Archive for December, 2007
Friday, December 28th, 2007
Real-Time Snarkiness
Mad Doc, what the hell man? Seriously? You had a crapload of time to make Empire Earth 3, and you had ample opportunity to learn the ginormous mistakes made with Empire Earth 2, and you fudged it up? Why? Dear sweet merciful god, why! Empire Earth 3 is a freaking travesty and a miserable shame to everything in the RTS genre. I have never before regretted plunking down $50 as much as I did for this game.
First off, the game lacks any polish whatsoever. It’s as though they didn’t bother. The voice acting for unit responses, and this happens to be an aspect I know a thing or two about dissing and being dissed for, is atrocious. The epic scope of the original series has been reduced to four, count ‘em, four ages. That’s fewer than Age of Empires 3 and its invariable march of “TRICORNE HAT-WEARING TOO-MUCH-TEAM COLOR COOKIE-CUTTER UNITS.” Empire Earth 3 all but completely relegates resource management to “that thing you do when you aren’t pissed about the framerate” with one singular resource known as Raw Materials.
The nukes are gone. The awesome flying gundam-style units are gone. The aircraft as units are gone, replaced instead with abilities tied to the expenditure of Wealth, which is gained through opening “slots” which are filled without your say so. Building placement is horrifying. Don’t even bother trying to build walls. At least, not where there are trees, or plants, or units, or land of any kind. I literally spent 15 minutes trying to place a tower to defend my docks, and when it finally placed it was a good ten miles away from the shoreline.
Empire Earth 3 chugs on my new machine (AMD 6000+, 4 gigs ram, 512 video card) and really looks and feels like a game you’d find next to Theme Hospital and Prison Tycoon 2 in a shadowy corner of a Big Lots. Gigantic disappointment.
Universe at War was a really nice surprise. Petroglyph has outdone themselves with this new RTS, and I got quite a bit of play out of it over the holiday. The three factions are incredibly unique, clever and quite inspired. I get a kick out of playing the Hierarchy, these big lumbering aliens with a War of the Worlds type flavor to them. Having units slam down into the ground from suborbit is a nice touch, and the fact that their method of resource management is basically the harvesting of trees, random cars and pedestrians is delightful. The Novus faction is also really intriguing, zipping around from point to point through strands of light dotting the map.
I’m not going to spoil the whole shebang, it really is fun enough to go out get, and definitely worth the buy. I’d give it a nigh perfect score as far as RTSs go, with the exception of the major pathing issues the Hierarchy walkers run into constantly. Next on the list of games is Hellgate London, so stay tuned. 
Thursday, December 20th, 2007
Are Es Ess?
After installing Windows Vista on a new machine (WHY, DEAR GOD WHY?) GreyPawn has discovered RSS feeds! Welcome to the year 2004!
Yes, I am indeed a dinosaur. Rawr. *gesticulates wildly with little t-rex style arms*
Change-resistant until there’s a nice excuse to make the plunge. Two and a half weeks ago, I got a new cell phone, a Blackberry Pearl, in fact. Quite nice. Yet, for some reason I am still lugging around my ancient LG flip-phone. As a side-effect, this expanded level of interconnectivity is somehow comforting. When Google releases the very first eye/brain embedded cyberware, I think I’ll jump to the bleeding edge of technology. Until then, steady goes it.
A few side notes, before I totally forget them.
- Moving is annoying and difficult.
- Age of Conan no longer looks as appealing as it did before they showed gameplay.
- Ice water showers are not as fun as I remember them being.
- Portal remains the funnest game of the past half-decade.
- My old boss Brian Reynolds -totally- needs to remake Alpha Centauri.