Re: Rinox' "to play" list
I've been playing (the recently released for free by EA) Tiberian Sun, the second installment in the C&C series. It's actually surprisingly playable. I had to manually adjust resolution in the .ini because the game's standard resolutions didn't exceed 800x600 (
), which worked like a charm. The menus are still fixed at 800x600 so that's messed up, but the game itself now gives me a nice and large overview of the game map.
Minor issue is the radar now being so small that it's virtually useless on anything but the biggest maps, but hey.
I actually finished the singleplayer campaigns for both Nod and GDI over the weekend. It's pretty amazing how easy this game is by today's standards, bar 1 or two missions. General remarks:
- classic base building gameplay beats the shit out of modern RTS with their lame limitations
- C&C universe rules
- cheesy FMV ftw - they even have James Earl Jones in there!
- standard game speed is slooooow. Insanely so. Speeds go from slowest, slower, slow, normal, fast, faster, fastest. I play standard on 'faster'. It's seriously bizarre to think about the normal speed back then. Tend to crank it up to fastest for unit production moments or when cleaning up enemies.
- unit balance is poor, compared to modern RTS. In most situations there's basically only one viable solution and that's a tank rush with your best type of tank. Nod artillery also amazingly overpowered.
- some frustrating design choices of that era that haven't been ironed out yet. For example, when I select a group of units in my base and my harvester is among them, he gets selected. In most modern RTS games your resource gatherers are automatically excluded from such selections, as in 99% of all situations there is no way you'd actually want them to go with your army.
Also, left click is the same button for select, attack and move. No use of right-click. When you have to clear 'all enemy forces' this may sometimes mean scouring the map to find that one SAM site, silo, soldier or chopper that you missed, pretty lame. Etc.
- A couple of missions depending on timers, stopping moving units and micro-management stuff. Not what most people would consider fun. Also, missions that can only be beaten by saving/playing them a few times because of "zomg unexpected even trashed half your base!" moments that can be stopped only if you KNOW they are coming.
-Music by Frank Klepacki - amazing.
Currently playing the Firestorm expansion. For the record, I already played both the original game and Firestorm years ago, but I can't remember if I actually did finish every firestorm mission. I think Derf might like the games, tho he might just jade out over the game's weak points. Graphics are holding up surprisingly well, however (voxel-based).