I desperately wanted to put Sang-Froid’s excellent soundtrack here but a) it’s not on Youtube and b) the game itself isn’t officially out yet. Instead, have this seminal track from Age of Empires, a game which was as much about the development of better agriculture techniques and tools as it was dismantling your opponent’s castle stone by stone.
Banner Saga: Factions had a soft release to Kickstarter backers on Monday. For those who don’t know, Factions is the free-to-play multiplayer component to the Banner Saga that Stoic developed first to make sure their combat system for single-player Banner Saga worked properly. The release of Chapter One of Banner Saga proper has been set (rather optimistically, in my opinion) for this summer, so it’s not going to be arriving for quite some time. While I’m waiting for it, though, I figured I’d dip my toe into Factions now that it’s out of beta to see if this much-vaunted tactical combat is all it’s cracked up to be.
Everyone seems to like the loading screen music better — so much so that it became the main theme for the series as a whole — but I always preferred the proper menu music from Battlefield 1942.
I found myself cranking through yet another game of Civilization V the other day and a thought crystallised in my brain that’s been niggling me ever since I started playing it back in 2010: for a game that is based so much around cities and the civilizations built from them, a city in Civ V is a staggeringly two-dimensional entity. Open up the city screen for your capital and all you’ll see is a big list of numbers, symbols and building names. Open up the city screen for your newest colony and you’ll see exactly the same thing; the numbers might be smaller and the lists shorter, but there’s nothing to really differentiate the two as entities apart from the name. Cities in Civ V exist purely as resource gathering and production nodes, and while this is certainly how they are supposed to function mechanically I feel that the game loses something for not having them feel like places.
A review of a rerelease of a 15 year-old game on Steam. What has the world come to?
There’s plenty of old games on Steam these days. GoG has many of them cheaper and more easily moddable to work with newer operating systems, but Steam is the more appealing platform if you’re a developer/publisher both because of the large in-built audience and the DRM. This means it’s Steam which gets a lot of the XBLA HD rereleases like NiGHTs (which I will get around to downloading and playing one of these days), and it also gets Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition1, an update of the original Baldur’s Gate (and expansion) to work on modern computers at modern display resolutions with a whole host of bugfixes and even some extra content.
So apparently I haven’t done Red Alert yet. I think this is because Hell March basically eclipses the rest of the game’s soundtrack in popular consciousness, which is a shame because the rest of the soundtrack is just as good. The interesting thing about it is its markedly different sound compared to the original Command and Conquer — more electronic/industrial as opposed to electronic/techno. It’s recognisably C&C, but it marks the game out as its own thing. Considering Red Alert looked like a C&C reskin this was very important at the time.
Getting your game on Steam is an incredibly big deal for an indie developer. Valve’s combination digital distribution/social gaming network serves over 5.5 million concurrent users every day, and that number is continuing to trend steadily upwards with every passing month. This is a huge potential market – far larger than an indie dev would be able to reach on limited or no marketing funds – and Steam access can make all the difference between ridiculously successful sales figures and going out of business. At the same time obtaining that access is a rather murky and opaque process that can be rather baffling to everyone outside of Valve, with games being rejected or accepted for Steam in a manner that seems somewhat arbitrary to say the very least. I say “is” rather than “was”, because despite the introduction of Valve’s Greenlight community voting system the process is still rather uneven.