Volume 2, Issue 9 of played.todeath has been released, and within its labyrinthine PDF you will find not one but three of my articles. Read them, love them, and then send hate mail. They include:
- Indie Scene: Auto Assault Trading Card Game (page 8), a review of World’s Apart’s followon to Star Chamber and cross-marketing effort with NCSoft.
- The Elder Scrolls I: Arena (page 15). For those of you who just can’t get enough of Oblivion, you can find out exactly what made me give up and buy the Xbox 360.
- Game Tycoon (page 34). Why brilliant concepts sometimes turn into dull games.
The magazine is full of other brilliant writers as well, of course. It’s quite worth the download.
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Re Game Tycoon:
I have no quarrel with the conclusion that this is a terrible game. That seems to be the consensus opinion and it has no attraction for me whatsoever. One major gripe seems to be that it is, in fact, a project management game, to which my reply is, “Well, sure. What did you expect?”
I’m not sure that Game Tycoon is even a brilliant concept; it’s merely the tycoon game moved to yet another arena.
Have you tried the freebie GameBiz? It also lets you manage and develop games through the early days of the industry and puts you in direct competition with the legendary games of the past. It is also, fundamentally, a management sim but I think captures the risky nature of the industry quite well since you need to ride out fickle public appetites and prepare for the development of new hardware. What do you do with your C64 programmers when the machine dies?
My objection to Game Tycoon is not that it is a project management game, but that it is a bad one. Real (more to the point: fun) project management does not consist of creating a schedule and then going away for 6 months. But that’s the mechanic used in Game Tycoon.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear.