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The Perfect Clock Radio - A Pipe Dream?
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Back in Black: iPod Nano + Griffin iTrip
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Dear Weighted Companion Cube, It's not you; it's me.
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Gaming Media: The Suits March On
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War (Games). What are they Good for? Absolutely Nothing.
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The Problem With Demos...
Plagiarize dives into the many issues surrounding good demos and bad demos, and what people should be getting out of them.
Addiction. It’s a word that gets thrown around a whole lot in this industry. Typically it’s used in a very positive way. For instance Civilization is often described as having addictive gameplay which makes you really want one-more-turn. I know I’ve been guilty of using that word to describe lots of games. However now I know different, I know what addiction is—it’s something that’s really quite different. I’m Andrew ‘Vermouth’ Martin and I’m a recovering World of WarCraft addict.
Back in 2001 when I first started making appearances on GameSpy’s community forums, my restricted internet connection meant that I was never really able to play games online with anyone who I met there. Quite often I’d have to just sit back and read about the fun which other members had while teaming up to play Tribes 2 or StarCraft or a bunch of other games. While most people at the time had meager 56k connections, which were sufficient, I didn’t quite have that. At my house we had our 56k modem shared on the home LAN between 2-4 computers depending on who was around, and usage was restricted to just a couple of hours a day.
So, it comes as no surprise that the first gaming experience I had online was with the text-based browser game Mech Wars, with NukeZone following soon after. Being websites, they didn’t require much in the way of bandwidth or time - although after getting deeper in, I began to realise that time was actually something that was more important than I first thought. After a while, in both games, a pretty clear gap was evident between players who could log in at any time, and those who had severely restricted access like myself. Some of the focus behind the development of The Project has been to see if this gap is still a problem, and if so, if it can be minimised.
Aside from a few heretics who prefer the Red Alert series over Command and Conquer’s Tiberium universe, most people seemed pretty pleased when CnC 3: Tiberium Wars was announced. I was rather neutral to the whole thing. I like the universe, and I liked the first game a lot, but the second game of the series, Tiberian Sun, left a very sour taste in my mouth with its slow gameplay and generally poor… everything. They did much the opposite in CnC Generals - a rather poor game universe but with pretty solid gameplay. The Generals experience was always a tad lacklustre for me though due to the poor performance of the game engine, and terrible patching support from EA. Its main weakness was just bugs.
So upon hearing that CnC 3 was to be built using the same SAGE game engine, I was a bit skeptical - though I heard they improved it a lot for the Battle for Middle Earth games. On top of this, the screenshots and interviews I’d seen online all showed how the game would return to the classic CnC everyone knew - both in terms of gameplay and interface (and cut scenes, of course). To be honest I wasn’t sure if this was necessarily a good thing, and now that Vermouth and I have played the demo, we’d like to outline why.
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