Category Archives: strategy games

Magic Stones campaign

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I have been thinking about a cool addition to implement in my game Magic Stones. A sort of campaign mode, different from the quest. Basically you could select a deck of cards, picking from all the avatars present in the game (not just the 4 elements) and play battles in a map, in the style of Heroes of Might & Magic.

But maybe is better to start a complete new game from scratch. I love the “card” feeling of the game, but I believe that a grid in isometric view would offer even more strategic fun. Someone remembers the game “Age of Wonders” ? that was pretty cool.

Also I definitely want to try to implement internet play on my next rpg/strategy game. I don’t have much free time right now, but I’ve tried to play the latest expansion of Lux, Ancient Empires, and is really cool in multiplayer. Yes, definitely need to add multiplayer mode to my future games!

The old west

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Recently I’ve been playing a lot the game Westward, that could be shortly defined as “Virtual Villager clone with Wild West settings”. It is a nice game, with all the “required” features. This kind of games even if are defined “casual”, have some appeal also to a “old hardcore” player like me. I mean, they surely have some limitations and too much “tutorial”, but they’re definitely miles away from the classical match3! 🙂

End of the year thoughts

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This 2006 was a very busy year for me. Many things happened. I managed to release two Magic Stones expansions, The Ice Queen and Haunted Mines of Vox. I updated some of my old games, adding new interesting features in Universal Boxing Manager, like the new search screen, retiring boxers, new young boxer appearing, and many minor bugfixes and gameplay enhancements. I also made Universal Binary versions of my games The Goalkeeper and Supernova: Galactic Wars.

So yes, was a very busy year, but very rewarding, also because I finished USM2, and started three more projects at same time. I can’t reveal yet the details but can tell you that one is a RPG, another is a nice “tycoon” game, and the last one is an adventure game with manga drawings that I’m making together with Sakura Games.

Oh was about to forget: Happy New Year! 🙂

Sid Meier's Railroads

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I’ve been playing (in my very little spare time while working on USM2!) the last game from Sid Meier’s, Railroads. At first my impression was very positive (well is still quite positive). But lately I found that the AI, which is in charge of moving the trains from one city to another, using the binaries you’ve placed, has some troubles 😀

I bet that from the programming point of view that part of the game must have been a real nightmare… figuring out what is the best path to take with algorithms must have been really hard to program for the (poor) coders of the game!

Apart for that the game rulez, as if Sid was a “quality guarantee”. Indeed of their latest games I’ve played (Pirates, Civilization IV) all of them are very good. Maybe a bit too much geared towards the “casual” market (like the annoying cutscenes of Pirates that I was skipping everytime after I saw them once!). Still, he is a real master of gameplay!

galactic civilization 2

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Today my copy of Galactic Civilization 2 (Galciv 2 for the friends) arrived. I tried the demo some weeks ago and was impressed about it so decided to buy it. I bought it as always from www.play.com because the price was quite lower than the one listed in their official website… 🙂

After playing it for several hours, I can say I’m pleased. The game has lot of replayability and depth, even if I would have preferred a “real” battle – not just the CPU doing everything for me. The first time I saw it, I was quite disappointed, I must admit! the game is still cool, no doubts about it, but if you thought to be able to play cool intergalactic strategic wars like in the Master of Orion series, you’ll be disappointed!!

Overall a very good game, that could have been perfect (for my tastes, of course) with a turn-based battle on which you move each single ship involved in the battle.