Video Games

Aren't there any RTS gamers out there? What's with all you science types and the shoot-em-ups (or slice-em-ups as I was corrected earlier)? No one wants to argue about the relative merits of Protoss over Zerg? Your take on standfast orders for grenadiers vs cuirassiers? No?Sigh. Q is always out of step...

Dune II, now there was a game!! Actually I was never very good at it, but everyone else seemed to think it was the bee's knees, ho hum.

How about we all propose games for designers to make...here is an idea...
a game called Syamsu-pong
The object of the game would be to annoy the hell out of people. It would involve groups of identical squares that must be selected somehow but no rational is given how to sort them much less differentiate them. The player must go through boring repetition over and over not sorting the squares. Meanwhile, with each round of sorting the player will be subjected to messages stating how their playing does not fit the standard definition of gaming. If by some chance the player scores a point the game will announce "Please go away" and the program will crash to the desktop and cause the computer to emit smoke.The designers can play a beta version of the game by going to the Free for All and clicking on Heritablilty of Zero or Syamsu's objections to Natural selection and substituting squares for posts

Hmm, I think sypong has been done. Think of minesweeper without any safe zones. My preference would be a RPG. We could call it Sy Quest: The Search for a Rational Answer. Your character would constantly blunder from one utterly incomprehensible and pointless encounter after another, slaying oddly-tinted mishappen monsters with the Sword of Logic and Shield of Evidence that are actually different critters in a different place and that just vanish (possibly with faint evil laughter) instead of dying, and that then reappear completely unchanged in a totally different context. Only after fruitlessly playing for six or seven months would you come to realize that there isn't any possible way to win, and just resign. At that point, the computer would play "We Are the World", cackle maniacally, and proclaim victory - after telling you to "just go away".

Or how about one of your favorite genres..the real time strategy game?
Let's call it ASS (A Syamsu Scenario):
On one side troups would be creationists and on the other those who accept the theory of evolution.Units on the evolution side will have the overpowering weapons of logic, education, and evidence from multiple disciplines. They will have a technology tree which allows them to experiment and produce more supportive data and the capacity to build testable hypotheses. The offsetting weakness of the different units (such as paleontologist, molecular biologist etc.) will be that they don't agree on the fine points of evolutionary theory which can be used by the opposing side to claim that the entire theory is in trouble.Units on the creationist side will have the powerful weapons of extreme resistance to knowledge, logic, education and comprehension. Their technology tree will allow them to build strawman arguments like "evilution aint true cuz my dog did not become a cat" the idiocy of which can momentarily stun the evolutionists as nobody would expect a rational human being to hold such a ridiculous view. The offsetting weaknesses will be that they don't know what the theory of evolution is and easily confuse it with abiogenesis. They will suffer from not understanding why making bald assertions like "evidence for design is self evident" often causes spontaneous laughter in the opposing sides units...the result being that they are often left unable to respond, respond with insult, or units will spontaneously disappear when encountering the opposition.The various game maps will include the mythical flood debate, phylogenetics: or my uncle aint no chimp, Prove there is no god, and a free for all mode where all stupid comments are tolerable...at the end of each round (when the evolution side wins) the computer will crash to desktop with the final message "please go away"

I do enjoy RTS games, though I can't play them as well as FPS ones. I play "shooter" games at their hardest difficulty level and RTS ones on "medium". I like actual strategical or tactical games, so build & rush like your-mentioned Starcraft doesn't appeal to me that much. I do adore Warcraft III at this moment. Although a bit similar, it does at least work in 3D so you need to consider elevation too.I also love the Total War series and, despite its numerous flaws, Empire Earth.Have you played Natural Selection? One of Empire Earth's programmers created this. It uses Half- Life's engine and revolves around Marines vs Aliens, but with an RTS foundation. So RTS with an FPS viewpoint!------------------

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All the boys think she's a spy

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sodding pure genius! If I had any game programming experience (I've only just started learning C++ and JavaScript with a dash of Perl thrown in) I would make that game with you!Here you go!------------------

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All the boys think she's a spy

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Take a look at any threads where Symansu or A Christian are posting and you will see a beta version of the game running now

Me too. Interestingly enough, "build and rush" is how I would have characterized Warcraft. There is a bit of that in Starcraft (especially if you play "melee" or "free for all" games against the computer). I think that's a significant failing in most RTS games. However, I found the single-player scenarios/campaigns in Starcraft to be much more interesting and enjoyable from a plot/story standpoint than Warcraft. There is also (to my mind, at least) more of the strategic resource control/resource denial aspect to Starcraft than Warcraft (although it does have some of it). And I beg to differ - Starcraft most assuredly takes terrain elevation into consideration (although simplified: there's only 3 possible "levels"). If you think otherwise, you've never had hidden seige cannon batteries open up on your ground level troops as they're wandering by and be practically incapable of striking them back. I haven't seen Natural Selection. Sounds like I'll need to check it out (Q adds it to Homeworld II on his "to buy" list).For some reason I also appear addicted to Empire Earth. Talk about "build and horde" games! Not to mention the computer cheats big time; the AI is moronic compared to either of the Blizzard games (which is why they had to cheat); there are major technical glitches (ever been "fire hosed" by a bombard? I call it the "black arrow of death"); the AoC expansion added the most useless Epoch I've ever seen (Space is STOOPID!) in any expansion; and there are serious tactical imbalances in the game (the almost unbeatable power of the Emissary civilization special not offset by anything else/any other unit in the game). However, in spite of all that, I've been wasting all my free time playing it. Go figure.Have you ever played Star Wars: Clone Campaign? It's almost the same engine and play - Age of Empires with ray guns. Now THAT'S fun...Do you play "pure" strategy games like Master of Orion III or Imperium Galactica II? If so, what do you think about them?

As long as you have Half-life you don't need to buy 'natural selection', provided you have a mighty broadband pipe to download through that is. Did you ever play Magic and Mayhem, I thought that was a pretty good RTS, or how about XCOM-apoccalypse?

Hi WK. No to both, unfortunately. So much for my claim to have played the majority of RTS games that have come out... See how easy it is to refute an unsupported assertion? The last "fantasy" type RTS that I played (that I enjoyed) was Master of Magic (which came out about the same time as Master of Orion I and by the same people.) It was kind of fun, but very much earlier generation of the genre. I've heard of Apocalypse, but can't remember why I didn't get it at the time. Have you ever heard of/played CaveWars (I think made by the same people - CaveDog Software - that produced Total Annihilation)? Although the game engine was very glitchy (one of Mammuthus's "Crash to Desktop and Corrupt Saved Games" type), it was fun: you went up a tech tree from swordsman to main battle tank. There were these great little machine-gun mounting dune buggies that were really fast - you could go whizzing through the tunnels and caverns shooting up the bad guys and be gone before they knew you were even on the same dungeon level. I used to think they'd make a great addition to an RPG or FPS game.

Hey Q, try Myth I, II, or III(did not play III but I think it was the same as the first two roughly but better graphics). Nothing like pinning down the undead armies in a ravine with archers while your dwarves bomb them from the cliffs ...and the explosions of the undead into gibs always brings a smile to my face.

Did anyone ever play Ground Control? I played the demo but kept getting totally fried by the flying units, got frustrated and never bought the game...it is worth persevering or is it pure frustration?Same questions for the game Sacrifice

I have come across cavewars. Surely MOM isn't RTS though, it is turn based if I recall correctly, are you sure you aren't thinking of 'Lords of Magic'?Another couple of really old ones come to mind, because of your clubs to nukes reference, does anyone remember 'Megalomania'? That was a brilliant game, and very amusing. My favourite RTS style thing of all time was probably 'Syndicate' although I guess that was possibly a bit atypical as RTSs go. I realise I am going back a bit here.

Oooh, I like that image. I can seriously get in to bombing undead. Now why haven't I picked up Myth? I'll bet I conflated it with Myst and never paid attention to it. It's a little hard when you're in Babbages or somewhere and the kids are tugging at you going, "But Daddy, you promised that if we went into this store with you you'd buy us ice cream. We want ice cream NOW!" etc. Quick glance is all you get. (Q scratches Natural Selection - I can barely get email off this third world ISP I'm stuck with, let alone "broadband pipe" - and adds Myth III to his to-buy list.)Hee hee, this could be fun.