Count Toten

Colonel Burton's whereabouts are urgently sought by agent Black Lotus On the last mission they were on together she found herself alone with this mysterious character in a bunker and during the course of the night succumbed to his rugged charms. In the morning he went into stealth mode and promptly did a bunk. Now her spying abilities have been compromised and with the forthcoming new arrival due soon, will be needing support and maintenance. As the CSA no longer exists to assist her in this matter are there any gamers out there willing to help her in her hour of need and come to the aid of this poor damsel in distress and spill the beans on this latter day Lothario namely Colonel Burton who had a bonk in a bunker then did a bunk!

True - but the pause buttons gives you a chance to give the various units orders and queue them so when you press go some rather more complicated orders can be performed simultaneously. I always thought that in this game the camera could be rotated, am I missing something. That aside I'm really enjoying working through the various campaigns, the gameplay is quite enthralling and it makes for an interesting scenario and I'm looking forward to some of the Download single missions that appear on this Website.

This game could have been massively improved with the inclusion of a pause button, I know the menu can be selected to give you time to collect your thoughts but any serious tactics cannot be enacted this way, more like a click fest. Oh! with a game needing high specs for its time why didn't they give it better camera controls. When units are commanded to leave a building they often hide on the blind side- in AoW they come out pre selected saving the need for another click and if in doubt you can wizz round the back of the building to make sure. I've got used to this feature in the Blitzkrieg and CN Panzers games and miss it. I kow some RTS diehards say pause buttons are for pansies, real gamers just blast there way through regardless, but after playing a number of games like this and eventually feeling its just all more of the same. A deeper gaming experience can be had by using more true to life strategy and tactics - Think " Soldiers Heroes of WW2" that game really demanded a gamer to be up to snuff to get anywhere.

There is one difference in buying it now -about £40 The other is the gamer has access to a lot of info, game improvements, patches and mods I'm making it a policy now to wait a while when new games are released to test the reaction to them One recent case in point " War on Terror" released by Deep Silver beautifully modelled but requiring very high specs which they were reluctant to impart and a hopelessly frustrating gameplay best avoided if a major load of disappointment be averted. That and the fact they surripticiously wrap Starforce with it

I recently purchased a copy of Generals/ZH out of interest and to make a comparison with AoW Direct Action and to my surprise found myself really enjoying it. When it first came out I was put off by a lot of criticism and some poor reviews. I've only just started the USA campaign and am into the 3rd mission and from what I've seen so far am quietly impressed, the visuals are detailed and realistic with a lot of care going into them, the units are nicely modelled- I can see what some critics were getting at with the weapons the Rangers are wielding- lookiing like planks of of wood but this is a minor drawback when the soldiers themselves are fairly lifelike and some of them have a life of there own and is only visible when fully zoomed in. I wonder why the developers let this pass in an otherwise almost faultless game. The game itself runs smoothly and the AI employs intelligent pathfinding with units anticipating bottlenecks and not stacking up on themselves. The code is well written and the system is not stressed. Unlike AoW were the code is just about adequate to run the game on a mid to high end system thats well maintained, even with these prerequisites the game will involuntarily crash to the desktop if a unit is summoned to go were a path is not written or gets stuck - its even worse in High Treason were I found in addition the mercenary involvement too overpriced for their contribution and the plot scenario too confusing. The Naval pathfinding is on a par with Red Alert with ships taking short cuts over islands and ramming each other if you don't micromanage them. I've seen a few gripes on this forum about running this game but if you take a peek at the AoW forum and the fun and games some of these guys are having running it on top end systems you will consider yourselves lucky. So - so far so good and I'm looking forward to playing ZH as by all thats on the SP it seems to be even better than Generals - though more difficult Oh well it will be good practise for "Company of Heroes" when it comes out later this year.