I have mixed feelings about this whole fiasco. On the one hand, I don’t really understand what Ubi hoped to achieve here. Requiring a game to be played online while giving the player no real reason to want to play the game online is kind of stupid. On the other hand, I can’t help but think that you don’t have to work too hard to find reasons not to play Assassin’s Creed.

What confuses me most about this “conversation”, if you will, is that tone of the rhetoric coming out of the PC-gaming dork community. I could understand anger that the feature sucks. I can understand being angry with Ubisoft for imposing restrictions on play without any sort of compensating added value. It seems to me that in the current marketplace the minimum bar for requiring the user to be online to play a game is in turn providing that user with services that are on par with Steam or Xbox Live.

What I don’t understand is expressing one’s anger over this slight in almost political terms, as if the ability to play a video game on your PC is written into the Constitution. I don’t really understand the notion that there is something going on here that has earth shattering implications on the future of personal freedoms in personal computing. I don’t really even understand why anyone would spend more than a dozen words complaining about this before just not buying the game or buying the game used on a console. Even the normally sedate and rational Gamers with Jobs have seen fit to throw what seems to me to be a melodramatic fit over this.

Is this really this important?

What seems clear to me is that Ubisoft does not really give a shit whether they sell games on the PC or not. I would bet that it’s an overall lose on their bottom line to spend all the time and pain needed to get something running on that 15-headed chimera that is the Windows Platform. It’s not surprising that they don’t like PCs. There are probably easier ways to get out of the game than this weird protracted war, but then I’ve never understood management anyway.

Of course, civil rights-like rhetoric around the control of the personal computer is nothing new. The Open Source jihadists have been doing it for years. In fact, the rhetoric around what Ubisoft has done reminds me most of the similar levels of teeth gnashing that surrounds all discussions of “closed” vs “open” software platforms. Here is how these discussions go:

1. Dork: Man, it’s bullshit that the Fruit Fucker company doesn’t let me run any code I want on this machine they sell.

2. Regular Human: But it’s not meant to run *any* code… all it does is fuck fruit. You don’t complain about this on your car or your Xbox 360

3. Dork: Yeah, but the FF3500 is obviously a general purpose computer, not just a game console, therefore I should be able to run anything I want on it.

There are two fuzzy points of reason here. The first is the notion that there is a fuzzy yet absolutely recognizable line between a general purpose computer and a special purpose computer. I find this notion strange. When I was in school any CPU that had memory and branching was defined as essentially general purpose. So I think when people use the term “general purpose” here what they really mean is something like “a machine I’d like to program, and it pisses me off if this desire is blocked in any way.”

The second fuzzy point is the notion that given a “general purpose” machine, it is always and undeniably wrong to block any code from running on this machine, even if doing so would arguably improve the user experience. I’m not sure what legal or moral doctrine is used to derive this line of thinking, but I’m pretty sure it’s something like: “well, this is how computers and operating systems have worked since I was 13″.

The result is that if I put a bunch of hardware into a box and I call it anything that might be interpreted as a “personal computer”, I’m a pigfucker if there are restrictions what software that the machine and run. But, if I call it a “game console” or a “automobile” or a “DVD Player” then it’s OK if you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to just get a dev kit for the machine *and* anything you develop must then be additionally tested by my internal Q/A certification team.

The truth is that these sorts of value judgements are quickly becoming useless and irrelevant. In my opinion, like it or not the world is moving away from the traditional model of a “general purpose and completely open” computing platform and more and more towards machines that do specific things and take advantage of their specificity to better tune the user experience.

What does this mean for the poor fan of Assassin’s Creed 2? I can’t really say. I’d just buy the game on the Xbox 360. And then sell it, because it sucks anyway.

PS3 Slim

I caved and bought a slim PS3 a few months earlier than I wanted to. But it’s OK because I had a gift card for it. This new incarnation of the Playstation yet again shows why Sony completely destroys Microsoft as a pure hardware company. Everything that made the original PS3 a better hardware platform that the original Xbox 360 is amplified by a factor of two in this new machine. It’s smaller and sleeker. It doesn’t require an external power brick. It hooks up to your wireless transparently. The thing makes basically no noise at all. You can’t really even hear the fan. The only noise the machine makes is an occasional rumble from the Blu-Ray drive.

The machine is a total joy until you actually have to interact with its software. When I stuck in Uncharted I had to wait 25 minutes for it to download and apply four patches one after another. I guess it’s just not feasible to combine them into one big ball. Speaking of Uncharted…

Uncharted 2

I didn’t play the first Uncharted. I haven’t really even played the second one yet. But it was the first new game I stuck into the new PS3 and I had a quick thought about it. I put the game in the machine for about an hour and played through the introductory chapter and the tutorial. Having had this experience, I would like to propose that the guys at Naughty Dog go over to Ubisoft and teach those morons what pacing means in a narrative-driven video game. The tutorial in Uncharted 2 was brilliant. In a short half an hour or so it teaches you all the major game mechanics that you will need and sets up the plot in a series of remarkably well produced cut scenes. Compare that with the nearly three hours of torture that you are subjected to in Assassin’s Creed 2 before you are even allowed to stab someone. Well done.

Bioshock 2

I don’t have much to say about this one. Same cool setting and atmosphere. Same “environmental” combat mechanics. Same creepy little sisters. Dumber story. More combat. More combat means the game was less interesting and more tedious overall. The narrative and plot has the Dragon Age disease in that it tries to make up for the fact that it is completely redundant and mostly uncreative by just giving you more dialog. The more intense things get, the more your radio chatters on about THE FAMILY or WHATEVER. But none of it is particularly interesting. One good thing: the fetch quests don’t make you constantly backtrack.

Demon’s Souls

Demon’s Souls was the second game to go into the PS3. Here is a game that takes you through a straightforward tutorial and then immediately presents you with a Boss who more than likely insta-kills you with one hit. This is most definitely not the sort of thing I usually go for.

The best way to describe this game is as a Japanese take on Diablo with a bit of Nethack mixed in. You run through dungeons. You kill monsters. You collect “souls” that you can then use to buy more power. Then you run through the dungeons some more. If you die, no problem! You just run through the dungeon to where you fell over and pick up the souls you lost. Then you start all over again.

In most other games, this repetition would crush your very will to live, but for some reason in this setting with this game, it seems to work. You just have to put yourself into a state of mind where clearing the same enemies from the same spots on the same maps all over again is progress in its own right.

Demon’s Souls enables this by avoiding the narrative weight that many games seem to insist on carrying. There is almost no plot to advance, so not being able to advance it is not as bothersome as it would be if the plot were there. And, thank the gods above there is little or no NPC dialog in the game. This game is the anti-Dragon Age. No endless trees of pseudo-philosophical babble attempting to hide clumsy exposition. No badly written “emotion”. No artificial “moral choices.” The game is delightfully free of the encumbrances of the bad video game story. Instead, the point of the game is simple: you run through dungeons, you kill things, you do it again.

I’m sure I’ll get tired of it after the first few maps. But at least by the time I quit I will not have had to read enough bad dialog to fill eight novels.

LOTRO is probably the most popular MMO today after World of Warcraft, which is to say that it probably has only three orders of magnitude fewer players, rather than five. One would think that this would make Turbine, like Avis, try harder, but that doesn’t really seem to be happening.

LOTRO is a game of strong contrasts. Unlike Blizzard, whose World of Warcraft is of such preternaturally high quality throughout that you have to suspect it was designed and implemented by hyperintelligent aliens from another dimension, LOTRO is a fundamentally human, which is to say flawed, endeavor. The high points are very high, and the low points are very low. Let’s cover the high points first.

LOTRO partisans will crow about their favorite game’s “graphics”, but this is standard misguided PC gamer wankery. What is distinctive about LOTRO is not its “graphics”, but its visual design. Whereas WoW goes wholly (and brilliantly) for a cartoonish, oversaturated look, LOTRO tries to achieve a lyrical, somewhat photorealistic appearance. To my shock, it mostly succeeds. For me the highest points of the game are exploring Middle-Earth. It is worth trying the game out if for no other reason than to experience a sort of Virtual Shire Simulator. The game has the license from the books, not Peter Jackson’s movies, but the resemblance between the movies and the game-world is strong.

Also strong, again to my surprise, is the writing in the game. I came into the game viewing the Lord of the Rings license as a potential liability: how do you write several thousand random heroes into a game and still make it seem plausible? Turbine pulls this off by keeping you tangientially appraised about the progress of the War of the Ring, and by occasionally – only every so often – giving you quests that either foreshadow or deal with the aftermath of some of the events in the books. The “non-plot” quests easily number in the thousands, and are sufficiently well-written that I actually found I wanted to complete quest chains even after I had “out-levelled” them.

The game’s leveling system tries hard to make you not care directly about XP by also providing rewards in the form of “traits”, which are vaguely analogous to WoW’s Talent trees. By completing certain quests (say, “Kill 150 goblins in and around Bree” or “Explore and discover all the farms in the Shire.”), you get a trait that you can choose to equip which provides some sort of bonus. There are way more traits than you have slots to equip, so you can spend quite a lot of time chasing the various completion bonuses down.

There is no “world player-vs-player” in the game; just arenas for something called “monster play” that I haven’t tried yet. Every single person I have met in the game has been uniformly nice. It’s like all the players are Canadian or something.

The game itself is fairly easy. The mechanics for attacking monsters are very WoW-like, and vary widely among the classes; playing a Hunter feels very different from playing a Warden or a Minstrel. Likewise, there’s a crafting system which is the most fun out of the three MMO’s that I’ve tried. To craft you choose a career which is a grouping of three different crafting skills. Generally speaking, skills either provide resources or consume them, and they’ve cleverly tried to balance things such that you’re likely to have to depend on another player to get everything you need for all of your skills.

The game has drawbacks, though, and it wears them on its sleeve. The UI is a disaster, a complex of buttons and mouse targets that shift and morph and never act the same way twice. The inventory is particularly galling, taking the worst parts of the WoW system and intensifying them. Here’s my favorite example. I promise it is just one of many: when you go to a vendor to sell items, your inventory is arrayed in a random useless order, with no labels. When you actually decide to sell stuff, it appears in a separate window, in a different random useless order. This window shows your to-be-sold items in two columns. To sell an item, you double click on it. Since that item disappears, and since your inventory is being displayed in two columns, every single item in the inventory below the item you clicked moves horizontally.

It is to weep.

Other problems with the game that keep me from unreservedly recommending it include the lack of a Mac client, the terrible auction house interface, and the game’s version of “fast travel” which involves a completely incomprehensible network of travel nodes which may or may not allow you to go from one place to another. You know how sometimes in real life you want to get a flight somewhere and you find out that the only way to do it is to make two stops at different airports in opposite directions? Welcome to the LOTRO fast travel system. At least they don’t lose your luggage. Although, since your luggage is in the aforementioned LOTRO inventory system, you probably won’t be able to find it anyway.

So all in all, I find LOTRO to be a mixed bag. The UI issues are enough to turn me off of it for the long term (and that’s on top of my standard “I don’t actually have time to level a character all the way, because I have a job” MMO angst). But I’d be lying if I said that being able to enjoy the view from the peak of Weathertop didn’t trip all of my Serious Geek circuits in a very deep and powerful way.

I don’t know why I have this particular biorhythm, but for the past three years, like clockwork, every winter I switch to playing PC games, and then in nicer weather I switch back to playing console games. Perhaps it has to do with the ambient heat in different parts of the house. Perhaps it’s just an expression of seasonal affective disorder — the only time I’m willing to put up with the hassle of games on Windows is when I’m already depressed! — but now that I’ve switched back to gaming on the Xbox, surely the crocuses will arrive momentarily.

The particular game that lured me back, this time, was Mass Effect 2. I enjoyed the original Mass Effect quite a bit on the couch, and figured I would continue my character’s travels on the same platform.

To be honest, I was reluctant to take the risk, given how objectively terrible Dragon Age: Origins was in nearly every possible way. But, like a dog returns to his vomit (or, more precisely, like Charlie Brown taking another run at Lucy’s football) I was drawn to the prospect of a Bioware RPG that told a good story, and told it well.

And, to my surprise, Mass Effect 2 is pretty damn good. That Mass Effect can be so good and Dragon Age can be so numbingly bad is a vivid demonstration of how thin the edge is on which game design must balance. Get just a few subtle things wrong, and your magical world of mystery and wonder can turn into a whirling nightmare slog of soul-crushingly boring encounters. Both games, after all, have essentially the same core gameplay: explore unknown territory, fight enemies, and try to have interesting conversations to advance the plot. So what’s the difference between these two games?

The Closer To The Bone, The Sweeter Is The Meat

Mass Effect 2 makes some bold departures from the standard Bioware template. This makes a huge difference in playability. Historically, every Bioware RPG that I can recall has a moment that I refer to as “The Packrat Singularity”. It goes like this. When walking through any area in a Bioware RPG, you can riffle through highlighted drawers, garbage cans, and crates, picking up items that are typically useless but are sometimes worth a small amount of gold. The best case is you find a weapon or piece of armor that is a level or two better than what you have at the moment. Each game does this for absolutely no good gameplay reason: the game before had it, and hell, that’s a enough reason for a lazy designer. As you slowly get laden down with small alexandrites, finger bones, and random pieces of scrap metal, you eventually run out of inventory space. At that point, you visit a shop, sell all the crap in return for gold (or, honestly, credit slips, since gold would weigh too much), and then start the process over again.

The Packrat Singularity is that moment in the game when you realize the following things:

• You have more gold already than you can ever spend.
• Even if you don’t pick up that slightly better weapon, the next merchant will probably have something just as good anyway.
• Seriously, screw these guys and their lousy inventory system. I would rather die than hit “sell” 96 times at the next town.

After The Packrat Singularity, you continue playing the game and don’t ever pick anything up at all. Gameplay is exactly the same as it was before, only now it’s 80% less annoying.

The original Mass Effect took baby steps in addressing this problem by providing a button that would let you instantly convert items into gold at any time. Mass Effect 2 goes a step further by virtually eliminating the concept of inventory. There are a few exceptions: you carry a battery of weapons and some healing-potion equivalents, but for the most part anything you pick up is either money or an upgrade.

Just like that, the game is 80% less hateful than Dragon Age with its never ending attempts to drown you in “elfroot” and “deep mushrooms” and hundreds of other bits of bric-a-brac that no sensible human being could possibly care about in the slightest.

The Perils of Pen-elf-ope Pitstop

Going back at least to Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware RPGs have given you SUPER! DYNAMIC! CHOICES! where you could be “good” or “bad” in conversations (these choices existed in the Baldur’s Gate games, but it was in KOTOR that they really tried to make them affect the plot in a fundamental way). In every game the “good” path was fairly well developed, and the “bad” path dialogue was lifted straight of a Snidely Whiplash cartoon: they practically had you twirling your handlebar moustache and saying “Mu-hu-hu-hu-hah!” Perhaps you’d like to help this starving family pay their rent, or perhaps you’d like to kill their puppy for no reason. It was that bad. The “evil path” choices in Dragon Age aren’t quite that bad, but they’re pretty close; certainly worse than in Jade Empire.

Mass Effect and its sequels are the only games where Bioware has written “bad guy” choices that are compelling. In fact, I’d say they’re so well written that most people would find it difficult to play through Mass Effect 2 and not take the “renegade” path at least some of the time. The “renegade” choices aren’t just acceptable, they’re sometimes just so damn sensible that you’ve gotta do them. And isn’t that really how tough choices sometimes unfold in real life?

The gap in scripting is compounded by the stylistic choice in Dragon Age to have the standard mute protagonist, while in Mass Effect games your protagonist is voiced. The difference in effect is astounding. I certainly ended up identifying with Commander Shepard more than with my Dragon Age avatar because Shepard, at least, didn’t just stand there and stare at the person he was talking to like an idiot. He talked to them, and did so with voice acting of a uniformly high quality.

If I Let Them Kill Me, Will This End Faster?

Pacing is hard: just ask any film director (except Terry Gilliam, who doesn’t seem to know anything about it). Bad pacing can take a great idea, great writing, great acting, and great art and grind them into a meaningless paste that nobody cares about. Mass Effect 2 has great pacing. Dragon Age: Origins does not have pacing at all, ejecting it in favor of its gibbering idiot cousin, padding.

It’s hard to quantify this, of course, but the missions in Mass Effect 2 are, with so few exceptions that they’re notable, perfectly timed. Just when you’re starting to get bored with shooting robots, you’ll reach a break point, or discover that you’ve in fact reached the end of the mission. Once you accept that the game is not going to constantly ambush you with meaningless battles for hours on end, you learn to start enjoying the combat: “Oh, good, a group of Geth. What tactics can I use to defeat them?” Contrariwise, in Dragon Age each combat is just a single bead in an seemingly unending friendship bracelet of pointless battles against the exact same goddamned group of 2 skeleton archers, 4 skeleton warriors, and a skeleton mage. What makes them so existentially horrific is not the battles themselves, but the knowledge that you’re going to have to endure another 45 of them before you get to the next plot point. And that you’ll have to manage your stupid inventory while you do it.

I should also mention that in Mass Effect 2 my squadmates seem almost as good at killing the enemies as I am, and are reasonably intelligent about finding cover, whereas in Dragon Age my teammates are retards who charge headlong into their own gory deaths. It’s hard to enjoy a game when you despise the people on your own team for their limitless stupidity.

Little Things Mean A Lot

It is not as if Mass Effect 2 is a perfect game. It wears its flaws on its sleeve (the planet prospecting, for example, is an homage to Star Control 2, yet manages to not be as fun as the prospecting in that early 90’s game.)

But it’s better that Dragon Age in so many countless little ways, and those little moments of better are the difference between a game that is fun to play and a game that is a joyless slog. An interesting thought experiment that I’ve been kicking around in my head for the past few days is “What would Mass Effect 2 be like if it had been designed by the Dragon Age team?”

• Instead of minigames to unlock safes, if you found a safe while on the mission to blow up the space station, you just wouldn’t be able to open it. Instead, you’d have to blow up the space station, go back to your ship, go back to the wreckage of the exploded space station with your thief, and try to open the safe. When you did this, the game would tell you that your thief’s lockpicking skill wasn’t high enough.
• If you came back to the exploded space station later, when your thief had levelled up, the safe would turn out to contain 5 mushrooms and some crystals.
• Every enemy you met would run straight at you, climbing over whatever obstacles they needed to get to you.
• Each gun would have 8 types of bullets. After firing a shot from your gun, you would then have to fire a different type of bullet until the first type’s cooldown expired. When all of your bullets were on cooldown, you’d use a BB gun.
• Snidely Whiplash moustaches for everyone!

On the flip side of things, the sex scenes in the game would still be about the same level of cringe-inducing. So the games do share at least some similarities.

Boiling this overly-long article down to a single, hopefully cogent point: the design choices in Mass Effect 2 seem to me to indicate a team that took a serious look at the drawbacks of the traditional Bioware RPG and attempted to slice them away. The design choices of Dragon Age, on the other hand, took the same problems and wallowed in them.

And therein lies the difference.

Telltale Games, a company that I have such an irrational love for that I hope someday it wants to be my boyfriend, has finally succumbs to my nagging and released their fabulous game Tales of Monkey Island for Mac OS X.

This in itself would be news, but in a move that can only be compared to the gaming industry’s version of “Don’t Be Evil”, they’ve gone a step further. You buy a Telltale game, you can play it on Windows or Mac. For that matter, if you’ve already bought a Telltale game on Windows, you can now download the Mac version as well. Tell me the last time you heard of a game company doing that.

I’ve reviewed Tales of Monkey Island on this site, as well as Telltale’s other games, such as Sam and Max (a series so wonderful that it deserves more than one review), their paean to adventure games Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, and their Wallace and Gromit games. Their games are good. In a world where you can spend $60 on a game and feel bitter about it, Telltale’s games offer something that shouldn’t be unusual, yet is: quality entertainment value for your money.

On the company’s launch page, you can also vote for which game they will port to the Mac next. Everyone will have their own opinions about this. From my perspective, the best ones in their stable (and, possibly, the best adventure games of their type, ever) are the Strong Bad series. But even if you disagree with me, drop by and make your voice heard.

Kudos, Telltale. Thanks for giving those of us on the Mac side of the great divide something to smile about.

Disclosure: Telltale has provided me with review copies of pretty much all of their games. But I’ll be buying the Mac version of Tales of Monkey Island with my own cold, hard cash. $34.95 gets you the entire series. It would be a bargain at twice that price.

This January, I had the same urge to play something “big” again. I can pinpoint the thought process that led me there: I was enjoying Torchlight, which made me try Titan Quest and then Borderlands, and that last game was sufficiently MMO-like to reawaken the hunger. Some people will tell you that they like MMOs for the large, persistent world, or for working together with their friends to vanquish a common foe. But I know what MMO’s are really all about: the ability to pick up a limitless number of objects whose titles are rendered in green, yellow, blue, or purple text. I can never get enough of that.

And when there’s no sunshine, collecting objects with colored text is a pretty good way of waiting for winter to end.

There are two games that I’ve tried out this time around: Star Trek Online (which is in beta) and Lord of the Rings Online. For this article, I’m going to talk about the new Star Trek game.

Star Trek Online is by Cryptic, the outfit that developed City of Heroes (which I, personally, found way more addictive than World of Warcraft – possibly because it taps into the deeply-rooted comic book geek inside me.)

The conceit of the game is that all the action takes place in two separate spheres. There is starship combat, where you take on Klingons, Romulans, and others from the Star Trek mythology, and there are ground missions, where you take an “away team” onto a planet’s surface and shoot things up.

Amusingly, just before getting my beta key I had reinstalled Starfleet Command II, a single-player Windows game that simulated ship-to-ship combat in the Star Trek universe. Tightly modeled as sort of a real-time Star Fleet Battles, SC II was, at the time, considered one of the best space combat games of its type (which is to say, space combat games that loosely pattern themselves after naval combat tactics).

Star Trek Online

The ground combat, while not quite as polished, is workable. It feels very much like Bioware’s Mass Effect. It uses the time honored MMORPG user interface, which boils down to “press a number key to do an attack, then wait a while before you can use that attack again.”

One thing that I think is sort of brilliant is that, with a few exceptions, the space combat and the ground combat use practically the same UI. This makes switching between the two feel particularly fluid. (Internally, you can tell that they’re in fact using the exact same engine. A few times, I transported down to a planet and saw my ship’s model flying around on the planet before my captain “popped in”; likewise, a few times I got to see my captain strolling casually around deep space before the graphical engine got around to loading the right mesh.)

All is not sunny in the Federation, however. There are a few places where I think Cryptic has missed the mark, and missed the mark widely.

First, let’s talk about advancing your character. In every game of this type, as you gain experience, your character gets additional powers or gets stronger. The same is true here. At the high level, it sounds simple: gain experience points, get a ship with more guns! The devil is in the details, however. Let’s see if I can concisely explain the scheme.

As you complete missions, you gain skill points (which are distinct from “bridge officer skill points,” and also distinct from “Federation merits points”). Before you can gain a rank, you have to spend those points on skills, each of which gives you a 0.004% increase in efficiency. After spending so many points, you will gain a subrank, which gives you 0.05% increase in strength. Subranks themselves aggregate into hyperranks, hyperranks into zomflargs, and 38.4 zomflargs make a strudel. Strudels can be hyperborean, transborean, or antidiluvian (in which case they are negatory, except when transmogrified into the dimensional blahdificator, which will blah-de-blah-de-blah.) After blah blah blahing your blah until it’s completely blahed like a cheerleader at the Super Bowl after-party, you bore yourself to death and die, and re-subscribe to World of Warcraft instead.

In other words, the game is constantly, and I mean constantly, asking me to “allocate points” which, when I allocate them, accomplish approximately nothing. Just to be even more bloody minded, you earn the points one at a time, but you spend them in groups of (at least) 100. This is completely ridiculous. Don’t ask me to make a decision until the decision actually matters.

The other aspect of the game that I suspect misses the mark is the social aspect. Now I say “suspect” because I am not the best person to judge these things, because I fundamentally dislike people. Perhaps because so much of the game is spent in outer space, where other players just look like spaceships that are all extremely similar, there just seems to be no particular incentive to interact. Mind you, this meant that I was as happy as a clam, because I didn’t have to talk to anyone, but if you aren’t like me, this might bug you.

The game goes out of its way to not just “encourage” grouping, but to just make it happen. This is probably the best part of the social aspect of the game. You go off to do a mission, and if it’s a group mission, there’s no time wasted looking for a group: you just warp into the area and other players are already there or arrive shortly. It’s so uncanny, in fact, that at times I literally couldn’t tell if I was playing with human or computer players. This was profoundly unsettling.

There is no “world player vs. player” in Star Trek Online: if you don’t want to be randomly killed by other players, you can (at present) completely avoid this. If, on the other hand, you’re the sort of sociopa loser player who likes nothing more than teabagging the corpses of your enemies and calling them gay lamers who probably use a Mac, you can play as a Klingon, which, I’m told, is a mostly PvP experience. I didn’t try this because I’d rather dig latrines for the army than voluntarily do PvP in a MMORPG. It’s a pretty good bet that at some point they will roll out optional missions that allow PvP between the Feds and Klingons. For all I know, I might have played one, but given that I couldn’t tell if my allies were other players, I sure as hell couldn’t tell whether the enemies were.

As a gamer with a job, the biggest problem for me was the unpredictability of mission length. Sometimes you pop into a solar system and there’s a brief, furious combat that lasts 5 minutes. Other times, there’s a protracted series of encounters in the system that last 20 minutes to half an hour. Still other times you’ll get that plus a ground mission that can take 40 minutes to an hour. The problem here isn’t that there are missions of differing lengths, the problem is that, unless I’m missing something obvious, I can’t tell which ones are which in advance. This, more than anything, is why the thought of clicking on the Star Trek Online icon fills me with a sense of unnameable dread. And inducing that feeling isn’t really a big selling point for a videogame.

So in conclusion, Star Trek Online leaves me feeling conflicted. This feeling, I might add, has been shared by literally every person I know who has played the game. There are moments in the game, in ship to ship combat, particularly, that are absolutely gripping and beautiful. If I could purchase a space combat simulator that constructed random battles using that engine, I’d buy it today, just to get those moments. But in the product we actually have, those moments are embedded in this monthly-fee MMORPG that is littered with systems that are at best ill-conceived and at worst actively irritating.

That I’m even still considering paying for a month or two is an indication of how good the space combat parts of the game are. But it’s not a slam dunk, and it should be. And in the back of my mind, I think to myself “If they can’t deliver something that’s compelling from top to bottom with this licensed property, what hope is there for the game in the long term?” That’s the source of my conflict. Time, I suppose, will tell.

“Interesting” has a few meanings in this context. First off, the various hardware features of the platform (multitouch, the directional sensor, and so on) have led to certain game interactions that you just don’t see on other platforms. Second, the ubiquitous networking makes multiplayer games, especially turn-based strategy games like Uniwar a pleasure to play, instead of a chore. Thirdly, the massive competition in iPhone games has led to a price war, leading to a market where consumers can buy scores of games, many of them excellent, for a few dollars. Or sometimes less.

Bee Spelled is in the third category. It’s at heart an iPhone translation of many of the mechanics from Popcap’s awesome game Bookworm Adventures. If Popcap had published BWA on the iPhone, I’d have bought it. But they didn’t. So I bought this instead.

(Popcap did publish a version of their original Bookworm, but the mechanics are completely diffferent. In Bookworm, you can only spell words from letters that adjoin. In Bookworm Adventures, and in Bee Spelled, you can use any letters that are visible in the current matrix. I actually can’t stand the traditional Bookworm mechanic, because I feel like I get stuck in a rut too easily in that game.)

Bee Spelled

The game has a lot to recommend it. First, each round is comparatively short, so you can dispose of a game in about 10 minutes or less. Second, the dictionary they’re using for the words is fantastic. One of my perennial complaints about Bookworm Adventures is that it seems to know way fewer words than I do. The difficult level (chosen when you start a game) seems to affect the mix of letters that you get, although that could just be a coincidence: I felt like I got a lot more J’s and X’s when I played on Hard.

The game is not a complete replacement for BWA. There’s no overarching story, and no bonus items beyond the colored tiles you can earn.

My biggest criticism of the game is that parts of the interface look a little drab. The animated figures of your bee and its antagonists serve perfectly well, but the tile grid wants a bit more life — there’s a gradient and an edge highlight on the tiles, but it doesn’t really make them pop. The tiles feel, if you’ll pardon the pun, a bit flat. But for a game like this, if the biggest criticism I can come up with is “the tiles aren’t pretty enough”, that’s hardly a criticism at all.

Bee Spelled by The Dumpling Dimension. $0.99. What are you waiting for? That costs less than coffee at Starbucks.

Disclosure statement: Since I say nice things about the iPhone and iPhone games here, I will note that I hold long positions in AAPL. Screen shot provided by the developer.

Yes, the bug bit me, and it bit hard. Witness:

Roman cavalry.

Yes, even though this is the exact sort of hobby I swore up and down I’d never get into, I did it. I bought the excellent block game, Commands & Colors: Ancients and, not satisfied with the blocks, bought and painted little Roman and Carthaginian soldiers. I die of shame, but I die with lots of toys.

Because, truth to tell, I’m a Roman history geek. This is odd, given that I don’t have a drop of Latin blood in me, but maybe it stems from watching I, Claudius in grade school.

Therefore, you can imagine that when I heard that Slitherine had released a Windows version of their popular tabletop miniatures game, Field of Glory, the effect was akin to telling a feline that a catnip truck had overturned its cargo just outside his house.

Field of Glory is a miniatures game for ancient and medieval combat. There are, at present, only two anceints miniatures game systems.(footnote 1) One is called De Bellis Antiquitatis, and is too complicated for anyone to actually play.(footnote 2) Field of Glory is the miniatures tabletop game that everyone plays after they try to learn DBA and then think better of it.(footnote 3)

Now, when I say DBA is “too complicated” I’m actually expressing a personal value judgment about most miniatures games. What makes Field of Glory a “miniatures” system and, say, Memoir ‘44 not a miniatures game is, basically, that the latter has hexes. The central conceit in a miniatures game (derived from as traditional a source as H.G. Wells’ Little Wars) is that your little toy soldiers are doing the fighting. The implication of this is that things like facing and line-of-sight are too important to be left to mere abstractions. So if you want to know if your archers can see the enemy to take a shot, you get a piece of string and try to ‘point’ a straight line between the archer and his target. Likewise, if the archer’s range is 12.5 inches, you’d better have a ruler handy. This whole issue of rulers and straightedges and fiddly movement is what has kept me from ever seriously considering playing a miniatures game in person.

The appearance of a computer version of Field of Glory then, presented a great opportunity for me to enjoy the flavor of the tabletop game without having to put up with all the intolerable fiddlyness of it.(footnote 4)

The game is wonderful.

It should be said that this is not a perfectly faithful translation of the game: compromises were made for playability, which is always a good thing in my book. Amusingly, there’s no measuring, for example – the computer version of the game is played on a hex grid; my guess would be that this makes managing the AI much simpler. The graphics are simple, and fairly low tech, but are clear enough to clearly illustrate what’s going on in any given battle, although things can get a bit cluttered at times:

Field of Glory

There are 25 battles that ship with the game, 22 of them historical. The game comes with a scenario editor, and players are already designing their own historical scenarios. Before each battle, you’re given the choice to assign sides to humans or computer players, and to given an advantage to one side or the other (necessary for those of you playing against the AI, which is, regrettably, weak). Once on the field of battle, each player moves (or declines to move) all of their pieces in turn.

The combat rules are only slightly more baroque than those of Commands & Colors. There are essentially three types of combat: ranged attacks, “impact” (riding your cavalry into an enemy) and “melee” (slogging it out with swords and shields). Light troops, such as velites, will evade melee with stronger units if they can. As units take damage, they may lose levels of cohesion, which will make them fight worse. A strong unit, taking enough damage, may become disrupted (see the units in the picture above with the “D” badge on them), and will fight at a penalty. A disrupted unit may become fragmented, fighting even worse. And a fragmented unit may rout, trying to flee the field of battle headlong. Each turn units that have lost cohesion have a chance to rally back up a level, a process helped by the presence (and proximity) of a strong commander.

There are a few things that bugged me about the game as a software product. Parts of the user interface, while functional, lack polish. More importantly, there’s no obvious tutorial, and the manual is a disorganized mess of web pages. A little programmed instruction would have gone a long way for me. This is not a hard game to comprehend, so after I played through a short battle or two I understood what was going on, but a tutorial (especially on how facing affects your ability to charge, and how training affects when and whether you can manuever during a turn) would have been really nice. (Strangely, the game started giving me tutorial explanations only on the third or fourth time I played it, 7 battles in. Perhaps I picked up an update?) But these are, ultimately, nitpicks about what is, at heart, a lovely little wargame.

The game supports play-by-email, and Troy Goodfellow, who has written about the game here is already needling me on Twitter to play with him, presumably because a night without delivering me a humiliating defeat is like a day without sunshine. I will have to take him up on it. The PBEM part of the game – which I have looked at, but not actually used yet – is extremely polished, compared to the single player game. You register an account, and then you can issue and accept challenges from other players. I look forward to trying it.

We don’t give numerical scores here. But if you love strategy games, and you love games themed on ancient warfare, you must buy this game.

Field of Glory by Slitherine, published by Matrix Games in the US, available here. Digital download is $29.99. Windows only.

Footnote 1: …that I will bother to tell you about.
Footnote 2: I’m lying, but the chances that anyone who reads this will have actually played a full game of De Bellis Antiquitatis make it unlikely that anyone will call me on it.
Footnote 3: Or, if they don’t think better of it, their wife leaves them and they move back into their mom’s basement.
Footnote 4: Intolerable to me – I suspect most of the tabletop players in fact play it because of the fiddlyness. And that’s fine: let a million flowers bloom.

Disclosure statement: Matrix Games graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

Same results as with EU II. Beautiful map, and gameplay more stultifying than Sominex. I just don’t get it.

On Steam: Not counting Dragon Age, which I purchased before the sale started, I ended up with: Borderlands, Bioshock, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Counter-Strike, Titan Quest, and The Witcher.

On Good Old Games: Myst, Riven, and Jagged Alliance 1 and 2.

A few more sales like this, and I’m gonna be broke.

To be fair, I probably only ended up spending about $70, at least half of which was just for Borderlands. But as I read accounts from people who one-clicked their way through $300 worth of games because “the deals were so good”, there is a sad recognition.