Tag: games

Apple removes Civil War games

I almost wish I owned Apple products so I could stop using them in light of this:

Apple Removes All American Civil War Games From the App Store Because of the Confederate Flag

Many large US companies, like Walmart and Amazon, have already banned the sale of any Confederate flag merchandise as a reaction to the recent events. Now, it appears that Apple has decided to join them by pulling many Civil War wargames from the App Store. As of the writing of this story, games like Ultimate General: Gettysburg and all the Hunted Cow Civil War games are nowhere to be found.

I assume WWII games are next. Orwell was right. The totalitarians of the Left love nothing so much as erasing history. Some of the games removed:

  •     Ultimate General: Gettysburg
  •     AAA American Civil War Cannon Shooter
  •     Civil War: Hidden Mysteries
  •     Civil War The Battle Game
  •     Civil War Defense
  •     Civil War Battle Defense
  •     1861 A Civil War Rebellion
  •     Civil War: 1862
  •     Civil War: 1863

I’m buying Ultimate General: Gettysburg today to support one of the developers who have refused to modify their game in accord with Apple’s demands.

As you may have been already informed, Apple has removed our game from AppStore because of usage of the Confederate Flag. Ultimate General: Gettysburg could be accepted back if the flag is removed from the game’s content.

We accept Apple’s decision and understand that this is a sensitive issue for the American Nation. We wanted our game to be the most accurate, historical, playable reference of the Battle of Gettysburg. All historical commanders, unit composition and weaponry, key geographical locations to the smallest streams or farms are recreated in our game’s battlefield.

We receive a lot of letters of gratitude from American teachers who use our game in history curriculum to let kids experience one of the most important battles in American history from the Commander’s perspective.  

Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” did not try to amend his movie to look more comfortable. The historical “Gettysburg” movie (1993) is still on iTunes. We believe that all historical art forms: books, movies, or games such as ours, help to learn and understand history, depicting events as they were. True stories are more important to us than money.

Therefore we are not going to amend the game’s content and Ultimate General: Gettysburg will no longer be available on AppStore.

Mailvox: the Dungeon Crawl interview

DG has a few thoughts:

It struck me that – like “diversity” in some quarters – game reviewers / etc. DO treat “story” as an unalloyed good, without ever asking “what it is at the expense of”? Not only is time spent on retail/etc. time taken away from working on making the best possible game, but time spent on “story” qua story that doesn’t directly drive the game play – pointlessly long cutscenes, etc – is time spent on things other than immersing you in the GAMEPLAY.

Also – I’m going to borrow a gripe from Aurini – but his argument why HD sucks has some relevance. Sure, “quality” of 3d graphics and worlds is great, but every increase in detail, whether modeling or textures, requires a lot more work to get it looking right. 8-bit, or deliberately cartoony/stylized games can still have an environment that immerses you in the game – depending on the mechanics – but doesn’t require anywhere near as much time on artwork.

It comes down to opportunity cost. Time spent on graphics, 3D or otherwise, that makes the game play better and keeps you in the game, is time well spent. Time past that is time that could have gone into scenarios/etc.

After all – is the new Homeworld HD reskin a better GAME? No – just prettier. Possibly more immersive. but at some point you cross the threshold of “good enough” and ship, or keep focused on the game.

This is not a call to spend less time on graphic/game design. Some of the better recent hobbyist boardgames not only have beautiful graphics, but use them to make understanding the game mechanics and tracking game status and play easier. Again – does the time spent on the artwork make the game PLAY better, or does it just get in the way?

Incidentally – loved Doom and Doom2, but liked Marathon 2 even better. Just a little bit of flavor and story through the computer terminals to give you a purpose to what you’re doing, allowing even otherwise repetitive missions to have a different feel, without wasting a lot of your time on it. Some excellent humor in there too. “Introduce them to the ‘magic’ of orbital bombardment” being a favorite line, still.

The Sinister Stone

I backed this kickstarter today from Autarch, The Sinister Stone of Sakkara. For the gamers here, you should check it out. They do quality stuff that isn’t generic:

The default setting of ACKS, the Auran Empire, was also designed to support the player characters’ advancement from adventurer to king. The Auran Empire setting was inspired by the collapsing empires of earth’s Late Antiquity (250 – 750 AD), a turbulent era in which ancient glories were drowned in a torrent of violence. However, in the Auran Empire setting, the horror of civilization’s imminent collapse is worsened by the existence of nightmarish evils lurking in the world’s dark places, threatening to strike mankind at its weakest moment. The established leadership is too preoccupied by the empire’s political and military downfall to take these shadowy threats seriously, leaving them to be handled by adventurers, fortune-hunters, and would-be heroes. The adventurers’ success in dealing with such threats is, however, what garners them the fame, wealth, and strength they need to take power and restore order. Of course, the adventurers are not certain to win; indeed, the odds are stacked against them.

The premises underlying ACKS’ setting are evident throughout The Sinister Stone of Sakkara, most notably in its backstory. The adventure begins with local hamlets and villages suffering from beastman raids because the troops that ought to be protecting them have been sent to stem an invasion at another border. With the local military barely able to garrison its strongholds, it falls to the adventurers to deal with the monstrous threat.

The setting premises are also evident in the design of the dungeon itself. The upper level of the dungeon was inspired by real-world ancient architecture, and the brigands and beastly barbarians that populate it would not be unfamiliar to any Late Roman centurion (albeit the barbarians who menaced Rome were only figuratively beastly). Conversely, the lower level of the dungeon is a warren of weird horror wherein lurks an insidious evil that is far more threatening than mere beastmen. The dungeon thus represents the Auran Empire setting in microcosm – visibly endangered by mundane threats, appallingly imperiled by hidden horrors.

What I like about ACKS is the way it incorporates a military aspect into the role-playing. The world isn’t all random events, and you get the sense that things happen for a reason there, even if you have no idea what that reason is.

A doctorate in comparative gaming

2015 Hugo nominee Jeffro Johnson is better suited to make the following introduction than I am, so I will simply quote him in introducing the latest Castalia House blog star, Douglas Cole, the author of GURPS Martial Arts: Technical Grappling and a number of other combat-related RPG publications.

Game designer Douglas Cole will be joining Ken Burnside and myself at Castalia House with his new blog series called “Violent Resolution.” As you can see from his first post, this is going to be a doozy. From what I’ve seen, this will do for rpgs what Nick Schuessler did for wargames in his Space Gamer column. If you’re the type of person that’s always wanted a doctorate in comparative gaming, you will faint!

As for Violent Resolution itself, Cole himself explains what the weekly column is going to entail:

The column will focus on combat in games, mostly to the exclusion of other things. It will of course include fighting, but also how fights start and end. It will spend a great deal of time looking at game mechanics along the way, and will probably spend a lot of word count looking at what kind of storytelling environment is created by those mechanics.

Through the Lens

As the blog progresses, I’ll frequently be looking at combat with examples from different games. There will be others from time-to-time – notably when I have an anecdote from games I’ve played (or stopped playing) in the past. But by and large, I’ll explore this topic by looking at how certain games handle things.

Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition

I’m going to refer to D&D5 here
frequently, because you can’t talk about RPGs – especially combat in
RPGs – without talking about the moose in the room. D&D-based games
dominate the market of tabletop RPGs that all other games combined are
pretty much an afterthought.

I’ll use D&D5 as a proxy for the kind
of resolution system that is found as variations on a theme in
Pathfinder, the D&D-derived Old School Renaissance (or Old School
Revival? Maybe both!), and other games that are recognizably the same
basic mechanic. All are recognizable as essentially the same game that I
learned to play when I was 10 years old, roleplaying for the first time
in 1981 – the Basic/Expert D&D boxed sets, followed by AD&D.
Stepping into Swords and Wizardry, Pathfinder, or D&D is usually a
matter of fine-tuning. You may need to understand the proper use of a
Feat hierarchy, or what will kill your character as opposed to knocking
him out, or get the feel for various special mechanics, such as the
Advantaged/Disadvantaged mechanic newly introduced in D&D5 . . . but by and large if you’ve ever played D&D you’ll understand what’s going on pretty fast.

As the future leading publisher of military science fiction, the martial arts from the grand strategic to the tactical is of interest to us, and while I think it is highly unlikely that we will be able to convince Dr. van Creveld, Gen. Krulak, Gen. Gray, or Mr. Lind to take up blogging  at Castalia House anytime soon, we are very pleased to have Mr. Cole intelligently addressing matters from the other end of the spectrum.

Video games reduce crime

From Reaxxion: We always hear the old line that “video games have to be toned down,
they always make boys so violent.” Although numerous scientific studies
have shown that this is hardly the case, the clan of insatiable, denialist harpies still trot out that tired canard every
time they need a seemingly rational reason to attack our hobby and push
their agenda. However, if we look at a certain U.S. Court ruling, Interactive Digital Software Ass’n v. St. Louis County, we actually find a case of the law completely rejecting the claim that video games cause people to act violently.

There goes that old lie. Forget causation, there isn’t even a statistical correlation. It never made any sense anyhow. I mean, you usually have to get off the machine and go outside to commit much in the way of violent crime anyhow.

Interview with Vox Day

Sam Roberts at Reaxxion interviewed me about the game industry, the SJW attack on it, and our upcoming plans for First Sword:

SR: Many commentators, at our site and elsewhere, have noticed the sudden outbreak of prudishness in the gaming industry. We saw this with PAX and its ban on booth babes, even to the point of specifying a minimum length for girl’s skirts. Even Mortal Kombat, the franchise that established itself in the 1990’s through its willingness to break all the rules, is moving to “more realistic” characters with smaller breasts and thicker waists. What do you think has changed in the gaming industry in the past 20 years that’s made it so much less able to resist moral scolds?

VD: The most important change is that game development no longer belongs to the mavericks. When we started Fenris Wolf in 1993, literally everyone thought we were crazy. We were throwing away good jobs and wasting our educations to do what people considered to be the equivalent of playing with digital Lincoln Logs. Now that games are widely understood to be big business, many of the jobs pay decent salaries, and you can get degrees in “game development” and “game design,” you have considerably more risk-intolerant, conflict-avoidant people entering the industry.

Twenty years ago, the average developer would have laughed his ass off at the idea that he should design or develop anything other than whatever the hell he wanted to do. These days, there are a fair number of bed-wetters in game development who are terrified at the idea that someone, somewhere, might take offense at something in one of their games. And then, of course, you’ve also got SJWs trying to stick their noses into the industry in order to change it, just as they did in comics and science fiction & fantasy fiction.

You’ll definitely want to check out the screenshots of the 3DV engine in action. Be sure to click on the image of the High Elven archers. 3DV is visually spectacular and is intended to do for miniature gaming what VASSAL did for board-and-counter games. In addition to various other topics addressed, you can also see our response to the SJW demands for more women in games, beginning with the introduction to Morwyn Shadowsong, a female elf gladiator who is the face of First Sword, the fantasy gladiator miniatures game.

It probably won’t take a genius to put two and two together and realize that the Tactical Uncertainty model I’m developing, which has been discussed in some detail over at Castalia, is intended for the third edition of Striker that Marc Miller has asked me to develop. The rules will be developed for use in 3DV and on the tabletop alike; the challenge is how to make something that works almost automatically in the former can be translated to the latter. With regards to some of the other games mentioned, we will have some exciting new announcements soon.

The slaughter of the development houses

EA kills another legendary name in game development:

In an a move to consolidate its studios Electronic Arts has announced that it will be closing down Maxis. One of the sad truths of the video game industry is that game studios close down and disappear all the time. That being the case, there are still moments when you see certain names coupled with the words “shut down” and can’t help but feel a bit saddened.

Case in point, Electronic Arts has announced at GDC today that it will be closing down Maxis Emeryville in an effort to fold its staff and projects into other development houses under the Maxis brand. Recognizing that this consolidation will lead to many of the studio’s staffers losing their jobs, EA stated that former Emeryville employees “will be given opportunities to explore other positions within the Maxis studios and throughout EA.” The publisher also intends to work with employees leaving wholesale “to ensure the best possible transition with separation packages and career assistance.”

What is that now, six or seven classic development houses that have been devoured by the EA monster? I was seriously concerned when they acquired Origin, and downright bummed out when it became obvious that they were going to kill both the Ultima and Wing Commander franchises. Chris Roberts even worked out a deal to try to revive the latter a few years ago, but wasn’t able to find the funding, hence Star Citizen. One hopes that one day, he’ll be able to buy back the IP that EA is never going to utilize.

I have fond memories of Maxis. Roger, one of their tech support guys, was my initial contact there in my Transdimensional Evangelist days, and we used to go into the city from time to time when I was in town. We had some unforgettable evenings, most notably the time another Maxis employee who had a jeep with the license plate “JAHARMY”  was driving and took us to DV8.

Well, at least they’re keeping the brand name for now. I seriously wonder sometimes how EA even stays in business. They shut down a friend’s studio last year that was highly profitable, just because the overall revenue was under the level dictated by their new corporate policy. They didn’t sell it or anything, just shut it down and threw away literally millions of dollars in profit. So PopCap is next, after which it will presumably be Bioware’s turn.

Game design at Castalia

Over the years, I’ve noticed that most of the readers here are not terribly interested in the nuts and bolts of game design. Which is fine, it’s a fairly esoteric topic that tends to require both extensive reading and extensive game-playing, which considerably limits the potential appeal of such discussions. However, those few who are interested in it tend to be very interested indeed.

So, I’m going to be doing the occasional post over at the Castalia House blog on some of my thoughts on a very particular game design for a tactical wargame on which I am working as part of the First Sword Kickstarter, about which you can read more in the Game Dev letter. And you can also read about my initial thoughts on doing something new with the design, which I think could potentially be as significant for tactical wargaming in the long term as the ASL morale model has proven to be.

If you subscribe to the Game Dev newsletter, you’re aware that Alpenwolf has a new partner and I’m going to be writing the new rules for a certain SF infantry combat game. Without getting into any details concerning that, I want to discuss two of the primary principles I plan on utilizing as the basis for the core gameplay. I was recently editing a book by Martin van Creveld that we’ll be publishing in another week or so, A History of Strategy, and one thing that occurred to me while I was working on it and reading his Technology and War, was how the great stress that Clausewitz placed on friction, and in particular, on information in war, was seldom modeled at the tactical level in wargaming. Clausewitz wrote:

 A great part of the information in war is contradictory, a still greater part is false, and by far the greatest part is somewhat doubtful. This requires that an officer possess a certain power of discrimination, which only knowledge of men and things and good judgment can give. The law of probability must be his guide. This is difficult even in the pre-war plans, which are made in the study and outside the actual sphere of war. It is enormously more difficult when, in the turmoil of war, one report follows hard upon another. It is fortunate if these reports, in contradicting each other, produce a sort of balance and thus demand further examination. It is much worse for the inexperienced when chance does not render him this service, but one report supports another, confirms it, magnifies it, continually paints with new colors, until urgent necessity forces from him a decision which will soon be disclosed as folly, all these reports having been lies, exaggerations, and errors.

Read more about my concept of a Tactical Uncertainty Principle over there, if it happens to strike you as interesting.

A taste of things to come

John Wright is pleased with Jeremiah’s artwork for the first volume in his Unwithering Realm series, Somewhither, which will be coming out in April. And if you’re interested in supporting an esoteric, but worthwhile project, Castalia House blogger Ken Burnside and Ad Astra game developer needs just $2k more in order to fund his AVID Assistant via Kickstarter.

Speaking of Castalia, we’ll have a new offer going out to the New Release Subscribers next week, but for various reasons I’m not going to bother going into, we will be releasing not just one, but TWO new books the week after that. I’d like to find 10 volunteers to review both of them, so if you’ve got the interest and the intellectual chops to handle either Equality: The Impossible Quest or The Art of War: The History of Military Strategy, both by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, email me with EQUALITY or WAR in the subject. UPDATE: have all 10 for both books, thank you.

The former is conceived as the third in a conceptual trilogy with Plato’s work on Justice and J.S. Mill’s work on Liberty, whereas the latter features a foreword by none other than Dr. Jerry Pournelle himself, who describes van Creveld’s work as “a necessary supplement to Clausewitz.” It’s a short, but as you can probably imagine from that description, brilliant history, and anyone who has appreciated Mr. Lind’s work is going to find it fascinating and educational. Thanks to Chris Kallini, who did both of the van Creveld covers.

We are fighting back

Reggie at Reaxxion explains how SJWs are putting women out of work.

 PAX banned booth babes from their events and they are just one of many events including E3 to start banning booth babes. This is an excerpt of what PAX had to say on their booth babe policy:

PAX has a strict ‘no booth babe’ policy with the purpose of creating an environment where everyone can feel comfortable and welcome, and the focus is on games, not hired booth staff.

Booth babes are defined as staff of ANY gender used by exhibitors to promote their products at PAX by using overtly sexual or suggestive methods. Partial nudity, the aggressive display of cleavage and the navel, and shorts/skirts higher than 4” above the knee are not allowed. If for any reason an exhibit and/or its contents are deemed objectionable to PAX management, the exhibitor will be asked to alter the attire of its staff.

Cosplayed characters that are playable in-game are an exception to this rule (within reason), and exhibitors must obtain permission from show management prior to the show.

As Reggie points out, cosplayers shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief, because it’s obvious they are next. Hot women make not-hot women uncomfortable, therefore they must be banned.  As Game Dev newsletter subscribers already know, Alpenwolf has bravely responded to this attack on women by adding a female character to First Sword and making her the face of the game.

About more in the near future. “Morwyn Shadowsong” is already scheduled to be featured in a photoshoot for a popular men’s site and will also be appearing in miniature, cartoon, and 3D formats. She will also be the protagonist of a novella, The Gladiator’s Song, which will be published later this year by Castalia House.