GameLog 173 & 174

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon (40h) - More Philip campaign stretching all the way down to Athenia, and more east toward the second port city needed for boats. Seemed to get bogged down in constantly monitoring 5 battles at once, but eventually it didn't seem to be too much of a callenge with phalanx and cavalry ruling everything else.

Gran Turismo 5 (10h) - Ordered a new force feedback wheel for this one when I pre-ordered a week ago, but the wheel still isn't here :/. Plays Ok on controller, but there seems to be no real direction as to what cars you should (or shouldn't) be using for the next challenge. What it really needs is a way to filter all cars in the dealership and 2nd-hand lot according to a challenge. Even worse, future challenges don't even show you what the requirements are until you're the right level :(. The game also is unbearably slow between races, even after clearing 8Gb on the HDD to "speed up loads". I didn't notice that much speed up. Lucky the Cricket was on at the same time and I could catch up with the score while it all loaded up in the background.


Bejewelled Blitz (3h) - More matching mayhem. New catseye gem is a bit weird. Way more powerful than the moonstone gem that seems to have dissappeared, and as it's shareable you can also more or less trigger it when you want rather than hoping a lucky moonstone lands when you have the cash to use it. I'm predicting scores approaching 1 million with cateye, although I've only got up to ~550K using it with other multipliers.

Team Fortress 2 (2h) - Twiddling time waiting for GT5 and Cataclysm to hit. Going through some of the older stuff as it might be a long time until they see the light of day.

MtG: Duels of the Planeswalkers (1h) - Another twiddler. Not sure why I put this one down, but after a few games I remembered the arbitrary nature of the interface. Almost always feels sluggish until you WANT to cast an interrupt, then there's no time at all. Lucky I didn't lose a game because of it, but it was frustratingly close.

Civilization 5 (1h) - Loaded up some uploaded scenarios and I finally found how to trigger the 'scenario' button, but they still seem end immediately with no opponents.

Ravenwood Fair (1h) - I'd heard that Romero was developing a facebook game, but was incredibly dissappointed to find it's another Farmville clone. In frustration I also dug through some more games and for the explosion that Zynga had back a couple of years ago, there's bugger all available. There seems to be either farmville clones, mafia wars clones, or travian-like web games shoehorned into the facebook juggernaut. Really dissappointed. I'm hoping Sid Meier can do better.

The lament had me put some time into designing a new game that allows a different type of social player interaction. Like all my games it's probably never going to get past the design stage, so I'll publish it up here once I've fleshed out the idea.