Three Moves Ahead 66: The SimTex Legacy

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05/24/10 • 0 min

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Good Old Games has made the classic SimTex games Master of Orion, Master of Orion 2 and Master of Magic available for low, low prices. So Troy, Tom, Bruce and Rob spend an hour talking about what made SimTex special. What do we mean by personality in strategy games? Does the UI hold up? Which of these games has aged the most poorly? When is tactical combat an impediment in a turn based 4x game? We answer these questions and more in this new analysis of classic game design.Troy’s Revisionist History on SimTex Tom’s Retroview on Master of Orion II Buy Master of Orion 1 & 2 and Master of Magic at Good Old Games. Master of Magic Intro

Previous Episode

Three Moves Ahead 65: Tutorials and Training

Tom Chick returns after a month away from the podcast to join Troy and Rob in a discussion about designing tutorials for strategy games. Is the failure of tutorial design a root of the decline in strategy gaming? Can you really integrate a tutorial into a story based campaign? What are the responsibilities of the gamer to learn what he/she is doing on a battlefield? Dave Perkins’s tutorials for Solium Infernum

Next Episode

Three Moves Ahead 67: Experimenting With RPGs at Rabbitcon

Oy. Troy breaks his computer and therefore sounds like he’s calling in from a submarine. But the rest of show is a long discussion about Games Masters experimenting with RPG and miniature mechanics. Julian and Rob discuss a fascinating game session before the team digresses onto iterative learning in game design and whether games do a good job of teaching through systems at all. Promised images will have to wait until I have a computer that can resize them properly. Stupid netbook.