Winter-Een-Mas Game List 3/4 – RTS

I have always enjoyed RTS games (Real Time Strategy), partly because I feel so smart when I play them. It’s a smart kind of game (usually). Having to play with a macro is a nice change after playing with a micro all the time, and fascinatingly fun really. Having to check your map, controlling your units, constructing units from a distance and knowing your hotkeys… aaah..! Still I often wonder how it would have been if I was a one-man army (like in FPSs) in a RTS game.

StarCraft: Brood Wars

The story in this game is perhaps the most enchanting story I’ve ever experienced in a game. It’s simply wonderful, smart and just dark enough for my taste. Blizzard did (as they usually do) a great job with this early RTS, and I believe they really added a something new to the whole RTS genre. It’s one of the few Sci-Fi RTS that was actually good, and will forever be close to my heart. And Zergs rock!

As with the rest of the Blizzard games the units comments and sounds stands firm in my memory for ever, and more than once I’ve thought to myself “you must contruct additional pylons” or “battle cruiser reproting” (in nice Russian-English) as I wander along in my daily life.

I am really looking forward to StarCraft 2, and if it’s half as good as StarCraft: Brood Wars I know I will enjoy it. Check out StarCraft 2’s first battle report here. It looks sweeeet.

Master of Orion 2: Battle of Antares

I’ve had this game installed on my computer since the nineties. True story. It’s an ancient game, but non the less I always return to play a game of this a couple of times every year. It’s an amazing RTS in a Civilization kind of way (but in space), which has souch a primitive look but is so incredibly smart, you just have to love it. It’s set in space, and you control a race, and you’ve got to: a) take over the universe or b) kill the Antares (which is a really overpowered outerdimensional enemy which constantly attacks your dimension). It has some lovely music and lovely pictures and it is just lovely. If you like old RTSs, and don’t mind “crappy” graphics, you should definitely check this one out.

Sins of a Solar Empire

Nothing beats the scrolling possibilities in this game! I went from playing Red Alert 3 to playing this, and suddenly a new world appeared in front of my eyes: the world of scrolling! When I went back to play another game of Red Alert 3 it seemed like my little soldiers wanted to poke me in the eye, they were so close. A very good RTS, using the idea of the good old 4x (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate). A must-play if you’re into smarter RTS’s, like a mix of Civ and WC3. I got bored of it pretty quick (after about 10 full games each lasting 6 hours or so each), but if more people make RTS’s like this the world would be a better place. I’ll probably return to it a couple of times in the future, because this was one of those timeless games. Lovely.

Check out Sins of a Solar Empire here.

Other (really) important RTS-games in my life:

• Age of Empires 1 and 2
  
• Red Alert 1 and 2
  
• WarCraft series (never did like WoW though…)
• Civilization series

So, my brother and me “finished” Dynasty Warriors yesterday! Lu Bu’s campaign was definitely more fun than any other campaign in the game. Great fun. Then we went on to play Castle Crashers, which is perhaps even fun! I haven’t had a laugh like that for a long, long time! Since I played the Lego Star Wars demo actually. This is going to be a real treat for the future.