think the thing that most gamers like to get some kind of (however sick) "sense of accomplishment" out of games.

Wumpus: Actually, you know what? I think you're completely wrong about this. Most gamers are looking for a game where they can simply.. win. People are stymied in so many other ways in their life; they're looking for an entertainment outlet where they can run roughshod over whatever fantasy obstacles are put in front of them.

Actually, guys, I think you're both pointing in the same direction here. Whether difficult or not, playing a game where we can achive goals or objectives gives us a sense of accomplishment and power. The level of challenge desired is probably a subjective thing, but the end result is that you pass the level, or get the bad guy, or finish the game.

There's something theraputic about just shutting off the world for a while and, in Men are from Mars parlance, going into a cave for a few hours, emerging refreshed.

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Actually, you know what? I think you're completely wrong about this. Most gamers are looking for a game where they can simply.. win.

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Actually, guys, I think you're both pointing in the same direction here. Whether difficult or not, playing a game where we can achive goals or objectives gives us a sense of accomplishment and power. The level of challenge desired is probably a subjective thing, but the end result is that you pass the level, or get the bad guy, or finish the game.

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After kicking my own ass via Google for the last 30 minutes (the things I do for you guys) I came up with the following Oct '99 article on GA-Source, re: developers answer the question, "what is the perfect game?"

http://www.ga-source.com/features/dev1.shtml

The quote from David Perry can be found about halfway through. It's one of the most memorable articles on gaming I've ever read.. It certainly stuck with me all this time.

Here's the quote:

"The game would be called Freedom. It's a photorealistic perfect world simulator... Except that you have complete freedom.

You can do anything, hold up a bank, feed the swans, talk the clothes off a girl, start a bar fight, fly like a bird, swim like a fish.

The objectives would be things like 'start a riot' or cause an earthquake any way possible, steal Concorde etc....

Freedom is the future of the business. We will just keep taking small steps there. Messiah has proved to us how difficult it is to program, but that it is possible."

Okay, pretend the word "Messiah" wasn't there for a second. Dave completely and utterly nails this question. That little blurb is more compelling to me than many complete games I've played.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

"What hardcore gamers want and what casual gamers want is (for the most part) completely different. "

I guess the difference between you and I, then, is that I view the label of hardcore gamer as a perjorative term.

It's not our job to be "hardcore", rather, it's our job to continually expand the sphere of "gaming" to become more and more inclusive.

Everyone's a gamer. They just may not know it yet. Just like sex, it's more fun with other people.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Bruce wrote: "the game mechanics of Shadow Watch are a poor cousin to some 1970s tactical combat games, like Sniper or Firefight"

Perhaps, but Shadow Watch isn't supposed to be a detailed recreation of tactical combat. Among the common complaints were things like "you can't go prone and crawl around" or "you can't climb through windows". Sigh. Shadow Watch is more a cousin to abstract board gaming that detailed tactical sims like Jagged Alliance. Bruce understands that, but then he says:

Bruce wrote: "That's where short, elegant, thought-intensive games work best. Which is why in that area, boardgames kick computer games' ass."

Which is one of the many reasons I adore Shadow Watch. I've played the full campaign four or five times over. Each battle is a nearly perfect fifteen minute exercise in solving a mission.

And the point that I think Bruce completely missed in Shadow Watch is the way the mechanics evolve based on your choices in the character skill trees. A central tenet of game design is that you present the player with a paradigm and then -- and this is the most important part -- you *break* that paradigm. Shadow Watch does this beautifully.

At one point, Bruce mentions that you can't play a stealth mission, which leads me to believe he never got around to trying out the various areas of the skill tree! Bruce!

I'll take a thoughtful and gradual evolution of game mechanics over the course of a campaign (SW) over bigger guns/more ammo (Odium) any day of the week.

-Tom

Bruce wrote: "the game mechanics of Shadow Watch are a poor cousin to some 1970s tactical combat games, like Sniper or Firefight"

Perhaps, but Shadow Watch isn't supposed to be a detailed recreation of tactical combat.

That's not what I meant. Firefight and Sniper are actually pretty simple games. The point I was making is that if computer games are just now getting around to making simple, abstract tactical combat games, then that's pathetic. All this stuff has been done. And it works better as a boardgame for various reasons.

My real point is that the tactical combat in SW doesn't work. Not because you can't crawl, as Tom pointed out, but because the abstraction is busted.

I kind of wish I had de-emphasized the story complaints and spent more time on the combat elements. If you're going to do combat at that scale, you need a gimmick. Otherwise there aren't enough decisions to make.

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As far as creative rules and dynamic play, let me tell you something: the game mechanics of Shadow Watch are a poor cousin to some 1970s tactical combat games, like Sniper or Firefight. If you want to enjoy really creative rules, boardgames such as Tikal, Die Hanse, Euphrat & Tigris, El Grande, and a host of other games have computer games beat so badly that it's not funny. Try one some time if you get a chance.

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>>People don't _want_ to be challenged. They simply want to be free.

I've always thought the perfect game is one that self-balances as you play, where you're constantly challenged but you never lose... you're always sitting on the edge, but you never go over.

Winning is good. Losing is frustrating. A cakewalk is boring. Feeling like you've been challenged, when in fact the game is just cheating and making you feel like you're actually winning, is ideal...

"You're entitied to your opinion, but stop trying to pawn it off as gospel."

Actually, this is one of my favorite things about Bruce. The gaming press is full of idiots with misguided opinions. I, for one, am happy to see a smart guy with a misguided opinion. :)

Having said that, I disagree most of all with this statement from Bruce about SW: "the abstraction is busted".

Even after reading his article, I don't understand how he figures this. How can abstraction be busted? I understand he doesn't like the pacing, the way the story is constructed, the settings, and the lack of "getting stuff". Those are all, IMO, 100 times more valid than most of the idiotic complaints I've read in SW reviews.

But complaints about "busted abstraction" make no sense to me.

BTW, this is where I'd like to get Andrew Bub, the writer of Gamecenter's Shadow Watch review, in here to knock around. He doesn't stand up very well under the abuse, but Bruce needs someone else on his team. :)

-Tom

"Winning is good. Losing is frustrating. A cakewalk is boring. Feeling like you've been challenged, when in fact the game is just cheating and making you feel like you're actually winning, is ideal... "

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.. as usual, I was oversimplyfing. The kind of freedom where you're in god mode and you cannot die is too far down one side of the axis; the kind of challenge that involves doing a load/save cycle fifty times to complete a jump sequence (as Charles Ardai did in his latest Alice review*) is too far down the other side of the axis. We need to find a happy medium.

What I was railing against was the popular "hardcore" misconception that challenge = fun, which is echoed in Bruce's statements above. If I want to be challenged, I might as well friggin' go to work.

This reminds me of the bad old days of adventure gaming where the designers derived great satisfaction in killing the player for making the slightest mistake... or hinged puzzles on items that could be used up earlier in the game. I like to think we've progressed beyond these draconian measures. Modern games like SIMS, RCT, and even Diablo II make great strides in constantly rewarding players... they aren't "challenging" in the traditional sense. This widens the potential gaming audience.. and the more gamers there are, the better off we all are in the long run.

Really, do check out the article I linked. There are some mighty provocative statements in there; particulary the lengthy comments from Gabe Newell, which I consider borderline genius (the comments, not the man). I haven't seen gaming distilled to a science, but this comes damn close.

http://www.ga-source.com/features/dev3.shtml

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

* I was completely mindboggled that Ardai STILL gave Alice a very positive review (4/5) with that comment buried in the article.

"It's actually salami. I thought it was pretty clear that this criterion was being
applied to computer strategy games, specifically computer tactical combat strategy games."

Even in this specific context, I'm not so sure. Bruce, take for example the comparison of TA and StarCraft in your RTS feature. Even a TA adherent like me would agree that StarCraft's story elements were orders of magnitude better than TA's. Even in a genre where it's a given that the story is hackneyed crap, TA's was the most hackneyed crap I've ever seen--an exceptionally weak attempt to hang a bunch of missions together. And yet it was the game I preferred and one that I still play 3 years later. And of course it's all to do with the combat and nothing to do with the story.

Even in historical tactical combat games, how necessary is the story element? I love Combat Mission. I pay zero attention to the story elements. It's WWII, Americans vs. Germans. I don't need to know more. What makes the game great is its representation of tactical combat.

Like a lot of people (OK, not mainstream gamers by any means, but still a fair number of people), I enjoy playing chess against the computer. No matter how good I get (which, alas, isn't very) a challenging computer opponent is easy to find. What is chess but a highly abstracted form of tactical combat? If you can find story elements there, the recreational chemicals have really taken hold. ;) Does story become more important when the game setting is less abstracted? I don't think the evidence bears that out.

"BTW, this is where I'd like to get Andrew Bub, the writer of Gamecenter's Shadow Watch review, in here to knock around."

I was wondering how long it would take for you to say that Tom.

"Bruce needs someone else on his team. :)"

Does he? I've read his article, I read the developer's reasoned (and hilarious) response and I've read this current argument.

I'd say Bruce is winning.
He doesn't need my help. Besides, our last clash ended with me challenging you to lay out your opinion as to why Shadow Watch is so brilliant. You've yet to do that. That puts Team: Geryk-Bub at an unfair disadvantage.

For the record:
I gave Shadow Watch a 7 of 10 (the editor bumped it to a 6) and cited the lack of diverse tactical choices, poor characterization/story and stylish but ultimately obtrusive graphics as faults but praised it for the admirable skill tree and the random missions.

>>the kind of challenge that involves doing a load/save cycle fifty times to complete a jump sequence (as Charles Ardai did in his latest Alice review*) is too far down the other side of the axis. We need to find a happy medium.

Well, he must suck at that game (he's too busy keeping Juno alive to practice much, I guess) if he had to do that... Alice's jump puzzles weren't that difficult.

But what a game could do is, if you "miss" the landing point, is have it somehow magically deposit your right on the ledge and precariously hang there for a second before righting you. Then you'd feel like, "Woah, barely made it" even though you couldn't really have missed it... you get the feeling of a challenge without the frustration.

"But what a game could do is, if you "miss" the landing point, is have it somehow magically deposit your right on the ledge and precariously hang there for a second before righting you. Then you'd feel like, "Woah, barely made it" even though you couldn't really have missed it... you get the feeling of a challenge without the frustration."

Case in point: Rayman 2. An absolutely *brilliant* game with lots of forgiving jumping puzzles that look no less harrowing considering how easy they are.

-Tom

"Besides, our last clash ended with me challenging you to lay out your opinion as to why Shadow Watch is so brilliant. You've yet to do that."

Pshaw. I've made it clear here and in numerous other places why I like Shadow Watch.

Don't make me call you out again, Bub. Just because Geryk's on your side this time doesn't mean I'm going to go easy on you. :)

-Tom

Lee: You're entitled to your opinion, but stop trying to pawn it off as gospel.

I think you're reading way too much into this. It's just a style. Feel free to append a bunch of smileys to every sentence. Besides, in a column, it's better to take that attitude. How interesting would that article have been if I had acknowledged in every paragraph that "this is just my opinion and others may, of course, disagree"?

Also, I hate that "instead of criticizing it, do it better yourself" attitude. By this reasoning, if I were to kill someone during surgery, that person's family wouldn't have a right to criticize me unless they were able to perform surgery themselves. I'll be sure to keep this in mind when I do my general surgery rotations. :)

Tom: How can abstraction be busted?

The abstraction is busted because there are few real decisions to make in combat. The game makes it possible to advance slowly enough (in fact, it forces you to) that with enough caution, even the hard missions aren't really a challenge. There is nothing to stop you from (figuratively) crawling through the game. In Odium, you can't just stand there and shoot. Each turn has concrete (and non-trivial) decisions that, while they're not very "realistic", make for more of a "game" than SW does. SW's scale and pacing don't fit with the abstract skill system.

The inability to crawl, etc. is a concession to abstraction that should have been carried further. Instead, it's a game of half-measures.

Tom again: And the point that I think Bruce completely missed in Shadow Watch is the way the mechanics evolve based on your choices in the character skill trees. A central tenet of game design is that you present the player with a paradigm and then -- and this is the most important part -- you *break* that paradigm. Shadow Watch does this beautifully.

I'd love to hear more on this -- I think you're definitely onto something. I still don't think it works, though.

One thing Kevin Perry mentioned to me in another email was that he fought hard to make it impossible for Gennady to fire a weapon, because he wanted him to be solely a support element. His comment was that in another game like JA2, Gennady would have been able to fire a gun but simply would have been bad at shooting. I agree with him that in the kind of game SW aspires to be, Kevin's choice is the correct one. But SW doesn't make it work.

Tom said: "Pshaw. I've made it clear here and in numerous other places why I like Shadow Watch."

Have you? Ok, I'll have to take that on faith. I don't have time to follow your traveling pundit show wherever it roams.

Tom said: "Don't make me call you out again, Bub."

Um... Didn't you already do that here? You called me out because you aren't able to counter Geryk, isn't that right? ;)

Screw it. I'm calling you out. What is it exactly that makes Shadow Watch such a brilliant game, as opposed to my equally established opinion that its merely a "not good" game.

(Please avoid using the word paradigm)

Come on, you've got a website here, give us a 300 second review or something.

~Bub

Tom: "Case in point: Rayman 2. An absolutely *brilliant* game with lots of forgiving jumping puzzles that look no less harrowing considering how easy they are."

Hear, hear. Based on Tom, Erik and I think D'Aprile's suggestions I've been playing Rayman 2 and I'm stunned so far.

I was thinking about how well this sort of concept could work with a 3rd person shooter. Instead of throwing health kits or armor around willy nilly and having the enemy constantly shooting you... implement an auto-dodge kind of system.

Every third or fifth shot that hits you draws blood. The rest cause your character to twist and dodge in visually cool ways. That way, maybe we can get a fighting or shooting game that looks like Jackie Chan or the Matrix. But with a simple and streamlined control system.

Then again, maybe you'd start to see through it and it'd get dull.
~Bub

"If you can find story elements there, the recreational chemicals have really taken hold. ;)"

I think that was precisely Bruce's point with X-COM. Debate who has better tactical implementation among the three games all you want, but X-COM found a way of integrating the story into the reward system. As a result, the gameplay experience was far more compelling and still hasn't been bettered since, IMHO. Even Starcraft's story (albeit very cool) didn't mesh into the game the same way. But that's sort of hard to do with an RTS anyway, so I think Blizzard did it as well as anyone could hope for -- unless Warcraft III comes along and tops it?

"Does story become more important when the game setting is less abstracted? I don't think the evidence bears that out."

Not if you want replayability. That's why X-COM isn't worth playing through more than once: the sense of discovery was so important, much of the thrill would be lost going back a second time. Well, at least it was for me. Nothing wrong with that, either. Do you want them playing your game three years from now (a la TA) or do you want them to have some *serious* game lock for a few days/weeks?

I said: The abstraction is busted because there are few real decisions to make in combat.

Let me explain this a bit more since Tom has hit upon an interesting line of questioning. In a good game, there are always "macro issues" that you have to take into consideration even when the game focuses on something specific, like tactical combat. In Odium, the tactical combat is set up so that you need to consider where all your guys are, where each enemy is, and how to use intervening obstacles to your advantage. If you move Ovitz to that square, he might be able to get away from this monster, but he'd block Trantigne's shot at that other guy. And he'd be in the blast radius of that barrel of gas that you need to detonate to kill a third monster. That's the "macro" or "global" consideration, small as it is.

In SW, this doesn't exist, because (thanks to pacing and map structure) you're almost always focused on one door or hallway or portion of the map at a time. There really isn't much to think about. The bad guys can't really come around from behind, because the game moves too slowly. So there is no "macro" element, and the only other place you'd find this (within the greater story) doesn't exist.

In JA, the AI mercs have enough movement points to flank you if you just try to stick to cover. They don't always do this, which is an AI failing, but the game design is sound on this point. SW's minute slices of time really, really hurt it as a game. There should have been more abstraction. But SW stopped short.

The best place to find abstract systems that work is in boardgames. In something like Avalon Hill's Adv Civilization, all the game elements interact with each other. So while your current "micro" consideration might be whether or not to build a single ship to carry those two tokens to that island one space away, this affected your census count, which determined your move order, which affected whether or not someone might already be on that island by the time your turn came, which meant you might need more than two tokens, which would require another ship, and so on. And your decision to move those guys could be driven by any number of factors, such as agricultural support, the need to build a city, the need to prevent someone else from building a city, etc.

In SW, you're going through a door.

The skill system would have been a great place to focus the abstraction. In a more abstract game, the skills could have allowed each character to perform some "macro task" that affected the whole game. Kind of like a boardgame where you can play some global effect card. A more stylized environment where you weren't stuck moving on a square grid would have lent itself much better to this. Instead, I think the SW designers tried to stick to a "conventional" (albeit simplified)tactical combat model and just add some interesting changes like the skill system. The skill system should have been designed first, and then the gameplay should have been structured around it. It wouldn't have been any way "realistic", but it could have been a good game. They got rid of the prone position and crawling. Good. They should have been far looser with the idea of "position" itself.

That's the Gospel according to Bruce. :)

Gordon: "Not if you want replayability. That's why X-COM isn't worth playing through more than once: the sense of discovery was so important, much of the thrill would be lost going back a second time."

Yes!
And that's what Shadow Watch sacrificed for it's admirable replayability. I fully understand why people like the game for that reason and why they forgive the lack of story because of it. The problem stems from whether or not you found the bare bones tactical engine and interesting skill system worth replaying. People who didn't, like yours truly, were left with nothing to engage them. No compelling story and repetitive (some would say dull) gameplay.

~Bub

It's just weird. The more Bruce gets drawn out about what he likes about Odium's combat, the more I fail to see why he didn't like SW's combat. And I don't think that I'm blind to my design's faults.

I'm going to have to agree with Bub here, and hope Tom will forgive that transgression. If you like the system I provided, you'll like the game. If you don't, you won't.

Tom's comment above about creating a paradigm and then breaking it is an excellent example of what I was trying to do, notwithstanding his use of the word paradigm. It's the sort of thing that I admire about the better Games Workshop rulesets: they present clear, simple rules, and then have each character break those rules in an interesting way.

I also must disagree with Lee about making Bruce actually design a game. There's no need to taint this happily theoretical discussion with the hideous reality that is game production--do you think what ships is the game that is originally designed? Let us all remember instead, with a moment of silence, what happened when Roger Ebert tried to make a movie. Bruce's opinions may be a sad cry for medical help disguised as normal English text, but they are quite legitimate comments on what was presented.

Thanks to all who have defended SW publicly, and thanks to all who have criticized it properly.

Kevin Perry
Shadow Watch Designer
Director of Game Design
Red Storm Entertainment

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Do you want them playing your game three years from now (a la TA) or do you want them to have some *serious* game lock for a few days/weeks?

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Bruce, Bruce, Bruce...

I generally have great respect for your critical opinions, but in this case I'm pretty sure there's some kind of gas leak in the lab. Get out now!

First of all, you're comments lead me to believe that you haven't played a Shadow Watch campaign through to completion, or even through one complete city. As Kevin Perry pointed out in his letter, you decry the game's lack of progressively new stuff in apparent ignorance of the carefully crafted skill tree. Did you ever, say, get to play around with Lily's advanced martial arts moves, Archer's Auto-Fire, or Bear's Smash Door skill? Granted that, if you didn't, it's a testament to the game's inability to successfully draw you in.

Most absurdly, though, you wrote, "If you want to enjoy really creative rules, boardgames such as Tikal, Die Hanse, Euphrat & Tigris, El Grande, and a host of other games have computer games beat so badly that it's not funny. Try one some time if you get a chance... if computer games are just now getting around to making simple, abstract tactical combat games, then that's pathetic. All this stuff has been done."

What's with this bizarrely limited and shortsighted notion of computer game design? I for one would KILL to have some of the innovation and elegance of German boardgame design brought into this creatively barren corner of the entertainment industry (btw, have you tried Knizia's Lord of the Rings yet? Great fun). Most computer game developers don't even appear to grasp the basic mechanics of chess, for Chrissakes. The only reason boardgames "do it better" is because smarter, more creative people are designing boardgames. Shadow Watch was a (largely successful) attempt to bring some of these ideas into a tactical combat game; of course, it met with the perenially small-minded sensibilities of computer gamers, so it's no wonder it bombed.

For a short 2 cents on the game, Here's a quote from my GDR Second Opinion that summarizes my feelings about Shadow Watch:

"It's tempting to describe Shadow Watch as a simple game, because the player has limited choices, both on the strategic level (dialogue choices between missions in a given city) and the tactical level (action choices for each character on the combat map). But the whole of the experience, the way the player's decisions accumulate and interact in their unfolding of the game's story, is greater than the sum of its simple parts, resulting gameplay with depth and dynamism.

"I wouldn't describe this cumulative effect as complicated so much as rich; it encourages the player to savor a decision, turn it over carefully while weighing the possible outcomes, and enjoy the next step in the story that that decision creates."

By "story" above, I mean the player's own narrative developed in the course of a given mission. I agree that the randomness of the overal campaign structure detracts from a sense of meaningful narrative flow in the game. But I also agree with another poster that story can be secondary to gameplay. Look at those of us who love Shadow Watch (all three of us).

By contrast, after hours spent searching for fun in Odium, I found it to be hackneyed, silly, boring, and about as engaging as a cast-iron basketball.

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Let us all remember instead, with a moment of silence, what happened when Roger Ebert tried to make a movie.

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I think you're reading way too much into this. It's just a style. Feel free to append a bunch of smileys to every sentence.

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Also, I hate that "instead of criticizing it, do it better yourself" attitude.

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In Odium, the tactical combat is set up so that you need to consider where all your guys are, where each enemy is, and how to use intervening obstacles to your advantage. If you move Ovitz to that square, he might be able to get away from this monster, but he'd block Trantigne's shot at that other guy. And he'd be in the blast radius of that barrel of gas that you need to detonate to kill a third monster.

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Gordo: X-COM found a way of integrating the story into the reward system

Yes. This is a very good point and is one achieved very elegantly by X-COM. It fits the 'macro' argument Bruce was making. Actions on the battlefield translate into the whole picture, not just the immediate situation.

When you're in battle, you could just use your marksman to knock out that last alien. But if you let your rookie take a shot, he might gain some skills. Or if you use a grenade, someone gains some strength. Or if you only stun it, you can research a live one. Or if you don't use the grenade, perhaps the salvage value of the downed UFO is higher. And don't hit the civilians!

Interesting that this sort of thing is common in an RPG, though it can certainly make its way into all sorts of genres like wargame campaigns that have improving troop experience, or action games that let characters improve with permanent power ups (Urban Chaos did this, though not nearly as well as X-COM). X-COM takes it a little farther than most by going beyond just the soldiers - the research also benefits from battlefield decisions.

I really wish I had played either Shadow Watch or Odium, so I could tell you all how very, very wrong you are.

But I haven't. I have played Rayman 2 (thanks Tom!) and I can concur that it is indeed excellent. Now if I could just get a hold of the soundtrack, which is in a completely, utterly proprietary (and probably French) digital format. :P If any of you high-powered influential industry types can help a brother out...

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

I don't say this often, but I agree with Wumpus. :-)

I find this discussion fascinating, but regret that I cannot participate. To Lee, I say this: I admire Bruce's tenacity. I don't think his style is patronizing so much as...playful, perhaps? I admire a man with a strong opinion. Even if it goes against the mainstream. Much like Tom. A man who has the guts to say, "Hey, I think the game of the year (Dues Ex) sucks!" So, anytime Tom and Bruce get into it, you can bet that I'll at least be on the sideline watching!

At the risk of quoting my own review at Gamesdomain about Odium...

"Something this game (Odium) does better than most games (including X-COM, Abomination, and even Jagged Alliance 2) is to provide a superb balance among all the weapons. Sadly, in so many games today, players inevitably find themselves favoring a few select weapons, while huge stores of unused equipment fill the virtual dumpsters. Not so with Odium, since ammo is rare and each weapon has certain effects, limitations, and ranges, even typically lowly weapons, like the axe and pistol are essential items for survival. Players have to be frugal with their resources, for while a rifle does more damage than an axe, you'll want to conserve ammo when feasible, as you'll need it later when the rifles range and coverage could become a lifesaver."

The abstract design of Odium is homage to console RPG's and it fostered a sense of deja vu for Incubation fans (another closet classic). I really enjoyed discovering the new weapons and their effects in combat and discovering what new creatures I would face in the game. Even character development was fairly well handled. Sure the game was contrite and hackneyed to the extreme, and by the time to game's over all weaknesses started wearing thin in play...the game ends.

To quote, Odium "is a fun, albeit brief, romp. If you're one of those gamers that finds his free time in limited supply; and fun and challenge are more vital than realism and authentic ambience, Odium is the game for you".

As for SW I have to agree with Bruce's major assertions. For me ultimately, the problem with the game was that it never grabbed me, from the very beginning till the moment I uninstalled it. I LOVE squad based games and have prided myself in playing everyone made. Somehow, however, this one left my colder than SAW or did, though nothing ranks so low as Squad Leader with bugs and botched design except maybe Mayhem (if I remember the title correctly) a gang war based tactical game.

For me SW had to little tactical variance and not enough design integration with the logistics and tactical levels. I had no idea what impact the different campaign choices I made had on the tactical encounters. If there was impact I was never able to decipher it. If I had... it may have help my interest longer and allowed me to discover the depth of character development. As it is, everything felt shallow and disjointed from my three attempts to try to "discover" this game.

In fact, after reading about Tom's glowing thoughts on the game recently I tried SW again one lat tieme, I really tried to give it a chance! I should admit I prefer tactical games that try to authentically recreate tactical engagements. However, gamey titles like incubation and Abomination have their own unique appeal. Maybe, if I had been assigned SW as a review I may have stuck through it long enough to find the gold filled center, but it was on my own time and the classic, 101st Airborne was calling me again! :)

I enjoyed the Odium vs. Shadow Watch piece a lot. I was really disappointed by Shadow Watch. I think it proved that the obsession with Randomness in game sometimes leads to a game where basically everything is sort of facelessly generic.

Odium I loved but it was short, and really not replayable. Still, I didn't really understand why all the U.S. gaming mags gave it such venemous reviews. Hell you would've thought it was Conquest Earth or Dominion. :)

I could deal with weapons not shooting diagonally in Odium but I know some friends of mine were turned off the moment they encountered that in the demo. I felt they could've better handled that by making diagonal shots a substantially lower % to hit (but still possible).

These days my time is devoured by Ring of Red on the PS2 and Kohan on the PC. In their own different ways I think they're the best squad type games (or "company" in Kohan's case) out there right now. I don't even bother Wolfgang Walk about doing Incubation 2 anymore cause those couple games meet all my squaddie desires. :)

/*end quote*/
"What hardcore gamers want and what casual gamers want is (for the most part) completely different. "

I guess the difference between you and I, then, is that I view the label of hardcore gamer as a perjorative term.

It's not our job to be "hardcore", rather, it's our job to continually expand the sphere of "gaming" to become more and more inclusive.

Everyone's a gamer. They just may not know it yet. Just like sex, it's more fun with other people.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com
/*end quote*/

Um, wumpus? Why on earth should I *care* what the casual gamer thinks? Maybe in a sort of "keeping enough of them around for the industry afloat" sort of way, I care. Other than that, I'm simply not concerned with what they want, anymore than I lose sleep as whether to Jerry Bruckheimer's latest travesty of filmmaking will be popularly accepted.

I don't see how you can make a case that hardcore and casual gamers have the same tastes. All the sales evidence counteracts there being a large pool of obsessive/casual commonality, as does the quality/profitability split in other entertainment industries (music, films, books). Occasionally something "good" is made that also has mass appeal, but it's the exception, rather than the rule.

Of course, the entire "common/elite" argument is more about culture, income inequality, and class structures than anything else. Paging Mickey Kaus!

"Um, wumpus? Why on earth should I *care* what the casual gamer thinks? Maybe in a sort of "keeping enough of them around for the industry afloat" sort of way, I care. Other than that, I'm simply not concerned with what they want, anymore than I lose sleep as whether to Jerry Bruckheimer's latest travesty of filmmaking will be popularly accepted."

I don't like being an outsider. Read this month's Shoot Club. When people talk about movies or books, they're not regarded as freaks. But talk about a LAN party, and.. well, like I said, read this month's Shoot Club.

This needs to change. And the only way it can change is if gaming becomes more mainstream.

Anything that helps that happen is good for everyone.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Not being an outsider is fine goal, wumpus, but the reason the average joe on the street considers gamers freakish is.....well, gamers are statistically freakish. Something about the hobby attracts people who are the living embodiment of Trevor; probably it's the numbers-heavy, high-technology, sitting-by-yourself-for-eight-hours-at-a-time aspect. You know, more or less the definition of what a video game is.

Making "everyone a gamer" won't change this. You may start to drown the obsessives in terms of numbers, but it'll be the stereotype until society either recenters itself on top of the gamer demographic, or gaming changes into something completely unrecognizable. If it's the latter, of course, I'll probably switch to board games or something, as popular culture appears to have a real lack of ability to produce things that are both *good* and *popular* by any reasonable standard.

To summarize, if you don't want to be an outsider, maybe you should.....well, I don't know what. Even if you get everyone in the world playing games, us types who write long wordy posts on gaming message boards will be the "ostracized freakish subculture of the larger freakish gaming subculture," to use Erik of OMM's description.

Oh yes, and to throw in the obligatory dorky gaming comment: Your theory sounds just like the Master's in Fallout I! If everyone is turned into a freakish gaming mutant, then being a freakish gaming mutant won't be stigmatized anymore! War will disappear! Kittens and puppies will be 55% fluffier!

"Oh yes, and to throw in the obligatory dorky gaming comment: Your theory sounds just like the Master's in Fallout I! If everyone is turned into a freakish gaming mutant, then being a freakish gaming mutant won't be stigmatized anymore! War will disappear! Kittens and puppies will be 55% fluffier!"

You're being unreasonably black and white about this. I'm not saying everyone should spend 8 hours playing counter-strike (or europa universalis etc) every day.

What I _am_ saying is that entering a room and mentioning how much you enjoy computer gaming shouldn't elicit blank stares. Gaming should eventually get to the level of movies, or at least books: a reasonably common shared experience.

So the more people that buy and play RCT or SIMS or whatever, the happier I am. I have that much more common currency with those people.

And I'd prefer if they were adult-oriented (adult in the mature sense, not in the porno sense), too. Gaming isn't just for kids. Another stigma..

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Wumpus why would you want to be a typical joe schmoe gamer? remember you are the few the proud the GAMER! anyway, i see gaming just like any other hobby, but its far from being an "art" still... i can't see anything that doesn't give me an emotional respone as being "art". though im sure we will see more games pushing that envelope.

who cares what ppl think of you in relation to gaming? bah! plus based on your posts you have other interests besides gaming...

but in my circle of friends i am the only "real" gamer... the rest of them buy like ONLY 3-4 games a year! SHeesh i buy that in a month or sometimes one week!

wait, maybe i am weird... uh oh

etc

Well, wumpus, most of the reason I'd rather not have gaming as a mainstream hobby is the artistic effect "mainstreaming for profit" has had on the publishing and filmmaking industries. Compare the pre & post-Steven King book market, or the pre & post-Star Wars film industry. In my opinion, a "normal" level of worrying about profits in an "art" industry tends to lower the quality of the product.

This is kind of a different issue, however. It's what I'm worried will happen to the PC gaming market, though.

Did I mention that the Red Storm offices are literally 5 minutes from my house? Mr. Kevin Perry kindly offered me a free copy of the game Shadow Watch, so I could participate in this discussion. And-- a bonus mini-tour of the Red Storm offices! I think I saw an XBox dev kit in action, which I like to think in some small way makes me as cool as Steve Bauman! Okay, not really. But a man can still dream, can't he?

Anyway. I promised Kevin I'd post comments on the game, and since he went out of his way to get me a copy-- thanks man-- I want to do that.

Though I have not played Odium, I have now played through a couple hours of Shadow Watch. I also recently completed Fallout: Tactics which is probably close enough in style to at least draw rough comparisons from.

Let me start by saying that.. turn-based anything is not really my cup of tea. I think Shadow Watch really suffers, WRT impatient gamers like myself, because it does not offer the ability to switch between real time and turn based modes. Didn't Baldur's Gate already do this perfectly? I'd like to be able to zip through the mundane navigation and exploration stuff in real time, then smack the space bar and switch to turn-based mode to micromanage combat. If you read Bruce's comments again, half of his complaints were about the time taken for basic movement and positioning in SW, eg "tiny time slices". I agree. Just like the Matrix, we want the combat to be in slo-mo, but it is a mistake to extend that to walking down the damn hallway!

Also, I had some major issues with the interface. In particular, I really disliked the arrow based navigation scheme. Why can't I just click the target square to move my characters there? It's especially aggravating because the arrows are relative to the character, not the screen. I don't want to digress into a niggling laundry list of criticisms with the game's interface here. But I just _hate_ it when the obvious things-- like clicking the character you want to select, or clicking the tile you want them to move to-- don't work. That is wrong.

As for the gameplay. I didn't see anything at all wrong with the game's design. I thought the different abilities, the varities of missions, and the skill tree were all cleverly implemented. A large part of Bruce's objections boiled down to the the inability to equip the characters. And he's right. Let's face it-- half the fun in a game like Fallout: Tactics is playing post-nuclear Diablo II. Collecting the best items and outfitting your characters, then watching the resulting carnage unfold (or not, if you didn't choose wisely). But in SW, we're "stuck" with the pre-rolled characters and we can't "upgrade" them with nifty flamethowers or chainguns, right Bruce? I emphathize. But...

The game is clearly designed to be abstract-- both the artwork and the gameplay mesh on this point. That's an admirable focus in a game; so many are all over the map, trying to be all things to all people (Deus Ex). So Bruce's criticisms on lack of "configurability", I think, are at odds with the intentional simplicity of the design. You get the characters as designed, with the skill tree evolution over time.

In Shadow Watch, I get the impression that considerable thought was put into the skill tree, the skills themselves, and their effect on the game. Whereas in a game like Fallout: Tactics I get the impression that the developers used the "shotgun" approach: let's include every goddamn weapon, ability, and item we can dream up, and gameplay be damned! This is fun, indeed, until you try to play the ridiculously unbalanced multiplayer. Or when you get to the last few missions and find them a cakewalk because your team is so powerful. Where's the balance?

If you read the SW manual, you can see there's a very satisfying, deceptively deep chess-like balance between the small set of skills for each character, and the gameplay. Some might call this limiting because there's only a few skills to choose from for a half-dozen characters. Others might call it a solid, deep design. And this choice to "keep it simple" fits perfectly with the game's abstract and austere art and design. And I'm not just saying this because I met the designer! I swear!

Anyway. Those are my thoughts on Shadow Watch. I didn't play the entire game because, frankly, I can't deal with the micromanagement of turn-based mode.

I think the game design and the gameplay are quite solid; it's the interface and the unnecessary, endless turn-based micromanagement that make it _seem_ tedious.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Just a quick comment since Shadow Watch always seems to generate a lot of talk that quickly devolves into "I like turn-based games." or "I hate turn-based games".
The complaint about the arrow movement scheme boggles my mind because I think it's simply a different way of doing things that works in the context of this game. If you were clicking on squares I think you'd be bitching even more about the interface and it being too "clicky". Forcing the arrow movement on players makes movement quick and painless and keeps the flow going. Three hours is enough time to see how the game works, but I don't think it's enough time to get comfortable with this game's interface and exploit it.

But that doesn't mean you should go back and play it more because frankly, if you dislike turn-based games, you probably ought to play something else... like Kohan! :)

--Dave

Good point, Dave. A lot of Shadow Watch complaints also seem to come from people expecting it to be like Jagged Alliance or X-Com. People whine about not getting equipment or not being able to kneel or not being able to snipe from 300 yards out. Sheesh.

At least wumpus seemed to appreciate the significance of the skill tree, something that was IMO completely lost on Bruce. A lot of the gameplay centers around growing the mechanics as you progress along the skill tree and make choices about who gets what skill and comes on which mission. For me, the joy in Shadow Watch is in the difference between the first mission on a campaign and the last mission on a campaign, when no one is the way he or she used to be and the game plays with completely different "pieces".

As I've said many times before, a central tenet of good game design is to present the player with a paradigm and then break it. Shadow Watch did this very well.

-Tom

Thanks again for the kind comments, Dave and Tom. BTW, Dave, do you play with the keyboard? Most people who appreciate the step-by-step model play with the keyboard, which is how I intended.

WRT the RT/TB split, wumpus, I both agree and disagree with you. There are two reasons why SW doesn't have that split.

The first is that in games like Fallout: Tactics and Jagged Alliance 2, there is a clear distinction between the exploration and combat stages. There is none in SW, because there really is no non-combat time. The mission spaces are small, to force contact very soon if not immediately. You're really not spending much time in a mission without enemy contact, unless you're trying a single-person mission in one of the larger maps. This can, of course, lead to tedium, if you're not fluid in moving the characters (see keyboard, above).

The other, more critical, reason, is that the engine wouldn't support it :)

Still had I to do it over again, I would absolutely have done a real-time non-combat phase, dropping into combat when enemy contact was established.

Actually, noodling it over now, I realize that one thing I could have done was have the player have unlimited action points for all characters until the alarm went off. Switching between characters could have been accomplished by end turn (kinda wonky), and the enemies could have acted in sequence every random(ten) APs or so. Reinforcements could have been handled the same way. Hmmm. . .

Thanks for taking the time to play a game that wasn't your cup of tea, wumpus.

KP

"People whine about not getting equipment or not being able to kneel or not being able to snipe from 300 yards out. Sheesh."

I see your point Tom but I don't think it merits a full blown "sheesh". First of all, the ability to kneel would've added a new combat option to the game. One that could have made the game feel more realistic for some or at least added a third animation during the incessant "knocked down - get up - knocked down - get up" cycle. ;)

The lack of sniping was a justified complaint though. I thought it was silly to have a sniper character - armed with a sniper rifle - in a game that presented no real opportunity to use her as a sniper.

I know, the skill tree lets you develop her into a much better close combat fighter deeper in the game but it still begs the question: why a sniper character in a game with little to no sniping. Especially when characters are so rigidly specialized.

Now, Mr. Perry, a real-time pre/post combat option would certainly have helped your game in this reviewer's eyes. And I'd like to add that it's fascinating to see a developer participate in a thread like this.

PS: It's been over a year now since I've played the game, I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies in this post.

Andrew

Like the fact that you *can* kneel in SW? :)

Maya (the sniper) is sort of a riff on the whole sniper deal in games like this. A real sniper has the most boring job in the world that you still carry a gun doing. There is no way to do a 'real' sniper in any game of this nature. Just giving them a longer-ranged gun doesn't count.

That's why Maya was presented as the Artillery piece in SW. She is devastating when she has a target, but cannot move and fire. It's a delicate interbalance of manuever and fire, like much of the rest of the game.

Some people can't get past the literal names for a fairly abstract game. I understand that, though, so please don't take it as a criticism.

No problem, Bub. (Heh, now I can finally sound like Wolverine without the ironic burden of my generation!) I'm happy to participate, and happy to hear legit criticism of any game, especially my own. It's nice that SW hasn't faded into total obscurity. If I can't get cult hit, or even cult favorite, I'll take cult curio.

KP

"First of all, the ability to kneel would've added a new combat option to the game."

Actually, you ccan kneel. It was an important part of the game mechanics.

As for your complaints about the sniper, what exactly did you want? Which of the maps were going to snipe on? Your quarrel with Maya's role in the game isn't one of mechanics so much as it's one of semantics. You hear 'sniper', you think someone who sits on a roof and shoots people from 100 yards out. Fine. However, Shadow Watch doesn't have maps this big, so they gave the 'sniper' a different, and very useful, role. When someone complains you can't snipe, it just belies that they didn't really get the game.

And, yes, I put you in that camp. Your Gamecenter review was indicative of someone writing about a game he didn't understand. Bruce's rant was entertaining, but similarly wrong-headed in that he seemed to be expecting things Shadow Watch didn't offer. He made some good points, but I think he similarly failed to appreciate SW's appeal to those of us who really like it.

I'm glad to see Kevin posting here (including some great comments on the thread on movies and books!), but I'm a little disheartened to see him making 'mea culpas' where none are necessary. Sure, a real time option might have been nice, but that's not what Shadow Watch was about (cf. Fallout: Tactics). Unlimited action points would have, IMO, made for less precise gameplay. Larger time slices would have changed the level of tension and suspense.

I think SW is a damn near flawless design in the context of what it was trying to achieve. Kevin, stick to your damn guns, already! :) You made a great game that, I presume, sold poorly and was widely misunderstood. But that doesn't make it any less great.

-Tom

Yes Kevin, I used the keyboard while I was actively playing the game. I must admit that lately I've not had time to play so it's been about 2 months since my last game. I remember reading on USENET before buying Shadow Watch that the game was built for the keyboard. I can't remember anymore who said it... it might even have been you or Tom! I think I tried the mouse at first, realized it was kinda kludgey and then went to keys and never looked back.

That's the thing about making a game for today's market. While hotkeys reduce clicking and increase control over a game, so many people are intent on using only the mouse alone to accomplish every in game task. Then they wonder why their pal who's using keys and mouse is smashing them in a game of Age of Kings, etc. They howl about real-time games being "clickfests" and claim they'll never play them again. I think it was wumpus who noted in the Black & White thread that he's got 104 keys in front of him, why can't he use them? Well, in Shadow Watch, that was obviously the preferred scheme and it worked for me.

It does seem like a lot of gamers don't want to take the time to learn anything new. Steve Bauman has noted a number of times in threads elsewhere that gamers want the controls to remain the same, innovation be damned. I think it's a valid concern. We have a whole lot of possibilities on the PC that we don't have on a console to diversify the control, yet we often don't take advantage of them. Take Sega's use of the keyboard in Typing of the Dead as an example. They built a whole game around typing and made it FUN. It's mainly entertainment but it just happens to teach you how to type in the process. I'd imagine that if given a widespread base of mouse devices on consoles we'd see a lot more innovative use of that device there as well.

Standard control schemes are good to a point. But if the game demands an alternate method that simply works better in the context of the game (such as mouse/keys for robot sim Heavy Gear II), then I'm certainly not going to bitch that the control isn't just like the last game I played in that genre.

--Dave

You *can* kneel in SW?
Well, it has been a while then. What were all those people whining about then? Sheesh!

I think you nailed it on the head there. It was an abstract game and that's why I didn't like it. That also explains why Tom is going on and on about paradigms and stuff. Abstract with a solid board game foundation.

Hmmm...

The Wolverine reference is just about the only perk my name gives me. Well, that and Day of the Dead. You'll think of me when you see Day of the Dead I guarantee.

-Andrew

"I'm glad to see Kevin posting here (including some great comments on the thread on movies and books!), but I'm a little disheartened to see him making 'mea culpas' where none are necessary. Sure, a real time option might have been nice, but that's not what Shadow Watch was about (cf. Fallout: Tactics). Unlimited action points would have, IMO, made for less precise gameplay. Larger time slices would have changed the level of tension and suspense."

I agree that the game appears to be very well thought out from the few hours I played it. However, don't you think that selling poorly is a flaw? I'm sure the finance guys would agree.

I'd wager that most gamers, like me, are stupid and impatient and would have appreciated A) a more logical interface (left clicking stuff makes it happen) and B) an easy, Baldurs Gate-ish toggle between real time and continuous modes to speed up the tedious parts.

I think Tom's right-- there was definitely a quality game design buried in there. However, accessibility and appeal was a problem, IMO, for the two reasons above.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

---

Quote:

But if the game demands an alternate method that simply works better in the context of the game (such as mouse/keys for robot sim Heavy Gear II), then I'm certainly not going to bitch that the control isn't just like the last game I played in that genre.

---

I wouldn't interpret my comments as mea culpas, Tom, more as illuminations of the thought process and limitations that go into work like game designs. I'm glad you appreciated the tension of the limited APs, but it's clear that not many others did. I made SW the game I wanted it to be, and that's its biggest problem: it's quite idiosyncratic. My initial draft didn't even have a mouse interface--clearly too idiosyncratic.

The problem, really, goes back to the dilemma faced by any craftsman in a commercial medium. Do I aim for the masses, or make what I like? SW was what I like, which is in part why sales were in fact disappointing.

But make no mistake, I and the rest of the team who made it will stand by it and every decision we made with a deep and shining pride that the cries of the confused and the unaffected can never shake.

KP

I agree with what Tom says. Stick by your design Kevin. It's a great one and fits perfectly in the realm of computer GAME. I think that many developers (and the public at large) are missing the fact these are games and not movies. Gamers are demanding complex stories and solid storytelling. That's bullshit to me. I want complex INTERACTION and solid GAMEPLAY and the story can evolve from there. It's one of the reasons System Shock 2 is one of my favorite games. It's got the game part right and the story stuff follows on from there.

I don't play games for a non-interactive ride. I've got movies for that. I want to be large and in charge with all my decisions affecting the outcome. I've had much better stories to tell after a multiplayer game of Kohan than I've gotten from just about any RTS campaign.

--Dave

Wumpus is right. (Hey, first time that's appeared on these boards! :) )

SW failed as a product, if not as a work of the craft of game design. Therefore, the mea culpas regarding accessability are right on the head.

But be aware, wumpus, that with the speed of Baldur's Gate et al., you lose the choices that are the hallmark of tactics. I am not questioning your preference for such. But I play games to make interesting choices, and real-time combat games remove the choices I wish to make (and often the feedback I want to make those choices as well).

KP

Since most every tactical strategy game discussion I've seen drags X-COM into it at some point, maybe that's how you have to sucker in the masses at this point. You take your gee whiz turn-based strategy engine and lather it with other genres as X-COM did and then you deliver it to them like a Trojan Horse. :) Then while they're fiddling around with all the fast paced stuff they hardly realize you've dropped your good old fashioned turn-based strategy into their lap. :)

While I was no Shadow Watch fanatic (I did actually buy it and keep it by golly! :)), I appreciated what it was trying to do.

Yeah, Geo, there is an interesting rift here. PC gamers claim that TB is dead, and they're bored with it, tired of it, can't imagine why anyone would ever want to play it. Then they go play FFVII on their PSX for 15 hours.

TB games are a vibrant genre on consoles, although the TB element is rarely the perceived point. I loved Front Mission 3, and could see how you could 'sucker' RPG fans into playing what is basically a mission-based TB strategy game.

Thanks for not returning SW :).

KP

Just a quick addendum... I loved the music and the intro in Shadow Watch. Bill Brown was a great choice!

Bill Brown's Other Stuff

--Dave

"Yeah, Geo, there is an interesting rift here. PC gamers claim that TB is dead, and they're bored with it, tired of it, can't imagine why anyone would ever want to play it. Then they go play FFVII on their PSX for 15 hours. "

And then there's Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns.

This game is actually as good as Tom Chick makes it out to be, unlike Moon Project. And it's an excellent example of how to make RTS games play sorta like turn based games. It's an intriguing and original riff on the genre. And the interface is outstanding!

"although the TB element is rarely the perceived point."

This is it. Like I said earlier-- we want the combat to be in slo-mo. We just don't want EVERYTHING to be in slo-mo. Console games do a better job with this than PC titles IMO, because they know their core audience is stupid and impatient-- just like I am.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

My current PS2 strategy favorite, Ring of Red, (link is to my fan site) mixes a turn-based strategy map with some fun (and time-limited) real time battle sequences. Although often compared to FM3, the 3-D battle sequences offer a lot of room for manuevering and strategy and special attacks (in FM3 they were basically non-interactive cut scenes). The funny thing is, most of the addle-brained videogame reviewers (not that all videogame reviewers are addle brained :)) complain about the 2-D turn-based map portion of the game. For me it's a joy. :)

I loved FM3 and Vandal Hearts, but something about the little big-headed kid graphics in Final Fantasy Tactics kept me from getting into it.

Anyway, Ring of Red made me feel good about breaking down and getting PS2 - I didn't get a PS2 to play PC ports (just about every ported PC game plays better and looks better on PC) afterall, but to get a few neat kinds of games I know I won't ever see on PC due to how the marketplace works.

Here's my suggestions (humbly, sometimes comically submitted) for the next Geryk head-to-head battle: :-) (I know he only does PC, but it got me thinking about some cross platform comparisons)

PC
* Commandos vs. Star Trek: Away Team
* Kohan vs. Shogun: Total War
* Summoner vs. Magic & Mayhem (may Mythos rest in peace)

PC vs. PS2
* Kessen vs. Shogun: Total War

PS2 vs. PSX
* Ring of Red vs. Front Mission 3

PC vs. PSX
* Incubation vs. Vandal Hearts (cited by the Blue Byte team as Inc's inspiration)

I'm veering wildly off topic (somebody stop me!) but one thing console games like Vandal Hearts and RoR so well, is not make you so fretful about losing a single unit that you keep reloading games ad nauseam (as I did in Incubation and a lot of turn-based tactical PC games). In VH, if a unit drops to a certain health % it flies up and retreats from the battlefield, unavailable that mission but back the next. RoR handles units in a similar fashion but your squads on the mech unit are permanently lost if that happens (the mech and pilot are okay and available next mission).

I would think, how much less frustrating would Inc: TWM have been if you had something like that (but maybe the marine lost his weapon or some skills points or something in the retreat - that would still punish you some but not convince you that you had to reload a game everytime you lost a marine).

Geo,

Ring of Red is pretty nifty, particularly since I wasn't expecting it to be what it was. It led me to go out and a find a used copy of Front Mission 3!

I'm not sure which I like better. FM3 is more brainy, but RoR has some damn thrilling graphics for a turn-based game.

My main complaint is that I'm not happy being shunted through scenarios, particularly the way it works in FM3. Give me some choices where and why I'll fight next. I like at least the illusion of choice. The strategy maps in RoR help in this regard, but so far FM3 seems straighjacketed into a progression from Mission A to B to C. Ugh.

-Tom

Hmmm, well, Kevin, I'm going to have to get a copy of this Shadow Watch. I love both TB and squad management, but somehow never got ahold of SW before. This interesting exchange, however, has inspired me to take a look.

Tom wrote:
"And, yes, I put you in that camp. Your Gamecenter review was indicative of someone writing about a game he didn't understand."

And:
"but I think he (Bruce) similarly failed to appreciate SW's appeal to those of us who really like it."

In all the arguments I've ever read regarding game criticism I don't think I've ever read anything quite like these two, rather amazing, quotes. Sincerely Tom, interesting bit of thinking here.

RE: Quote #1
Fair allegation. I reviewed the game after playing three entire campaigns from beginning to end. If I didn't "fully understand" the game as you say, then it certainly wasn't for lack of trying. So I'd have to place some fault at the game's feet because I think I gave it a fair shake. Then again, and sorry to fall back on this, a huge majority of reviewers also "didn't get it" and, judging by sales, neither did the public (no offense Kevin).


As far as the second quote...
Couldn't you say that about any game you like that others didn't like? I consider Deus Ex to be an excellent game with severe AI flaws and some easily surmounted "suspension of disbelief" issues. I gave it a 7 of 10 or something like that. I praised what did work and panned what didn't.

You considered it to be crap (3 of 10). Still, your review was laid out, logical, supported well, and a nice piece of work -- but to my mind, and to a lot of people's minds, you just didn't "get" that game. You failed to understand what did work and what was appealing to a lot of people.

The question is... does that make you "wrong"?
I stand by my 7 of 10 Shadow Watch review (the Gamecenter editor lowered it to 6 of 10 against my wishes) because the game didn't work for me on several fundamental levels. What worked for you, what appealed to you, didn't work or appeal to me. I don't think slightly panning a game for not appealing to me makes my review "wrong".

-Andrew

PS: I still think a sniper should be allowed to snipe in spite of your clever excuses Kevin. It'd be like having Bear but not giving him doors to bash through. ;-)

---

Quote:

The strategy maps in RoR help in this regard, but so far FM3 seems straighjacketed into a progression from Mission A to B to C. Ugh.

---

Oops.
I'm sorry, I should have read ahead and realized I was responding to a much earlier post and that the issue was in fact already kind of dead.

I'll let you get back to your discussion of that console game. Is it a Bubonic plague sim? Ring around the Rosie or something? ;)

-Andrew

I have Ring of Red and haven't played it yet. Like Zone of the Enders and the MGS2 demo. I can't pry the controller from her hands long enough to try either of them. Curse SSX !


As for Shadow Watch, I loved the concept, was bored to tears by the game. My review for Computer Games made that pretty clear. Liked the look, though, from an aesthetic standpoint.

Trying to veer back on topic. :) I try not to get peeved about reviews for their opinions because a review is an opinion by its very nature (whether of a game, movie, book or a painting). But facts, I get peeved about. :)

I've been peeved about a lot of Ring of Red reviews, fer example, because of plain inaccuracies by lazy reviewers who either didn't read the manual or rushed through the game. Gamepro's review claimed you couldn't save on the mission maps (which you can, but because the menu entry is labeled STOP rather than SAVE, a lot of folks missed it) and that you couldn't do anything during battles but wait for the targeting % meter (not figuring out you can move your AFW/mech forwards/backwards, command your troop squads, etc.).

Er, what was my point? :) Well, I liked what SW was trying to do with the random this and that and the skills, but it always felt just too generic to me. And the rather comical animation of someone in a pile on the floor repeatedly convulsing when shot just wasn't as much fun as someone getting gibbed in Incubation or Odium. :)

I appreciate they were trying to make maps small so you wouldn't get bored moving in TB mode, but it seemed to me like every room was virtually the same and mostly claustrophobic. And maybe I'm guilty of liking big guns and monsters too much - I think there's more room for variety using those in a tactical game (flamethrowers, lasers, mine launchers, and the like get me more goosed than repeatedly using small arms).

Just my humble observations. I may not have understood SW someday, and I should probably revisit it and even Odium some day soon. Speaking of Odium, I really liked those one-shot Uber weapons in there (where, theoretically, you were using a radio device to Call In a special wide spread weapon), and the tension involved in deciding just when the best time was to use it.

Kevin, have you heard anything about Red Storm's Ghost Recon (a sort of Army Rainbow Six) X-Box game? I read a preview with some screenies in Gamepro, but I can't find so much as a single Web page on it on the Web, even on Red Storm's site. I'm intrigued, but I thought there'd be something up about it somewhere.

Fair point, Bub, and don't worry about the thread-dragging. . . it was actually my fault that we spiralled off into console TB games.

Quick question for you: what would sniping entail for you? Is sniping just a really long shot?

KP

In most games sniping is simply the ability to shoot farther. In many shooters, you have to wonder why every army in the world doesn't consist of just snipers--try any of the Delta Force games, and any weapon without a scope is at a severe disadvantage.

I guess it's tough to model the complexity of using real-world snipers in a game situation. Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear did a decent job I guess. in a game like Combat Mission, snipers (sharpshooters) have their correct historical role of suppressing and demoralizing the enemy (leader shots a specialty), but for a game the scale of SW or XCOM or JA or Fallout Tactics or the like, it gets problematic. On that scale I'd think a sniper's role would be to take out the enemy snipers, cover certain areas from a distance, and provide precision fire on very particular targets. Trouble is, if you just let the player have a character/unit that can shoot farther and more accurately than anyone else, unless your game design is super-sophisticated, they'll just use that character as some sort of uber-commando.

Uh... what Bob Mayer said.

Since Shadow Watch is a game of rush and tackle blitz-style offense Maya feels rather useless until you develop her further with the skill system. I would have liked more opportunities to use supression tactics or even the ability to flush enemies into her range. Instead she rushes in with the rest and hopes for a clean shot.

Honestly the sniper issue wasn't really a huge concern to me then or now, it was just something that jumped out when I was writing that review and playing the game.

-Andrew
PS: What are you working on now Kevin?

Andrew,

We've been over this before, but...

"Fair allegation. I reviewed the game after playing three entire campaigns from beginning to end."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I doubt it. If you played through "three entire campaigns from beginning to end", you weren't paying very close attention. There are various errors in the review that belie your claim to have "understood" the game. You squander a lot of your word count on stuff about Tom Clancy (huh?), how you would have preferred the game to have been made, and hyperbole in lieu of anything helpful. "Unprecedented boredom"? Come on. You've also made various errors in the discussions we've had in the past, ranging from how weapons work to what rating the game was given (hint: it's not a 6).

"Then again, and sorry to fall back on this, a huge majority of reviewers also "didn't get it" and, judging by sales, neither did the public (no offense Kevin)."

Then don't fall back on it. Your opinion of the game needn't have any bearing on how other reviewers felt. It should come from having played the game.

-Tom

"I guess it's tough to model the complexity of using real-world snipers in a game situation."

Games like X-Com and Jagged Alliance are better suited for traditional sniping because they play out on larger maps where range is a factor. The close quarters in all the SW maps don't really lend themselves to that. Range matters in SW, but not like it does in other tactical turn based games.

As for Bub calling Maya useless without her skills, it's no more the case with her than with any of the other characters. And like anyone else, she becomes a unique and important playing piece if you choose to focus on her.

-Tom

Tom:
"We've been over this before, but..."

Actually we haven't. You've always expressed a disdain for my review but you always did so in a vague manner. You never went into specifics. In fact, since you never once told me why you liked the game (despite my asking you to) for a while I thought you were just messing with me.

"Not to put too fine a point on it, but I doubt it. If you played through "three entire campaigns from beginning to end", you weren't paying very close attention."

It's your perogotive to doubt me at my word Tom.
But I'm not lying or exaggerating. I had ample time and used it wisely. Still, perhaps you're right about me not paying close enough attention. Reading Kevin Perry's posts has made me feel a bit guilty about that. But the fact remains that I paid little attention because I was bored and unchallenged throughout my experience with the game.

"You squander a lot of your word count on stuff about Tom Clancy (huh?)"

I say 'huh?' in return. Shadow Watch is a Clancy property and I was told by PR that Clancy had his hand in the story development. I still think it isn't a good story at all and the randomness hurts what little *is* there. That's appropriate criticism I think.

"how you would have preferred the game to have been made, and hyperbole in lieu of anything helpful."

I disagree with this allegation. Well, I agree with the first part. I did spend probably too much time on how I'd have preferred the game, but I did explain the game accurately in the process of doing so.

"Unprecedented boredom"

Ouch.
Yeah, that's pretty bad. Ok then, fair enough on that charge, let's call it plain old vanilla boredom. You've never used hyperbole in the heat of the moment? Still, I apologize for it.

"You've also made various errors in the discussions we've had in the past, ranging from how weapons work to what rating the game was given (hint: it's not a 6)."

Those discussions occured two months after my review went up and they also occured while I had a 2 week old baby in my house. I doubt they would have happened had the game still been fresh on my mind at the time. Face it Tom, we're not all bachelor dillentants ready to replay a game for fact checking purposes two months after a review for the sake of argument.

On Usenet you mistook my being *unwilling* to properly engage you on Usenet for my being *unable* to do so. Once I realized you were serious and that I'd have to reinstall the game and play for a while to counter your argument I withdrew. I shouldn't have allowed that to happen.

Also, you're right. The score is a 5 of 10. Damn. Well, my draft here is a 7. What more can I say to that? We both know how much Gamecenter liked to muck around with reviews. At least I didn't rate it below average.

"Your opinion of the game needn't have any bearing on how other reviewers felt. It should come from having played the game."

Tom my review was the very first one put up online. It is entirely based on my experience with the game. Don't mistake my using other reviewers to back up an argument about accessibility with using them to back up my review.

-Andrew

PS: Here's the review if anyone is interested

http://www.gamecenter.com/Reviews/Item/0,6,0-3977,00.html

"In most games sniping is simply the ability to shoot farther. In many shooters, you have to wonder why every army in the world doesn't consist of just snipers--try any of the Delta Force games, and any weapon without a scope is at a severe disadvantage."

I thought in modern warfare this was pretty much an accepted fact? If they can SEE you, you're dead. Whether it's a sniper, missiles, or what have you. Same end result.

And you're right, every single game I play hammers home this tactical point even further. When you're a half-mile away and killing people instantly with little to no fear of retaliation, that's clearly ideal. Only a fool goes face to face when you can kill with a button press from a distance.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

"You've always expressed a disdain for my review but you always did so in a vague manner. You never went into specifics. In fact, since you never once told me why you liked the game (despite my asking you to) for a while I thought you were just messing with me."

I've been pretty vocal about why I like the game, here and in numerous other forums. And I've also been pretty specific about where I think you missed the boat in your discussions about SW. Which, BTW, were *never* about the review you wrote until this thread.

"But the fact remains that I paid little attention because I was bored and unchallenged throughout my experience with the game."

It's apparent you paid little attention, for whatever reason. If you couldn't be bothered to pay attention, you shouldn't have been writing the review.

"I say 'huh?' in return. Shadow Watch is a Clancy property and I was told by PR that Clancy had his hand in the story development."

Interesting. Tom Clancy's name appears exactly zero times in my copy of the game. You must have played the special version that has Clancy's name stamped on the CD, in the credits, or maybe on the box. I imagine it's pretty valuable since there are no others in existence. Keep it somewhere safe and it'll probably be worth money some day.

"I still think it isn't a good story at all and the randomness hurts what little *is* there. That's appropriate criticism I think."

You know, I couldn't even begin to tell you the story in SW. And guess what? It doesn't matter! It's not a story-driven game. You might as well bitch about the character bios in Soul Calibur.

"I did spend probably too much time on how I'd have preferred the game, but I did explain the game accurately in the process of doing so."

Which is exactly the problem. Right out of the gate, you're attacking the game for not being like X-Com or Jagged Alliance. This was a common -- and wrong-headed -- complaint about SW. It is not, in fact, X-Com or Jagged Alliance. How very astute.

"You've never used hyperbole in the heat of the moment?"

I don't write reviews in the heat of the moment. I write them after spending time with a game and weighing my thoughts carefully. Then I edit them for clarity. Usually a few times. Credibility is a precious coin and I'd rather not squander it on sloppy hyperbole.

-Tom

"Credibility is a precious coin and I'd rather not squander it on sloppy hyperbole."

Well, I'd argue that the way you saddled up Deus Ex and rode it around town like a goddamn pony is .. awfully hyperbolic.

I submit your review of Deus Ex as Exhibit A. You're just as guilty as the rest of us. Every reviewer has pet peeves, blind spots, and biases.

However, that being said, I do agree with some of your Bub criticisms. Reviewers should take the time to get to know the game. I get the feeling that Andrew was going through the motions because he didn't like the game. I empathize. It's easy to review games you enjoy. It's excruciatingly painful to review the ones you don't.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Well, in modern combat in re vehicles, seeing is killing a lot of times, but in terms of grunts, the vast majority of infantry rifles still don't have scopes on them, though in advanced armies the introduction of weapons with integrated 2x or 4x scopes seems to be increasing. Anyone who's fired a scoped weapon knows though that you can't bring it to bear as fast as you can one with iron sights. The time it takes to focus through the scope, not to mention the limited field of view, makes it tough to acquire targets easily. I always found shooting unscoped rifles more intuitive and faster than using a much more accurate (in theory) scoped rifle--if time was an issue. If you are sitting still and waiting (like a sniper) it's a different story. And a lot of the "scopes" being fielded on combat rifles now are low-power, relatively wide-angle aids to aiming more than traditional telescopic sights. Most armies have pretty much abandoned the idea of marksmanship in the traditional sense. Given that the standard world-wide rifle caliber has been steadily moving from 7.62/7.92 to 5.56mm, and the effectiv range of most assault weapons has been steady at around 250-300m in most tactical situations, the need for the ability to shoot single shots accurately seems to have become largely devalued.

Anyhow, even in games like JA and FT, your ranges are grossly truncated. Same for games with sci-fi weapons like XCOM (though I have no idea what the effective range of a laser rifle is, really). In JA, if you gave the assault rifles the ranges they really have, you'd be shooting across several maps. That's especially true for the sniper rifles. In that respect SW was no worse than any other tactical game that you play on the PC. With limited screen sizes and resolutions (and limited abilities of the human eye to resolve data on such a screen) you have to make compromises.

Tom,
My copy of Shadow Watch didn't have Tom Clancy on it anywhere either. My copy was a silver disc with the words SHADOW WATCH GOLD written in with a black marking pen. I didn't have a manual, I did have a deadline and I did have a PR rep telling me Tom Clancy had a hand in the story. Why do you immediately assume that I'm lying here? My review wasn't the only one who made that claim. Doesn't it stand to reason that we were, maybe, fed information from the same source?

If this is about you disliking my reviewing style (as your examples increasingly reveal), well, you should have warned me. I really don't think that's something I want to get into or defend in a public forum, especially attacks from an admired colleague on his own webpage.

Wouldn't you call that "poor form"?

Look, I did my best with Shadow Watch. I have nothing more to say on the subject. I stand by it, hyperbole or no. No mocking from you will change that. No regrets. (Ok, except for "unprecendented boredom" line -yuck!)

-Andrew

"If this is about you disliking my reviewing style (as your examples increasingly reveal), well, you should have warned me."

Who said anything about your reviewing style? Do you consider your "reviewing style" not paying attention to games you're reviewing because you're bored? Resorting to pointless hyperbole because of "the heat of the moment"? Passing on inaccuracies because you were "fed information"? Reviewing a strategy game like Shadow Watch without cracking a manual? Can we extrapolate from your comment that these things are facets of your "reviewing style"? Ouch.

Anyway, the point of this thread is that I disagree strongly with the things you've said about Shadow Watch. There's no need to take it as a professional sleight. Plenty of people who write reviews are capable of discussing the games they review without assuming their professional integrity is being called into question. You'll find some of them doing it on this very board.

-Tom

---

Quote:

I didn't have a manual, I did have a deadline and I did have a PR rep telling me Tom Clancy had a hand in the story.

---

---

Quote:

Wouldn't you call that "poor form"?

---

"This sounds a lot more like how I would write a preview such as the one I'm working on right now for WWII Online. I have no real manual, a PR rep helping me understand the game and a bunch of beta tester "help files" to work with for getting where I need to go. I could never review a game with only this information."

Speaking of which, I did my damnedest to shoot you down in your Spitfire last night, Mr. Ironfist. ;-)

Regarding Tom's message:

The real "ouch" here is that I meant to write "writing style" not "reviewing style". Meaning that I feel it's good to use a bit of hyperbole and it's important to always talk about the story and gameworld. Still, Tom was probably very pleased to get the chance to fashion that brutal paragraph. Ouch indeed.

That said, looking over his posts you'll see they're made up of assumptions. He assumes I'm lying when I say I played the campaign three times all the way through. He assumes I wrote the review last minute without revision. Both assumptions do not follow logically from the posts and both assumptions are insulting. Look, he - or anyone else - can take my review apart all they want, but I balk when the attacks move to my credibility, or work ethic.

Dave Long Said:

"It's just that in reading your review, it seems like you really didn't play it and more importantly didn't review Shadow Watch, but reviewed the game that you wanted it to be."

Thank you Dave.
I appreciate your use of the word "seems" in the above paragraph. It makes all the difference in the world.

I'm sorry the review comes off that way. I certainly did play the game.

Still, in hindsight I think it is a valid criticism, your point that I may have slammed the game for not being what I wanted it to be.
Maybe I did weight that too heavily. That stems again from my not liking the game as it was. So, that would be a stylistic not a factual change to the review.

I think a certain degree of comparison is necessary. SW may not be XCom or JA but it is similar and is playing toward the same audience. As a fan of that type of gameplay who was disappointed with SW, I think it valid to mention what SW could have been. I probably just did it too much.

Regarding the merits of reviewing a Gold Disc:

Dave, of course I agree with you. I always try and make sure I have a manual in front of me when reviewing. But Gamecenter always put an emphasis on speed and Red Storm wouldn't/couldn't send a manual in time for their deadline. Since I didn't find the game difficult enough to require the manual I decided to do the job I was contracted to do. Which was to review the game to the best of my ability by deadline.

So far as the PR rep:

Woah! Don't jump the gun. There's a big difference between my asking a rep "What was Clancy's involvment" and "The PR rep was feeding me info". I simply asked a question and it was answered.

Anyway, I gather now that Clancy wasn't involved? Well if not I certainly apologize for that error as well. I didn't mention the PR rep as an excuse but as an explanation.

-Andrew

Chick, your comment about Deus Ex in GDR saying "... it's only 90% bad. " is pretty hefty... how can you quantify 90% bad in agame... ALOT of fans of DX will argue EVERY point made in your review of Deus Ex as you are doing here with Bub. I mean its comparable to Bubs "an unprecedented boredom factor".

I like reviewers to voice there opinions on games... but what puzzles me about comments like this in reviews (which EVERY reviewer will do once in a while, games or not) is that they are completely subjective... it is hard to be objective no doubt, but proving to someone that DX is "90% bad" or SW is of "unprecendented boredom" is a choice of bad words...

I'm not knocking either of you, just saying all reviewers are biased... even the best of them...
everybody has an opinion but that opinion doesn't prove anything.

btw, i didn't play SW yet so i can't really comment on it!

etc

"Still, in hindsight I think it is a valid criticism, your point that I may have slammed the game for not being what I wanted it to be.
Maybe I did weight that too heavily."

I thought this was a problem with a number of Shadow Watch reviews. The Gamespot review, which was written by Michael Ryan who writes for Newsweek, didn't understand the initiative system in the game.

"Besides that, the only real problem with Shadow Watch is the sometimes-bizarre turn sequence that seems to give the computer a distinct advantage. For example, during your turn, you may only get to issue a movement order to one character before the game returns control to the enemy side."

He also had this criticism of the game:

"Rather than forcing you to keep the same six characters alive the whole time, the game instead could have greatly benefited from a larger pool of available troops."

That was another common criticism of the game, and displays a lack of understanding of the game's careful balance of characters and skills.

Age of Empires is another game that got bashed in places for not living up to reviewers' expectations. Not to pick on Gamespot, but T. Liam McDonald reviewed it for them and had this to say:

"I wish that Age of Empires was what it claimed to be - Civilization with a Warcraft twist. Instead, it is Warcraft with a hint of Civilization."

And then he closes the review with this:

"Is it a simplified Civilization or a modestly beefed up Warcraft? It's almost as if the designers started out to create one game and ended up with another. With such beautiful production and the fundamentals of a vastly entertaining game, it's sad that it fell short of the mark. The disappointment is not merely with what AOE is, but with what it failed to be."

Clearly he dinged the game in his review, giving it a 6.8, because he wanted a real-time Civilization.

Quick manual pointer in defense of Bub-

I don't remember when the manual was finished (as in printed, bound, all that good inky stuff), but I doubt it was finished when we GM'd.

However, I (the designer) wrote the on-line help in the game, which, at some 10,000 words, is rather more to the point and useful than the manual anyhoo.

So no smacking him around about not having a manual. I don't think that SW had 'hidden' features that required the manual anyway.

Kevin Perry
Standard Disclaimers Apply

"but what puzzles me about comments like this in reviews (which EVERY reviewer will do once in a while, games or not) is that they are completely subjective... it is hard to be objective no doubt, but proving to someone that DX is "90% bad" or SW is of "unprecendented boredom" is a choice of bad words..."

Most everything worth reading in a review is completely subjective. Weeding all the subjective commentary out of a review leaves you with a features list. I can get that on the back of the game box. When I read a review, I want opinion.

"proving to someone that DX is "90% bad" or SW is of "unprecendented boredom" is a choice of bad words..."

I think if you read my Deus Ex review, Mtkafka, you'll see the "90% bad" comment wasn't necessarily an exaggeration. :)

-Tom

REading your Deus Ex review Tom I thought i was reading about Daikatana! I mean do you really think Deus Ex is THAT bad ie 90% bad? sheesh. I love your reviews n all... but cmon you really axed that game.

etc

"REading your Deus Ex review Tom I thought i was reading about Daikatana! I mean do you really think Deus Ex is THAT bad ie 90% bad? sheesh. I love your reviews n all... but cmon you really axed that game."

Here's the real test for a review. Read it again and see if Tom supported his arguments. If he did, he wrote a good review, even though it's one you can vehemently disagree with.

It's a more interesting gaming scene when we have differing viewpoints that are well-argued.

While we can all agreee that "unprecedented boredom" is a bad phrase to use in a review, I can think of a few game reviews in which I wish I had thought of this closing line from James Berardinelli's review for "Freddy Got Fingered:"
"I have gotten better entertainment value from a colonoscopy." =)

Has anyone read Roger Eberts review of "Freddy Got Fingered?" He tore it to shreds and clearly despised it. And he supported his arguments to the point that not only don't I want to see it, I will actively avoid it.

It looks pretty stupid to me. I'm not a huge fan of Tom Green, though. To think -- Drew Barrymore's gonna marry that guy! (Or has she already? I can't remember.) That's one movie I won't be likely to see.

Sure, Tom supported his arguments but this is the game I played:

2nd opinion on Deus Ex

You can pick any game and rail on the points you don't like for a review and say it sucks and even support your assertions. Anyone who is competent can do that. However that doesn't make the game bad or the review good IMO.

As a fellow reviewer I have comments on the following quote...

"Who said anything about your reviewing style? Do you consider your "reviewing style" not paying attention to games you're reviewing because you're bored? Resorting to pointless hyperbole because of "the heat of the moment"? Passing on inaccuracies because you were "fed information"? Reviewing a strategy game like Shadow Watch without cracking a manual? Can we extrapolate from your comment that these things are facets of your "reviewing style"? Ouch."

"Do you consider your "reviewing style" not paying attention to games you're reviewing because you're bored?"

OK, I agree on this point, as I said in my earlier post I would have gone a lot further with the game if I had been assigned it as a review. I think that a reviewer really has to try to be willing to see where the developer was trying to go and evaluate how well they did in getting there. My initial go with the Lego Rock Raiders review started out badly because of the stigma Lego's had with me, especially in context to a serious RTS. A challange to be sure, but by the end of my time with the game I realized that the developer had done something fairly impressive with a potentially trite premise. I actually got a note from the developer that praised me for taking the time to accurately (in their estimation anyway) assess both the good and bad points of the game.

All said, I would still lay into a game as a bore if it took me 20 hours to find the fun or redeeming value! What casual gamer is going to commit that kind of time to get value??

"Resorting to pointless hyperbole because of "the heat of the moment"?"

Isn't that the definition of a good review (though I think 'heat of the moment' implies snap judgment, I think his actually meaning was his gut impression after serious play time)?! :)

"Passing on inaccuracies because you were "fed information"? Reviewing a strategy game like Shadow Watch without cracking a manual?"


Is information from an authorized spokesperson from the publisher considered Passing on inaccuracies, or even the fault of the reviewer? A few times CGO had me review games with only the gold burn of the game, a PR person to ask questions of, and (maybe) a help file. My Incubation review is one example that is clear in my head. Actually, I agree with Tom with this one in principal, but it really is up to the magazine editor what resources the writer will have for the review. The best I can do as a reviewer if I disagree with editorial policy is not write for them again. I did that with UGO after they dramatically changed my review rating and text without consulting with me.

"(though I think 'heat of the moment' implies snap judgment, I think his actually meaning was his gut impression after serious play time)?! :)"

Well, Tom was right. I *wrote* that review in the "heat of the moment". I spent very little time editing or proofreading it. Gamecenter was known for it's 4-5 day deadlines and I spent most of my time actually playing the game, rather than massaging the review into something better than it ended up being. This is a very lame excuse, but it's true.

"Is information from an authorized spokesperson from the publisher considered Passing on inaccuracies, or even the fault of the reviewer?"

Again I'm going to shoot myself in the foot and say "yes". I should have investigated that claim, even a little bit, before reporting it as a fact.
But, as inaccuracies go, it could have been much worse.

The reason I feel fairly good about the review, despite the fact it isn't my best work, is that I did play the game sufficiently. I think I did "understand" the game and I do stand by it for those reasons.

If I could do it over again, the only difference would be in the writing. Not in the opinion/critique itself.

-Andrew

I should fess up, I haven't read the review in question. I was just giving my feedback based on Tom's statements.

'Again I'm going to shoot myself in the foot and say "yes". I should have investigated that claim, even a little bit, before reporting it as a fact.
But, as inaccuracies go, it could have been much worse.'

I thought about that after i posted it. If it was something i thought was significant, i would usually ask my contact to pass a few questions onto the developer themesleves. I did this when i was working on my Abomination review and walkthrough. However, there have been times I've taken the press people on their word, though I do try to work it in as a qoute if I can (to cover myself-usually in context to a preview).

>>I should have investigated that claim, even a little bit, before reporting it as a fact.
But, as inaccuracies go, it could have been much worse.

That it ended up in the final article is the fault of the editor, not the writer. It's the editor's job to verify any factual statements because ultimately they have the final say on an article's publication and accept responsibility for its content.

"My initial go with the Lego Rock Raiders review started out badly because of the stigma Lego's had with me"

What possible "stigma" could Legos have? Legos rock! =)

"A few times CGO had me review games with only the gold burn of the game, a PR person to ask questions of, and (maybe) a help file."

Over time we've backed away from this approach, however, and in retrospect I think that it's probably not a good way to do reviews. I've never found any indication that being second (or third, or fourth...) with a review decreases hits (online, at least, although I suspect that the same holds true in magazines). If the review comes out within a reasonable time, people will read it, even if other pubs have already run their reviews.

A review that is not comprehensive and accurate (and this is not a slight towards you, Sir Bub, since I don't actually remember your Shadow Watch review specifically) IS a problem, however. The "rush to be first" is what gives us superficial and often outright inaccurate evaluations (such as the Tribes 2 review on Daily Radar). Given the relatively minor consequences of not being first, I think that it's far more important that a review be... well... good. Well thought out and well considered, at any rate.

My current policy towards software reviews is this: if we get any sort of review copy that is not final or that lacks documentation (depending on the game--if a shooter comes without docs it's not really a problem; if a strategy game comes without docs, it usually is), I'll give it to a reviewer to get started, and let them make the determination about whether or not they have enough material upon which to base their review. If they say "no," then we hold out for a boxed copy of the game, and the review deadline gets pushed back.

We have run reviews in the past that have contained inaccuracies that were a direct result of missing docs, and we've had trouble with "review copies" that don't actually match the consumer version of the game (particularly the ever-annoying time limited "C-Dilla"-protected discs).

The bottom line: in the long run, none of your readers will remember that your review was first, but all of them will remember if your review was bad.

"That it ended up in the final article is the fault of the editor, not the writer. It's the editor's job to verify any factual statements because ultimately they have the final say on an article's publication and accept responsibility for its content."

True. But as a contracted freelancer my job is to give the editor clean accurate copy. Of course I can blame the editor and running the error is their fault, but the buck stops here. My journalism professor would have killed me....
"You accepted one source's word?" DUNCE!

-Sir Bub

"Interesting. Tom Clancy's name appears exactly zero times in my copy of the game. You must have played the special version that has Clancy's name stamped on the CD, in the credits, or maybe on the box."

Ok, so I'm a day late and a dollar short on this conversation, but what the hell. Walking around Best Buy the other day, I actually picked up this game (off the shelf anyway) because of the column/thread here. Sure enough, right on the front cover it says Tom Clancy's Shadow Watch. Just thought that was interesting. Why put his name on it? To sell games to his readers? (Which after his last book, I'm not even one of his readers anymore.) I'll think twice about picking up ANYTHING with his name on it from now on.

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Just thought that was interesting. Why
put his name on it? To sell games to his readers? (Which after his last book, I'm not even one of his readers anymore.) I'll think twice about picking up ANYTHING with his name on it from now on.

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"(not counting horrible novels written AFTER computer games)."

Jeff has received copies of books based on Ultima: Ascension, Diablo II, and StarCraft.

Guess who walks into his cubicle, and sees these Jeff-reject books on his desk?

Glad to know my English degree is getting some use, yessir!

-Thierry

I think the Blizzard books are at least written by experienced authors. I talked to Blizzard about it and they got some writers with a lot of genre novels under their belts to write 'em.

I have to say that with this issue of the Geryk Analysis (which, by the way, is up), Bruce summed up my feelings for this game very well. I only played the demo, and only for about fifteen minutes, and then knew that this game was not going to be my cup of tea. And Bruce just told everyone why.

When my son was about a year old, we went Christmas shopping at the mall. A guy in an elf costume came dancing up to us doing the Santa's helper thing. My son was absolutely terrorized. After reading this latest column (and a number of others over the years), I'm pretty well convinced that the same sort of thing must have happened to Bruce.

And I think the elf that terrorized Bruce must have been chanting "Taaxxx Collector!"

I think Bruce NORMALLY has a point but for what this game is trying to do I think it does it nicely. I guess if you look at it as a builder more than a straight RTS its not as bad.

If Bruce hates Majesty I just KNOW he'll have a few nice things to say about Tropico (which I guess is much more a builder than Majesty was but, to me at least, has a lot of the same mechanics).

Actually, I did have some nice things to say about Tropico.

Majesty is only partly a builder because there is a significant "direct play" aspect when it comes to spells. Spells are one of the most important parts of the game. That makes it very RTS-like. If pressed, I'd say it's "builder ultra-lite" (if you allow that Zeus is "builder lite" and Caesar III and Pharaoh are "builders").

Just read 'em Bruce, congrats on totally subverting the whole Gamespot "Questions" thing (kudos to Greg for letting him). Funny stuff.

You'll pardon me if I tell you I have no idea if your remarks about Castro, Cuba, Tropico and criminals are NICE things to say.

-Andrew

Hi. Long-time poster, first-time anonymous poster. That article Bruce links to has nice things to say about Majesty! What's going on here? Now maybe that thing is a joke. But then again, the Geryk analysis might be a joke. Do you like Majesty or not? I'm starting to wonder whether or not you didn't actually not like Shadow Watch/Shadow Company. You have no credibility.

So I've been wondering what Black & White would have been like as a traditional RTS game. Now the latest Geryk analysis has me giving Majesty the same treatment. Would it be any better than, say, Warlords: Battlecry? Speaking of which, Warlords: Battlecry gets my award for worst voice acting in recent memory. At least there aren't any characters chanting "Taaax Collector!" at me.

- Alan

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That article Bruce links to has nice things to say about Majesty!

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What it must be like to live inside Bruce's head...

"You have no credibility."

I love it when anonymous posters say things like this. It always makes me laugh almost as much as Bruce's outstanding columns.

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I love it when anonymous posters say things like this.

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"That's probably why he said it was a long-time poster -- to establish his own credibility."

If you knew who I am, you'd be very surprised. Bruce is not a credible source of opinions. That's the bottom line, and that's all I can say right now. On Gamespot, he says one thing (according to him as a "joke") and on Quarter to Three he says another thing. One credible person cannot have two opposing opinions. And I've heard the argument that Bruce is praising the expansion of Majesty and not the original game. That's bunk as far as I'm concerned. Bruce may be interested to know that I've emailed some key people at Cyberlore and they have in fact responded and have said exactly what I am saying here. How can you praise it on one site and trash it on another? "I'm scratching my head." is a direct quote from one of the emails. They may even come to this board. I got the feeling that they are not very happy with Bruce Geryk and may also write an email of complaint to either Craig Beers or Jennifer Ho at Gamespot.

His article at Gamespot was dripping with sarcasm. Dripping with it. Could you not smell it? Of course it was a joke!

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If you knew who I am, you'd be very surprised.

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Yeah, I'm a little worried about those people at Cyberlore, too...I thought it was pretty obvious that it wasn't to be taken seriously.

"If you knew who I am, you'd be very surprised."

You mean I'd be very surprised that you're afraid to reveal your name? In other words, you're a coward.

"And I've heard the argument that Bruce is praising the expansion of Majesty and not the original game. That's bunk as far as I'm concerned."

You really have no sense of humor. At all. The reply I made above was in jest since I really didn't take your post seriously.

I love this kind of anonymous "I've complained to Cyberlore" or whatever kind of stuff. If they don't like it, they are free to email me. As are you, although you're apparently afraid to do so. Go ahead and complain to whomever you like.

The fact is that the answer to the Question of the Week was written as humor, and as an afterthought I figured I'd play on the "hardcore simulation" joke by throwing in a Majesty reference since I could write the words "fantasy kingdom sim."

If you can't distinguish between a humor piece that makes no attempt to justify my opinions, and actual opinion piece, then that's not my problem. I'm not going to change my writing style because of your comprehension problems. I'd rather stop writing altogether.

I'm not going to argue further with someone who is too cowardly to approach me directly.

In case Cyberlore does come here, as Anonymous has darkly insinuated they might, I would just like to say that Majesty has helped me immensely in the manner Bruce noted:

"Let's say you were someone who was a budding fantasy monarch (like Tom Chick) who lived in California (again, like Tom Chick). You may go through the entire game without ever even thinking what you'd do if a vampire invaded your town in the wintertime."

Bruce is correct.

"Then, when this exact thing happened in real life, how long do you think Tom Chick would last? In case you think this is a trick question, the answer is: not long."

Again, Bruce is correct.

"Thus, the Majesty Expansion becomes an important survival tool for residents of Los Angeles."

Bruce is correct. I would like to make it known that I am ready for any vampires that come to Los Angeles between the months of, oh, say, October and March.

However, Bruce is wrong about Majesty, a fact that will be empirically proved by science when we post tomorrow's rebuttal. Stay tuned. And watch out for vampires in the snow.

-Tom Chick, checking in from Los Angeles

"I'm not going to argue further with someone who is too cowardly to approach me directly."

I'm not going to argue any further as well. The reason I am not posting my identity is to allow people to approach what I say without bias - my identity might make people agree with me (or less likely, disagree) simply because of who I am. I'm doing you a favor by posting anonymously believe me, because my credibility is my trademark and has been unimpeached in public opinions. And to Tom Chick, I am not darkly insinuating anything about Cyberlore. They will come here or they won't, as will Craig Beers of Gamespot - who has been reluctant to enter "the fracas" as it was described to him I'm told, but may not remain so if it continues for much longer. Any darkness you are perceiving is in your own head, I think.

I would be as likely to agree or disagree with someone based on who they were as anyone, but this...Not this time. It wouldn't matter who you were. Bruce's article was obviously not meant to be taken seriously. I'm honestly surprised that you could read it otherwise.

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my identity might make
people agree with me (or less likely, disagree) simply because of who I am. I'm doing you a favor by posting anonymously believe me, because my credibility is my trademark and has been unimpeached in public opinions.

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"The reason I am not posting my identity is to allow people to approach what I say without bias -my identity might make people agree with me (or less likely, disagree) simply because of who I am."

It's Batman. Omigod, it's got to be Batman. I mean, who else is so unimpeachable?

"I'm doing you a favor by posting anonymously believe me, because my credibility is my trademark and has been unimpeached in public opinions."

No wait, it's just an idiot. Nevermind.

-Andrew

Funny that. I post using my name for the express purpose of establishing credibility. Well, that and to drill home the point that I'm not related to that "W. J. Au" fellow.

- Alan

What seems strange to me is that most people who post here often should know that anyone who posts anything anonymously is never going to be taken seriously. I'd expect you to know that.

"I'm doing you a favor by posting anonymously believe me, because my credibility is my trademark and has been unimpeached in public opinions."

Bwah-ha-ha-ha! Hee hee hoo hoo ho! Ah ha ha ha ha! Ohh, stop, no, stop. Ha ha ha ha. Hee hee... Man, that's good.



Oh, man, that was funny. Hee hee...

"My credibility is my trademark," said the anonymous guy who doesn't understand a joke when he reads it.

Bwah-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha-ha! I'm laughing again! Hoo hoo ha! No, stop, really! Hee hee...

-Tom

I'm still wondering how credibility can be "unimpeached in public opinions".
Face it. This could very well be George W. Bush here guys!

-Andrew

Given the apparent ego of Mr. Anonymous, how could it be anyone other than Jonah Falcon?

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Given the apparent ego of Mr. Anonymous, how could it be anyone other than Jonah Falcon?

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Well, not to muddy the waters or anything as I see public opinion here is that no one could have taken the initial Gamespot thing as anything but a joke, but I was confused myself. I guess I'm just dense. Or maybe it's that when you go to Gamespot, you don't expect that kind of sarcasm.

It didn't help me to "get it" that the rest of the editors' put down deadly serious comments about their favorite games of this year. I think sarcasm is fine. But taken in the context of the site they have there (where that kind of thing just doesn't seem to happen), it didn't fit. I can see where someone would find the comments in The Geryk Analysis of Majesty as contradictory after reading the Gamespot piece. I don't know that it warrants anyonymous posts and developer anger though if this fellow above is to be believed...seems more like a case of crossed wires and an ok style at the wrong time.

--Dave

This thread has been good medicine--if laughter is indeed the best type.

Now, wumpus, come out from behind that curtain!

:)

Kidding, just kidding really!!

For what it's worth,
Dave is right that it IS contrary to Gamespot's well established style (a change in style for which I applaud them) but Geryk probably should have been put last not first. Putting him first throws the whole thing off kilter.

But I don't understand why anyone would get angry about it. I also can't imagine ANYONE in the world credible enough to convince me otherwise in an argument simply by revealing their identity.

Anyone who does believe they are that credible... is insane and likely dangerous.

-Andrew

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Or maybe it's that when you go to Gamespot, you don't expect that kind of sarcasm.

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Now, wumpus, come out from behind that curtain!

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>>Given the apparent ego of Mr. Anonymous, how could it be anyone other than Jonah Falcon?

Jonah uses a lot of bold type for emphasis.

>I'm doing you a favor by posting anonymously believe me, because my credibility is my trademark and has been unimpeached in public opinions

That's nonsensical.

Bruce, I'm not at all concerned about your humor or style. These are things I've come to expect and look forward to in your articles. No, what interests me is this thing you've got for elves. There's not much I'd pay to read on the Web. But a Bruce Geryk review of Baldur's Gate II. Oh yeah, I'd pay to read THAT.

>>I'm doing you a favor by posting anonymously believe me, because my credibility is my trademark and has been unimpeached in public opinions.

Whew. Thank you! I shudder at the thought of someone who is a paragon of integrity actually using their real name - that would truly be horrible.

I too will post anonymously, as my honesty is legendary and my sainthood the topic of the pope's visit to the Middle East. I've also never been contradicted and only truth has ever passed my lips. Mother Theresa once told me that she normally didn't believe in role models, but after meeting me she now had one. Tiger Woods thought that was a good story last week after I took his money in a $10,000 Nassau.

I am doing you a favor by telling you things anonymously, as my credibility is my trademark and my honesty has never been impeached in public forums.

-Jeff Lackey (OOOPS - Forget that! I'm Anonymous2! REALLY!)

I am the all knowing Oz. Who disturbs my slumber behind my curtain???

Man, my PC gets busted and I'm forced to break into other people's homes just to log some Internet time and a fracas breaks out here on the boards.

Um, can someone 'splain to me...

If an anonymous poster is posting, well, anonymously, but says they are doing it to avoid overawing (sp) the local rubes, then I'm confused. I only see, really, 3 reasons to post on these boards. You ask questions for more information, state an opinion (not caring if anyone agrees), or you state an opinion (trying to sway others to your view. There is a fourth reason, that of being a troll, but we'll leave that alone for now.

So the part where I'm confused...If our anonymous but imperious poster is trying to sway others to their view (as seems the case), then what is the point of hiding their nigh-on-omniscient identity from us, since if making us agree with their viewpoint would then be assured?

Did that make any sense at all?

Quote:

"They will come here or they won't, as will Craig Beers of Gamespot - who has been reluctant to enter "the fracas" as it was described to him I'm told, but may not remain so if it continues for much longer. Any darkness you are perceiving is in your own head, I think."

So, whoever the anonymous guy is, he sure's going to tell your Mom! Christ. Maybe it is Jonah Falcoln; someone want to ask him his penis size, since that's apparently his calling card?

"the fracas"

You misspelled "tempest in a teapot." As David Letterman used to say, "It's a JOKE, people!"

My take on the anonymous issue is that he states he is a long-time poster to establish some credibility (which, of course, has never been impeached), but posts anonymously because he knows what he is about to say will ruin his credibility if it is attached to him.

I think the whole "Anonymous" thread is really a (Andy) Kaufman-esque prank , making the likely identity of the Anonymous poster to be none other than... Bruce himself!
Or maybe Erik. Or Mark. Or Tom.

I considered Tom to be the culprit, though I don't really think so.

I don't think it was Erik, as he was writing the rebuttal letter.

Mark? I don't think so. Not really his style, I think.

Bruce -- Hey, anything's possible with Bruce. It could be, though I doubt it.