I've been having fun playing around with Civ City Rome despite a few problems -- I really just love city building games. Unfortunately I'm finding my machine doesn't quite have the horsepower it seems to need (ironic given that visually, it's no great shakes).

My current machine was a pretty nice rig when I bought it... back in 2003.  That may not be long ago in the "real world" but in gaming tech time it's practically ancient.  I've staved off the inevitable for a bit with a nice monitor upgrade and a video card upgrade a year or so ago, but it's clear to me that my core processor power is not holding up like it used to.

I think the biggest thing holding me back is only 1 Gig of RAM.  So I went to Fry's today to try and research what it would take to upgrade to 2 Gigs.  At first I think, this isn't so bad, heck, 4 Gigs of DDR is only like $400.  Then I realize my computer has RAMBUS.  Why I have this particularly abandoned variety of RAM is lost to the mists of time, but nevertheless, that's what I've got.  Turns out it is like $1200 for just 2 Gigs of RAMBUS memory.  Urk.

Well, that's a good chunk towards a new machine itself.  So I guess now I can start the research process of buying a new gaming rig that will be outdated as soon as I purchase it...

Whew... I realized today I've been raiding in Molten Core once or twice a week for over 9 months now.  That's a long time for me playing any game, much less one dungeon in one game.  The social aspect certainly helps keep it fresh, but the task of "mastering" the adventure with a good group of friends has been rewarding as well.  But I think I'm finally reaching the end of my journeys there, as we've basically refined it to a clean 4-hour clear (a long way from where we started) and I've personally gotten just about all the gear there I can reasonable expect to get.  Tonight I got my class-specific loot from the end boss of the dungeon, so I can hope to complete the gear at the next level of difficulty there.

I'm continually amazed that I'm still not bored with Warcraft.  They certainly make some decisions I don't always agree with but the core gameplay is just so darned fun.  Even pulling back from Molten Core, I'll probably just use that time to go explore other places in the high level WoW game...

I've recently gotten addicted to HSX, or Hollywood Stock Exchange, a web-based game that centers around a stock-market style mechanism for wagering on the success or failure of movies at the box office.  It's all fake money, of course, but I find it a very potent combination of my love of movies and love of stat crunching and general game-theory analysis.  While I'm not really sure the HSX guys would necessarily refer to it as a "game", to me it is very clearly a multiplayer game, one that is very cleverly leveraged into real world events.

"Game" is often viewed as a dismissive or derogatory term, which of course I do not mean.  Actually I think the predictive powers of a system like this is a fascinating example of how game mechanics and game theory can be leveraged to harness the predictive powers of large groups of people behaving in statistically motivated ways (c.f. The Wisdom of Crowds).  A study of how the predictions of HSX correlate to actual results would certainly be interesting to see, and gives "games" like this a kind of utility that is quite unique.

It would be fascinating to see something like this set up for game releases, though the shoddy state of game sales tracking would make it all but impossible.  I could imagine it being used as a mechanism for predicting popularity of key brands and franchises however.  It is a perfect example of how very simple rules can generate quite complex behavior -- a very elegant solution for the Gordion Knot of how to model human beings.

So when I preordered Saint's Row yesterday, they gave me a neat little demo disc.  I guess the downloadable version of it won't be available until next week or something.  Anyways, since I'm quite looking forward to the game, I popped it in and played around for it.

First off, it certainly confirmed for me that this is going to be a serious contender for game of the year for me.  The city seems nicely done, maybe a little soulless compared to the style of the GTA games, but still very nicely done overall.  Meanwhile the combat mechanics are excellent, and even in the demo the variety of activities involved was quite nice. 

But I quickly reached the point, even before I'd gone through the demo content, where I just had to stop playing.  Not because the game was bad, because it was good -- good enough I'm certainly I'm going to dig into it completely when the game is out in a few weeks.  I don't want to spend time on a demo character I can't save when I'm just going to replay all that content soon enough anyways.  With a game backlog that is huge and getting larger by the week, I just don't have the time to really explore a demo when the real game is just on the horizon.

Of course, one advantage of demos is filtering out bad games -- but I've often found that demos, despite their intent, aren't very indicative of the final game.  Apparently the Hitman: Blood Money demo, for example, is the first level of the game.  But that level is really just an extended tutorial, and exemplifies none of the non-linearity and intricate timing / complexity of the actual levels in the game. Were I to have only played that demo, I might have missed out on one of my favorite gaming experiences so far this year.

Demos certainly have their place.  In fact, I think with the advent of Marketplace downloadable demos, major games without a demo are going to be seen like movies that aren't released for advance reviews, as if they have something to hide.  For buyers who are making very limited purchase choices, I think they are a key element and a good demo can serve as fantastic PR.  But for me, more often than not I'm just better off waiting.

To my dismay, I discovered my "usual" EB Games has stopped carrying PC games entirely.  Sigh.  Fortunately a few calls around later I found a Gamestop with CivCity and Civ 4: Warlords in stock.  I'm hoping to dig into C4W later, maybe this weekend, but I was able to log a few hours with CivCity.

I absolutely adore city building games.  CivCity definitely tickles that same fancy.  I love watching my little people walk around and tweak with the ever growing machinery of the city, with the flow of resources and constant troubleshooting.  I'm not far enough into CivCity to say whether it has long term problems, but it is off to a nice start.

Unfortunately for me, even a medium-small size city starts to noticeably slow down and start getting choppy, especially when scrolling.

I think the time has finally come to get a 2nd Gig of RAM for my machine, and hope it improves the situation... I hate not being able to play a game I'm really excited about due to hardware reasons!

In light of the Civ 4 expansion pack coming out this week, I decided to brush of Civ 4 and finish a huge (for me) game I had in progress.  Man, I forgot how addictive Civ can be.  I had previously opted not to go for the Space Race victory, so I was invading the evil German / Mali alliance who narrowly outscored me.  The war was going quite well and was really down to the wire... 2039 or so, when my erstwhile allies the Romans launched into space!  So distracted was I with the my grand continental invasion plans that I completely failed to notice that the Romans had overtaken the Mali as the closest to a Space victory.

I'm hoping (though I haven't seen anything to indicate this) that in the expansion the Space victory will be a little harder to achieve.  It's just so much easier to pull off than any of the other victory modes by a good degree, I fear I would never see the others if I don't disable it.

Of course, it was slightly fitting that the Romans won in light of the other game from Firaxis coming out this week: CivCity Rome.  I am such a sucker for city building games, and Firefly (who did the actual development of the game) has a permanent place in my heart for amazing games like Space Colony and Stronghold... enough that I'll even overlook the fairly miserable Stronghold 2.

Certainly it promises to be a good week for PC strategy gaming...

One occupational hazard of being a game developer is that you become acutely aware of how problems you have to solve go fundamentally unsolved in other products that are held to a less competitive standard.  A key case in point I encountered today -- the onboard GPS navigation system I recently upgraded to in my car.

There are a number of pretty straighforward UI flaws that seem like they have pretty straight analogs to problems we face in game UI design.  For example, hiding the display of the "points of interest" is done with a button called "delete" even though it isn't really deleting anything.  You can easily put the interface mode in different states with no apparent way to reset it without leaving the nav app altogether and going back in.   There are huge lists of categories that require 3-4 deep menu navigation that don't support multiselect or group select, despite those being very natural touchscreen UI metaphors.

I'm not adventurous enough to try and mod in a different UI for my car's GPS system, but it does make me wonder a bit about the process.  I know that for most of the car's design, they work for years on really improving the design of the controls and interiors, but it naively seems to me that just about any UI designer worth their salt in the games industry would be able to identify problems like these quite readily. 

Maybe it's just hubris, but sometimes I think good game development has got to be one of the most challenging in terms of requiring a wide array of cross disciplinary skills.

I thought it was very interesting to hear the news today that Blizzard is adding in their WoW expansion pack, the ability for the Horde to create Paladin characters, and the Alliance to create Shaman characters.  For those not entirely up on WoW Arcana, those two classes were previously restricted only to the opposite sides.  I thought this was an interesting way of providing more difference in the experience on both sides, although really, I think that is executed far more through the content available to each side.

It is difficult to say why exactly Blizzard made this decision -- perhaps the difficulty of balancing high end content for the two different one-side classes, or perhaps just a way of getting a new class in the expansion for each side "for free".  But what I find interesting is the strong negative reaction that it seems to be generating among the fans.  I've heard claims that this is proof that WoW has finally "jumped the shark", or at a bare minimum, has capitulated to the whining masses on their forums.

I can't always see the wisdom in some of Blizzard's decisions, but so far they have yet to disappoint.  I'm looking forward to rolling up a Dranei Shaman, myself.  Would I have rather seen a new class?  Sure -- but tradeoffs have to be made in reality.  I will miss that little bit of difference between the sides, I admit.  But I don't expect my interest in WoW to falter any time soon.

I finally managed to go with my wife to see Superman Returns tonight.  Kind of mixed opinion on the flick, though some awesome special effects.

One thing I found quite interesting was in the trailers before the movie, there was a trailer for Spiderman 3, announcing the release date as Summer 2007.  I know there are a great deal of reasons that game release dates aren't known as far in advance or are as solid -- though we are seeing a change in that trend like the announced release date of GTA4 in 2007.

What really struck me, though, was the smart way movies use tools like trailers to generate interest and awareness for movies even that far out in the pipeline.  I'm not quite sure what the right game analog was -- I remember the horrible experiments Interplay made with unskippable game trailers during install.  But there's got to be something less intrusive than that, and more visible than the "coming soon" adverts on the back of the game manuals, to help build better awareness among consumers who aren't the hardcore well-informed fan base that visits Gamespot daily.

It certainly drove me crazy every time I'd mention AOM to someone a year or two after it released, only to have them say, "Wow, a new follow up to Age of Kings?  When is it coming out?".

Initial buzz about the Saint's Row demo has been quite possible, including Toys R Us selling out of them when they accidentally labeled the demo as a $10 game.  As any reader of this blog knows, I am a crazy-huge Grand Theft Auto fan. 

Unfortunately, there's no major GTA game being released in 2006, just as there was none for 2005.  That leaves a pretty big opportunity for someone else to come in and be a very major player in that space.  Will Volition step up and fill those (very big) shoes?  Unclear, but they seem to have the best shot at it that I've seen.

It amazes me how few games seem to be able to really compete head to head with the industry giants.  Where are the Sims clones?  Where are the GTA clones?  All attempts seem to be not even coming close to matching their primary competition on production quality OR features.  Maybe developer ego is inhibiting the best players from trying to compete 1:1?