There was some online chatter about StarCraft 2 about the video that was showed up last week. That set off some people to be really enthusiastic about it, but--maintaining my previous stance--it looked like more of the same. Booooring.
Because I always felt that Total Annihilation was a better multiplayer game, I asked about a demo for the new version, Supreme Commander. Sure enough there is one. I downloaded it and it's pretty good, even if is sort of chugs on my machine when there's a lot going on. (Oddly, TheBoy totally dug it. He loved the idea of making machines build other machines. He actually maxed out the unit cap and, with a little help from his pop, completely obliterated the enemy. He's going to love RTSs when he can really strategize.)
This let me to a round of old fashioned TA which is still as good as ever. But after that, I started thinking about StarCraft. Before I knew it, I had it fired up and I was engrossed in the single-player storyline. I forgot how good it actually is.
Because the graphics are somewhat dated, I started thinking about other RTS from back in the day. Command & Conquer comes to mind. It was my first exposure to any RTS (it was one of the first, I believe). I was totally blown away at the idea you could build a base, train some soldiers and lead them to war. Even if the soldiers were only about 8 pixels, it looked and played like nothing I had ever seen before.
Unfortunately, I have no idea where my original C&C discs were, but I did have my Red Alert discs handy and that's a great game too. I absolutely love the introduction video; back then, I remember being wowed by how much like a movie opening it was; Here, feel the nostalgia.
So I played some Red Alert, which runs kind of goofy on XP, but at least it worked. I got into a couple of missions and TheBoy took over. Which was a little better for him; Supreme Commander was frustrating him at times because he had too much going on, but Red Alert was slower and you couldn't queue up 200 units at once (of course, I had to put the computer on Easy, otherwise it would have crushed him in a tank rush).
Finally, on our little tour-de-pixel-gaming, I played a round of multiplayer StarCraft with Joe last night. We teamed up against a single computer component and it pretty much kicked my ass. Luckily, I was able to move my Command Center and Barracks before it decimated me and I hid behind Joe's Protoss base, but I never really recovered. Joe pretty much won the game.
And that brings us full circle: Multiplayer StarCraft blows.
posted by Evil Wayne @ 6:49 PM
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