Weregamer's Game Musings

This is a really clever idea, especially after some of the total boners on pre-order ideas by other companies in the recent past (I'm thinking of the craptastic thing Bethesda tried and abandoned for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.) . The pre-order bonus for Civ 6 will be immediate access to a Civ that all other players will get for free three months later. So it's not a financial offer - latecomers won't have to pay anything. But it's still a great incentive for those of us who would buy the game anyway, to take the risk of pre-ordering. Admittedly, Firaxis is one of the few companies that I don't feel I'm risking much to preoorder from. Even Civ: Beyond Earth , which was quite a bit weaker than I'd hoped and expected, was not such a disappointment that I felt I'd not have bought it if I'd waited for reviews. And Starships was clearly telegraphed and priced as a "lite" game. But this approach is something that I hope other companies will...

I picked up this title a while ago, and at first was very excited. It's clear that somebody finally actually made a MoM-alike that's actually a lot like MoM. Unlike most of the early attempts, you are the big wizard in the tower, not on the battlefield, and your decisions about magic are the central focus of strategy. The game setup screens had me really excited. It's presented differently but the choices are extremely similar to those in MoM - anything that wouldn't be infringing is practically verbatim, but the presentation is clearer and cleaner. The big change is the larger and interlocking array of spell schools, which are more or less lifted from recent games (IIRC it's straight out of Sorcerer King). In fact, the most striking thing about these screens is that they are still basically low-resolution, though higher than the ancient original. I think they are 1024x768x16. And the gameplay itself is very similar, with some new ideas stolen from the HoMM ser...