Rise of Legends is GOOD

Gamespot has all the info you need, including references to the 2nd edition of Big Huge Games' Demo (different links, those).

Rise of Legends succeeds for many of the same reasons I list Rise of Nations (and its expansion, Thrones & Patriots) as the greatest Real-Time Strategy game of all time.

What Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends have in common:

• Impeccable AI that doesn't cheat (on the "tough" and below settings) that gives you a right challenging game.
• Intelligent, intuitive actions as you play. You'll find yourself clicking on something because you want to do this, and the game has had enough human interface engineering put into it that it does what you expect.
  
• A kind of advanced Rock-Paper-Scissors balance (hint, it doesn't stop at three) among the units.
• A high level of strategy, far deeper than Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War (which was a great game, but the amount of strategies at your disposal were far more limited).
• Easy to manage cities that makes base-building a dream. It doesn't leave you starving for more base-building as the original Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth did (although I enjoyed that aspect of it to an extent, Rise of X's solution is superior).
  

What I hope both games have in common (Rise of Nations had):

• A plethora of options to customize your experience, and XML-editable units, techs and nearly everything else but the game itself.
• The ability for more than one human player to control the same country, allowing one person to focus on the economy, and the other on the war effort, until the end game, when I typically commanded the navy or air-force while my friend Kevin steamrolled the foe.

Rise & Fall
Rise & Fall sucks ass because its AI is so bad - yours and theirs. Your ships are too stupid to maneuver around each other, and so stupid that when you do give them a clear order, like "make a beach landing," they jostle around like indecisive virgins, necessitating you to click-click-click-click on the beach to get them to finally aquiesce. On the enemy side, not only are they so stupid as to keep opening their gates while you have an army outside (thus, letting you pour into their city), but they have infinite resources and cheat liberally. Nevermind the 3rd person "Command Mode" of your heroes, nor the awesome potential of the naval battles - this game is marred by is banal AI.

Oblivion rated 17+/Mature Only because it can be hacked

I mean, come on. How the hell can a game get taken off of the store shelves because some MOD maker found a way to unlock hidden art assets that are otherwise inaccessible to the game?

Are we so interested in policing games, that if they have the potential of being nudified we need to change their rating?

If I found my son (he's 1 right now) nudifying a game of his, I would have a talk about objectification and natural curiosity, not necessarily in that order. But I wouldn't expect the game to come with a mature rating because, if he sat there and downloaded some hacks/mods, my son could alter the game.

Microsoft thinks Online is Key

Microsoft's goals with the XBOX & XBOX 360 is to become the dominant player in the future/imagined "Home Entertainment Center System" - and they're hedging their bets that online games will be the deciding factor in what consoles win; however, they're forgetting, as this study points out, that the U.S. has yet to reach the broadband saturation levels of Korea, or the cultural perspective on games as mostly social, competative entertainment. Most Americans, it appears, like to game casually - the hardcore gamer, unsurprisingly, is not the majority.

Sony wants Blu-Ray to become the dominant format, and this is part of their goal with the PS2, the study suggests - Sony knows that whatever future HD format wins will get mountains of royalty money.

The study goes on to talk about why Nintendo's recent strategies (it predates their "Wii" announcment) have been more viable, profit-wise, than even Microsoft's... but again, Microsoft is in the game for long-term goals. Nintendo needs to make a profit, and thusfar, it's been quite successful. Wii.

The Microsoft XBOX 360 Development Story

It's as interesting - and as dry - as it sounds. What really went on and how Microsoft put forth the concerted effort to come out ahead of Sony's release date in the next Console War.

Typically, Microsoft claims that their new console is called the "360" because "it puts gamers at the center" not because it phonetically competes with "Playstation three"

188 Page Analyst Report on the New Console War

"A massive 188-page report from Wedbush Morgan Securities analysts Michael Pachter and Edward Woo details why they think the Xbox 360 will retain its first-mover advantage -- for two years, anyway -- and how Sony is more interested in the HD format wars than the console battle." [source article]

If you want the report, sign up for a free account (privacy protected) and get the full report in PDF. It's stupid that you have to register, but it's relatively painless and the report costs nothing but your time.

First Post since 2004

I'm going to practice being brief. It's easy to say a lot, it's hard to say a little.

I will reiterate this throughout my life, because it is something true to all of human history this will outlast me: most evil is found in normal people doing things to other people because they disassociate them -- from Electronic Arts' treatment of their employees to the Generals of The Great World War sending men to their deaths by machine gun fire. Evil is indifference, in this regard.