Rome Total War

Rome Total War is a RTS game from the Total War series.  The single player is about you conquering all of the Roman Empire and you are given a few areas.  The goal of the game is to control a lot of areas/cities and to be declared the Roman Emperor.  You get to manage multiple cities and build up your armies, but you also get to manage your armies first hand whenever you get into battles.  This game is very intimidating just based on its size, it starts in about 350 BC and you play through a couple hundred years of conquering, each year is divided into two turns.  Late in the game, when you control many areas, each turn can take a lot of time, especially if you don't auto-resolve battles (when one of your armies goes against an opponent's army, you hit a button so that the game randomly generates the results based on who had more and better men.)

When you play it, you get to learn a lot about the Roman Republic and how it functioned.  When playing through you are a major family from Rome and you can get elected to magistrative positions and the Senate assigns missions to you, if you complete them you gain popularity with them and if you don't, you lose popularity with them.  One of the big requirements to win the game is that you are the supreme ruler of Rome, so you must gain popularity through the way you rule and when you do certain things like defeat an enemy.

Overall I really like this game, mostly because it is a game that involves a lot of strategy and is really long and lasts for a while.  I also like how the game makes me think about everything and doesn't get boring even after many hours of gameplay.

See you next time!
Chauncey

Diablo 3 Will be Legendary

Diablo 3 so far looks like an incredible game, it will come out in America and Europe on May 15.  It is an action based RPG.  When you start you get to choose from so far 5 different classes including: Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Wizard, Monk and Witch Doctors.  You can customize your skills and spells and attach runes to them to make them more powerful.  There are also a few followers that you can hire (the Diablo 3 hirelings.)  You can also customize your hirelings abilities and what not.

One of the aspects of the game that I am most excited about is the game's promised auction house.  You can trade items that you find in-game in the auction house for either in-game gold or REAL MONEY.  Blizzard does take a small transaction fee whenever you trade items, they also take a fee whenever you withdraw money from Blizzard to get your actual money.  Don't worry, there is a whole bunch of security having to do with this aspect of the game, as it would be very unfortunate if you were to lose all of the cash that you played for hours to get.

I'm going to go a little more in-depth onto each of the Character Classes.

Monk - Monks are melee attackers, or physical, and they focus on having high speed, combos, aura, bonuses, and tactics.


Barbarian - Barbarians are melee attackers just like the Monks, but they are more brute force.  They use fury as their resource pool.


Demon Hunter - The Demon Hunter is a ranged attacker that specializes in bows and crossbows to attack.  They also have a lot of traps and some melee attacks that they can use (those are ranged melee.)


Wizard - The Wizard is a pure spellcaster, using arcane and elemental magic to do his bidding via a devastating array of offensive spells.


Witch Doctor - The Witch Doctor is a pure spell-caster that uses elemental magic, necromancy, nature magic, and alchemy.


I think I'm going to go download the beta for this game, I'll be choosing the Witch Doctor class!  Have fun if you play it yourself!


See you next time!
-Chauncey


Resources: http://www.diablowiki.net/Diablo_3_Basics