Maybe it's just me, but I'm thinking Gamespot's Wii division right now is a lot like a baseball closer whose team is in the midst of a streak of blowouts and never gets into a save situation. Every time some crappy game comes out for the Virtual Console, Gamespot feels a need to review it just to get its bullpen some innings. Even for games that are quite good (Ocarina of Time), is it really necessary to review it for the Wii when it was already reviewed when it came out the first time for the Nintendo 64? Either it's emulated properly or it isn't, but since the VC has a pretty flawless track record for getting emulation right, even that's a moot issue.

Of course, this diarrhea of the pen on Gamespot's part speaks to a greater issue with the Wii, namely that there just aren't any games for it that aren't at least a decade old and sourced from somewhere else, much less any that are actually worth playing. It really doesn't augur well for the long-term success of Nintendo's experiment that the best Wii games thus far have been the pack-in Wii Sports and some SNES games.

Call me crazy, but I think the Wii's going the way of the Gamecube if Nintendo doesn't get its ass in gear.

Been playing Patrician 3 again---call it "Rostock Project 3.0" (v1.0, last September, was scrapped with my old PC, v2.0, in February, fell idle after a long Oblivion kick.) I'm not actually sure whether I prefer P3 or Port Royale 2 (which are essentially the same game in a lot of ways), since each has its own very strong virtues. The distinct advantages of the former are as follows:

- All cities are on the same side, so you don't have to worry about other nations' buccaneers constantly monkeywrenching your businesses.

- With the lone exception of Spices (which are found in great abundance in Bruges and Scarborough, it seems), all products in the game are actually produced somewhere, so no artificial shortages like in PR2 (which has three products wholly depending on deliveries from Europe).

- Ship lineups are quite simple. There's snaikka, crayer, cog, and (eventually) holk. No wondering what you're going to get when you sail into a port with a shipyard---if you start in 1350 or later everything is right where it's supposed to be.

- Avoiding pirates is actually possible. In P3, if you're not a combat-oriented player the game doesn't penalize you.

- In addition to the above, you can actually build a town without having to play Kull the Conqueror first.

PR2 has its good points (goods production is a snap, a fact which almost tilts the balance by itself), but right now I'm just more into what P3 has to offer.

Just completed a successful Rome: Total War Barbarian Invasion as the Sassanids, driving the Eastern Roman Empire completely out of Asia Minor and North Africa, then mounting a thrilling siege of Constantinople for the final victory.

Oh wait.  That's right.  The final siege involved pushing three massive armies up to the walls, using assassins to pick off family members as they came to try and relieve the siege, and watching the garrison punk out without a fight to give me the victory screen.  Yawn.  But hey, a win's a win.

Just a quick thought, but I'd love to do those gameplay video-type entries you see all over GameSpot.  Too bad my games are so ill-suited to being filmed!  Seriously, folks...would YOU want to watch gameplay footage of Europa Universalis 3?  (I'd say "I'll do Oblivion stuff", but my Oblivion wanderings are too random even for THAT game.)

 Maybe I'll do something along those lines with Sims 2...maybe not.

Gamespy's Shivering Isles Review 

Delsyn made an EXCELLENT point about how Oblivion players have been spoiled with mods---Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul (yes, the same mod that annoyed me as recently as two months ago, until I figured out how to work with it) in particular made a bunch of changes, almost all of them good, and certainly almost all of them good enough to fill anyone with dread at the idea of playing Oblivion or any of its content packs the way Bethesda intended.  Level ranges matter.  Especially in a premium-content expansion, level ranges matter TREMENDOUSLY.

Of course, on the subject of mods and modding, it stands to question whether Oscuro and friends will view Shivering Isles as something to be tweaked to test experienced players (like the Burning Crusade stuff in World of Warcraft) or whether it should be integrated in such a way as to encourage a new character to dive right in (probably the route Bethesda decided on, if the reviews of Lv1 characters kicking butt in Sheogorath's domain are anything to go by).  I lean toward the former, actually, but I would---I have a Lv24 character with over 120 hours' play in the gameworld.

Either way, I'll hold off buying Shivering Isles until it's been modded to the same degree that the base game has.  The idea of playing vanilla Oblivion, even with new content, makes me shudder.

I mentioned yesterday that I was going to do a "trillion dollar project" on Cap2.  I decided to cut it at "foregone conclusion" after I forced my major rivals out of business and dominated all 76 consumer products in the game (from apparel to watches.)  I love how Cap2 doesn't have any of those silly government regulations and restrictions on trade...one of my rivals had a head-and-shoulders lead on me in Leather Goods technology, so while my R&D department was catching up I decided to manufacture leather wallets and handbags and price them at 1 cent (you can do this when your corporation is pulling annual profits over 2 billion dollars).  Then, once my opponent (who'd been in business for 31 game years) was forced out, I restored the price to the level required to maintain a 100% product rating (margins were somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 an item) and made an absolute killing.

 After that, my next dirty trick was to set up a massive ($300M/yr or so) R&D operation dedicated to researching technologies even in products I did not yet manufacture (stuff like air conditioners and DVD players) so that once the time came to get into those industries I'd have the max quality bonus available to me.  The world was taken by storm, and it was glorious.

 Meanwhile, my personal avatar kept racking up dividend payments while collecting a $300M salary annually.  By the time I threw the kill switch at 1:30 in the morning, my net worth was $218 billion (that would be 4 times Bill Gates' fortune), half of which was in cash.  I'm thinking having more money in your Scrooge McDuck money bin than Bill Gates has in cash, stock, and other assets might just be about as cool as it gets.

As an amusing aside, I'm thankful to the gods that Capitalism II's resource-depletion algorithm ensures that there are always at least two sources of any given raw material---I tapped out more gold mines than a Warcraft 3 player in the pursuit of my thriving jewelry business.

In closing: I have GOT to write a FAQ for that game that seriously dissects the raw material costs and margin-per-item stuff and use it to create a vertically-integrated pricing guide.  It should be a fairly simple matter---take the total salaries of every worker at a farm or factory, add the monthly maintenance cost of the firm, and divide it by the number of units of throughput that can be run through the sales units in any given month (that last one's the tricky part, especially for things like silica or leather that never seem to hit their theoretical maximum outputs for lack of factories and whatnot making use of them.)  For manufactured goods the margins are obvious---just do the math based on your inputs and the capacity of a purchasing unit; ditto for things with non-employee-dependent costs (apartments, commercial buildings, media outlets, although I've yet to see demonstrated a good way to determine the reach-and-CPM relationships in those media.)

All of the above sure seems like a lot of work.