Saracen

I haven't listened to this yet. But I can guess he enjoyed the role he played.. I'd like an interview with George Takei as well. But right now he's flown all the way to Austrailia, skydived out of a plane, and found his way into the Heart of the Australian Jungle... Like Gemma Atkinson (Lt Eva) did before him, he's taken part in 'I'm a Celebrity, Get me out of Here!!" Which is on British TV right now... The bookmakers here have him as favourite to win! I'll give a more accurate comment to this Podcast once I've had the time to listen, but I thought I'd get out while I still remember.

The Japanese are great. I've enjoyed playing as them. I've enjoyed playing the whole game. But 3 factions is starting to tire a little, everybody's been doing it since Starcraft... and any more than 3 seemingly is doing a Relic with Dawn of War.... despite the quality in that, the factions were all pants. The fact of the matter is really, I've played almost every RTS from the extremely Rubbish, to the downright awesome. This helps me form a critical view on all Strategy games, not just C&C. It may come across as negative, but I'm trying to be constructive about it.. I'm critical about all games. And Sod Westwood, I couldn't care about them anymore... they're gone... if they were any good I'm sure there would have been more conservative efforts to keep the studio afloat like Maxis.

I'm personally not saying I hate it. I'm saying it misses a lot of the quality. Mission design, while the best in any EA C&C, is still rather low quality. There's a "click 2 win" button in most missions... and you are even told where things are and how to go about destroying them.. So much so, they poke through the shroud, and you even know the location of every structure the enemy has. This would be OK on Easy, but for medium and hard difficulty... simply ramping up how much the AI is prone to cheating, or chucking forces at you isn't an improvement in difficulty. I used the old Westwood games as an example. I could have said, Dark Reign, Dark Reign 2, Total Annihilation, Earth 2140 etc... The reason I pick older Westwood titles is because most (if not all) people have played them. Any other game may not sit well as an example. And so it goes back to my previous point above... the other games I mentioned. They had a difficulty which is based around clever mission design, and the older games chuck you in the deep end. You know your objective... but you have to find your own way to complete them. That's what RTS is about... RTS isn't putting arrows over your objective with a target shouting "Destroy me!!!" I mean, where has the strategy gone from these games... It's like developers are creating games for dumb people these days. That's great and all.... But RA2 and Yuri's revenge did a lot of things better. The Game speed was horrible... but still... Hand up, I'll admit Co-op is a great feature, and it offers a lot in the way of new Gameplay dynamics and features. But I don't wish to see it in the next C&C. An AI co-commander was OK, but the old style formula of fighting on your own felt great. If co-op is involved, then devs need to find a way to incorporate that into campaigns without giving us solo-game players the chance to fight alongside useless AI. However, the 3 faction thing is becoming so cliche it's as bad as the "click-2-win" mechanic. What happened to 2 faction wars. They were better. This article I've written... it's exactly along these lines, and I've basically said what I find wrong with RA3... save posting it on the site, I'll post it in the RA3 section later..

Welcome to American Airlines flight VOM17... This is your captain speaking. We will be experiencing some turbulence, so please fasten your seatbelts.

The same... the extra money you pay for is for all those features. It doesn't improve the quality of the game and the fact that Red Alert 3 is just a "Run of the mill RTS"... which it is.... You'll get more for your money with a game like Fallout 3, or even the Civilization games in that list than you ever will with RA3. I have to be honest here. But in Hindsight, and after playing Red Alert 3 a little more I can see why the reviews rate it around the 75-85% mark. As a package, RA3 is still one of the best Multiplayer games out there... but despite all the money they spend on single player, it still lacks quality. It's clear with the original C&C and RA games. They were single player games first and Multiplayer just about factored in as an extra. The quality showed, and you could pack in many many hours with the original games. These days, you can do all 3 campaigns in less than a week, or even a couple of days at most! I'm an extremely busy person, and I still completed all 3 campaigns in under 7 days with around 3-4 hours game time a night. Compare that to Tiberian sun which took me 2 weeks to do both campaigns, and I was hammering 6-8 hours a day out of that game. Agreed, I was battling with a lot of time killing bugs which would mean I'd have to start entire missions again. But the game still took me longer to complete and I was dedicating more time to it. Back then it was all about huge amounts of Quality with a shed load of Quantity... these days, it's a set amount of quantity with however much quality you can pack in with the time you're given. Really, when it comes to games, whatever happened to the idea of creating a masterpiece. So very few games these days are keepers, and as a result can never be given "Classic" Status... because the quality isn't there any more. This is why EA are sticking DRM into their games... because their games are not classics and are not worth really keeping. That's why the original Civ 4 is still in the charts. The quality is there, the replayability is there. The game is already a classic because Sid Meier has put the time and effort into his masterpiece franchise. It's not churned out like RA3 and every modern C&C feels. Need I say much more?

This is the actual long range cruiser Westwood used as inspiration for the cutscenes and the game itself. See, 3 turrets, with 3 guns per turret

Throughout the first war and until around this decade there was only just the one meteor strike. It took just 4-5 years for Tiberium to spread across the planet. From about 2000 onwards 10 years after the impact, the earth was bombarded by several more to speed up the terraforming process. These were fired from the Scrin Mothership in the outer reaches of our Solar system. Which is why in Tiberian Sun, the Earth has undergone a huge dramatic change. But while you're correct in some ways. The major part of Earth's infection was from that single strike. The Map Tiberium Gardens is the result of Doctor mobius taking just a small sample of Tiberium back to his lab for testing. It spreads faster than wildfire.

1995 is actually incorrect. The original Command & Conquer takes place in 1995... But for the meteor to crash in italy, have Tiberium spread around the planet, and be utilised as a currency, and traded on the stock market, even in the minute space of 8 months is impossible. Do not forget the intro to the original game. This intro is supposed to be a day's programming broadcasted on the exact date of August 31st 1995: The exact date Tiberium ended up on earth is unknown, and was never disclosed exactly. But gathered on the time it takes for a new currency to be recognised and put into the markets (5 years)... I'd more or less say it hit earth between 1986-90. This would have given it time to spread across the planet, for Kane to start putting his plans into action, to have Nod come out of hiding and make an impact on the world financially.... such things take time. So yeah, I'd say at most 10 years before the game starts. EA made the grave mistake of messing up the canon in the first Nod mission briefing in C&C 3. It was there they said Tiberium hit earth in 1995. It's just not logically or physically possible for it to have hit Earth, and have a huge economic and ecological impact in the same year. If it was possible for Tiberium to make such an impact in the same year, the world seen in Tiberian Sun with mutations and Ion storms would have been prominent before the first war had even finished!

Waveforce worked for me. I know you said they don't seem to work, but they do. Failing that, Blow up EALA! That gave me some motivation

I had a look through my PC games collection today to find an old game to play. With Red Alert 3 over and done with, Skirmish is proving rather limited and is in deep "Done it all Before" Territory... So I thought I'd post up 5 games from my collection that you guys have probably never played. Imperium Galactica 2 would have been number 1, but I've ranted and raved about it so much in the past, that I get sick often bringing it up to everyone i Know... so that's off this list.... Anyway I'll post up either Trailers or game intros dependant on what source material is out there. 5) Z - 1996 No base building in this game. You had an HQ, which spat out troops on a timer... from there you would have to expand your territories by capturing extra tech buildings and factories to further your War effort. This game (at the time) was called the Crazy drunken retarded Brother of C&C. It was a little shallow at times, but offered more strategic depth than C&C, and a rather solid humour unmatched by any game to date. It's sequel (Steel Soldiers) is also good, but not as good as the original.. 4) Soldiers of Anarchy - 2002 If the Fallout Franchise kept some RPG elements and was instead an RTS/RTT, Soldiers of Anarchy would be it. The story is loose, but after a bio terror attack, the typical post apoc setting comes to light. Several Generals emerge from bunkers, and instead of wandering around the landscape, they commandeer the military vehicles left about, and go on a rampage to restore order, because humanity didn't die, it either got mutated or plunged into Anarchy. Despite having more bugs and path finding issues than RA3 has right now, it was an extremely fun game. In fact it probably paved the way for games such as World in Conflict and Tom Clancy's Endwar, as this was one of the first 3D Real Time Tactics games that got the formula right. 3) Dark Reign - 1997 It's probably a game that some have played. But Dark Reign was one of the greatest RTS games of 1997. Sandwiched between The Original Red Alert and Total Annihilation, it got lost, and very few played it. This game rocked in every sense... it had a solid Single Player campaign and an even stronger story to boot. A Truly awesome game! 2) Darwinia - 2005 From British Bedroom programmers Introversion, came this rather basic, yet fun, satisfying (yet short) RTS game. You basically have been employed by a programmer who has to rid a computer network of a strange virus. The only way to do that is become part of the Anti-virus program and command it to victory. The game is truly beyond words and is one of the most innovative to ever be seen in the Genre. It's been a while since I played this game, but it's a true winner without a doubt! 1) Perimeter - 2004 This RTS had innovation written all over it... Not only could you terraform the Landscape, but you could morph basic forces into any unit you wished. It doesn't seem like much in theory, but in Practice, it's just a truly awesome game! It may have been damn hard at times, and contained a lot of trial and error gameplay... but it held it's own, and is one of the few games that required Strategical thought! The sequel is due out soon. But it's doing a vapourware thing right now. The developer KD-Labs also created one of the worst RTS games of all time Maelstrom... so I'm not holding my breath for a repeat performance.

Think I'll throw this in here:

nope there are actually 3 turrets... But on the cutscene, 2 turrets are situated at the front of the ship and one at the back. However the cruiser in the cutscene has 3 guns each per turret instead of 2 as depicted in-game. I had a little poke around to back this up, and it's towards the end of this vid (1:06):

This caught my eye: In a conversation I had with Adam Isgreen a couple of month's ago, he actually said this about the co-op. Just thought I'd pop that in as a reference. So yeah, that's the reason why it hasn't been done sooner.

That would be impossible, because technically RA3 doesn't use the SAGE Engine anymore. Every single bit of the original SAGE engine has been changed now. For Red Alert 3 the engine was heavily rewritten. So now it's called the RNA engine.

It will do soon. Soon as in 2011 They're also planning on "a greater emphasis on backwards compatibility and digital distribution, plus a large storage solution." In other words they want the Wii to be a power horse like the other consoles, while still offering the novelty and fun of the current model.

I check my CNCNZ.com e-mail account every 24 hours... Normally I'll have around 100-250 minimum every time. But in the last couple of days I have only been getting around 20-40.... it's great!

Well, if Al Qaeda attack Holland tomorrow, I'm gonna wet myself from laughing so hard. No it's not evil. Irony can be a bitch ya know!

OK, if you don't wanna read a constructive form of slaughtering stop reading now. In a story, you have to approach the reader as if they know nothing at all about the setting, the characters or the plot. With that in Mind. How do you feel your teacher will react to this? You've taken an existing (yet widely unknown) Science fiction, created a randomly generated event, and called it a short story. The average Joe will not know what Nod is, what Tiberium is, in fact, not know what half the stuff is in that passage of text. There's no introductions, no build up, no real flow and no real ending. The only way you can tell it's based on War is the acronym "APC". Moving on from there, you then get the image of a horde of Electric Razors (probably Philips Razors), chewing this guy to death. At this point, the average Joe would think, OK, it's a comedic parody of the survival horror, set in a wartime setting. Beyond that it even confuses me, and even I know the setting you're trying to portray. The passage is all over the place. Spelling and grammar is terrible, the narrative and syntax is extremely poor at best. If you are about 11 or 12, this is just about acceptable at best. But if you're 14 or above, then Ohio's education system has failed you. In 1997, I was 14. My English teacher gave the class a task to write our own short story. It could be on an existing work, or something entirely our own. The only thing was, the story should have been no larger than a single exercise book. Those of us who knew how to write a story, we couldn't be confined to that limit. Most people who did this used less than, or exactly too full books. I on the other hand wrote the entire story of Red Alert, from my perspective, over 4 whole books. Although I was told off for not doing a "short story" and going 4 times over the limit, I got an 'A'... The reason was simply that I used comprehensive detail, set up a good narrative, introduced all characters, created a solid setting and ran with it all the way to a solid conclusion. So unless you're writing a story for anyone under the age of say, 10 years old. A proper short story should be around 3-5,000 words. To put that in perspective, that's around 5-8 pages in Microsoft word at a standard '12' font size. Anyway, I think that's rained on your parade already. Insert coin to continue.

No topic on this yet? Hmm... You're all probably waiting for the PC version next year.. Anyway, Endwar is now out for the 360 & PS3... and it's a pretty impressive RTS from a console standpoint. As you probably know, you can play the game entirely through voice command or use traditional method of the gamepad. Despite some early concerns that it wouldn't work before I bought this game, I must say I'm very surprised with what has been done with the Unreal Engine 3. Anyway, here's the review from Gametrailers, seems to be about right for this game: (if you see just a white box, the site is down for maintenance) If anyone mentions RTS on consoles fail, I will probably have to warn you for being an idiot!

Well I suppose there is a redeeming feature.

That final empire mission annoyed me though... The reason why is that * * = Don't read the spoiler unless you've completed every campaign in RA3!

Oh my, I loved that! Where'd you find that Louis, and where can I find more? If RA3 was turned into an anime, I'd watch it... OK, it'd be strange, and probably wouldn't have much backbone... but that cartoon above makes RA3 look like it was supposed to be Anime.

FACTS!

I thought I'd post Obama's speech here:

See David Hasslehoff was right on conquerthislife.com.... "That's good RTS" I like to think the score I've given in the review was fully justified. It is a great game. One thing I have noticed though upon replaying the campaign on Hard, is the game is a lot easier. Now I thought that was simply down to knowing how everything works etc. But then I had a go at the Hard AI on Skirmish.... I wiped the floor of it easily. So... I went back to medium, and it put up more of a fight! I just about won that game after it hit me hard a few times.... Of course, on brutal (especially with large maps) You're screwed! Fact of the matter is, the Medium and Hard difficulty levels are the wrong way round. This is similar to how Universe at War played, where the Hard difficulty was easier than the Medium... Looks like someone applied the difficulty profiles incorrectly.... Although Hard doesn't seem to wanna do much.... I think the AI triggers could be broken somewhat.