Addicted

By Vermouth , 28th March 1:51 pm

Addiction. It’s a word that gets thrown around a whole lot in this industry. Typically it’s used in a very positive way. For instance Civilization is often described as having addictive gameplay which makes you really want one-more-turn. I know I’ve been guilty of using that word to describe lots of games. However now I know different, I know what addiction is—it’s something that’s really quite different. I’m Andrew ‘Vermouth’ Martin and I’m a recovering World of WarCraft addict.

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What have you been playing?

By Vermouth , 28th February 11:37 am

I like games again. No really I do. Why are you looking at me like that? I kinda quit liking games while I was going through a pretty hard bout of World of WarCraft addiction. I really had come to dislike games in general, even if I did play WoW twelve hours a day. So anyway for the last two months I’ve been playing games like crazy, so let me tell you about a few of them.

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In the Company of Heroes

By Vermouth , 22nd October 4:31 pm

I feel like real-time strategy games have been in something of a rut for a while now. Sure, plenty of big names have came out and received great scores like Empire at War and Battle for Middle Earth 2, but they just haven’t been able to capture that old Black Magic. Well, very surprisingly to me, Relic’s Company of Heroes takes the genre out of it’s rut and really shows that there is plenty of life in real-time strategy games. Not only that, but this is an excellent game in just about every category and a really nice WWII game as well.

Let’s start with a quick disclaimer: I wrote a column a month ago complaining about this game’s demo, and how it had all sorts of elements that were conventional for the genre but really didn’t fit in a WWII game. And while those elements still don’t fit in to WWII, they’re almost trivial in this game. Once you get into the game you’ll understand that while resources and base building are still here, they occupy such a fractional proportion of your time that they’re barely worth mentioning.

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Convention Center

By Vermouth , 10th September 4:29 pm

Real time strategy games have been around for a while now and most people are familiar with the conventions of them. The player gathers resources, constructs a base and then recruits an army. They’ve certainly seen their fair share of evolution; for instance a single unit rush isn’t an unstoppable tactic. Gone are the days of Red Alert where a Soviet player could just keep pumping out 100 heavy tanks and expect to win in a quick first round K.O. Despite that, most of the genres conventions have stuck around even in games where they have no business being there. These conventions work, there isn’t any doubt about it, and they make sense in some games. Especially in the case of a game set in far off foreign worlds. When you’re off on the frontier, living in a semi-medieval or actual medieval world it’s entirely reasonable that a commander might have to actually develop the infrastructure to support his army. However I recently picked up the demo for Company of Heroes, and in this game these conventions are just strange.

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My First Mac

By Vermouth , 18th August 1:16 am

Well, considering I used to be a hardcore Windows PC-only kind of guy, I guess it would make sense to write a column on my first weeks using my brand new Macintosh laptop. That’s right, I finally did it, after months of thinking about getting a Mac and considering getting a Mac, I finally did buy a Mac. No I’m not one of those guys, those switch guys you’ve seen on TV. I’m not abandoning the PC. I still love PC games and Macs just aren’t affordable for serious gaming. Just because I’m not inclined to switch however doesn’t mean that my first Mac hasn’t been a very pleasant experience.

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