Monday Gamewatch

This week: A whole lotta hotkeys for your favorite brawny Cimmerian, gnat-sized robots roughhousing in neon terrariums, a goateed playboy in red and gold micro-weave 3D alloy, and an RPG (as in rule-playing game) for D&D diehards only.

Monday

Age of Conan Zboard Key Set: If you're really-really-really smitten with whatever you're playing, the Zboards are like adding all the aftermarket bling to your economy class ride. Sure, it's a little 1980s keyboard overlay geeky, but so is buying a quilted metallic Italian lambskin coat with Swarovski crystals for Fido. The only worry I've ever had about custom keyboards with dedicated buttons for stuff like inventory, quests, chat commands, feats, spells, and GUI tweaks is that the game's developers patch and potentially change key-maps when and where they want to -- Ideazon compensates by shipping a standard keyboard into which you simply plug (or unplug) swappable key sets. The Age of Conan model comes with over 70 game-specific commands, two emote layers (12 emote keys a piece), group and chat keys, and game graphics in the overlay that "immerse you into the action."

Supreme Commander: Gold Edition: It's Chris Taylor's macro-micro RTS with its less-exciting followup (Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance) in a box for forty bucks. I loved GPG's idea and admired the heck out of the lovely interface, but snored through all three absurdly generic campaigns. Echoing Total Annihilation, Taylor seems to think giving everyone two resources and identical starter units can be offset by slicking up the look and feel of the game with an admittedly cool continuous-zoom overlay. It can't. And after thoroughly trouncing the UEF, Cybran Nation, and Aeon Illuminate, I said goodbye to this series along with any vestigial tolerance for boring, lookalike sides with broadly indistinguishable units.

Tuesday

Iron Man: Could it finally be? A movie tie-in that actually lives up to the critical promise of an acclaimed popcorn flick? Bzzzt, try again. I haven't played it, but with a GamePro score (for the Xbox 360 version) in the 40s and OPM's review of the PS3 version lower still, you're probably better saving your sixty bucks for extra viewings of the movie instead of rolling the dice on the PC version. Hey, you can always smuggle in your wireless gamepad and, you know, pretend.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Gold Edition I've revisited Neverwinter Nights 2 twice since I reviewed it, had that review pulled, then reviewed it again for the fanboy-proof SCIFI Channel. Both times have felt like balancing chemistry equations. Other reviewers mostly carped about the game's bugs (if they chose to carp about anything at all). I groused that the game played less like an RPG than a macro-riddled spreadsheet. I love that in a wargame, say SSG's Korsun Pocket or AGEOD's Napoleon's Campaigns. But I hate it in RPGs, especially when the whole point of playing with a computer is that you don't need to see all the naked algorithms and exotic formulae (which were only introduced to shore up do-it-yourself pen and paper abstraction anyway). Still: D&D'ers can just ignore me, while the rest of you will have to decide how much dogged literalism you can stand in the all-in-one version (original plus Mask of the Betrayer expansion) of Obsidian's otherwise averagely plotted elf-human-dwarf-orc simulator.