(via) The Sleeping with Hinako website has gone live.

I can't resist it. I'm going to order a copy come Thursday, just for the kitsch value alone. On Blu-Ray, of course!

UPDATE: They're selling a Hinako cuddle-pillow case. NSFW but not as ecchi as you might think.

UPDATE: Peter saw the new Haruhi movie. He doesn't say a lot about it, but he says he liked it.

UPDATE: If enough copies of this Hinako BD sell, maybe we can get them to do 入湯...

UPDATE: Here's a Japanese DVD I won't be buying: "Crying Girl"

Ye Gods. I don't want that even if it's free.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 05:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I guess the adults at Wikipedia don't like all the fan-stuff that's showing up there. There used to be a lot more information about Negima on Wikipedia than there is now.

For one thing, the article about the Pactio system used to have a complete list of all the girls which listed all their pactio forms, especially Shinbo's mutant form of it. Someone deleted all of that. Pity; it was good.

Someone put a lot of work into it, and it didn't look inappropriate to me. Maybe the Powers That Be at Wikipedia decided they needed to save a couple of kilobytes of disk space.

I was just looking at all the information about the Mai-Hime/Mai-Otome franchise and there's a hell of a lot. I was composing a post full of questions, and then found out the answers.

For instance, I was wondering who the little schwarz girl is in Mai Otome Zwei. Turns out her name is "Ribbon-chan" and she's shown with her hood down at the very end of the credits of the last episode. I had never watched that far, which is why I didn't see her.

We can't see it at the time, but it goes a ways towards explaining why Nina gaver her such a big hug about half way through the fourth episode. She looks just like a girl named Erstin Ho

One of the things that I noticed was the way that every single Otome has her own unique form of attack. That part's fine; it's a standard trope. But some of the ones they show are really quite odd (e.g. Nao's Spider-girl getup) and some are utterly weird.

There's some girl with pink twin-tails who has a little gizmo she holds. It's got a crank on it, and when she spins the crank, it makes her enemies float in mid-air and spin around. I haven't delved into the pages enough yet to figure out who she is, but that has to be the stupidest power in the series. Mahya's power, by comparison, is reasonable but its manifestation is silly. Mahya can create a giant creature out of soil and sand. And she can control it by dancing and shaking a couple of maracas. She's a strong fighter, but that's really a weird way to control it.

I think that Sara Gallagher's power is the coolest. She can become invisible. Her costume apparently is supposed to harken to that of Batman, and her combat weapons are a couple of batarangs -- so that part is kind of stupid, too.

Chie Hallard's power is pretty formidable but it sure is presented strangely. She's got a top hat which apparently contains a dimensional portal. At one point she's shown shoving her fist into the hat, and punching out a man about 50 feet away.

There are a lot of things in Mai Otome Zwei like that which make it seem as if the people who planned Mai Otome weren't taking it totally seriously.

UPDATE: The girl I was thinking of turns out to be Shiho Huit.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 03:27 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I don't have a television any more. And I'm not really a big sports fan. But I was curious about just how it was going. And damn, but it was hard to find anywhere that listed the current score, let alone any detail.

I guess the NFL is trying to clamp down on that kind of thing. But on their own site, there's a page which has a pretty nifty flash app that receives data regularly from their server and graphically shows the state of the game.

Most predictions I've seen say that the Saints are gonna get whopped, but as of half time it looks like they're hanging in pretty well. Behind, but not all that far behind.

While I'm talking about sports, another weird thing: Asashoryu won the January tournament, his 25th win. Then he seems to have gotten in a fight in a Tokyo bar. Now he's announced his retirement.

He wasn't very popular with the fans, and he has kind of dominated the sport for the last five years or so. I gather that ratings and tournament attendance has been off during his years as a yokozuna. I wonder if it'll pick up now that he's out of the sport?

That leaves Hakuho the only yokozuna. He, too, is from Mongolia but I don't think he's as controversial as Asashoryu was.

Kind of a pity that Asashoryu couldn't control himself. It's obvious that he is still in winning form. And his 25 victories is third on the all time list. If he'd stayed out of trouble for another couple of years he might have set a new record.

UPDATE: And now the Saints are in the lead. Good for them!

UPDATE: What's with the Colts not doing any huddles?

UPDATE: You know, it's really pretty neat watching the game this way. I don't have to put up with all the advertising, or listening to moronic "analysis". I've got a player window open and I'm watching Nanoha A's, and whenever anything happens on the browser window I can pause it and take a look.

Somebody named Porter just earned himself an MVP, I think. I bet he's on cloud 9 right now.

Why in hell would New Orleans want to take a timeout when they've got a 14 point lead? (They have an extra man on the field or something?)

UPDATE: For a team that was supposed to get whomped, New Orleans is playing a pretty good game.

UPDATE: Congratulations to New Orleans for a hard-fought win. And congratulations to someone named Porter, for putting the game away.

Unfortunately, the Superbowl is usually a mismatch. Doesn't seem like it was this year, though; both teams did well. (Except for one interception pass tossed by Manning, and I bet he wants that one back.)

UPDATE: Naah, Porter didn't get the MVP. They gave it to New Orleans' quarterback. Boring!!!

Any interception is a good interception. But an interception that you run back for a touch down, in the Super Bowl, is as good as it gets for a defensive back. I think Porter is probably a pretty happy man tonight.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 05:09 PM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
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I've often wondered whether the battery in a notebook would automatically kick in if the power went out. Today I found out: yes, it does.

Quite a shock, as it were. About 1020PST suddenly it became very quiet around here as the refrigerator went off, as well as the cooling fans on Regulus and Deneb. Arcturus and Alcyone both kept running, though, off their batteries.

But they weren't very useful without internet connections, so I turned them off and went for a walk. It seems this entire area was down. Traffic lights out on Canyon Road were out. Lucky it's a weekend; I can't imagine what a mess it would have been during rush hour on a week day.

I imagine there were some football fans who were frustrated as hell, though, hoping that the power would come back on before the game begins. (heh heh heh...)

It took about 3 hours before PGE got it fixed, whatever the problem was.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 01:28 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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Run away! Run away!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 09:15 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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There was an episode of Twilight Zone about a guy on death row who was stuck in a loop reliving his last day over and over again. Each loop ended with him dying in the gas chamber, and then he'd waken in his cell again, with it being the morning of that day.

There's one last appearance in a court room. And certain people are always present: a defense attorney, a judge, a bailiff, a prosecuting attorney, and some others. On every loop they all mix around and take new roles.

I just had a bit of that feeling. I originally watched about four episodes of Mai Otome, but gave up about the time Arika's underwear got stolen. That was a couple of years ago. A few months ago I downloaded Mai Otome Zwei and I like it a lot.

There's a related anime called Mai HiME. That one came first. Mai Otome is a "reimagining", I think they call it. It's set in the far future, out in space, on a planet colonized from Earth. Mai HiME on the contrary is set in the present in, I gather, a high school in Japan.

And that's where the creepiness comes in. Almost all the same characters are in both, and the characterizations and relationships are similar, even though the situations are entirely different. In HiME, Haruka and Yukino are friends. In Otome, Yukino is Haruka's master. In HiME, Yukino is part of the student government. In Otome, Yukino is president of one of the city-states.

In Otome, Mikoto is Nekogami-sama, and is Mai's master. In HiME they're friends. In both, Mikoto loves Mai's cooking.

Nagi is the villain in both.

There are differences, of course. Nina and Arika are new characters in Otome. Natsuki seems to be quite a lot different in the two series.

I haven't watched HiME; I was just visiting Wikipedia about it. And I think it would be really strange to watch it, seeing characters I know in such radically different roles.

I wonder if that's how it feels to watch Sasami: Magical Girl Club, with the added weirdness in that case that Sasami has a different seiyuu. (As do Washu and Mihoshi.)

UPDATE: There is something really a bit strange about one of the names that they chose for the Otome series. The school where Otome are trained is called "Garderobe". Probably to the director he keyed on "guard" and "robe".

Apparently he didn't know that a garderobe is a latrine, at least in medieval European architecture (e.g. castles).

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 Hmmm, I don't know - the production staff were hitting up a lot of German for the terminology for ZHiME, where Garderobe would be Wardrobe or Cloakroom or something to that effect.

The "reimagining" thing is a sticky wicket as far as ZHiME goes, as whilst I don't think it's ever made explicit, there's more than a few hints that it's technically a very far flung sequel. Certainly, it's suggested that Miyu and Mikoto are actually the same characters as in HiME.

Suppose it doesn't doesn't stop the whole re-casting thing from being a little peculiar, though, although that was a lot of the fun in watching ZHiME when it was new. I can imagine it being a lot stranger going back-over, though. It's also one of the many things Sunrise trolled the audience with in iMAS Xenoglossia, where a lot of the characters ended up having very little in common with their game counterparts, but then most of Xenoglossia was playing around with the expectations of the audience coming in from ZHiME.

Also, strictly speaking, Nina is in My-HiME, though only as a dialogue-free background character (Also, it was Arika's school uniform that was stolen in ZHiME, not her underwear ^^

Posted by: DiGiKerot at February 07, 2010 05:12 AM (AM9il)

2 I think you mean this Twilight Zone episode.

Posted by: Mark A. Flacy at February 07, 2010 07:47 PM (Lbkvv)

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Looks like the Washington DC area really got hammered last night.

RACS is near there, or at least near enough to be caught in the same storm. I wonder how bad it was?

UPDATE: The roof of an ice skating rink collapsed from the weight of the snow. The place was open at the time, too. The owner saw the main roof support beam was begining to give way, and got everyone out in time, so no one was hurt.

UPDATE: Dan Riehl says "This should be illegal in Virginia."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 12:07 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Now that I've got a lot of stuff installed on this computer, several times now things have gotten automagically updated for me without my permission.

One time I logged off by hitting the power key, and instead of shutting down, the system informed me that it was installing updates. Next time I turned the computer on again, it finished the installation. I'm pretty sure that was Adobe's autoupdater. I remember finally figuring out the magical name of that program on Procyon and deleting the damned thing, but I don't remember what the magic word was.

Today Firefox updated itself. It also updated Java. Never mind that I carefully unchecked all the option boxes relating to automatic update -- it did it anyway. If it does it again, I'm going to uninstall it.

I've got Windows Update set to not automatic update, and I think that's working correctly.

I can understand why companies want autoupdate. Probably 80% of the time when someone calls and asks for technical assistance, it's for a problem they've already fixed, and the solution is "install the update". I can understand why they want everyone up to date.

But the other side of the coin is that occasionally, just occasionally, someone releases an update which royally fouls things up, or even turns the computer into a brick. Or opens it wide up for exploitation by black hats. All of those things have happened. (One version of Nero had a nasty habit of deleting the C partition.)

I don't like it when the state of my computer changes without my permission. So while I understand that the companies want there to be an auto-update mechanism, I want there to be a clear way to turn it off. Adobe, I'm looking at you!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 11:59 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Pixy is looking for a database package which doesn't suck.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 09:20 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm not much of a computer gamer any more, but there are some things I enjoy. I'm getting sick of Spider Solitaire, though, so I did some searching and found my copies of "Pandora's Box" and "Microsoft Casino".

Unfortunately, Pandora's Box insists on running full screen. And it thinks the screen is 4:3, even though it's really 16:9. So given that a lot of it involves putting together fragmented images, the severe aspect ratio distortion makes it impossible to play.

When Microsoft Casino runs full screen, it's distorted too. But you can run it windowed, and then it looks fine. Small, but fine. So I've been having fun with that.

Microsoft got a license to use images and scenes from three real Vegas casinos when they created that game: The Bellagio, Treasure Island, and the Mirage. At that time they were all owned by the same company.

I've been playing "The Mirage" since it's medium stakes. So whenever I enter or leave it, I get shown pictures of Siegfried & Roy and/or their albino cats. Which is kind of bizarre now, considering  that one of those cats damn near killed Roy.

Actually, Pandora's box has that kind of thing, too. Last time I played through it, one of the pictures used at one point was of Manhattan, and it prominently featured two very tall buildings that aren't there any longer.

I don't even remember what I was looking at, but I was following links on Wikipedia and found out about something called "Great Old Games". It's a web site which has legal license to sell a lot of older games, for cheap. Having looked at it, seems as if everything is $6. And they've done all the work of figuring out how to make older games run on modern Windows machines.

...I remember now. I was looking at my copy of "Under a Killing Moon" and was appalled to see that it ran under DOS. And my copy of Zork Nemesis did too. So I got online to see about them, and Wikipedia said that Zork Nemesis was one of the games licensed by GOG.

So I started  to reminisce about the games from back in the day that I most enjoyed, and started looking to see whether GOG had them.

They don't have Civilization.

They don't have Master of Orion.

They don't have Master of Magic.

They don't have Sim Earth or Sim Life.

They do have Duke Nukem, and I'm sorely tempted. I spent am amazingly large number of hours playing that thing.

I still have my copy of that game, and I know what DosBox is, but I just don't feel like screwing with trying to get it to work. The big attraction here is that GOG is offering turnkey solutions. That's worth $6. Maybe sometime I'll do that.

In the mean time, I'm beginning to remember how to play Pai Gow Poker. I'm losing "money", but not very fast, and I'm not making stupid mistakes any longer.

It's been years since I've been to Vegas, and since I can't travel any more I won't ever be going back there. But I do remember that it was fun. And I can still enjoy the games, though it's not really the same as staying at the Luxor.

UPDATE: Included with this computer were a couple of pieces of paper from NVidia telling me that they were giving me complimentary, free!!, copies of World of Warcraft. Generous of them.

World of Warcraft is free anyway, I thought. They make their money from monthly fees. Can't you download the software from their site?

UPDATE: I can't remember the term we used in Pai Gow Poker to refer to a hand that is complete garbage. In Poker it would be "Jack Shit" but in Pai Gow Poker it was something else.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Vista at 11:13 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment
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1 You can get a free trial for 10 days, but the software is sold.  At least the upgrades are; I would bet the free trial includes only the old world without the two (so far) expansions.

I still play, in fact I recently picked the game back up after nine months away from it.   I've got one character over 70, three over 60, but none at max level.

I had more to say about its design, but I doubt you'd be interested in it, anyway.

Hmmm. No MoM.  Drat.  Was that the side scroll DN, or DN3D?  I guess I could go look for myself...

Posted by: ubu at February 05, 2010 11:42 PM (uDoAi)

2 DN3D.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 05, 2010 11:55 PM (+rSRq)

3 Also no  XCOM. Sigh... I wonder who owns the rights to all those MicroProse classics?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 06, 2010 12:03 AM (+rSRq)

4 Amen to WOW charging for the client. I don't really blame the publisher for that though, if gamers are dumb enough to pay for the client on top of a monthly fee, it's kind of their duty to take the money!

Gratz on finding GOG. I got Heroes of Might and Magic III, which I played the hell out of a decade ago. I'm hoping for Mechwarrior 2+Mercenaries, though original XCOM would be great too!

Posted by: gaiaswill at February 06, 2010 12:59 AM (d2HOY)

5 Actually, for WoW, you can download the game for free (and the two expansions as well). However, if the account you're subscribing with hasn't been upgraded with the expansions, you can't access them.

You pay for the ability to upgrade your account, really. Not for the client itself, per se.

If you know someone who plays on the North American realms, they could also use the Recruit a Friend service to recruit you, too.

I don't want to derail this so I'll stop here. If you want to know more, drop me an email. I'm a pretty avid WoW-player with several max level chars actively raiding the end-game content.

Posted by: Geralin at February 06, 2010 01:08 AM (rhbyu)

6 GOG is great, but they don't have everything.  They insist on releasing all their games DRM-free, so they have a hard time signing up some publishers.  They did recently get Activision on board, so it will be interesting to see what shakes out there.  Activision published Civ 2 and Civ: CTP, for example.  And Activision acquired Infocom at some point, so maybe there's a bundle of the Infocom classics coming.

I actually just bought Under a Killing Moon on GOG - they had the whole series on sale a couple of weeks back.

I have Steam as well, which isn't quite as friendly DRM-wise, but has more (and more recent) games.  They have all the XCOM games too.  And they have crazy sales on a regular basis - 75% or more off - so I keep going back for more.

There's always Abandonia for stuff that no-one sells any more - they have MoM and the original MOO, and Sim Ant/City/Earth/Life/Tower.  But like you, I'd be happy to pay $6 for a packaged and tested version.

What I don't have, unfortunately, is time to play any of them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at February 06, 2010 04:30 AM (PiXy!)

7

Microprose (Which all the rights they had, have all one way or another gone to Atari.) published the Civilization series - not a surprise, since the guy who created it, Sid Meier, was a co-founder of Microprose.  They also had the publishing rights to all Simtex games, which means Master of Orion 1/2 and Master of Magic.

There was some interest in developing an update version of Master of Magic, but Atari's demand for marketing control ended that.  Probably fortunately, since Quicksilver (Which was trying to get the rights with Stardock.) made a through mess of the Master of Orion sequel they developed.

Activision only had rights to the Civilization 2: Call to Power series, and the first one is not all that memorable or good.  The second one was was better. 

X-COM and its series are also available from Direct2Drive.  They are available because the rights to them are now owned by Take-Two Games via their 2K Games division, and there are persistent rumors (Some of which have some real substance.) that of a X-COM project in the works at 2K.

Regarding MOM - it actually runs fine on DosBox.  I have DosBox installed on my Vista machine, and without any tweaking, I can immediately run the copy of Master of Magic that once upon a time I copied whole from the C: drive on the computer I had installed.  It also runs pretty good in Win98 by clicking on the .BAT file, without any emulation.

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at February 06, 2010 07:06 AM (i86a7)

8 Dragon turtles!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at February 06, 2010 07:58 AM (PiXy!)

9 Darn, no Full Throttle.  I really enjoyed that game, but I could never finish it because of a bug that crashed it during a mini-game partway through.  Since this was before I even owned a modem, I wasn't able to get the patch that corrected the bug.

Posted by: Siergen at February 06, 2010 09:30 AM (3R6Xp)

10 Siergen, if you still have your Full Throttle disc somewhere, it runs under ScummVM. They list it as 90%, but the notes say you can make it all the way to the end, and I've gone far enough through it to believe them. You can even jump to specific points in the game, although you can't necessarily finish it from them.

Me? I have jealously guarded my copies of Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, and the full Legends of Infocom box set that came on a large pile of floppy disks. "Will trade for catgirl maid"

-j

Posted by: J Greely at February 06, 2010 10:20 AM (2XtN5)

11 Forgive me for not reading all the comments before chiming in. Steam has X-Com. I wish you'd asked last week; they had all 5 games on sale for $2. I'll second Pixy's comment about them having regular dirt-cheap sales; I picked up Half-Life for $3 a few months ago. Civ 3 is routinely available in the $10 bin at places like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc., although IIRC you don't have a vehicle and would need someone to take you there (but on the gripping hand, they have this wonderful thing called a website; I just looked and Civ 3 Complete is available for $15 and Civ 4 is $20.) HOMM III doesn't like to install under Win7. I just tried it this weekend on my new Win7 box (I got an HP dv4 with a Core i5) and if you don't do it as adminstrator/in compatibility mode, it just dies on the second disc of the install, and if you do, it dies in a different place on the second disc.)

Posted by: RickC at February 06, 2010 11:00 AM (8GbPX)

12

I actually have my own copies of some of those old games, but they're on floppy disks and I don't have a drive anymore. I suppose I could buy a USB floppy drive to access them.

I am not really interested in WOW. I know that be heresy in some quarters, but it looks too involved for me; I can't work up that kind of mental energy anymore. Also, DN3D is the only twitch game I've ever been any good at. My favorite strat games have always been turn-based, so that I could take my time and answer at  my leisure.

Steam scares me. I've heard too many horror stories about it. The idea that it installs a package on my computer which has to give permission for programs to run? Well, that gives me the willies. Don't want it, uh-uh.

And I just thought I'd clarify something: I wasn't asking for advice on how to acquire those games. I was just commenting on the fact that GOG didn't list them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 06, 2010 11:20 AM (+rSRq)

13

Pixy Misa - Unless you never patched your copy of MOM.  In which then the swordsman unit is the most poweful unit in the entire freaking game (Due to Microprose's early '90s habit of releasing really buggy games - in the days when going 'online' meant using Compuserve and GEnie.  I will not mention Sears' attempt at online service, because it is better left forgotten.).

As for Full Throttle - It is a LucasArts game.  It is a given that eventually a version engineered by LucasArts for Vista/Win7 will be available for download.  Heck, they even have Loom and The Dig out already.

J. Greeley - Oh, so you are other person who got Legends of Infocom?  I wished I picked up Volume 2 - But I did get Volume 1 as well as 2 of the smaller sets released (Fantasy Collection, primarily because they put Seastalker on it for who knows why, and the Battletech collection.).  Like many other 3.5" games in my collection, I have both the floppies and copied them onto archive CDs.

Now all I need is GOG to take Discover and a way to install Koshan Conspiracy...

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at February 06, 2010 11:35 AM (i86a7)

14

I liked trolls. When their numbers got low, I'd march them around the battlefield and avoid combat until they regenerated. A group of 8 troll tiles could defeat damned near anything.

But hobbit slingers were good, too.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 06, 2010 11:52 AM (+rSRq)

15 Well, if its any comfort, here's another non-WoWer.  I've never touched MMOs, too much work, too much money, too much mandatory teamwork with too many people.  I prefer single player RPGs of various kinds ( JRPGs, WRPGs, Sandbox RPGs, I like them all ).

Posted by: metaphysician at February 06, 2010 05:48 PM (vM63Z)

16 Thinking back, turn-based 4X games were always my favorites.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 06, 2010 06:24 PM (+rSRq)

17 And also X-Com and DN3D and a lot of the Sim games. But overall, 4X games were the top.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 06, 2010 06:25 PM (+rSRq)

18

Sadly, while there has been many a sci-fi 4X games since Master of Magic, some of them quite good, fantasy 4X games similar to Master of Magic has been non-existent.  There have been ones that gotten close in most regards - Age of Wonders 2, for example, but even that game lack the same level of city management as MOM.

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at February 06, 2010 07:08 PM (i86a7)

19 There was "Heroes of Might and Magic" but I didn't think it was very good. (The first one, that is; it's the only one I've played.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at February 06, 2010 07:16 PM (+rSRq)

20 MoM amazes me with the extraordinary range of ways you can play the game.  You can go for magical power focusing on one school, you can go for strong cities and a strong normal army, you can go for summoned creatures, you can send a full party of heroes around the world clearing out all the monster lairs.  And then there's the notorious (Invisible) Flying Warships method.  Does any other game even come close to MoM's range of strategies?

(P.S. Hobbit slingers with adamant equipment, Lionheart, and Flaming Weapon.  *thwip* *splortch*)

Posted by: Griffin at February 06, 2010 08:00 PM (kGbQI)

21 Elemental is a sort of spiritual successor to Master of Magic. I was sold enough on the concept that I preordered; there's a beta, but at the moment it's a beta beta; the intention is for customer feedback to help craft the game as a part of the development process, rather than to preview a nearly final game (like most game betas). I think the scheduled release date is late this year, and even that isn't set in stone.

Posted by: John at February 06, 2010 08:35 PM (cR/Ak)

22

And I totally messed up that link. I hate fancy comment boxes. Here is the proper address: http://elementalgame.com/

Posted by: John at February 06, 2010 08:37 PM (cR/Ak)

23

Heroes of Might and Magic had most of the elements of a fantasy 4X game, even if most of them were watered down.  However, there was no research, no real meaningful town development (Beyond raising an army.), and no expansion (You could conquer a town, but not create one yourself.  Basically, it was Monty-Hall hack n' slash taken to a strategic level (Which was in keeping with the Might and Magic style.).

Warlords (At least the turn-based ones.) was much better, even if the combat was completely random-number generator based.  Too bad SSG could not find a company in the US that could release the game without going out of business not long after.  They were fun, just like HOMM, in a beers and pretzel kind of way (Though Warlords always had superior AI.).

Age of Wonders, especially AoW2, got close.  They certainly had a much better combat system (Even if you could not name your Heroes -  my MOM heroes were an army by herself or himself toward the end game.), but city development was very lacking.

I think part of problem is that fantasy 4X has also fallen into the RTS fad, which limits what can you with a 4X game at the same time it opens different gameplay.  Unfortunately, I generally find RTS to be annoying in exactly those type of gameplay styles (And particular scorn for Majesty, which turned me off RTS for good because of the no pause button to consider and give orders.)

Of course, even AoW2 does not have High Paladins, with True Sight.

C.T.

Posted by: cxt217 at February 07, 2010 02:27 PM (i86a7)

24 Hmm, re:  4X and RTS, the closest good synthesis I've seen is Sins of a Solar Empire.  It is RTS, but the scale is big enough that micromanagement is less important that big scale decisions.  Huge research trees with multiple paths, exploration and development is highly important, multiple ways to win ( cultural or military ). 

Its a fun game, though it has its flaws ( extremely good graphics that you won't see, because zooming into the beautiful space battles cripples your strategic view; pirate strongholds that are a little too unrealistically invincible ).

Posted by: metaphysician at February 07, 2010 05:22 PM (vM63Z)

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