Stella!

Lasse Seppänen and Thiago Rocha are on Skype with me. They’ve ducked into an empty room at the Slagthuset Conference Center in Malmo, away from the bustle of the 10th Annual Nordic Game Conference. What is the Nordic Game Conference?, I ask them.

“It’s partly a government venture,” Lasse tells me. “You get a chance to meet other developers and the governments of the Nordic countries give grants to help fund game development.”

This is how much more civilized the Nordic countries are than the rest of us. Everybody in Scandinavia speaks three languages, they invented flatpack furniture, their prisons are kitted out like luxury condos (and their crime recidivism rate is basically zero), and their governments just hand out cash to make video games. That’s beautiful, I tell Lasse. “It really is,” he says.

Seppänen and Rocha are co-founders of PlayRaven, a brand-new outfit based in Helsinki that is working on one of the most exciting game ideas I’ve heard in years. They’d just announced the award of a Nordic Game grant to develop it, in fact.

PlayRaven is a 5-man studio in Helsinki led by Seppänen, the CEO of the new studio and ex-Remedy producer, where he lead the Alan Wake team. Design lead Rocha is also formerly of Remedy and had been working on Quantum Break — possibly the only thing that people were universally excited about coming out of this week’s Xbox One announcement.

The game that PlayRaven want to make is Spymaster, a spy network management game for iOS set in 1941 in the cities of Nazi-occupied Europe. “To put it very, very simply: it’s Football Manager for spies,” Rocha said.

I immediately stop thinking about the Scandinavian welfare state. Tell me more, I said.

“When we were doing our research for this game we found that there’s so many spy novels and spy films — but no spy games. Not really,” Rocha tells me.

He’s right, of course. The last proper spy game (as in, a game with actual spying in it) was probably Sid Meier’s Covert Action. From 1990, for god’s sake. All of the purported spy games since then are action games with stealth veneers of varying thickness. Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, Alpha Protocol — these “espionage” games have as much to do with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as Skyrim does.

“You’ll be managing your spy network that’s operating in occupied Europe,” Rocha says. “You establish spy bases in different cities and develop them, and you recruit spies and can launch missions from your bases. But the more connections you make between your bases and your headquarters, the more the Gestapo will be able to trace back when they compromise one of your agents or bases.The goal isn’t to have bases, exactly — they’re a means to an end. You use them to infiltrate factories and prison camps and research facilities and Gestapo headquarters. It’s a bit of a territory conquest game, but you’re not fighting the Axis openly. You’re trying to outsmart the Nazis.”

PlayRaven are keen for the agents to be at the very center of your experience, like your players are in Football Manager, or your squaddies in XCOM. Because the Gestapo will follow clues to connect your agents to one another, you’ll be able to cut connections and close down operations or burn your own spies to save agents higher up in your network. And PlayRaven want those decisions to hurt.

“Your agents will be precious commodities,” Seppänen says.  “Losing an agent should be like losing a family member in Agricola — do you know Agricola?”

Yeah. I know Agricola, I say.

“That’s the sort of thing we want it to feel like. Is it worth trying to assassinate that Gestapo agent or infiltrate that heavily secured V2 facility? You might lose your best agent.”

“It was great to make a third-person action-adventure,” says Seppänen, the former Alan Wake executive producer, “but I wanted to make strategy games. My heart called for it.”

Both guys frequently bring up their love of Civilization (“Civ IV was the best one,” Seppänen says) and Paradox grand strategy games. Clearly, their intent is to make an accessible, iOS-native game, but their eyes are fixed firmly on a proper, core strategy gaming experience.

I ask the duo what the game looks like — how you interact with it.

“Because it’s an iPad game, we want to make it so when you open up the app you can glance at the screen and remember what you were doing last time,” says Rocha. “We really admire Battle of the Bulge for that reason. There’s no hidden information in that game, you always remember what your strategy was when you come back to it because it’s all right in front of you.”

It won’t be like Civ where you are a detached god making all the changes yourself. You work through the agents. If you want something changed in the Paris spy base, you have to task one of your agents to do that.”

“At the moment — and it’s still early,” Seppänen says, “we’ve got a European map, and a different view for missions. We’ll have lots of illustrations for events like Paradox-”

“–or like King of Dragon Pass,” Rocha interjects. “I really enjoy the way they manage to create interesting actions and events but you’re not always sure what the long-term effects will be.”

“The thing with King of Dragon Pass is that once you’ve played through it many times you start to see the same events again,” Seppänen continues. “Our game is more like a board game, with lots of smaller random elements. Every time you start again you’ll get a slightly different board setup, your agents will be differently constructed, some of your goals will be different. You’ll get dynamically generated text debriefings for each mission. We’re aiming for maximum replay ability as a design goal. We want the game to generate stories and the player to generate his own stories.”

Part of the experience that PlayRaven want to capture from Football Manager is the emergent stories that unfold from the player’s decisions. You will be recruiting agents and training them. Those characters are dynamically generated but they’ve got their own stories, their own strengths and weakness, their own tendencies. Your agents might not get along with each other, or fall in love with each other.

I cringe a little bit at one point in the conversation when Seppänen notes that he’s good friends and former co-workers with the guys from SuperCell. In the ecosystem of free-to-play games, SuperCell (the makers of Clash of Clans, which recently claimed to be making $2.4 million dollars a day in consumable in-app purchases) are the apex predators. I ask Seppänen what the plan is to monetize the game, but he’s not sure yet. “I know there’s hesitance around free-to-play models, but I love the idea that the game could be played by as many people as possible that way. I also see the value of charging a premium price up front. We’ll be studying that problem over the next months.”

With the money in hand to develop the game full-time thanks to Nordic Game Conference, PlayRaven are hoping to deliver Spymaster by the beginning of Q4 of this year. A unique game iOS design that takes a familiar setting (cliche, really) and forces you to look at it through a different lens. And delivered by a team of former AAA devs led by a former major studio executive. I’m still pinching myself to make sure I’m not dreaming all this up.

You can follow PlayRaven’s progress on their new development blog — they’ve also set up Facebook and Twitter accounts for Spymaster.

Owen Faraday
Dead drop: PlayRaven tells us all about their debut iOS game Spymaster
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.

Dude, greenskin is not the preferred nomenclature.

What an awful week to be an ork. If you’re an ork, my heart goes out to you. Truly.

Not only have we learned this week that Slitherine’s forthcoming Warhammer 40K Armageddon for iPad will be a veritable ork genocide sim, but now news comes to us via Eurogamer that Warhammer Quest will be releasing next week. Having played a fair bit of Warhammer Quest, I can tell you that this game’s many dungeons are basically ork abattoirs, filled to the rafters (if dungeons have those) with orks that you’re meant to kill.

If you want to continue man’s war of persecution against the poor, unlettered ork, stay tuned for our review of Warhammer Quest for iOS. The Games Workshop-licensed dungeon crawler from the makers of Hunters 2 is definitely one of the year’s standout games so far. We’ll put the review up at midnight next Thursday morning.

Rodeo Games’ most recent gameplay video of WQ is after the jump.

Owen Faraday
Won’t someone think of the orks? Warhammer Quest coming next Wednesday night
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.

It’s probably good to have the physical manifestations of Death and Power on your team.

In my time zone, it is way, way too early in the morning for Holst — but in Rubicon’s defense, he posted this teaser video of Combat Monsters last night at a more allegro hour. We first talked about the fantasy follow-up to Great Big War Game about a month ago.

Rubicon has said that he wants this multiplayer-focused tactical game to play like a card game but with more visual spectacle — you can definitely see what he’s going for now that we’re seeing the game in motion.

Have a look at the Combat Monsters teaser after the jump. Maybe turn down your speakers if you haven’t had any coffee yet, though.

Owen Faraday
Rubicon, Bringer of War: First video of Combat Monsters
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.

It’s a farm town, but don’t you dare call it Farmville.

Last year was Playdek’s year. After releasing a quiver full of bona fide hit games, graced with some of the most sought-after board game licenses in the business, you could argue (as I did) that the San Diego-based studio had no peers in the world of mobile core gaming.

But if you wanted to look for criticisms to level, it could be argued that Playdek was playing it safe. All of their highly-acclaimed iOS games were cousins — deck-building card games with broadly similar mechanics. Look closely at Summoner Wars — their highest profile departure from the deck-building genre — and you could see the Ascension engine peeking out at you from behind the Jungle Elves. Maybe Playdek was a one-trick pony.

To prove that there’s more in Playdek’s arsenal than just card games, they decided to bring Agricola, Uwe Rosenberg’s 2007 board game about managing a medieval family farm, to iOS. Hoping that your next big App Store hit will come from a famously complex Euro board game seems a pretty crazy bet at first — but Agricola isn’t just any Euro board game.

There are many sets of eyes watching Playdek at this moment. Firstly, the fans. Agricola is a game that is regarded with real reverence by its fans, and it’s fans are legion. The Bible of Board Games, BGG, currently lists Agricola as the 3rd-best board game of all time. Besides the players, there’s also the investors. This is Playdek’s first release since raising $4 million in venture funding back in April, and their new partners will be eager to see that their money has been invested wisely. In my conversations with Playdek’s leadership over the past months, I’ve gotten the sense that they are keenly aware of how important Agricola is both to the hobby gaming public and to their future. Whether 2013 turns out to also be Playdek’s year will depend to a great degree on Agricola’s reception.

After the jump, my conversation with Playdek CEO Joel Goodman: their philosophy for translating Agricola from cardboard to touchscreens, what they learned from Summoner Wars and Nightfall, what veterans of Ascension and other Playdek games can expect from this new title, and more.

Winter is coming.

Owen Faraday: Joel, you’re the CEO. What does your role with Agricola look like from the corner office?

Joel Goodman: As the CEO, I’m responsible chiefly for the financial aspects, assuring that Playdek is a healthy and viable company so that we have the resources to get Agricola out the door. From there, I have a cultural responsibility to make sure that Playdek is healthy and happy. We have been for quite some time — we go back for many years.

OF: Do you date back to Incinerator with Gary Weis? [See September's interview with Gary Weis and George Rothrock for more on the history of Playdek.]

JG: Indeed. Gary and I and Jeff [Garstecki, Chief Creative Officer] founded Incinerator back in 2005. Gary and I go back to about 2000 when we were at Sony and Jeff and I go back to 1998. George [Rothrock, Director Business Development] and I go back to 1996.

OF: So the core Playdek team goes way, way back.

JG: We do, we really do. A lot of the original Incinerator founders left Sony together with us back in 2005 — a lot of designers and senior artists. We’re a tight-knit group, and that’s a key part of our culture and how we develop.

OF: Tell me more about that culture and how you see your role in it.

JG: I generally set a target tone for our projects. Agricola was such an important project for us — it’s so beloved around the world and we don’t take that lightly. Through our history we’ve always tried to achieve the highest quality possible but also to incorporate and move things further into taking advantage of the platform that the games are. So I’m the one — for better or for worse — who’s been trying to instil the idea that we make video games here. We love hobby gaming, we love board games — but we make video games. We have to marry the two. Once those board game rulesets depart from the physical plane and enter into the digital space, we’ve created something different.

With Agricola in particular, when we started considering how to approach the game we knew that we would be walking a balance beam between ensuring that every serious Agricola player was going to be at home in this game, recognise this game, have everything that they could ever and and expect from this game [on iOS] — but also to make it socially appealing to all kinds of gamers. Whether it’s a Call of Duty FPS player or people who are used to more casual fare. How can we at least get them intrigued and get them to explore and crossover, so to speak? This is a great product for getting people exposed to hobby gaming.

Newbies and those after a less “Euro” experience won’t have to worry about most of the game’s cards.

OF: A gateway drug.

JG: Right. Agricola has a profoundly simple nature to it. I realise that might sound a bit ridiculous–

OF: –it does a bit. [laughs]

JG: It really does, though. In order to amass a huge 50-, 60-point score in Agricola, you have to get extremely good at the strategy. But just to get from one end of the experience to another and finish with 5 points or negative 2 points, you can still get there and have the experience of plowing a field, picking up sheep. At that point they’re miles away from the true depth of the game, but that shouldn’t be prohibitive to that player’s enjoyment of the game.

Last summer, George and I had a summit in Germany with [Agricola designer] Uwe Rosenberg and Hanno Girke to discuss this approach. We brought it up with Uwe and he couldn’t agree more. He travels around Germany to middle schools teaching Agricola, and within 20 minutes these schoolchildren get the experience, and they’re enjoying the game. You can grow into the depth.

OF: One of the things that — I think it was Gary — said to me a couple of weeks ago was that you wanted to grab that midcore or casual gamer who wanted to just pick up Agricola and make a farm. I think — somewhat controversially on some forums — he said that you could have a sort of Farmville experience with the game.

JG: Um, yeah — it’s an interesting point. I actually haven’t played Farmville, myself.

OF: You know what? Confession time. I haven’t either.

JG: I get the concept — at least from a business sense. Who wouldn’t want their game being played by 200 million people? However, I think we can all agree that Agricola has nothing to do with Farmville. That’s not what we’ve made.

OF: I think we can agree. Insofar as neither of us have played Farmville.

JG: Part of that balance beam I was referring to before: we do not want Agricola to be unappealing to someone who’s never played a hobby game before, or ever seen a board game before in their lives. We want people to be intrigued. ‘This art looks friendly. This game looks appealing.’ You look at our screenshots and you’ll see that we’ve accomplished that using the original art. So we haven’t made gratuitous changes, but we have concentrated on making it accessible to so-called casuals. For the casual player there’s the family game that you can score in solo play — no cards. Then there’s a random play mode and a draft mode for more advanced players.

We can call those guys casuals, but it could still be somebody who literally plays Assassin’s Creed or Devil May Cry every day — but he’s just never done board games.

OF: Right. That’s a highly parochial definition of ‘casual’.

JG: We want that guy as well.

OF: So you’re opening the doors to ‘non-hobby gamers’ — that’s a more appropriate term than ‘casual’ gamer for who you’re trying to reach. Fair to say?

JG: Absolutely.

The universal appeal of baby animals — it’s the Buzzfeed of board games.

OF: So how does striking that balance come across in the game itself? What liberties have you taken with Agricola the board game that make it more ‘video-gamey’ but that won’t alienate the core hobby gamer?

JG: First off: our Agricola has to be completely, 100% literally true to the rules of the board game. Uwe wouldn’t allow us to change a rule or how anything was played. So at the very least, this game is Agricola. Somebody who’s been playing this every week for the last umpteen years at their game night will instantly recognise this as Agricola.

It’s great to have this core audience, this super passionate audience. There’s no bad advice really — you can always take something away from what people say and it’s wonderful to have somebody who’s passionate enough to be worried that if you don’t literally transplant the exact board over onto digital. To those guys I say: I respect your passion. I appreciate it. Thank you. But from a Playdek perspective though, we’ll never do that again. We’re forging forward to create incredible experiences in hobby gaming but we’ll also take advantage of the platform. We make video games.

OF: Just for clarity’s sake: you’re saying that in the future we shouldn’t expect perfectly literal, Ascension-style interpretations from Playdek.

JG: No — though keep in mind with Ascension, we’re talking about a deck-building game that’s a very different animal from Agricola. With a deck-builder, there’s really no other way to interpret besides putting the deck of cards in the middle, etc. The key with Ascension was that it was accessible to people who’d never seen a deck-building game in their lives.

But with Agricola, we could have scanned the board in, so to speak, laid down the rules in a PDF and I’m sure we’d have quite a few players who would be very content and even some who will be upset that that’s not what we’ve done. But as Playdek, we’re trying to advance the medium.

That said, when you open up [the Agricola app] you’re going to recognise it if you’re a hardcore fan. That’s the board there. Going back to our discussions with Uwe and Hanno, they were ecstatic. They said to us, ‘please free the game from the cardboard.’ The cardboard is just a constraint that doesn’t exist in the digital world and there’s no reason to stay slaved to those constraints when you’re making a video game.

OF: Tell me about the asynchronous multiplayer. One thing that you rightfully get praised for is how well your games handle online multiplayer. There’s sort of a Playdek multiplayer vernacular that transcends individual titles: the Penny Arcade game and Ascension and Summoner Wars all had that Playdek’s multiplayer cues, with signposts that told you when you had a turn available and chess timers. Is that something we should expect to see big changes to with Agricola?

JG: We have evolved that. With Agricola there’s changes that we’d wanted to make in previous products that we hadn’t had time to. We’ve also gotten tremendous feedback from the community and Agricola incorporates some of those changes. Menus are better, getting into games is easier and quicker.

There’s been some refinement to how games are picked up. We’ve added a match-making feature, for instance. It’s not a massive overhaul, but it’s a lot of little improvements.

OF: What’s the business relationship with Uwe Rosenberg? Do you have other Agricola expansions or other games from the Harvest Trilogy lined up?

JG: We do have other things to work on with Uwe, including continuing to extend Agricola. We’re lucky to be working with Uwe and Lookout Games — they’re really the upper echelon of hobby gaming.

OF: So is there already an agreement in place to develop the expansions for Agricola.

JG: Yes. We’ll absolutely be bringing out the other decks.

The all-important tutorial.

OF: What do you see as Playdek’s vision then — for lack of a less bullshit corporate-speak term? For the first year or two of Playdek’s existence it was very much a card game company. With the exception of Can’t Stop, I suppose. You built this amazing card game engine and you iterated with all of these beautiful games — but I don’t think it would have been unfair to say, ‘Playdek’s a card game company’. You’ve announced a lot of things over the past few months but now with Agricola we’re seeing something really different for the first time — a board game, not a card game. More different even than Summoner Wars was from your other stuff.

JG: What you’re starting to see with Agricola is something that steps away from the card game experiences. From our original vision and plan, we want to encompass hobby gaming and board gaming in total. Trading card games, deck-building games, board games, miniatures games. For us, that entire breadth is what we wanted to execute on, and move those things into the video game space.

OF: The hallmark of Playdek is that your polish and quality are second-to-none — you’re the Blizzard of this universe. But part of that has to be down to your laser focus on making card games up until now. Can you continue to deliver that kind of quality while still expanding into all of those very different genres?

JG: That’s a good question. I guess the simple answer is: we have to. Otherwise we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot. My role is to manage that process. We have no desire to have massive growth spurts. We’ve always — even when we were Incinerator — been very careful about hiring and how we bring on resources. We’d rather take a few months to bring on a couple of key people and then extend the runway on our project than try to add 8 or 10 people over the course of the month and have half of them not really fit.

OF: You’ve also gotten quieter. We don’t hear from Playdek as often as we used to.

JG: In our early history we announced games early, and rightfully enough we’d get skewered by fans for not delivering quickly. We’ve gotten smarter about managing expectations over the past year.

Part of that is that we’re confident in this. Even as enormous as Agricola is, we’re a team that has delivered massive sports titles and racing titles for consoles with hundreds of people. Gary was in Japan as a core member of the PS3 team years before anybody even knew it existed. We’ve got incredible experience here. I don’t want to have too much bravura, but we know we can deliver. We just want to be careful at the same time about over-promising. We would rather — sadly in some cases — and leave fans hungering for news than over-promise.

We’re still listening, though. We see people saying that Summoner Wars has been out for almost a year now and we haven’t brought out new content or updated the game. And they’re right. That’s a profound shame — but we’re going to put it to rest in July of this year with new content for Summoner Wars, and we will continue to support that great game.

Nightfall, for example was a case where we’ve learned a lot from the community. There were so many comments about the tutorial, how it could have been better. I read all of those comments and I honed in on a few of those that were incredibly constructive, and we overhauled the Nightfall tutorial based on those. Some of those guys were just dead on.

OF: Is that what informed your decision to segregate some of your Agricola beta testers until later, so they could have the fresh eyes for the game that you didn’t have anymore? To help you catch things like the shortcomings in the Nightfall tutorial?

JG: Oh absolutely. I have to be able to walk down to the office down the street and hand the iPad to a stranger and if they don’t get what’s happening after the tutorial for Agricola then we’ve failed.

OF: What’s one aspect of the product that surprises you now? Given the length of development, there must be some aspects of the game that are wildly different from what you thought they’d be six months ago or a year ago.

JG: Hmm. Well most definitely the construct of the living town — the board becoming a living town. I open it up now and I’m just incredibly proud of this team. It’s a board game, but it has this level of immersion with the ambient sounds and the baroque guitar and your farm is a real living experience. That’s miles away from where I thought it would be [last year].

OF: What does Uwe think of the finished product?

JG: He loves it.

Playdek isn’t saying exactly when Agricola will be out (“Apple prefers you to not comment on release dates while games are in the approval process,” Goodman told me) but its release is “imminent”.

Owen Faraday
The Agricola Interview: Joel Goodman on Playdek’s biggest game yet
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
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The family that Catans together.

When it launched way, way back in the hazy past of 2009, Catan (and its later iPad HD counterpart) set gold standard for iOS board gaming. Times were simpler then, and the only thing we asked of our digital board games was that they function reliably and not overtax our steam-powered iPhones. Despite its age, the mobile adaptation of Settlers of Catan is a still regular in the top 100 apps in many countries.

Now in the Jetsons future of 2013 we want things like online multiplayer, something that Catan’s developers USM didn’t originally include — but to keep pace with Johnny-Come-Latelys like Stone Age and Battle of the Bulge, it’s a necessity.

USM tells me that online multiplayer for Catan is now in late beta and nearing release. This will not be Game Center multiplayer, as the German devs are cooking up their own solution to allow for cross-platform play with Catan for Android. This might well be USM’s most ambitious development yet.

Given how much Catan focuses on wheeling and dealing, it doesn’t strike me as the ideal online game — but I’m willing to be surprised.

Owen Faraday
Ore gates: Online multiplayer coming for Catan
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
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I love the smell of lasguns in the morning.

Whilst I was otherwise occupied yesterday, the overworked sods at strategy imprint Slitherine put a name to their previously announced Warhammer 40K game bound for PC and iPad. Warhammer 40,000 Armageddon will take place in Games Workshop’s signature science-fiction dystopia and chronicle the Second War for Armageddon, where the Emperor’s Space Marines repulsed an invasion by the Orkz, the galaxy’s fiercest warriors and worst spellers.

I tried every trick in the book to get some more details or an image out of Slitherine, but no dice. Given Games Workshop’s the tight control over their intellectual property (remember what Rodeo Games told us about their insistence on getting the lore right in Warhammer Quest), maybe that’s no surprise. Slitherine wouldn’t even reveal if the game was being developed in-house like Battle Academy or if it was being handled by a Slitherine partner like Lordz, the makers of Panzer Corps.

So let’s go through Slitherine’s announcement in detail — I think there’s a clue about what to expect buried in there.

Warhammer 40K Armageddon will be a turn-based (thank the Emperor), hex-based game, Slitherine tells us. Armageddon will feature a branching campaign with 30 scenarios where the player leads the Imperial Guard‘s Steel Legion in the battle against the Ork hordes.

Your units will gain experience and their gear will be upgradeable between battles. A detailed tactical engine that tracks 20 different unit stats will also factor terrain, weather, and morale into battle results. There will be over a hundred different unit types as well.

That sounds awesome, does it not? It also sounds very familiar: sub out all of the science fiction stuff and replace it with 1940s Europe and you’ve got yourself a note-for-note description of Panzer Corps there. I feel like gambling this morning (I’m on my third cafetiere) so let’s make a bet. This game is going to be developed by Lordz Game Studio and will be running a modified version of the Panzer Corps engine — possibly a prettified faux-3D one.

If I’m right, you all owe me a beer.

Owen Faraday
Let’s over-analyse Slitherine’s Warhammer 40K Armageddon announcement
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.

Who knew Bono was a Jedi?

IGN is reporting that a newsletter from Mac porting specialists Aspyr Media has revealed a forthcoming iPad edition of Bioware’s classic Star Wars RPG Knights of the Old Republic. The email sent around to Aspyr customers about Call of Duty for Mac erroneously included a sub-header reading “The critically-acclaimed Star Wars RPG is now available on iPad…”. The HTML email is still online here for the time being.

IGN‘s Justin Davis assumes this refers to KOTOR — and I agree. It sure as heck doesn’t mean Yoda Stories. It could theoretically be some sort of companion app to the current Star Wars: The Old Republic PC MMO, but that doesn’t really fit with Aspyr’s modus operandi.

Knights of the Old Republic is one of the best RPGs of its generation and one of the last (if not the last) good Star Wars game. My sepia-tinted memories from 2003 suggest that the controls wouldn’t be too hard to implement on a touchscreen, either. In an ideal world, this could also mean that KOTOR 2 will be getting ported as well, which presents an opportunity to fix a potentially brilliant game that was rushed out the door too quickly by its publisher in a catastrophically buggy state. But hey, one thing at a time.

I’ll see if Aspyr has got any comment to make on the matter. Maybe this is all a misunderstanding because Aspyr’s copy writers use the world’s most tantalizing lorem ipsum.

Owen Faraday
Knights of the Old Republic for iPad potentially outed by newsletter slip-up
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.

Bumper crop.

I don’t suppose these will require too much preamble: here is the very first look the most anticipated game since Go: Playdek’s Agricola for iOS. Very rightfully listed amongst our 2013 most-wanted games, Agricola has been over a year in the works and marks the vaunted developer’s first significant departure from the deck-building card games they made their bones with.

I’ve just hung up from a very interesting hour-long chat with Playdek CEO Joel Goodman, where we talked at length about Agricola’s development and Playdek’s plans for the near future. That interview will be up here on the site tomorrow but for now, feast your eyes on the shot over there to the right and the one I’ve buried below the jump.

In true Playdek fashion, Goodman couldn’t be pinned down to any particular release date, but barring any 11th hour App Store approvals shenanigans, Agricola shall be upon us very soon.

One more screenshot after the jump — check back tomorrow for my interview with Joel Goodman and even more screenshots of Agricola. In the meantime, have a read of my interview with Playdek execs Gary Weis and George Rothrock from last month.

An easier read than Hesiod.

Owen Faraday
Bountiful harvest: Two exclusive screenshots of Playdek’s Agricola for iOS
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.

Say hello to my little friend.

When it rains small-scale tactical games, it pours small-scale tactical games. Last week’s release of Frozen Synapse (our review should be up later today, by the way) seems to have been the biggest launch for a hardcore iOS game yet — developer Paul Taylor told me that FS has been featured on the App Store front page in nine different countries.

Frozen Synapse will soon have some company. DoorKickers, the SWAT-flavoured tactical game we’ve been talking about all year, has a new PC alpha available to download for pre-ordered customers that adds more squad commands, a new planning UI, and something I wish I have every time I lock myself out of the flat: explosive-assisted entry.

The new trailer is after the jump. DoorKickers still doesn’t have an ironclad release date but the alpha builds have already been pretty damned fun — check out PT forum denizen OBollocks’ entertainingly obscene playthrough of the previous alpha.

Owen Faraday
Not satisfied with merely kicking doors, new DoorKickers trailer blows them up
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.

Out-foxed?

Slitherine is all about role reversals this year. Besides flipping Panzer Corps on its head later this year with the Ike & Patton-sporting Allied Corps, Battle Academy is getting to play opposite day with the just-announced expansion Rommel in Normandy. Leading German forces for the first time, you’ll be putting on the boots of the Desert Fox in his quest to delay the Allied push across Europe.

As much as I’ve been wishing for some non-European WWII action lately, I must admit that Slitherine have chosen wisely here. Not only do you get to play as Rommel — the cuddliest Wehrmacht officer — but the Normandy scenario means you get to push around all of the late-war German kit: King Tigers, Jagdpanthers, Elefants — the cool stuff.

The 10-mission Rommel in Normandy expansion will (like previous expansion Operation Husky) be available for iPad around the same time as it is for PC & Mac — though they’re not saying just when that is yet. We’ll keep you posted.

Owen Faraday
Erwin is coming: Slitherine reveals Rommel in Normandy expansion for BA
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.
Pocket Tactics | The home of proper games on iPhone, iPad and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more. - The home of proper games on iOS and Android: strategy, RPGs, sims, and more.