Europa Universalis: Rome – 2. Tutorials and Manual

Click here to read Part 1 of this review

The in-game teaching tool is not interactive and not really a tutorial. You don’t actually click through the instruction along with the games. It’s a series of fairly static screens (you’ll see some animation in the background) with messages that point to and highlight the controls under discussion. They’re called “tutorials,” apparently, because that’s the custom in computer games. It’s better than calling them “static instructional screens.” 

Unfortunately there is no way to back up in the tutorials. If you click OK too quickly, or inadvertently, you’ll have to play the whole file over from the beginning. And similarly there is no way to end the chapter early. None of the game interface controls work and the OK button only takes you forward. So once you’re in one you must go on unless you want to end task. So in a way it works out well that the need to play and replay them is nearly nil. None of them are long, fortunately, and you can probably zip through the entire set in 30 minutes or less. 

On the plus side, the game’s background music accompanies the tutorials. As usual the developers have come up with a pleasing variety of era-evoking, ancient-sounding music. And it plays in random order too, an improvement over some earlier titles.  

The hard-copy manual is quite informative, touching on many subjects the tutorials do not and in much more detail on the ones that they do. It is profusely illustrated with sharp and clear monochrome screenshots. A thorough reading of the manual would be well worth the time spent.

Click here to read Part 3 of this review
Click here to read Part 4 of this review
Click here to read Part 5 of this review

Europa Universalis: Rome – 1. Out of the Box

 It has arrived, our copy this highly anticipated game. Over the next week or more we’ll share our experiences with it in our trademark multi-post fashion. As the main review fades posting may trail off  but if the game is worth playing then from time to time you may see more posts on into the infinite future. It all depends on the greatness of the game.

The Box
It’s a handsome package; tight, simple side-open outer box, with a 97-page full color manual on slick paper, and a high quality plastic disk folio. The cover is a striking illustration of Augustus Caesar, judging from images of his busts out there on the Web. A map of the game provinces is included, which is a nice-to-have but not destined to be an indispensable tool during actual game play. In this case it’s the thought that counts (and it makes for a nice background for do-it-yourself product photos.) Overall the game is well worth having on your shelf. And in our view if you’re going to pay $50 for a game you deserve more than a PDF on the disk. Paradox has always been good for this, but it looks like they’ve taken the next step graphically.

The  Patch
Starting the game brings up a screen connecting directly to news from Paradox interactive, the game developer, and version 1.1 update is available now. First things first then. Patch it up. Be sure to Download rather than Runand don’t forget to close the game launcher before running the download exe file.

Getting Started
One down note: We were interested in the “windowed mode” mentioned in the manual but could not get it to work. The “windowed=no” line in the settings.txt file was not present, and adding “windowed=yes” didn’t help. We also tried removing the “fullscreen=yes” setting altogether but to no avail. It always plays in full screen mode. We’ll keep our eyes peeled for a solution in the Paradox Roman forum and elsewhere and relay our findings. We like to have multiple windows open and though it is still possible to ALT-TAB away from and back to the game, it’s a bit slow, and we were hoping for somewhat more agile switching.

Otherwise the game holds all the promise of its predecessors. Like most in the Europa series, you can play as any of the available countries that start your chosen scenario, or, of course, take charge of Rome itself. The game is named after that empire because, according to the manual’s introduction, the earliest start date coincides with the 3rd century BC ascendancy of Rome over Greece as the Mediterranean superpower.

We’re looking forward to digging into this title, as the Europa series has always delivered on its promise of informative game play. As we’ve stated in a review long ago of the very first release, the games are like interactive scholarly documents, impeccably researched, with involving simulation of the economic and military decision-making.

***

Click here to read Part 2 of this review
Click here to read Part 3 of this review
Click here to read Part 4 of this review
Click here to read Part 5 of this review

Infinity MMO Update

We get a fair number of visits from searchers looking for info about the Infinity Massively Multiplayer Onlinegame, stemming from a post we made long ago, to which our friend Howeno Effronski commented. Howie’s comment, which we have retained as a tribute to him,  must come up on Google along with the page for the real thing.

This is a game that also interests us, so we contacted the folks at Infinity MMO and were assured that the game is well on-track, and that a beta version might be in operation by early 2009.

Their web site is due for an overhaul, we’re told and good indicators on progress in the game design can be found by viewing the screenshots and in the forums, especially in these two developer journal topics:

Dev Journal 1
Dev Journal 2

We’ll be on the case so check back.

Coming up: Europa Universalis: Rome Review and more…

A Game, a Game!
Paradox Interactive will be sending along a retail copy of their newest entry in their series of highly detailed historical strategy games Europa Universalis: Rome for our review. We’ve been reviewing games in this series since the first release of just plain old Europa Universalis and have played just about all of them one way or another, including the tiny Europa Universalis: Crown of the North, a game about medieval Scandinavia that seemed so much smaller than its title. We’re looking forward to doing one of our trademark, in-depth, multi-part reviews that will reflect our (and possibly your) total gaming experience.

Beer Beer!
We’ll recount our ongoing search for a taste here in the US of that guru of brews from the spiritual and beer-drinking land of Tibet. Lhasa beer is owned by Carlsberg now and we’re hot on the trail of scoring a coupla-three bottles.