Crassus, Cicero, Calius, Clodius, Caesar, Cato

Cross it

I just finished Tom Holland’s “Rubicon:” a narrative history of the end of the Roman Republic: i.e.  the part where the senate mattered to the part where the senate didn’t matter any more (except to complain about stuff and get horses appointed to it) along with a lot of fighting.  It was extremely fast paced and well done and if you want to delve into a little piece of Roman history (well, a big piece actually)– this is definitely a book to pick up.  However, and this is no fault of Holland’s, one section of the book  (right before the formation of the Triumvirate of Crassus, Caesar and Pompei) deals with so many historical figures with a name starting with ‘C’ that it becomes totally insane to keep track of them.  I personally got Crassus and Cicero confused MOST of the time, which is ridiculous because they were drastically different people.  Once you get to the next tier of players (Calius, Clodius). it’s almost comical trying to keep track of people and what they did before to lead up to what their doing (and eventually, of course, how they got killed).  I only remembered Clodius because he’s the dude that dressed as a woman to hide in Caesar’s house during the women only ritual of the good goddess and got busted for it.

I would describe this phase of Roman history as the thug showdown at a massive scale.  With the exception of Cicero and Cato, the rest of the bunch, including Octavian, were total gangster thugs when in Rome and pretty much the same outside of it.  The sad fact was, however, that there was no way to survive at that level without being one FULLY.  The last man standing, of course, was Octavian who, having spoken to people who lived through Marius/Sulla and the Caesar/Pompei showdowns was fully prepared to do what needed to be done to gain total power over the Republic.   Anyway, give it a go.  As narrative history, it’s written to not be boring dry micro history or entirely academical historiography, both of which have their place, but maybe not for you.

Gaming rig died

Right during my Skyrim redux to push through to the end of the game it powered off and won’t come on again.  Well the fans come on which means either it’s not getting enough power to fire up proper, or a hard drive died, or the motherboard went.  Thing is, it’s not that old of a machine so I’m hoping it’s just the PSU.    Shiiit…

Rome Total War 2 in the works

As suspected, after Empires, Napoleon and Shogun 2, Creative Assembly has announced Rome Total War 2.  This is a long time in coming, but the company had a lot of ground to cover before getting back to the best!  Needless to say, I’m stoked: just the rumor of this is fappable to the extreme.   Rome Total War was my second favorite game of the early 2000’s, and the only contender against Warcraft 3 for the game of the  decade.  CA made so many improvements from Medieval Total War to Rome that it was almost a completely different game.  It was the first where you could move your armies around inside a territory, rather than just attack at territory and have it go right to battle (ala Genghis Khan 2).    While a smaller map than Medieval, Rome felt huge, both because you really have to work it to hit the edges of the map, and that each faction/nation/city state had a ton of character.  When the eventual civil war happens, it’s both challenging and very rewarding as you crush the other Roman factions as well as the lesser nations.

That said, Rome 2 has to be a masterpiece and likely it will be: CA knows what it’s doing and, other than CIV, has the most successful strategy franchises out there.  While I am not the biggest fan of Shogun 2,  Empires was amazing– I played it so much that I haven’t even cracked open Napoleon.   Medieval 2 wasn’t my favorite either, but coming after Rome, it had massive shoes to fill.

So what will we have in Rome 2 that we didn’t have in Rome:

  1. Detailed real-time naval battles
  2. MAYBE naval+ground battles at the same time (per the screen shots, this looks like it’s happening)
  3. Better AI for marine landings – Shogun 2 had the AI doing bag-around-back army landings from the sea– a first! So no more hiding in Britain knowing the AI can’t get to you because it doesn’t know how to put troops on a boat and drop them off.
  4. Better sieges – they’ve been getting better and better each game, and it’s the best thing about Shogun 2
  5. “Well of Nations” – Rome Total War barbarian invasion players will know what I’m referring to here– the Cimbri, Huns, Parthians seem to come out of nowhere in massive hordes historically and while the original Rome didn’t do much with this– the expansion had it in spades and was, ever so slightly, the better game for it because you never knew what was going to spill over the horizon into your empire.  This was a key factor in the post-Punic War era.

Random RPG shit

bam!

Not that this happens often, but there has been some actual pen and paper RPG that has dropped this year: couple Dresden Files games and one abortive session of Bulldogs! with tabletop forge using Google Hangouts.  While the session was taking the piss due to it being just character creation, the tool proved to be pretty great and now they have a kickstarter (like everyone else) to make it better and better.  I threw 35$ in because even that one night was worth it.

Secondly, alright! finally something good coming out of the old school D&D craze.  This was released in 2011 as a boxed set.  That’s right, a BOXED SET.  Champions!

And speaking of D&D, that died the day 4th edition came out because the designers couldn’t stop for more than 10 minutes from playing WOW, 5th edition (the community edition) is still in the works and it looks um…yeah….they’re still playing WOW.

Windows Live on PC: what an awesome idea!

Hang or defenestrate, it makes no difference to me.

Thence, I got Bulletstorm off steam the other day for 19.99 and thought: alright, People can Fly is a pretty good shop based on Painkiller, and even though the main voice actor is the same guy from URBAN REIGN and a thousand other games, it couldn’t be that bad– and it’s not.  Though it follows the whole “you are playing a movie” style, it’s fun and despite the whole redneck’s in space vibe (yet again), the dialog is snappy and filthy and far better than the embarrassingly strained Redneck’s in space babble of Starcraft 2.

However, like Dawn of War 2 and lots of other games I try to avoid for this reason alone,  if you buy it from Steam you then have to sign in to play it on windows live.  Like the true measure of gaming ennui, Diablo 3, Bulletstorm, a primarily single player game has an online all the time requirement?  And WHY did this get pirated?  Simply put, without Windows live the pirated version is a better experience than if you, like me, did the right thing and purchased the game legally for the PC.  Now call me an idiot because I forgot my Windows live login first off, then apparently if someone else is logged in as you (like some childe watching my little ponies) you cannot validate your game or even play it.  All of these things make sense, but of course, I just wanted to play the SINGLE PLAYER game and not be connected to the internet in any way. I don’t want achievements, I don’t give a goatsee about anyone seeing on my gamer tag that I have been playing Bulletstorm and finally it seems like it would be a crap multiplayer game, so I have no interest in that (which is sad because Painkiller’s DM was great!).

So to end this rant, I want to say that I do like Origin and Steam (of course) because they offer VALUE to me.  Windows Live for PC offers absolutely nothing but total annoyance for all users.