Penny Arcade: Blah Blah Blah 3- The Suckening

Here's another quicky-review, this time about the new Penny Arcade RPG

Supershort Take-
How much do you like Penny Arcade? How much do you like Turn-Based Retro-style RPGs? If the answer to both questions is "I bark like a trained seal every time anything even resembling X is mentioned," congratulations- you should buy Penny Arcade 3: Electric Boogaloo. Otherwise, it's a "comedy" game with very limited humor potential, a million annoying little features (or missing features, to be precise) , and music that I'm sure was developed to torture detainees at Gitmo (BAM, political commentary).  It is almost saved by a pretty neat combat system, but it pulls shitty from the jaws of "ok for ten bucks" by having too many same-y fights which you can (and should) play through on autopilot.

Gods and Kings- a “brief” review

Ok, so, say you want to hear some about Gods and Kings but don't want to read a million billion words about stuff with me talking very little about the actual game. I'm going to try a review format where I give an ultraquick take above the fold, and then talk a little bit about things below.

Supershort take-

I liked Gods and Kings. It makes navel combat worthwhile, improves the tactical and diplomatic AI somewhat (note, tactical AI still makes some silly moves (though no more than it did in Civ4), and certain AI powers are really kinda dopey-aggressive (see- Bismark, Atilla, Monty)) and adds two nice features in the form of religion and espionage. Religion is a lot of fun, and I really like the way they model beliefs. Espionage does a good job of helping weaker powers to catch up, and is a worthwhile addition (unlike building spies in civ2-3 or the miserable espionage slider in Civ4 BTS). The new civilizations are fun without being overpowering (except for the Ethiopians, maybe), and the changes to city states (combined with espionage) make it more than a game of “who has more money” to win the diplomatic war (though money helps!)

Gods and Kings and Grognards

The Civilization (Civ) series has a long and storied history, pioneering a genre (4X games) and serving as an introduction to turn-based strategy games for a large number of folks. The most iteration of the franchise (Civ 5) was not particularly well-received by the community, with many singing its praises, but a large number turned off by the changes to venerable mechanics, as well as the DLC model, and general AI jankiness.

Gods and Kings is the recently released expansion to Civ 5, bringing the return of two subsystems from Civ 4- religion and espionage, along with an assortment of new civilizations.  Will it bring the Civ 4 holdouts back into the fold, probably some, but I feel like a lot of the old guard are going to keep going their own way. In my mind, there are a lot of similarities between the Civ 4/5 struggles and the D&D edition wars which raged hot during the switch from D&D 3.5 to D&D 4.0. In both cases, you had a group of designers come in and make mostly beneficial changes to a system which was creaky and in need of an update, changes which a significant percentage of the community rejected due to some poor implementation (in D&D, the Monster Manual )  and nebulous "flavor considerations," as well as a general resistance to change. In this piece, I'm going to wrap a review of Gods and Kings in with a larger exploration of the parallelism between the two edition changes. Join me, won't you?