played yet another computer game or two...

Got several new games either for or near Christmas...

Guild Wars (right after TG)
Sam and Max, Season One
Jade Empire
Spellforce (actually, I got this a while ago, finally installed it)


Guild Wars is an online-only MMO game. I've written about it elsewhere ...haven't played for a few weeks while I did the others...


Sam and Max simply wouldn't install--the very first time I could see the disk, but the installer would not run. After that, couldn't even see the disk. No idea what the problem is, I read online a few comments about the disks having trouble with certain drives, so I swapped out the DVD-RW in my machine for a CD-RW in the old machine, and that worked just fine...so there's something about that disk that didn't like the DVD drive it was in...kinda strange.

Anyway, a pretty funny game. Not a style I normally play, this is, while interactive, one of those simplistic ones where you have to click on all the stuff you can in each venue, and various little details you learn and items you pick up get used later. So it does involve some puzzle-like thinking, as opposed to:


Spellforce, which is pretty much your standard RTS, with a multiplayer mode. There are multiple races you can and will play/use during the game. Each has strengths and weaknesses.

Humans: pretty good overall, no specials. You can build defensive towers, and breeding farms for more food. At the moment, I think I don't have those structures available...
Elves: not great melee fighters, but excellent archers, and you can build defensive towers. Mostly the opponents won't even attack the defense structures, and you can often build a massive qty, effectively doubling or tripling your force strength. Structures require wood, and you can grow your own forest, which I recommend doing almost immediately. In general, there isn't going to be enough wood available to build everything you may want.
Dwarves: No ranged fighters, and no defensive towers. This is really bad. On the other hand, you can grow your own food (pig farms), which means that you can rapidly increase your food supply, which is the necessary resource for increasing your limit on force size upgrades.

My pref is the Elves, because of the towers, and the forest. My least favorite is the dwarves, because no ranged fighters (well, you can get ranged, they throw axes, that's an upgrade on one of the buildings), and the possibility that you won’t have enough iron to keep making fighters, and the "healers" don't seem to do that.

Managing your structures is important, as with most RTSs, which means that you have to micromanage this. I’d like to be able to take a squad of Elf workers, and tell them to make Towers in a particular area, and not stop until I say so. Once an area is cleared of trees, they should plant a forest to replace what’s been used. Then wait a bit, and start harvesting. I’m not really into this micro-managing routine, but that’s probably because the first really great game I played was Alpha Centauri, and while it allowed you to micromanage each city, you could also just provide a general goal, and the “city manager” would make the construction selections. That was good.

Resources do slowly regenerate, so just because you use one down to zero doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. But once it hits zero, you don’t need to leave > one worker on it, because that’s all the faster it will regenerate.

There are also Heroes, and Titans. Your Heroes are limited, but you do occasionally get new/stronger ones. These are not your primary forces, although a few maps allow only heroes. The human Titan is a Gryphon, the Elf Titan is what looks like an Ent.

On one of the maps, there are two different sets of opponents (beasts and skeletons; I LOVE ambulatory skeletons, those are even better than zombies), and they will attack each other if they get too close, which they will because once they start sending their waves of attackers towards you, they have to go through the same path chokepoint, and will tend to do it at the same time.

Your bots, of course, all run on Artificial Stupidity. Just like all the other games that feature AS, they will run towards a fight, and even when you stop them and make them go another direction, they are likely to run right back to the fight. And they’ll tend to bunch up, which is bad if your force is larger than the opponents. What happens: you’ll most notice this with the dwarves: your fighters will attack, and attempt to surround individual opponents—and you can only get six of them around one opponent. Others will attack a different opponent. But if there are two opponents adjacent to each other, you probably only get 8 of your fighters in there, reducing the odds from 6:1 to 4:1. If there’s room to spread out, your Elf archers can attack at 10:1 or greater, resulting in fast kills.

As with too many other games, the in-game economy is not very interesting. GET A CLUE, FOLKS! Either do this better, or drop it entirely.

The quest book is reasonably good, but the info doesn't tell you where to go back to to find NPC X who will give the next step.

I have also had clipping errors where the camera position was inside a wall my player was standing too close to.

Another nifty aspect here not generally done elsewhere: you can go from overhead view down to close-in 3rd-person, which can be interesting. In overhead view, map territory is dark until explored. In 3rd-person, intervisibility is the limiting factor for the terrain.

Other things to note: often you don't want to play the game the way they think you should. I.e., just because there's a monument doesn't mean to want to activate it and starting making things. Often it's better to fully explore by yourself, kill everything you can, because once you activate monuments to make workers and fighters, the opponents starting spawning things too. So if you can avoid that, it's better to do so. This also avoids the micro-managing of construction. (Hero monuments don't count in this, since they only make Heroes, and not workers/buildings. Always make the Heroes.) Also: if you can get to a point where you have enough defensive towers to protect you completely, while the opponents keep on coming, just let them do so for a few hours, overnight/weekend...all those kills are XP for you, and with the towers, don't need to be attended to all the time, which means you can level-up while doing nothing. I don't know if you get points while opponents attack each other. Some opponents' defensive towers can take off 250 HP at a time; you are dead if you get in range, and so will be your team members, one shot, maybe two.

I've played through the original game, and nearly all the first expansion; definitely got my money's worth. It's buggy, I get crashes all too often, generally with a C++ message about failing to a texture. It's getting to be a grind...I have the demo for Spellforce 2, but I have not installed it.


Jade Empire won’t run. The installer goes fine, but the first thing the game wants to do at startup is run a “Config” step, and this goes into infi-loop right away. I’m going to be able to get the disk replaced for free, but my suspicion is that that won’t fix anything, I think this is either a prob about being Windows x64, or my video driver. I’m pretty sure that I saw this before recently…forget where, tho.