Object: If you enjoy games like Starcraft, WarCraft or Command & Conquer, yet don’t like the resource gathering aspects, or just want to play with 50 or 60 other people online, check this out. Shattered Galaxy is a massive multiplayer online real-time strategy game, but it’s not as overwhelming as you think. It also combines some role-playing elements, where you control a hero who has attribute points that you can distribute to gain better fighting units. Winning battles gets you experience points that you can then use to get better units also.

Starting out, you get to control about six units (from a list of infantry, mobile units, aviation units or organic (read: bugs) creatures). When you join a battle, you’re joining all the other players in your faction who then fight the other players in that faction. So you could have 80 players in a battle, but you’re really just in control of your six units for that battle. In order to win, you need to depend on teamwork and cooperation with other faction team members, something that is missing in other online games, where it tends to be everyone for himself (or herself..

The game has a good tutorial to get you started, and enough safe zones where you won’t get slaughtered immediately. You can also battle computer-controlled aliens, but it’s much more fun to defend your faction’s territories in battles against your faction’s enemies.

The game also has a “community” area where you can elect an overlord to rule your faction, but that space seems underdeveloped at the moment, as the game just went public recently. Still, at this price, it’s a great little game that deserves a big following. It’s very addicting, after a battle you want to jump right back in and fight again.

Object: At first glance, this seems like another real-time strategy game where you take a bunch of villagers, get them to harvest the land, chop down some wood, produce food and then once all that is ready you build an army and go destroy the other tribes. And in some respects, it is just that. But Cultures, which puts it into historical focus by having you play as a tribe of Vikings, does more than that. Creating food is much harder than assigning someone to a farm. The farm produces wheat, which has to be milled into flour, so you need to build a mill. Then the flour gets turned into food, but only if you have a bakery. And the bakery needs a well, so you have to dig for water and build a well. And creating people for the different tasks is also more complex. It’s not just “create villager,” you have to marry off the male and female villagers, and then you can produce more boys or more girls, who eventually grow up and then can be trained in new professions.

It takes a long time to get the hang of the game, but for a strange reason I found myself hooked. I kept building one more road, then realized that my construction crew needed rest, and then realized that my food production was low, and then I needed more villagers. Before I knew it I had been playing the game for five hours. If that’s the sign of a good game, then I guess this is good. But if you’re looking for more military action, skip this and go with something like Command and Conquer or Age of Empires. If, instead, you like watching your villagers create a new world, then it’s worth checking this out.