So with that in mind, I’ve decided to start a new topic or category, Video games I want to play forever. It’s very literal. It will feature video games that I love and those that I want to keep playing until my computer conks out, or until my body crumples from exhaustion.

Without further ado, I present to you the Total War series on the PC:

Total War is a strategy game series developed by Creative Assembly. The games combine turn-based strategy and resource management with real-time tactical control of battles. On June 30, 2006, a box set of the first three Total War titles and their expansion packs was released. Called Total War: Eras, the boxed set also included several extra features and the Rome: Total War expansion Alexander, which had previously been only available through download.

When I first laid my eyes on the Total War series, via Rome: Total War, I wasn’t impressed. I found the game dragging and lacking in action. But that was just my initial reaction—a way of challenging myself to try out the game. Raymz Maribojoc, the friend who introduced me to the Total War series, was insistent. Thank the gaming gods I listened to him.

So, on a rainy evening around two years ago, I played Rome: Total War on Raymz’s, uhmm, office PC like there was no tomorrow. Upon my friend’s recommendation, I started the game playing the Brutii, one of three playable Roman factions in the game, the other two being the Julii and the Scipii. (The three factions are named after three great figures in Roman history, namely Gaius Julius Caesar, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.

Check out the details after the jump.

Each faction or house has a campaign to follow, mostly at the direction of the Roman Senate. Here’s a brief description from Wikipedia:

Rome: Total War (often abbreviated to RTW or Rome) is a critically acclaimed strategy game composed of both turn-based strategy and real-time tactics, in which the player fights historical and fictitious battles set during the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire (270 BC – AD 14). The game was developed by Creative Assembly and released on September 22, 2004. It is the third game of Creative Assembly’s Total War series.

The endeavors of the player involve a duality of turn-based strategy and 3D real-time tactical battles. The high-quality 3D graphics engine is able to render over thirty thousand men on a single battlefield. The strategic and tactical modes integrate such that the landscape for the battles is the same as seen on that particular spot on the strategic map where the armies meet.

The player takes a role equivalent to the head of one of the three great Roman houses at the time: the Julii, the Scipiones (known as the Scipii in the game) or the Bruti (called the Brutii). Each of these factions has a different set of attributes and initial objectives. After winning campaign as Romans (or using a simple mod) it is possible to play with other factions and take on a role similar to that of Hannibal, commander-in-chief of the Carthaginian armies during the Second Punic War or the Gallic Warlord Vercingetorix.

Prior to its release, a preliminary but completely workable version of the game engine was used in two series of television programs: Decisive Battles by the History Channel, where it was used to recreate famous historical battles, and Time Commanders by BBC Two, where teams of novice non-gamers commanded ancient armies to replay key battles of antiquity. The game engine was fine-tuned specifically for these TV shows by military historians for maximum historical accuracy.

Speaking of Rome, you might want to check out Google’s Ancient Rome 3D project. Sravan Bhamidipati of That Damn PC wrote about the Ancient Rome 3D layer in Google Earth and the LIFE photo archive late last month.

Cool, eh?

Now I’m looking for a full, updated version of Medieval II: Total War and eagerly anticipating the release of Empire: Total War. Yes, I’m going to play these games for a very long time.

Post from: EveryJoe

Video games I want to play forever #1: Total War series

Starship Troopers: Terran Ascendancy is a real-time tactics video game developed by Blue Tongue Entertainment and published by Microprose on October 28, 2000. The game is based on both the 1997 movie Starship Troopers and the book Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.

It’s so short! Am I the only video game player who played the game?

The graphics and sound aren’t shabby as this video shows:

The gameplay is great, that I can attest to. Me and the guys (read: my college buddies) had a blast playing the game 9 to 5 (yes, we had day jobs, but Starship Troopers took precedence) back in the early 2000s.

Post from: EveryJoe

Starship Troopers: Just a footnote in video game history?

What? You’ve never heard of Lode Runner? Well, that’s kinda impossible, but for those who aren’t kidding when they say that they’ve never even seen stick man running around brick platforms, climbing stairs and collecting mounds of what seems to be gold dust, here’s a little backgrounder for you:

Lode Runner is a 1983 platform game, first published by Broderbund. It’s one of the first games to include a level editor, a feature that allows players to create their own levels for the game. This feature bolstered the game’s popularity, as magazines such as Computer Gaming World held contests to see who could build the best level.

The prototype of what later became Lode Runner was a game developed by Douglas Smith of Renton, Washington, who at the time was an architecture student at the University of Washington. This prototype, called (ironically!) Kong, was written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer limited to one building on the UW campus. Shortly thereafter, Kong was ported to VAX minicomputers, as there were more terminals available on campus. The game was programmed in Fortran and used ASCII character graphics. When Kong was ported to the VAX, some Pascal sections were mixed into the original Fortran code.

In a weekend (around September 1982), Smith was able to build a crude, playable version in 6502 assembly language on an Apple II+ and renamed the game Miner. Through the end of the year, Smith refined that version, which was black-and-white with no joystick support. He submitted a rough version to Broderbund around 1982 and received a one-line rejection letter in response to the effect of “Sorry, your game doesn’t fit into our product line; please feel free to submit future products.”

Smith then borrowed money to purchase a color monitor and joystick and continued to improve the game. Around Christmas of 1982, he submitted the game, now renamed Lode Runner, to four publishers and quickly received offers from all four: Sierra, Sirius, Synergistic, and Broderbund.

And the rest, as they say, is history. I still play Lode Runner, although I must admit that I’m not as good as I used to be, especially when I had been playing the game on my old Apple IIc.

The gameplay is simple. The player controls a, sigh, stick figure who must collect all the gold in a level while avoiding robots (oh, those stick figures going after the good stick figure were robots?). After collecting all the gold, the player must travel to the top of the screen to reach the next level. There are 150 levels in the game which progressively challenge the players’ problem-solving skills and reaction times.

At this point, let me just shut up and make you watch a video of the game:

Post from: EveryJoe

Lode Runner belongs up there with Mario, Sonic and Donkey Kong

Well, here’s my list:

Pong, Space Invaders, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brothers, Leisure Suite Larry, Afterburner, Double Dragon, Prince of Persia, Tetris, Secret of Monkey Island, Sonic the Hedgehog, Castle Wolfenstein, Super Mario Kart, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Minesweeper, Myst, Rayman, Command & Conquer, Tekken, Tomb Raider, The Sims, Grand Theft Auto, and Total War.

Darn, I think I have to brush up on my video games history and literature again.

Post from: EveryJoe

The History of Video Games in two minutes

Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator, or simply Conflict, is a turn-based government simulation game designed by David Eastman and published by Virgin Interactive in 1990. Although available for DOS, Atari ST, and Amiga, I played it only on DOS on (yes, you guessed it) the 386.

The game is set in fictional 1997, when the prime minister of Israel has just been assassinated, leaving the player to run the country as the new head honcho. The player’s objective is to cause the defeat of the neighboring four states, either by invasion or political destabilization. What, no options for peace? Haha.

For those who have forgotten how to play the game, and those who have no idea whatsoever about what I’m talking about, here’s a little gamplay backgrounder, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Each game turn represents one month in real time. Each turn the player decides what diplomatic, espionage and military actions to take with regard to the other countries in the game, and then ends the turn. The game engine then runs and the results of the turn occur (each turn begins in fact with some information about what has occurred in the previous turn being presented as a screen of newspaper headlines). The actions available to the player are broken up into two phases: diplomatic/espionage and military.

Diplomacy

Each country in the game has a diplomatic relationship with every other country in the game, with that relationship varying from military pact (best) to war (worst), through a number of stages: Excellent (military pact), Profitable, Beneficial, Favorable, Satisfactory, Workable, Indifferent, Lamentable, Deplorable, No relations, At War.

Each turn the player directly sets Israeli diplomatic policy with regard to the other countries in the game. Diplomatic policy is very simple: Israel is either trying to improve the diplomatic relationship, keep it as it is, or make it worse. The action change in the relationship for a turn depends upon Israeli policy set against the policy of the other country; if both are trying to improve, the relationship will improve by one step. If either tries to make the relationship worse, it will deteriorate by one step. Otherwise, it remains steady.

When a relationship is Indifferent and Israel decides to reduce the relationship in the diplomatic phase, or if the relationship is at Lamentable or Deplorable, Israel can declare war and invade.

When a relationship is at Profitable, the player can choose to request a military pact. If this is given, then if Israel goes to war with a country which also has a border with the allied country, that country will in turn reduce its relationship to Lamentable and then declare war. (Note however there is no such obligation placed upon the player, who can simply ignore wars his pact partner enters into).

Espionage

Each country’s government has a stability rating. If that rating falls to the lowest value, the government collapses and the country is out of the game. Each turn, for each country in the game, Israel can choose to work to reduce the stability of the Government, keep it as it is, or increase the stability of the government. Stability ratings are: Very solid, Firm, Moderately solid, Good, Fair, Fragile, Weak, Very weak, Dangerously weak, Close to revolution.

Also, each country has a level of insurgency, which represents how well-organized the insurgent forces are. Insurgency ratings are: Ready for action!, Guerilla Force, Strengthening, Ineffective, Disorganised Rabble, and Non-existent.

If a country’s stability rating is Weak or below or if the insurgency the country is at Guerilla Force or better, Israel can opt to consider extreme measures, which are to attempt assassination of the country’s leader or start a coup. If this attempt succeeds, the country collapses and is out of the game.

However, if the assassination attempt fails, Israel is detected and relations with that country and with the West sour. Also, if an attempted coup fails, the insurgent forces are usually destroyed. A coup is very unlikely to succeed unless the insurgents are very strong and the government is very weak, so a premature coup which destroys the insurgency can be a useful strategy for helping a government (often much more effective than disrupting a fast-growing insurgency).

Once diplomatic and espionage policy is set, the player moves on to the military actions. It is not possible to come back to diplomacy and espionage once the player has completed diplomacy and espionage and moved to military actions.

Military

The player has two tasks to perform: the first is to spend the defense budget, the second is to set military actions with regard to the other countries in the game.

Each turn, the player receives a budget to spend on weaponry. The size of the budget seems to depend on the level of hostility in the surrounding countries; if Israel is at war, or if another country is in the process of reducing diplomatic relations to declare war, the budget is large (300 million plus, per turn). If the level of hostility is low, and life is peaceful, the budget is small (100 million).

As such, the defense budget awarded by the game is an indicator of the policy intent of neighboring countries; if they’re peaceful, the budget will be small, if one or more countries is bent on war, the budget will be large.

Weapons are bought from the USA, United Kingdom, France or a private arms dealer. (Each country sells weapons that it itself produces, except the private dealer, who is a South African providing access to Russian weaponry.) Each source offers a different range of weapons with different prices and most countries will only offer better weapons once a reasonable number of purchases have already been made (which establishes that a relationship has been built up). Not all countries offer all weapons; for example, anti-SAM helicopters are only available from the USA and the private dealer.

Whew! Information overload! Let’s talk about Conflict again in a later post. In the meantime, let’s see if Conflict will work on my Pentium IV Core2Duo.

Post from: EveryJoe

Conflict: Master diplomacy and warmongering in this classic

Like all things in the corporate world, Strategic Simulations Inc., or SSI, was acquired by a bigger video games development firm. Join me in a virtual tour of the history of SSI, which is, for me, one of the most unforgettable video game developers and publishers.

Strategic Simulations Inc. was founded by war games enthusiast Joel Billings. He hired two notable computer programmers to start the company’s reign in video gamedom: John Lyons, who wrote Computer Bismarck for the Apple II and later the TRS-80 in 1980, and Ed Williger, who wrote Computer Ambush. Both games, Bismarck and Ambush were written in the Basic language. Come to think of it, almost all games in that era were written in Basic.

With its founder being a war games fanatic, SSI naturally launched mostly strategy games in its first two years of operations, from Computer Bismarck to Southern Command. Interestingly, SSI also developed and published sports video games, such Computer Quarterback, a football simulation game for the Apple II and the Commodore 64, and Computer Baseball.

No, not all SSI titles had the word “Computer.” In 1982, SSI launched the RapidFire line of video games, which included Cytron Masters, Cosmic Balance, and Galactic Gladiators. Don’t ring a bell? How about Epidemic!, a real-time strategy game dealing with a global plague?

SSI’s more memorable games, however, came only in 1987 with its acquisition of rights to develop and publish Advanced Dungeons & Dragons video games from TSR. The first such game, Pool of Radiance, came out in 1988. Oooh, Alias and Dragonbait! Oh, wait, that’s Curse of the Azure Bonds, another SSI title.

Of course, who can forget SSI’s powerhouse of strategy games, Panzer General, which spawned a host of other “General” games, like Allied General and Pacific General.

So what happened to SSI after all these successful titles? It was acquired in 1994 by Mindscape. Later, it became part of Mattel, and later still, a division of Ubisoft. Unfortunately, Ubisoft retired the brand name, and thus the world had been robbed of the legacy of SSI.

Post from: EveryJoe

Whatever happened to Strategic Simulations Inc.?

Before I begin another mind-numbing round of Dungeon Keeper, which is, to me, one of the best games ever produced by Bullfrog Productions, I’m going back to the basics of the game in hope of retrieving as much useful information that will help me through my relearning phase. No, it’s not cheating. Let’s call it a reconnaissance.

Well, Dungeon Keeper’s interface is pretty much like that of real-time strategy games. For a more detailed, if not accurate, description, I turn to Wikipedia:

The player uses a mouse, represented in the game as a hand, to interact with a bar on the left-hand side of the screen, allowing him to select which rooms to build and which spells to cast. Rather uniquely, the player can use the hand to pick up creatures and objects in the dungeon and carry them around, allowing for tactics such as gathering an assault force and dropping off the creatures en masse once a beachhead has been established.

The hand also allows the player to “slap” objects and thereby interact with them: creatures will hurry up when slapped, chickens in a hatchery will “splat,” and some traps will be triggered. Prisoners in the torture chamber can thus be treated with a hands-on approach.

The main game view is in isometric perspective; however, this view can be zoomed and rotated. The player also has the option of possessing one trap or room section. A smaller part of the map is shown as a minimap in the top left corner of the screen.

Right. Treat it like an RTS. That not only speeds up my understanding of the game, but also my reaction time. Time to research the shortcut keys and a good build order.

Here’s another cool Dungeon Keeper video. It’s actually a review, but since it’s in Deutsch (German), I can’t really understand much. Watching the video helps, though. I’m learning how to make rooms properly. Hurray!

Post from: EveryJoe

Dungeon Keeper: Going back to basics

After a few hours (yeah, right) of playing Dungeon Keeper again, I still can’t make heads or tails of how the game works, despite having played it hundreds of times in the past … way baaack in the past.

So my knees finally buckle (or my eyes finally give way to Morpheus’ sand) and I sleep on it. While dreaming of Dungeon Keeper, I get this idea of doing a little research to help speed my understanding of the game.

Still groggy from 12 hours of sleep, I head straight for the computer and drop by YouTube and gamefaqs, my favorite haunts for video game tips and tricks. I’ve found a video!

Labeled Dungeon Keeper Beginner, my first thoughts were of a fantastic step-by-step guide about the game’s basics. Unfortunately, the video failed to help much as the player or the one who recorded the video apparently isn’t a beginner at all but a seasoned veteran.

Well, I can’t really spend too much time learning about the game’s mechanics from web sources. The only way I’ll learn, I guess, is to get down and dirty and just play the game. Here’s to 16 more hours of groping in dark and musty dungeons.

Post from: EveryJoe

Dungeon Keeper: Trying to keep up

Dungeon Keeper is a PC-based strategy game released by Bullfrog Productions in 1997. Gosh, has it really been a decade? Going back to the topic, the game puts you into the role of (what else!) a dungeon keeper instead of a knight in shining armor or a muscle-bound warrior in search of good booty. Yes, pretty cool, huh?

Your goal as Dungeon Keeper is to 1) build dungeons, 2) recruit monsters to your cause, 3) set traps, and 4) fend off or eliminate computer-controlled heroes (this is the good part).

To whet my appetite, I viewed about a dozen videos. The result: I am thoroughly convinced that I need to play this game, again … and again. Time to chuck my MMORPG characters for a few days and then grab the godstick and wave them at silly adventurers trying to penetrate my lair.

As for you, content yourself with watching this video of the introduction to the game while I put on my work clothes before diving off into my game vault for the Dungeon Keeper installer.

Post from: EveryJoe

Dungeon Keeper: Being nasty and lovin’ it

Ahhh, Starcraft … playing it again, even against the AI, brings back fond memories of weeks of multiplayer mayhem with close friends at our small network gaming cafe. Starcraft was perhaps the second most played network game at our little nook, the first being (what else?!) Counter-Strike.

Going back to my memories of Starcraft, I recall the time when the game was just a week old (at our cafe). Being the owners of the cafe, of course we had first dibs. We needed to “test” the game before letting the kiddies play it (yeah, right).

Back then, there were no zergling, zealot or marine rushes, no build orders, no massive armies moving across the virtual world. The only thing present that had anything to do with gaming was complete and utter CHAOS (because half the time we really had no idea what we were doing). Soon, discoveries that had been enjoyable at first became boring, much like a static webpage.

Fortunately for us, like the Borg of StarTrek fame, we adapted. Single squad strikes became grand warfare, where battles were fought on land and in the air. Rushes became commonplace, replacing testing-the-water tactics, and racial advantages were not only maximized but exploited as well.

Before I launch into a tirade of Starcraft tactics, it is prudent to teach what all newbies need to know first—the build order. I’ll start with Protoss first, since I played this race more than the Terran and the Zerg.

First, order your initial four probes (peons) to mine the nearby mineral patch. Note that you will be better served by ordering each probe to mine different mineral patches since selecting all of them and right clicking on a single patch will delay your movements (which might be is detrimental to your game).

With that done, click on your Nexus (yes, it’s that big structure in the middle) and churn out one more probe with the initial 50 minerals in your bank. When the probe comes out, order it to another mineral patch, while you wait for another probe to come out. When probe number six steps out of the warp portal, make it mine as well.

By this time, you should have enough minerals to warp in another probe, which you will order to build a pylon. After initiating the warp, slap your probe on its rump and make it mine more minerals, and go back to your Nexus to bring in another probe.

This latest probe belongs to the mineral patch; the next one should build a Gateway (the Protoss ground unit production building) before joining its brothers at mining for minerals. The next two probes are destined to mine. If you have spare minerals, you might as well churn out a Zealot (your basic ground fighting unit) from the Gateway and make it scout as soon as it comes out.

Before you bring in the Zealot, however, make sure you have enough minerals for another probe and another Gateway. At this critical point of the game, you should already have 12 probes mining the mineral patch, two Gateways from which your army will spring, and a few hundred minerals in your bank.

After your short inventory, produce another probe to warp in a new pylon and to help its brothers mine for minerals. Once the pylon materializes, start churning out Zealots.

Well, I’ve brought you this far. Go and kick some Terran butts and Zerg tails!

Image downloaded from the Threedy Forums and modified by Joel. Image shows Protoss Zealot, a character from Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft.

Post from: EveryJoe

Starcraft: Beginner booboos and how to counter them #1