Game Metrics

Several years ago I became disillusioned with the "real-time strategy" genre of games. Initially I loved them, playing the first two Warcraft games, Starcraft, the Age of Empires series, and so on. Sadly, though, I came to the realization that while these games differed from each other aesthetically, they had nothing new to offer. The differences beween the first Warcraft game and Age of Empires II were mostly cosmetic and scope related. The gameplay was essentially the same, if slightly refined. I had thusly, until recently, ignored the Total War series of games by Creative Assembly. Having been branded by retarded marketing monkeys as Real-Time Strategy, I could think of nothing more mind numbing than the same old resource gathering, uber-unit building (en masse), and storming of my enemies. However, based on recommendations I received from several people, I decided to give Rome: Total war a go, as it's set in one of my favorite periods in history. I'm glad I did.

The mark of a game's success these days, sadly, seems to be how much pre-release hype it can build. People endlessly spout meaningless things such as "Gone Gold" (which every major studio game does, prior to release) and when it does come out, it's often unplayably buggy for a few months until it's patched. Given that, it's easy to see how a quietly released European title might go almost totally unnoticed, regardless of how good it is. This is the tale of the German company Pirhanna Bytes' 2001 release Gothic.

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Another ambitious--and, I might add, final--attempt from the RPG studio Troika. Troika, as you may or may not recall were the authors of the surprisingly popular steampunk game Arcanum and the feature-rich yet not fun Temple of Elemental Evil.

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