Right, David writing here and I have to get something straight before we write this review. Joe has been yapping on about Command and Conquer for weeks, Sam won’t shut up about how perfectly balanced StarCraft is, Tim says Age of Empires II is untouchable and they are all completely missing the point. Warcraft III didn’t just make a great RTS game, it created the entire MOBA genre and changed gaming forever. That’s not hyperbole,…
John here and I’ve got to bring up some old business that’s been eating at my brain for nearly 30 years. Whilst everyone else was busy mucking about with their fancy video game consoles back in the early ’90s, PC gaming was providing experiences that would make any Mega Drive user green with envy. XCOM: UFO Defense (a.k.a., UFO: Enemy Unknown if you’re one of the lucky ones living outside of America) was more than…
Hi there, my name is Joe and prior to Carl delivering his standard commentary about how Command & Conquer “pretty much invented the RTS genre” (which simply isn’t the case; I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about this one) I’m going to give you some insight regarding the game that really raised the bar for real time strategy whilst everybody else was still hanging back. Total Annihilation was released in 1997 and…
Marcus here, and I want to talk about something that has been bothering me about the way people discuss portable gaming. Tim continually claims that mobile strategy games are basically the same thing as those on Game Boy Advance showing that he has no idea about the technical brilliance that is Advance Wars. Advance Wars was more than a strategy game that simply ran on a handheld; it was a prime example of optimising complex…
Heroes of Might and Magic III Review: The Best Turn Based Strategy Game Ever Created John’s writing about this one because the rest of the team spent an entire Zoom meeting arguing about whether turn based strategy peaked with Civilization or Total War and completely forgot that the best strategy games actually come from the world of computer gaming. Whilst they are all fighting about console strategy games that barely meet the minimum requirements for…
I’m Marcus and there is one thing that I think has been driving me crazy for decades. Each time someone says that XCOM: Enemy Unknown “brought back” turn based tactics (which it certainly did) I think they should be pointed towards a title that was effectively addressing the very same issues in 1999. Jagged Alliance 2 not only predicted the direction of tactical combat – it improved upon the systems that would eventually become common…
Right, let me tell you something about Warcraft II that people have totally got backwards. Everyone bangs on about how StarCraft revolutionised real-time strategy and made Blizzard famous. Rubbish. It was Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness that actually did the dirty work, and I will die on this hill because I spent hundreds of hours with both of them on the original hardware. Not nostalgia by the way. I still have the CDs, I’ve run…
Look, I’m just going to be honest with you about Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun. It sundered our community when it was released on 27th August 1999 (Wikipedia), and, like, we’re still arguing about it to this day. Joe believes it’s the peak of the series’ ambition, Tim thinks it betrayed everything that made the first one special, and my feelings lie somewhere in the middle where I admire what Westwood were trying to do…
I am Carl and I wanted to write this review to help us resolve the argument going on in our group chat for the last 6 months. Joe has always said that Civilization II is the best game in the series. Sam always raves about how great he believes Alpha Centauri is, it is part of a totally different series, Sam, whilst Tim says the new games are always better because they look nicer. John…
Beginning as a young gamer and now as an adult, I will write this review for Tim to show him why Age of Empires II is the best Real Time Strategy (RTS) game ever produced. As he continues to tell me that Command & Conquer is better than AOE2, I will show him why the engineering decisions in AOE2 are the basis for all RTS games today. Not just nostalgia, but the design of the…