By Vermouth , 19th May 5:12 pm
StarCraft is the biggest name in RTS gaming. Can Blizzard live up to the expectations? That’s the big question as Blizzard announced StarCraft 2 today. The original is one of the sacred cows of PC gaming, perfectly balanced, still played today. When a boy turns 13 in Korea, I read recently, he’s given a copy of the game as a coming of age content. And as of today the franchise has been given new life.
At 2:00 in the morning (Eastern Time) I was sitting up waiting for more information to enter my life, is that not a bit odd? I know given Blizzard’s track record that this game will be out years from now but here I am dutifully awaiting the announcement and super-excited that it’s not the oft rumored Galaxies of StarCraft MMORPG. This is one of the biggest franchises in history being announced, and this comes hot off the internet presses.
So the big questions are can they live up to the wild expectations people have for the sequel to possibly the greatest RTS ever? And can they manage to one-up their own prodigal franchise WarCraft? How will the game handle the move to 3d, and what of the story? Will we see a direct follow up or something more along the lines of WarCraft 3 that happens years after Brood War? A lot of questions not a lot of answers at this point but it conjures up a good deal of excitement.
By Cyrris , 3rd May 9:49 pm
These days violence in games is getting considerable negative attention from those not in the know. So, I thought now would be a good opportunity to look over some of my favourite weapons that I have used in games over the years. They are weapons which have been creative, satisfying to use and just plain well-made. They’re weapons that I would love to have - though of course I wouldn’t go around using them on people… that’s not the point.
I’m not talking about weapons which help me rack up the most kills in my FPS matches, nor are they likely ones I used a lot. Here I am looking for that cool factor - the thing that makes you nod your head in approval whenever a spectacular kill is made while using one. In some cases, they are weapons which have become defining items of their respective games. In all cases, I want one.
» Read all of “The Finest in Gaming Weaponry“…
By Vermouth , 28th March 1:51 pm
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.
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By Cyrris , 17th March 9:26 pm
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.
» Read all of “Game Development - The Gap“…
By Cyrris , 2nd March 8:06 pm
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.
» Read all of “Command and Conquer 3 Demo“…
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