Games

I decided to roll all of my normal 'looking ahead' posts into one this year. It's a bit late, so January is missing from these lists and thus it's a list looking forwards to the next eleven months, rather than twelve. Books 2013 looks set to be an interesting year. At the more literary end of the spectrum we have new novels by Graham Joyce and Christopher Priest (two novels in three years is, by his standards, astonishingly productive). At the diametric opposite end of the scale we have Raymond E. Feist's last-ever Riftwar novel, which is being published to a reception of stone-cold indifference by most SFF readers. Inbetween we have the ongoing re-release of David Wingrove's Chung Kuo series (set to expand by four volumes this year) and the resumption of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Shadows of the Apt series, which reaches its ninth and penultimate volume. Neil Gaiman also presents us with his first adult-oriented, full-length novel in eight years, which should ...

Following last week's leaks, the Creative Assembly have confirmed that their next game will be Total War: Rome II . Details on the game are still somewhat sparse, but we know that the game will feature some serious graphical improvements over the previous titles in the series and, after the tight focus of Shogun 2 , will be again opting for a sprawling, epic scale. This time around the game will cover all of Europe, extending further east than the original Rome: Total War map, although it will again feature many of the same factions. Whether the Roman faction will be split between three families as before has not yet been confirmed. Creative Assembly have said that the game is their biggest project to date, requiring a budget 40% larger than their biggest previous game. The battle engine, although based on the same Warscape technology that every Total War title since Empire has employed, has received some serious upgrades. Combined-arms land-and-sea battles have been retained...

A fan-made logo.  Creative Assembly have revealed that the next Total War title will be announced on 6 July at the Rezzed gaming convention. At the same time a number of PC gaming magazines have said that there will be a big reveal in their July issues. One of them, PC Gameplay , went as far as listing the contents for their next issue and confirming there will be an article on Total War: Rome II (or Rome II: Total War for those who preferred Creative Assembly's old-school naming system). Excellent news. Rome: Total War was an excellent strategy game (well, once the patches upgraded the AI to something more formidable) and the last title in the series to garner near-universal praise. We can assume that Rome II will have vastly superior graphics and will likely employ the same format as the recent Empire , Napoleon and Shogun 2 (apparently it will continue to use the Warscape engine of those games) games by having both naval and ground battles, as well as possibly combined-a...