Then the Zulus had to foul it all up.

With one vote at the World Congress, a council of the world’s Civs, the Zulus had brought enough support from city states on their continent to pass an embargo on Morocco, shutting down my trade caravans with every other Civ and sending me into an apoplectic fit as my balance sheet at once dipped deep into the red.

This is the Brave New World of Civilization V. The new expansion comes out for PC on July 9. The “Brave New World” aspect focuses on how, once you either reach the Modern Era or have a few factories, you have a new option under the your social policies to set ideologies, which then results in new choices among “tenets” to underpin your new ideology.

But culture is where it’s at with Brave New World.

The artsy-fartsy expansion

One of the first experiences you’ll have with Brave New World is with Great Artists, Musicians, and Writers. These new Great Persons create Great Works that fill slots in your cities, which come from buildings and Wonders, and these pieces of art, literature, and music bring in culture and tourism (this is just a mechanic — you won’t see people from other Civs traveling to your cities). You can also send these new Great People to other Civs on tours, which ups tourism and culture. You’ll see composers such as Johann Strauss (I settled him in Marrakesh and got the Great Work “Die Fladermaus”).

This came about, explains Brave New World lead designer Ed Beach, because when it came to pursuing relationships with other Civs, he noticed something was lacking.

“Tourism fulfills the second shortcoming we saw with the existing Culture Victory: namely that you could win one without really engaging with the other players in the game,” Beach said. “Now in Brave New World, you must make sure this amazing culture you created is spread across the globe and permeates the other nations of the world. Tourism is the mechanic that enables that spread.”

I decided early on to focus on generating these new Great People, and I was surprised at how easy it was to do so (and just how much culture I was generating). Later in the game, I was pulling in 400 culture (or more) a turn. It makes pursuing a cultural victory easier, and if you’re a player who prefers plowshares to swords, it gives you more options.

“The culture victory in the Civilization series has been popular among fans; it’s a play style that many people seem to naturally embrace. And yet we’ve never before allowed players to really put their own ‘signature’ on their culture as they progress toward a victory of that type,” Beach said. “Introducing Great Works and putting them into ‘themed’ museums and Wonders allows you to create something culturally unique, in sort of a parallel to deciding which military units you were going to assemble into your armies when you went off on a conquest.”

World Congress is now in session

The United Nations doesn’t come into play until late in a game of Civilization. The World Congress, however, appears much earlier — and it can have a great influence on how your Civilization grows and the diplomatic relations you have with other world leaders, as I discovered with my diplomatic pissing match with the Zulus.

Ah, the Zulus. Our feud started modestly during the first session of the World Congress — a gathering of the world’s leaders. I proposed a resolution banning happiness from pearls, rendering the resource rather useless. Every nation but one passed it; the Zulus threw every delegate they had against that proposal. This started us down a path toward a cold war, where our relations quickly soured from Friendly to Guarded to Hostile.

But my Civ was on another continent, making open warfare a challenge. So the Zulus decided to use a new weapon against me: the World Congress. Shaka and his gang started proposing resolutions against my interests, culminating in an embargo against me. With delegates the Zulus gained from their allied City States (one per ally) and World Wonders — and my allies committing delegates to other resolutions — Shaka was able to get a trade embargo passed against my Civ. This embargo is worldwide; no Civ would accept a trade caravan from me. I countered with my own embargo proposal, and in ensuing sessions, I mustered votes against anything that would help the Zulus and sponsored resolutions that would hurt Shaka.

And I started building an invasion force as well, resulting in the world’s first arms race.

The World Congress adds new interactions to Civ V, but it doesn’t replace the United Nations — it evolves into it.

“[The World Congress] now springs into action well before the Atomic Era that you would historically associate with the United Nations,” Beach said. “But when you do reach those later stages of the game, the World Congress continues its evolution and does become the U.N. It is after this transformation that a World Leader can be elected, and that Civ wins the Diplomatic Victory.”

Trade winds

Brave New World also brings in trade caravans, special units that set up trade routes with Civs and city states. These don’t supplant trade routes; caravans also a second way to bring in cash. And as other Civs grow, the amount of gold that comes in builds up. In the modern era, I was getting significant amounts. I was able to establish new trade caravans with city states when the gosh-darned Zulus passed the trade embargo, which shut down my trade caravans with them (oddly enough, I could still trade luxury and strategic resources through the Diplomacy screen), and establish a new revenue stream.

Are cultural wins too easy now?

As I played with these news systems — and watched as piles and piles of culture accumulated — I worried that it would be too simple to pursue a cultural victory. But as my Congress feud with the Zulus shows, Brave New World comes with ways to keep you from simply winning through the arts.

Beach addressed these concerns. “We’ve been playtesting culture victory games for quite a while now to make sure we get the balance right,” he said. “During that time, we’ve had significant changes to how difficult it is to win the culture game. The biggest shift came when we finished tuning up the A.I. to really play the culture game effectively. It’s definitely a challenge now; I have no fears that it is too easy.

“In fact, in some games, when faced with a really dominant cultural A.I. such as France or Brazil [note: In my game, the Zulus crushed Brazil early], you might have to steer in another direction. It’s the equivalent of trying to win a Conquest victory when you are in the same game with Attila and Genghis.”

My final concern — and after my limited time with this preview build of Brave New World (about 10 hours), I can’t fully assess this — that the interactions between this systems, while rich, could be too complex and muddle Civ V’s existing game. But Beach is confident the resulting puzzle is one fans will enjoy.

“I don’t think any single system is very complex in Civ V. It is in the interactions between those systems where the complexity emerges, like religious pressure and science flowing along trade routes, or your tourism pushing the populace of other Civs to consider adopting your ideology,” Beach says. “It definitely takes some time playing with this expansion to get comfortable with all these interactions. But once you do, the web of interdependencies makes for a fascinating puzzle that holds one’s interest through the late game better than any earlier iteration.”

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Civilization V games often bog down when each society expands until the borders of empires bump into each other and wars become unproductive. But that’s exactly where the newest Civ V expansion, Brave New World, starts to generate opportunities for some real conquests. Based on a preview of the new expansion, players will be able to extend their aggressive behavior when borders bump into each other by engaging in culture wars or building trade empires. These kinds of victories give players an alternative to all-out warfare.

Firaxis Games packs so much content into its expansions that they are almost like new game launches in their own right. Brave New World should give you a lot of reasons to stay up late and play obsessively. We recently got a preview of the game, which comes out on the PC on July 9 in North America and July 12 overseas.

The new expansion from 2K Games’ and Firaxis Games could be just what players want at a time when they’ve played the 2.5-year-old game to death. Civilization V: Gods & Kings was released in June 2012, adding features such as religion, espionage, naval combat and nine new civilizations. Civilization V: Brave New World will feature international trade routes, a world congress, tourism, new cultural and trade victories, great works of art, eight new civilizations, and eight new Wonders. The struggles that will occur between empires over possession of the great works of art could be especially fun.

“With Gods and Kings, we added religion and a lot to the front half of the game,” said Ed Beach, executive producer of the expansion. “With Brave New World, we are emphasizing the back half of the game” where players start to settle into mature empires and lose hope of complete military victory. “We wanted to make sure there was new stuff coming and fresh all the way through the end.”

New civilizations

The studio previously announced Poland and Assyria as two of the new civilizations in the game. Now it is announcing Portugal and Zulu as well. Four more new civilizations are yet to be announced. Casimir is the leader of Poland, while Shaka Zulu is the leader of the Zulu Kingdom.

The Poles have strong solidarity in their culture, which gets them a free social policy as they advance through the eras, but that doesn’t mean they can get to a non-violent Culture Victory more easily. But the Culture Victory — where you get your culture to dominate the world — isn’t about filling out the five social policy trees and then building a Utopia project. It’s entirely different now.

The special unit for the Poles is the Winged Hussar, a medieval Renaissance cavalry soldier. They are a heavy shock cavalry unit and can blow a hole in the enemies line when they charge into it.

Brave new trade system

The new system for trade includes two new units: the caravan for land travel and cargo ships for the sea. You can build one of these units and then set it in motion on a trade route. The route can extend through a variety of cities and you can choose the route that maximizes your profits in gold or reaps the most luxury goods. The amount of gold generated by a trade route depends on how many resources and goods you have available to sell in your start city and whether the destination city has those goods or not. The point is to make more money by selling something that somebody else needs.

The visualization is good. If you highlight a potential trade route, it will show up on the map. If it runs through a barbarian camp or pirate region, you’ll have to provide protection. If those enemies attack your caravan or cargo route, you’ll lose it. It pays to send patrol ships out to scout the seas and protect your ships.

You can use this system to balance the resources throughout your own empire through internal trade. The ancient Egyptians used such systems to gather granite and supplies in Giza so that it could build the pyramids. The same is true here, where you enable your empire to build a Wonder more quickly. That helps you achieve a peaceful victory more easily. In the meantime, cities that have more trade will grow more quickly and become self-sufficient.

With the cargo ships, now it makes sense to build cities on coastal tiles. You can carry more goods on a ship and establish more lucrative trade routes. This pays off particularly well if you play the Portuguese empire, which is especially good at trade via ships. With Portugal, ruled by Maria I, you can take the trading game to an extreme. The special unit for the Portuguese is the Nau, a ship that is especially good for exploration. They accumulate money and experience the further away they are from their home turf. The Portuguese can also build a coastal fort to protect trade routes, and they can build trading posts along coasts too.

Trade complicates the world. If you declare war on someone, you’ll lose your trade routes. And that may hurt your empire in the long run.

Culture Victory

Beach said that Firaxis knew it needed to improve the Culture competition between empires. In the past, you just built a Wonder and hoped no one would attack you. If you protected it long enough in a defensive posture, you could claim a win. But that was very passive and not very exciting. Now, your goal is to dominate the world with your culture.

One way the game does that is to make you feel like you are building an amazing culture. You can create unique buildings like opera houses. In the past, if you built it, you would get four culture points that would help you on your road to winning. But now you only get one. If you want more, you have to fill your building with great works, such as The Great Gatsby novel by author F. Scott Fitzgerald. You can inspect the work, which comes with an educational description. And you can add it to the building and boost the culture point. There are scores of different great works in the game.

You can move them around and trade them with other players. Or, if you’re really conniving, you can attack a rival city and steal its great works so that you get the culture points. If you have the Louvre museum, you get bonuses from having works from all over the world. You can have great artists, writers, or musicians as well as a variety of building types.

“The culture game is more engaging, and you care about what you have collected,” Beach said.

Your great works also draw more tourists from other empires. You can push your culture out offensively by establishing trade routes with other empires, as tourists will come back along the trade route. It’s much easier to get a Culture Victory if you have open borders and trade routes. One of the dangers of trade routes is that religious fervor can flow along them as well. So a trade world may invite a religion into your empire, and you may have to deal with the risk of your enemy winning through a Religious Victory.

One of the cool new units in the culture wars is the Archaeologist. Once you discover archaeology, you can hire an archaeologist, who resembles Indiana Jones. You can then explore ancient ruins and bring back artifacts for your museums. The game remembers the locations of all of the ancient ruins, battle sites, or barbarian camps from the early stage of the game. Then it generates ruins at those exact sites. If you dig in lands of other empires, you may get into trouble as a cultural plunderer.

World Congress

The trade and culture mini-games figure into a new political system as well. Once all of the civilizations have been discovered, you can create a World Congress. Like a United Nations, the World Congress can be used to achieve political victories. These political councils can meet and change the rules of the game. You can propose, for instance, that a trade embargo be implemented against a particular nation. If you win that vote, then it becomes much harder for that nation to win the trade game. You can ban luxury goods such as furs or ban city-state trade.

When the game enters the industrial age, you can choose from new policies or ideologies, like freedom, order, or autocracy. The choices you make will affect your relations with other civilizations and alter victory conditions.

Ultimately, you can vote for a world leader and win the game by winning that election. In the more advanced part of the game, you can vote to build an international space station or create a World Fair. If you’re the host city of the World Fair, you get more benefits. You can choose a single world religion or start a nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty.  Each time you propose a vote on something, 30 turns will pass before the vote takes place. That allows you to prepare for the consequences of a vote.

Summary

This game is looking like another winning entry in the addictive Civilization series. We’re looking forward to plundering the great works of evil empires.

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Prepare your mouse hand: Developer Firaxis is back with another round of content for its addictive strategy game.

Publisher 2K and Firaxis announced this morning that they will release a new expansion for Civilization V called Brave New World this summer. This the second add-on pack for the 2010 turn-based strategy game. For those who don’t know Civilization, it puts players in charge of a small band of settlers that they must command throughout history.

Brave New World will focus on adding new layers to the culture and diplomacy game.

“After adding a number of great new features to Civilization V with the Gods & Kings expansion, the team continued to search for ways to create even more exciting gameplay through new systems and features,” Firaxis director Sid Meier said in a statement. “We’re happy to bring our fans another ambitious expansion that will provide hours and hours of new Civilization experiences.”

Like the $29.99 Gods & Kings expansion, Brave New World will add new civilizations, features, and systems.

The focus on culture will see Brave New World adding a new way to win a cultural victory. Players can use special artist units to create masterpieces to gain sway over rival nations. The first civilization with a majority influence wins the game.

On the diplomacy front, Civ V is adding the World Congress, that has the varying countries voting on important issues of war and trade.

In addition to those newly expanded systems, Brave New World will include international trade routes, nine extra civilizations, and more world wonders.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The barbarians officially have enough money to take on those pretentious Romans with their gates, and their culture, and their polytheism.

Earlier today, designer John Shafer’s new strategy game, At the Gates, surpassed its funding goal on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Nearly 1,350 backers already pledged $45,500, which eclipsed the project’s modest $40,000 budget. The funding campaign still has 24 days left to bring in more pledges.

For the unaware, At the Gates is a 4X strategy game (where players explore a map, expand their territory, exploit resources, and exterminate enemies) for the PC. Jon Shafer was previously the lead designer on Civilization V, a prime example of the sub-genre.

But Shafer isn’t just re-creating Civilization. He hopes to reinvigorate strategy with a new take on 4X that sheds some of its longtime elements. For example, players don’t control a major historical civilization; instead, they command a barbarian horde that must destroy the Roman empire.

You can read more about how Shafer intends to shake things up in our story about him and At the Gates.

Shafer and his team of developers at new studio Conifer Games will now focus on stretch goals. The team already has tiers for mod support, a map editor, and new playable barbarian factions. It is also looking into adding support for additional platforms and a reward tier that would provide a physical copy of the game with a box, a manual, and a DVD of At the Gates.

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If you’re Jon Shafer, you find another option: You start your own studio.

The lead designer for Civilization V and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress has founded Conifer Games, which you can find in the Detroit metro area. His first title is Jon Shafer’s At the Gates, a 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) turn-based 2D strategy game set at the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s due for a 2014 release.

“I am a creator. I’d rather be the person doing the design work, and I think this is the right way to do it — and the most fun for me,” Shafer said. “Obviously, Sid [Meier] has made that model work for a while now.”

Dumping the manager hat

Founding a game-design startup is all about making the game Shafer wants to create and doing it his way. He takes his inspiration from how hands-on Civilization designer Meier is at Firaxis (Shafer says he still does a great deal of programming and design) while divorcing the management duties that come with being a lead designer. It’s not necessarily about being indie — the freedom Shafer seeks is not just from big publishers but also big teams, which in his experience get in the way of making strategy games.

“[A strategy] game is a combo of systems that must work together well. It’s not an role-playing game where one person can do combat, another can do narrative, and another can do level design, and stitch it all together,” Shafer said. “With strategy, all go together seamlessly. You can’t separate the job. You have a vision and want to build it, and the number of nuances and details are immense. Your first and second drafts aren’t good enough. You must iterate.”

By starting a smaller studio, Shafer wants to close that design loop. He wants to be both the programmer and the designer. When he left Firaxis and went to Stardock, he tried to divorce game design from programming. But what he found is that he enjoys design work. “I had a conundrum — with larger teams, you can’t do it right,” he said. “You don’t have the time to do it right. You can’t ignore your team. You can’t lock yourself in a closet, and you don’t want to take the time from programming. The game can’t be as good.”

His conclusion? “What works for me is doing my own thing, starting something new, and for the development of At the Gates, I’m doing the design and A.I. programing, have another doing programming — a team of three, all living together — plus a few contractors. I can dig in how I want and spend time how I feel is best. It’s a ton of fun. It’s everything I wanted it to be. It’s what I wanted when I wanted to be off on my own.”

An evolution for strategy games?

While making the rounds after the announcement of Civilization V a few years ago, Shafer said that he was a student of history — in particular, 19th century German history. But he’s had an interest in many eras of world history. The theme for At the Gates comes from discussions for a Fall of Rome-type scenario he had with a developer friend from Firaxis, Scott Lewis. (“You can blame him for this,” Shafer joked.)

“In a 4X empire-building game, you start small and build up over time. The Romans didn’t do that in the later stages [of their empire], but the barbarian tribes they were fighting with did. That same friend got me hooked on the History of Rome podcast — one of the best out there — and it all coalesced with my game-design ideas.”

At the Gates is different because of its “evolving map.” Things change. One turn equals a month, and 12 turns equals a year. As Shafer points out, the change of seasons had an influence on the events of Rome’s fall. “When the Rhine or Danube freezes over, you can cross over, whereas in the summer, you can’t get an army over,” hesaid.

It’s also different because you’re not building an empire but seeking to save one — you’re destroying Rome’s crumbling corpse. This is an important distinction. “You don’t play as the Romans — you play as the barbarian tribes around them. The Huns, Goths, and Vandals,” Shafer said. “You have to move as resources expire.”

As At the Gates starts, the Roman Empire has already split into its Western and Eastern halves. Rome and Constantinople may be working together at this point or fighting. “At the beginning, they are tough. But they eventually get weaker and weaker,” Shafer said. “The progression is that you start with camps and build up over time.”

This is where the changing maps and eroding resources come into play. “The arc is different than in most empire builders and 4X games, where you get stronger and stronger and hit a point where you get so strong that no one can beat you,” Shafer said. This is where many players start new games as it’s just not fun to play out a scenario you can no longer lose.

“We wanted to get away from that,” he said. “One of the ways that we do is with depleting resources. You need food, wood to build improvements. In the early game, it’s fairly traditional. You go around, finding villages, resources, and uncovering the map. As the game gets in its later stages, the map runs out of stuff. The game climax is that your goal becomes to capture Rome or Constantinople, and you must do this before the map runs out of fuel.”

As your resources dwindle, you have two choices: Find more resources or take them from other barbarian tribes or the Romans. In many strategy games, you can sit and expand without fighting meaningful battles. That’s not going to happen in At the Gates.

“A big part of the game is trying to figure out where your next meal is coming from — during the first half, you can find resources pretty easily or capture iron mines or farms to keep economy going,” Shafer said. “But eventually, the easy pickings disappear. You must find new resources or take them from your neighbors. There is a military bent to the game — it’s a little bit more brutal.”

Shafter acknowledges this take isn’t going to appeal to all strategy gamers. “We wanted to do something fresh and interesting. The 4X genre is a great one, but there’s not a ton of innovation. Between seasons and a new arc to the game, it really spices up things.

“Unlike other strategy games, it becomes harder as you go.”

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Windows isn’t the best touch-control platform on the market, but I still want it on my laptop sometimes.

But until I saw Dennis Shirk, Firaxis’s lead producer on Civilization V, playing around with his game on a touch-enabled Ultrabook from Intel, I didn’t know that I wanted a touch interface in my 2,000-turn game of Civ.

Civilization is a strategy game that spans the breadth of human history, from a tiny settlement all the way to launching an interstellar space mission. Games can last for hours with lots of pointing and clicking, and it’s the type of gameplay that can lend itself to just touching and dragging on the screen.

In the video below, Shirk shows off the responsive touch controls of his game running on one of the powerful and slim laptops:

Civilization V touch controls use many of the gestures common to software optimized for any modern tablet:

• Pinching — Zooms the camera in and out.
• Dragging — Provides info about the unit or terrain the finger is hovering over.
• Two-finger scroll/pan — Moves the camera up and down or left and right.
• Tap — Select a unit.
• Double tap — Issue a move command to selected unit.
• Two-finger tap — Exit current command without issuing order.
• Three-finger tap — Close open menus or open the game menu.

Firaxis worked closely with Intel to get the game operating efficiently on Ultrabooks since many lack dedicated video cards.

The touch-screen controls are available in Civilization V since the last update.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gaming glasses have a legitimate purpose. I don’t get behind the “enhancing your game” gimmick many brands flaunt, but I do know that lightly tinted lenses decrease screen glare and help save your eyes. Turns out, human eyes don’t like staring directly into artificial light for hours on end.

I’ve spent the last few weeks testing three pairs of gaming glasses. Gunnar Optiks and Vision Concepts International both sent GamesBeat review pairs of their most popular models, and I appraised them. Do you really have to drop $79 or more to get a decent pair of glare-reducing glasses, and if you do, are they even remotely comfortable?

Well, I’m going to tell you…sort of. Mostly, I’m just going to make silly faces in Instagram pictures.

(Note: These glasses were not prescriptive, but Gunnar does offer that as an option.)

THE GLASSES

Vision Concepts Gamer’s Edge Eyewear: $39
The pair Vision Concepts sent me were really this green. I dig how the color gives them a real cyberpunk feel. The ear pieces are a little thick for my liking, but my head is weird, and I almost exclusively wear thin Wayfarer glasses from Ray-Ban. Besides the thickness, the shape is suitable for a lot of face types, and the glasses rest comfortably on my nose.

They’re almost too light, really. I am rough on eyewear, and every time I wore these, I was afraid I would snap them in two if I pulled just right. Nope. After a month of heavy use, they’re just as sturdy as the day I opened the box.

Gunnar Optiks Vayper Onyx: $79
When I contacted Gunnar Optiks for this product comparison, I asked them to send me a pair of its most popular brand. Well, Gunnar sent two pairs, each notably more expensive than the Gamer’s Edge.

The Vayper Onyx (that is such a silly name to say out loud) are part of Gunnar’s gaming line. The Gamer’s Edge glasses feel light, but these feel like they’re crafted from spider webs and morning dew instead of metal. I enjoy that the ear pieces are much thinner, but I’m afraid to even breathe on them for fear they’ll disappear.

Gunnar Optiks Attaché Phenom: $100
When I was thinking of descriptions for this pair, I couldn’t avoid words like “sleek,” “sexy,” and “outrageously expensive.” When I put these on, I feel like some sort of superhacker-spy. These are part of Gunnar’s computer line and are the heaviest of the three sets, and they certainly feel sturdy. The frame is entirely metal with little rubber bits on the end. While I was careful with the other pairs because they were so light, I babied the Phenom because I didn’t want to scratch glasses way more expensive than the pairs I wear to correct my vision.

They’re designed for programmers, data-entry professionals, and anyone who wants to pretend they’re really cool while they work with computers. These are almost too elegant for me and my perpetual hoodies and Iron Man accessories.

I did pretend I was Tony Stark (Iron Man) wearing these, though, and that was pretty fun.

COOLNESS TEST

I am a massive dork, but anyone can look cool if you put the right sunglasses on them. So this is the test to see how amazing I look in each pair.

Gamers Edge:

Vayper Onyx:

Attaché Phenom:

Conclusion
I like how I look in the Gamer’s Edge pair the most. I have a tendency to wear big, flashy glasses, and I love crazy frames. The Gunnars definitely look cool, but they don’t suit me as well as the green ones do. The Phenom looks a lot like the glasses that Yu Narukami wears in Persona 4, however, so if you need something for your cosplay outfit, they might work.

If I wanted a more professional look, though, I would definitely go with the Phenom. The other two look a little too extracurricular for office use.

The Onyx glasses also look too much like gun-range eyewear for me to use them every day.

COMPUTER SCREEN TEST

I spend most of my time staring at computer screens. Whether I’m writing for GamesBeat or selling video games, I’m almost always looking at a monitor. Gunnar recommends that customers wear its products for a week to determine if they’re useful, so I decided to follow that instruction for all three pairs. I wore them at work and at home, using three different monitors.

13-inch MacBook Air
I do most of my work on a MacBook Air. Apple’s LCD screens are crisp, and late at night I often get horrible eye strain because of it. I do turn down the brightness, but the MacBook’s light is still clean and blazing. Wearing the glasses while writing decreased my discomfort, but only when I managed to actually look through them.

Since I am often using my laptop on, well, my lap, I am almost always looking down at it. With the Gamer’s Edge and Phenom glasses, I found myself constantly looking over the edge of the frames instead of looking through the lenses. I do this with a lot of glasses, which is why I favor large ones.

So for general laptop use, I prefer the Onyx, even if the razor-sharp ear pieces often start cutting into my ears if I wear my over-the-ear Beats headphones for too long.

27-inch Vizio television
When I upgraded the living room to a 50-inch television, the old one turned into the monitor for my gaming PC. It turns out my mother was right about being too close to the TV: sitting mere inches from an HD screen will suck the life out of your eyeballs.

I use the desktop for games like Legend of Grimrock and Civilization V. Both titles have a tendency to trap me in my chair for hours on end. I often don’t realize how horrible I feel until I finally break free to get a drink or walk the dog. Then a sharp and preventable pain feels like it is burning through my retinas. Wearing the glasses prevented this.

I did not like wearing the Phenom to play games. Someone decided it was a great idea to print the Gunnar logo directly at the top of the left lens. I thought this was a sticker at first, but no. Someone really did make that design choice. If your eyes move around at all while you’re playing, you will always have something blurry in your field of vision.

The Onyx glasses win again as I found myself looking over the Gamer’s Edge pair even though the PC monitor is on the same level as my eyes. I just need big glasses! Funnily enough, the Onyx also have the silly Gunnar logo printed on the left lens. It isn’t a problem here, though, because the viewing area is so much wider that the logo is out of sight.

I question its purpose, though. I know what brand I’m wearing, and I will happily tell someone if they ask me.

15-inch work monitor
The monitor for my work computer is ancient. It’s a little dim, has a few dead pixels, and is pretty much only useful when running a retail point-of-sale system. One of the biggest tasks at my store is inputting new inventory item by item, which means staring at small text on a screen for most of the day.

Wearing computer glasses didn’t make a noticeable difference in my job performance or eye strain. They did, however, get a lot of comments from customers wanting to know why I was wearing sunglasses or “weird green things” over my eyes. Children seemed very uneasy around me when I wore the green glasses, and one man asked if I thought I looked cool wearing the Phenom.

Retail isn’t the best place for this cutting-edge eyewear.

3DS TEST

This one is pretty short: none of the glasses passed.

When you try to play a 3DS with the 3D functionality on and wear any of these glasses, it’s as if your eyes can’t fully process the image trickery. The result is a lot of double vision.

If you really want to decrease eye strain while using a 3DS, just turn the slider off.

YELLOW TEST

Yellow lenses give light a warmer color and make it easier to focus for long periods of time. In games, you probably don’t want your screen perpetually tinted that color.

As I wore the Gamer’s Edge glasses, I started to notice that my eyes adjusted to the color and just adopted it as part of the environment — kind of like color filters on movies. My brain accepted that the world had a weird sepia tone now, and I didn’t notice much color distortion. My boss at the game store said it felt like his eyes were adjusting like a camera when he put this pair on.

Both Gunnar glasses didn’t do as well. I was constantly aware that the world didn’t look quite right, as if I were wearing sunglasses. To test this fully, I played three games I am familiar with for an hour to see if I still noticed the color change by the end. In every case, I was less aware of the yellow hue when wearing the Gamer’s Edge lenses.

With the other two, though, the Onyx fared much better in color saturation than the Phenom. I think this has something to do with the Onyx lenses being wider. My eyes were less likely to look around the edges and notice the contrast.

FINAL IMPRESSIONS

My goal was to find out if you needed to spend lots of money on a decent pair of gaming glasses. The answer is, probably not. In all the tests, though, I liked the Onyx more for computer use, and I found the Gamer’s Edge lenses were much better if you didn’t want to constantly notice how yellow everything looks. I think either glasses are a smart buy for players looking for glare-reducing eyewear.

The pretty little Phenom just isn’t made for gaming, and Gunnar doesn’t pretend they are. The blurry text on the left lens, the $100 price point, and the smaller lenses make them much more appropriate for people working at computers. They are comfortable and have a sleek design, but I didn’t like wearing them when I was playing a game, and I spent most of my time worrying about scratching them.

Personally, I would go with Gamer’s Edge. They aren’t as elegantly designed as Gunnar’s entire catalog, nor are they as comfortable, but the lenses make all the difference. I also think the green suits my style, and accessories like this ultimately come down to how you think you look.

So, no, you don’t have to spend lots of money to get a decent pair of gaming glasses — unless you really, really want to.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Falling out with a game series is a difficult process, especially so when you’ve already stuck through the good and the bad of past entries. But Maryland developer Firaxis’ newest expansion for the PC strategy game Civilization V, subtitled Gods and Kings, is proving to test my resolve to hold off on that final goodbye.

Looking back now on the time I’ve spent with the original release, I suspect I was going through the usual stages of grief. Denial: “No, Rob. It’s really not that bad. Look at the graphics! The pretty unit animations!” Anger: “Seriously, computer A.I.? You’re going to place that weak, ranged archer next to my powerful swordsman? You’re not even trying!” Bargaining: “OK. I’ll just play on Immortal, the second highest difficulty. I never do that, but this should finally make for a good match.” Depression: “End turn…end turn…end turn….” Acceptance: “It’s not what it looks like, Civ V. I swear, Civ IV and I are just friends.”

I wanted Gods and Kings to make up for the fundamental issues with Civ V. I wanted to believe that the A.I. would know how to play the hex-based, tactical wargame portion. I wanted to believe that Firaxis could fix the inherent flaws in using a global happiness measure as a meaningful limit to empire growth.

But I’m left sitting with a night full of disappointment despite a few highlight moments here or there.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Civ V is finally a builder’s game
Many times when I approach a new Civ adventure, I just want to plunk down in some corner of the world and erect impressive structures of culture and significance that last the ages. Warring with rival nations can be a stressful affair that I’d prefer to avoid if possible. And if you choose an archipelago map type (because the A.I. still doesn’t seem to quite understand the importance of naval power), you’ll be left alone enough to build to your heart’s content.

Here’s where Firaxis actually fixed something important. The unusually long construction times in the initial release of Civ V meant that most of the buildings were useless. Taking 25 or 30 turns to place a Granary in a city for the extra food just wasn’t worth the effort when you’d do much better with a Colosseum for the happiness boost or a University for the additional beakers to push up your research rate for discovering new technology.

Firaxis has adjusted the pace of production (measured in hammers) of your empire so that it scales with tech progress appropriately, which was a major issue with the original Civ V release. Previously, you could accumulate beakers at such a pace that you’d advance well past new discoveries before you ever had a chance to build what you’d researched. Now, my large cities finally feel like the industrious metropolises I always imagined them to be.

Espionage makes diplomacy better
Civ V brings back Civ III-styled surveillance, which eschews fiddling with actual spy units and lets you get on with your secret missions from a dedicated menu screen. There, you can plant undercover agents within enemy cities, and they will gather intelligence about your rivals.

The spy’s primary function is to steal technology from other nations, but he also might discover nasty plots brewing within the halls of government of your neighbors. In one game, agent Col Ceathar revealed that an Iroquois attack party was en route to the borders of Carthage, led by my pal Dido. Clicking the pop-up notification took me directly to a diplomacy screen with Dido, where I had the opportunity to warn her of the pending assault. In other instance, the friendly Austrians warned me that Wu Zetian, leader of the Chinese, had her eyes on my lands. The way that espionage is woven into diplomacy makes for some exciting turns of events when you least expect.

The new religion mechanic plays into this as well. In another game, I decided to use my many, idle great prophets to spread Tengriism, the native belief system for my Celtic empire. After converting several cities in Japan, leader Oda Nobunaga asked for my audience to give me an ultimatum: Stop spreading Tengriism or face the consequences. Although we were prior allies, Japan and I were now on the brink of full-scale war.

Diplomacy is also less opaque than in the original Civ V. In another spat with Oda Nobunaga, he notified me that he had bullied a city-state that I had pledged to protect. I could make the incident a problem between us or let it go. The most interesting thing about this exchange was the fact that a pop-up detailing the exact effects — a hit to diplomatic relations or a loss of influence over the city-state — appeared when I moused over my options.

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Turn-based strategy game Civilization V now uses Valve’s Steam Workshop system for browsing, rating, and installing custom, user-crafted modifications.

In a official blog entry, publisher 2K Games community manager Greg Laabs listed the immediate benefits players receive from the Workshop’s inclusion, including browser-based and in-game mod libraries, following notable creators, favorites, and creating mod collections.

2K also released a new version of Civ V’s software development kit for mod authors to plug their works into the Workshop. To check out the steadily growing custom content for Civ V, head here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week Minecraft on 360 broke all digital-sales records on its first day, controversial marketing specialist Paul Christoforo filed a lawsuit against N-Control, Activision Blizzard touted Skylanders as bigger than Angry Birds, and Take-Two delayed BioShock Infinite.

You’ll also find reviews for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition,  Toy Soliders, Lone Survivor, and Awesomenauts.

Other GamesBeat stories included:

The DeanBeat: A tale of two industry giants

7 reasons why you should play The Secret World

Vita sales struggle in a new, tablet-ruled world

Carmageddon devs run over Double Fine’s Tim Schafer in the name of Kickstarter

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition is a successful port of an imperfect gem (review)

Minecraft on Xbox 360 breaks digital-sales records in first day

Civilization V: Gods and Kings will give you a reason to rebuild your empire (hands-on preview)

Toy Soldiers: A Great War in a small box (review)

The Sims Social on life support? EA says no way

Official DICE servers disappear from Battlefield 3

Skylanders is bigger than Angry Birds, says Activision Blizzard

Activision Blizzard says Black Ops II may be the biggest Call of Duty ever

World of Warcraft still on top with 10.2M subscribers in first quarter

5 Kickstarter games we may never see

Electronic Arts and Insomniac Games announce Outernauts for Facebook

Who wants a Wii U? Not three out of four gamers

Bethesda and id release 20th anniversary edition of Wolfenstein 3D as web/mobile game

Controversial marketing specialist Paul Christoforo files a lawsuit against N-Control

Are Chinese gamers addicted to crack?

Adventure game veteran Jane Jensen reaches Kickstarter goal

Mojang talks Minecraft subscriptions, boycotting E3

Lone Survivor delivers story better than big-name games (review)

MMORPG writer discusses the thin line between labor and love (exclusive)

Awesomenauts: Think of it as multiplayer online battle arena training wheels (review)

Company of Heroes 2 explores WWII’s Eastern front

Journey designer: PlayStation Network players “more likely to be interested in artistic games” than 360 or Wii

VentureBeat:

Why China’s game business will hit $20B by 2016 (exclusive interview)

Cmune spreads UberStrike to new platforms and raises funds from Skype founder

Game sales crash 42 percent in April with a light release schedule and early Easter

Facebook games don’t have to be stupid, according to AviNation (exclusive)

Call of Duty, Skylanders lead Activision Blizzard to beat analysts’ expectations

Milestone for a mobile blockbuster: Angry Birds hits 1 billion downloads

Take-Two delays highly anticipated BioShock Infinite until Feb. 2013

EA’s focus: Brands, platforms, and talent

Zynga launches Bubble Safari as it moves into arcade-style social games

Starhawk developers learned from social games that “analytics is king” (interview)

Hackers disrupt the gameplay of Zynga’s YoVille social game

EA chief suggests that Zynga overpaid for OMGPOP/Draw Something

Angry Birds creator Rovio says merchandising is 30 percent of revenue

Awesome! Raptr will give you targeted rewards just for playing games

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The relatively nascent social network and smartphone platforms have begun to challenge the consoles and the PC. But rather than siphon away players, these platforms are helping games reach new players. With the list below of the year’s top game releases, you can begin to see how these new forces are reshaping the industry. Nintendo had some decent hits but failed to produce a game that resonated with everybody. By contrast, Angry Birds was a phenomenal success, with more than 50 million downloads. Never before has an iPhone game climbed so high on everyone’s favorite list. The progression is clear: iPhone gaming has hit a major milestone with its first blockbuster hit. And the games are getting better and better.

The common thread between the traditional console games and the emerging titles on the iPhone is that the best games keep players engaged, but also leave them the option of playing for a short time. These games give you the option of playing for 10 minutes or three hours. They can hold your attention because the quality is outstanding. The duality of quality and time efficiency makes games more accessible and more likely to draw in the millions of people who profess not to have the time to play. Even the longer games — such as the 30-hour Red Dead Redemption — can be broken down into shorter missions. As long as games focus on quality, engagement and accessibility, they will keep gaining a larger share of our entertainment time.

Check out the list and vote for your favorites in the poll at the bottom. Also, please leave comments explaining your vote. I’ve also included in the poll other titles that were popular this year.

1. Red Dead Redemption
Developer: Rockstar Games.
Publisher Take-Two Interactive
Available on: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Average Metacritic rating: 95 out of 100
Our score: 97 out of 100

This could have been a spaghetti Western, but instead it turned out to be an epic. Red Dead Redemption is a great example of cinematic storytelling in a genre of video games that hasn’t been done to death. It stands out as a Wild West game the way that Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven stood out as a movie. And it shows that the “open world” style of Grand Theft Auto works wonderfully well in the Wild West. You play John Marston, a farmer-turned gunslinger who has to hunt down an outlaw in order to save his family. You can wander through a vast fictional turn-of-the-century Western world full of towns, hideouts, grave robbers, swindlers, lawmen, and everything else you need to make a Wild West setting come to life. The graphics are beautiful, the characters are memorable, and the Dead Eye slow-motion gunslinging makes you feel like a quick-draw artist.

The variety of activities — from horse racing to animal hunting — keeps you from getting bored. You can take on a hundred bad guys with a Gatling gun or just sit back in the evening and watch the wild critters roam across a moon-blanched prairie. There is so much ambient life out on the prairie that just looking at the landscape is relaxing — until a cougar attacks you. The whole time, you feel you’re making choices with consequences. You can wind up being a feared gunslinger, or a respected do-gooder.

What worked in this game’s favor was that there weren’t dozens of Western games on the market. Game developer Rockstar spent an estimated $100 million over six years to make this game, which many called a masterpiece. I felt that it delivered on every front –right up to its ending — and that’s why it’s the best game of the year.

2. Call of Duty: Black Ops
Developer: Treyarch
Publisher: Activision Blizzard
Available on: PS 3, Xbox 360, and PC
Average Metacritic rating: 88 out of 100.
Our score: 95 out of 100.

This game was just a hair away from being No. 1. It had a great and fresh setting in the Cold War, but it was just a tad too familiar to win the top spot. If you played last year’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, you could very well come away feeling that this game is an incremental improvement, which explains its relatively low Metacritic score. I didn’t mind the familiarity because I can never get enough of Call of Duty. Neither can anyone else. The title sold more than $650 million worth in its first five days of sales, breaking all records. It had an unfair advantage since its predecessor, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, was the previous bestselling video game of all time. But last year’s lousy story in Modern Warfare 2 sorely tested me as a fan of every installment of this series. And I was quite worried when the mainstay Call of Duty development studio, Infinity Ward, melted down amid a dispute between founders and executives. But Call of Duty Black Ops had a strong movie-like story at its core.

The single-player campaign focuses on a brainwashed covert agent and his CIA handler who embark on a series of clandestine missions behind enemy lines to stop a rogue Soviet conspiracy to use nerve gas against America. The agents have access to all sorts of experimental weapons such as Dragon’s Breath, or shotgun ammo that sets its targets on fire, and a crossbow with explosive bolts. Put that together with the Cold War environments such as Vietnam and the music of the 1960s and you have the makings of a great combat game. The story unfolds a bit at a time, and you eventually get to a revelation, much as you do with a good blockbuster movie. The online multiplayer combat is especially addictive. You can play it for weeks after you finish the single-player game. (I’m a brigadier general at multiplayer level 42). I expect to play the multiplayer version for weeks, at least until the next major game forces me to quit. That means a lot of games launching in the wake of Black Ops will find that their potential audience is still a bit tied up.

3. Angry Birds
Developer: Rovio
Publisher: Chillingo and Rovio
Available on: iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Android, Symbian, Palm Pre, Maemo
Our score: 94 out of 100

Everybody loves Angry Birds. During my Thanksgiving holiday, all of the kids were playing the iPhone game. I let my college-age nephew play it on an iPad and he was still playing it three hours later. The game has become the killer app of the iPhone, dominating the App Store for much of the year and launching phenomenally well on Android as well. The title comes at a special moment in time for the iPhone, since the smartphone is struggling to be recognized as a legitimate platform for real games. After Angry Birds, there can be no doubt that a mobile game can be as fun as the more traditional console and PC games. It stands out among 44,000-plus games on the App Store as uniquely fun. With Angry Birds plush toys on the market and talk of an animated movie, this title has become a cultural phenomenon. For the iPhone, this moment is a lot like when YouTube took off after kids started creating silly eruptions by combining Diet Coke and Mentos. The videos became viral and YouTube cemented itself in the culture as a site for quirky user-generated videos.

As a game, Angry Birds couldn’t be simpler. The evil green pigs steal the eggs of the birds, who become very angry. Seeking to retrieve their eggs, they slingshot themselves into the fortresses of the pigs. The touchscreen of the iPhone was a perfect interface for the slingshot mechanic, which was made all the better with accurate physics. Other games used the slingshots before, but Angry Birds was polished. When you fail to destroy the pigs, they smile and snicker. That’s enough to make you want to play it over and over again until you wipe out the pigs. Rovio had made 50 other games before Angry Birds. They finally created one that resonated universally. All I can say is, watch out, Nintendo, there’s a new player in town that understands how to make games that appeal to everyone from three-year-olds up to octogenarians.

4. Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment/Activision Blizzard
Available on: PC
Average Metacritic rating: 93 out of 100.
Our score: 93 out of 100.

Blizzard’s greatest asset is patience. The first StarCraft debuted in 1998. It was a real-time strategy game where you played one of three races fighting for control of the galaxy. You create units to collect resources, then spend those resources building up your base and your armed forces. Then you let them loose against the enemy and fight on multiple fronts until one side gives up out of exhaustion. The first game sold 11 million units and essentially became the national sport of South Korea, where professional gamers still play it today.

Blizzard waited 12 years before launching the sequel. It was worth the wait. The game play was refined and the enemies were perfectly balanced through years of playtesting. And Blizzard connected the tissues of the story together much better, thanks to the heavy use of animated cut scenes that were movie-like. The cinematic scenes immerse you in the story and make you care about the characters and what happens to them. With superb multiplayer combat, I have no doubt that people will be playing this game for years, and not just in South Korea.

5. Mass Effect 2
Developer: BioWare
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Available on: Xbox 360, PC, PS 3
Average Metacritic rating: 96 out of 100
My score: 90 out of 100

The story behind this sci-fi game is a lot like the classic film The Seven Samurai, except there are 11 tales about the team members that you, as Commander Jon Shepard, have to recruit for a suicide mission to save the galaxy. It is a blend of BioWare’s traditional role-playing game with a lot of action blended in. You wander around the galaxy in what seems to be an open-ended universe, but the story pulls you into certain planets and scenes, where you encounter ethical dilemmas that force you to choose between doing what’s right, loyalty to your comrades, and fulfilling the ultimate mission of saving the galaxy. The game is at its best when it makes you feel like you’re in complete control of the direction of the story and that your choices will lead to the salvation of humankind in the galaxy.

The stories along the way are emotionally engaging, like the tale of the super-caffeinated scientist Mordin Solus, who turns out to have a conscience behind his dedication to science. The execution on this game was much better than the first, as I noted in my full review. The action sequences and battles are much more spellbinding than they were in the first title. If there’s a fault, it gets a little repetitive as you go through each character’s own tale and it is easy to predict that every character has some kind of deep dark secret. I’m glad to see EA’s shift to focus on high-quality games paying off in both critic scores and market sales.

6. Halo: Reach

Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Microsoft
Available on: Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 91 out of 100.
Our rating: 95 out of 100.

Bungie’s swan song for the Halo franchise wasn’t a disappointment. The latest game in the sci-fi series that began nearly a decade ago lived up to its promise. This prequel takes us back to the beginning of the Covenant war against humanity. It has an overarching sense of fatalism about it, since you know how the story turns out if you played the earlier games. But you still want to follow the journey that is full of individual acts of heroism within the larger tragedy of a losing war. You play a member of Noble Team, a group of Spartan III super-soldiers who have to defend the planet Reach. The action in this game is first-rate and full of variety. You get to shoot all sorts of weapons, drive different vehicles, take to the air and even to outer space. The combat scenes in zero gravity are cool. And the multiplayer game is first-rate, making the game last a lot longer. This series has seen more than 35 million units sold, mainly because it has become a part of the fabric of youth culture. Microsoft will try to pump out more Halo games with its internal studio, 343 Industries. We’ll see if it can keep the quality up as original developer Bungie moves on to a new fictional game universe.

7. Sid Meier’s Civilization V
Developer Firaxis Games
Publisher:2K Games label of Take-Two Interactive
Metacritic rating: 90 out of 100.
Our rating: 95 out of 100.

I never met a Civ game I didn’t like. When new versions of Civilization hit the market, productivity goes down around the world. The games are so addictive that you always want to take just one more turn and then find yourself looking up at the clock in the wee hours of the morning. Civilization V is a lot like playing Risk on your computer, but with many more sophisticated nuances and strategic considerations. It’s a thinker’s game, for those who want to savor each move without the pressure of a ticking clock. You can develop a good strategy in the game, but you can never completely prepare for the secret deals and treachery of your seven neighboring empires. Those rivals play their cards strategically, sometimes surprising you with their cunning. The game is graphically beautiful and gives you the option of being a micro-manager or running an automated empire. This version made the enemies more like characters. Perhaps the best thing about this game is that the user interface is simpler than it used to be, even though the range of options and strategies you can pursue is mind-boggling. This is the kind of game that’s going to save the PC as a video game system.

8. Alan Wake
Developer: Remedy Entertainment
Publisher: Microsoft
Available on: Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 83 out of 100
My score: 95 out of 100

Alan Wake had the great misfortune of debuting on the same day as Red Dead Redemption. It was also panned by critics for some performance glitches. But I felt it was under-rated. This game’s strong psychological thriller story will hold your attention like a well-done thriller movie. You play Alan Wake, a bestselling horror writer who has writer’s block. His wife takes him to the idyllic Pacific Northwest town of Bright Falls, and then Wake’s life becomes a nightmare. Wake’s wife disappears, and he begins finding the pages of a horror novel that he doesn’t remember writing. The novel’s scenes start coming true, and a Darkness inhabits beings known as The Taken, who seek to murder Wake. Wake has to use light — flashlights, flares, and flashbang grenades — to hold off the Taken and then dispatch them with weapons such as shotguns. Wake has to solve a mystery and seek out havens of light in the darkness as he deciphers what is real and what is nightmare. The story and game play are entirely original. This game also took six years to develop as an exclusive for the Xbox 360 (see our interview with storyteller Sam Lake on why it took so long). Hopefully, the weak sales of this game won’t discourage further innovation in storytelling. Alan Wake is a much-needed breath of fresh air for video games. I consider it to be a work of art, as I said in my full review.

9. BioShock 2
Developer: 2K Marin, Digital Extremes and 2K Australia
Publisher: Take-Two Interactive
Available on: PS 3, Xbox 360
Average Metacritic rating: 88 out of 100.
My score: 90 out 100

This was another game that, despite an initial burst of enthusiasm, didn’t sell as well as expected. But I love its combination of imaginative setting and hardcore combat. The game is a sequel to the 2007 game BioShock. That title introduced us to the underwater utopia-gone-bad of Andrew Ryan, the megalomaniac who built the city of Rapture as a haven for intellectuals (much like in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged). That utopia was so unique, with its art deco architecture, 1930s music, and 1940s-style characters in cool period fashions. When it all went bad, it became a terrifying place and was the perfect setting for a combat game where you had a dizzying array of weapons to choose from.

In BioShock 2, you return to Rapture in its earlier history and find yourself immersed in a fight for survival again. This time, you are playing a Big Daddy character (like the one pictured) where you are built like a tank and have to find and protect (or exploit — it’s your choice) the cute little girls known as Little Sisters. The enemies are terrifying and smart, closing in on you from multiple directions as you fire and switch weapons. The Little Sisters are so swift and deadly that you would swear there was a real person controlling them. Fortunately, you are well armed. In this game, you can wield two weapons, using one weapon to freeze, incinerate, or electrocute enemies and then another weapon in your other hand to finish the enemy. BioShock 2 has the same great combination of horror, nostalgic art style, addictive game play and engrossing story. If there is a flaw, it’s that some of the weapons are just too powerful.

10. Heavy Rain
Developer: Quantic Dream
Publisher: Sony
Available on: PS 3
Average Metacritic rating: 87 out of 100
My score: 89 out of 100

Some games are complimented for being “movie-like.” This one was criticized for being more like a movie than a game. But it had a very unique interactive storytelling style, where you had to mash buttons quickly in the right sequence in order to move on to the next scene and the next cinematic story clip. Heavy Rain conveys great emotion, like the panic a father feels as he searches for his lost son in a crowded shopping mall. This game has lots of layers to it. You start out doing extremely mundane things, using your PS 3 game controller to take a shower, brush your teeth, and turn on your TV; and eventually you move up to more important things, like changing your baby’s diaper. That is your basic training to get you ready for the interactive story of the game. In the story, a serial killer is loose, and the only clue is an origami creation left on the body. The main character’s son is kidnapped and you play multiple characters who all have a role in trying to rescue the missing child. As the story unfolds, the question arises: How far will you go to save your son? It is a psychological thriller like Alan Wake, but the game play is far different. It’s a cool story, and the interaction is interesting, but the action could be better. Still, this game gets kudos for its originality and drama.

Online Surveys – Zoomerang.com

I’ve been playing the turn-based strategy game for a couple of weeks now, and it’s the only game that could have knocked me out of my addiction to StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. Some have called this the “anti-StarCraft,” since it relies on chess-like, thoughtful thinking rather than frenetic, on-the-fly real-time strategy. It takes me back to the days when I played strategy games on big maps on the floor of my home.

The fact that these two great games came out back to back — StarCraft II in July, and Civilization V earlier this month — gives me hope that the PC isn’t dead as a game platform. In fact, if you consider social games on Facebook, the PC is thriving. That’s important because the PC is still one of the platforms that allows for the introduction of new innovations such as better graphics. For the companies that still love the PC, such as Blizzard Entertainment (maker of StarCraft II and World of Warcraft) and Take-Two, the PC can be an important buffer against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on the consoles. The PC also offers a wide audience of diverse players.

You can’t get any broader in appeal than Civilization V. Parents like its educational value, since it teaches players about ancient civilizations and competitive strategy among empires. Since it isn’t just about blowing things up, boys and girls like it. Kids enjoy playing all-powerful gods looking down on cool animated scenes from a birds-eye view. Even though you’re watching the action from far above, the animations of the tiny little armies and ships — with the sounds of battle or marching — are a joy to watch. The game’s tagline is “just one more turn,” which implies you’re so addicted that you’re going to play it for just one more turn before you go to bed.

Because of its broad reach and attention to detail, it’s no surprise that the whole series has sold more than 9 million units over time. That’s something like $400 million sold at retail, which makes Civilization one of the most valuable properties in video games. My guess is this version of the game will sell great.

I give the game a 95 out of 100 rating, the same rating I gave to Halo: Reach, lower than the 97 rating I gave to StarCraft II, and higher than the average rating of 91 on review aggregator Metacritic. I like it because the single-player campaigns have a lot of variety and always surprise me. Each game you play is different. Overall, the fifth installment is fresh, and that’s no small achievement for a series that game designer Sid Meier started way back in 1991.

Here’s an example of a series of surprises in a single game: As Julius Caesar, I was deep into building coliseums and granaries to keep my population happy. I ignored increasingly belligerent threats from my neighbors and maintained a small defensive force to keep any nation at bay. I had more cities than anyone else and didn’t worry about being attacked. But then Ramesses II of Egypt and Elizabeth I of England conspired against me and launched a surprise attack.

Fortunately, I commanded good ground, with a natural ring of hills and cities that formed natural borders against attackers. I kept my archers up in the hills and used the archers inside my cities to shred the forces of the attackers. They attacked my cities but couldn’t make much headway. I brought in swordsmen and mounted knights to tear up the remaining armies and the treacherous hordes retreated. I was aided by the once-neutral city-state of Hanoi, which kept England at bay. By the time I built up my forces to counterattack, the losers had had enough and negotiated peace agreements with me. I had to keep on building features in my cities to keep the growing populations happy. But I never forgot who attacked me and then, in alliance with China’s Wu Zetian (pictured right), attacked Ramesses II, who quickly collapsed as he was attacked from two directions. Eventually, I built enough armies to take on China and England at once. Only then did I find that beyond their borders lay Persia, a mighty empire that was far more powerful than my war-stunted civilization. While I was busy fighting wars, Persia raced ahead building man-made wonders and technologies. While I still had sailing ships, Persia was armed with aircraft carriers. There are only 200 years left in the game for me to catch up, and I am certainly the underdog right now.

It’s surprising campaigns like that which can keep you busy with Civilization for many hours. Now that I’ve spent so much time with the game, I can appreciate the design that went into the user interface, which is very uncluttered given that you have to keep track of dozens of armies, workers, and cities. You can automate the workers to make improvements and just focus on the big stuff, or you can micro-manage if you wish. The streamlining of a complicated interface isn’t easy to do, and others could learn from this interface on how to design complicated user software.

The map is also prettier to look at and easier to grasp than in previous versions. Each section of the map is now divided into hexagons (which you can turn on or off), much like the old board-based war games. With hexagons, movement is easier. You never see, for instance, a ship go through a peninsula because it’s not clear exactly where the borders between land and sea are.

You also have to deploy your armies with terrain in mind, since you can’t stack them. In the past, it was always unwieldy to stack 10 different military units in a single spot. It was hard to see which units were in a particular location. And there was no real sense for how big an army was when you were attacking it. Now, you have to put your artillery in the right high positions, protected from frontal attack. So there’s more actual strategy and maneuvering that you have to consider when fighting battles.

Sea transportation was also a nightmare in previous games. You had to build separate naval units and move them to a particular location before your soldiers or workers could board the ships. Now you just move a land unit into the ocean and it automatically boards a transport ship.

Another big change is that the emperors of the other civilizations are true animated characters now. They talk in a kind, petulant, or hostile manner — and are fully animated when doing so. In that sense, Civilization V brings the characters and people back into the game. In the past, that was easily lost since you saw the action from above.

I played the game on the Warlord level, just below normal, because I found it hard to stay alive long enough in the early years of empire building. Also, I had to play the quick version of the game because it took far too long to build new units in the game. Otherwise, if you build a unit, chances are it will be obsolete by the time you’re done.

The game isn’t perfect in that it still takes time to execute your orders once you end your turn. The game makes you to wait while it makes all sorts of changes to the world. But the good thing is that it never crashed while I played with an Nvidia Fermi-based desktop computer. I played the DirectX 11 version of the game and it was both beautiful and responsive.

This game reminds me of why I love everything Civ. I’m looking forward to seeing what a smaller Civ experience will be like when Sid Meier launches a long-awaited Facebook version of Civilization sometime soon. By the way, don’t tell my bosses I’ve been playing a lot. They don’t know I’m spending all my time “researching” games.

Here’s a video review by GameTrailers.com below.

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