Re: Microid's 2024 Empire of the Ants demo came out yesterday!

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
...

It was -still is- a quite capable system, despite it being over a
decade old at this point. Certainly it could handle a lot of my
mainstay games (<cough>Truck Simulators</cough>) well enough, and even
a lot of the more modern titles, if at reduced graphics levels. Which
says less about the power of the machine and more about the state of
modern gaming.

But mostly I keep it around because it has easy-swap SATA bays which
makes it useful for whenever I need to test / wipe hard-drives. No
need to open up another computer, or fiddle around with external drive
chassis; I just slip the drive in the caddy and I'm good to go.

Nice. It's hard for me due to my multiple disabilities. :(

(It also had its hard-drives complete with all the user data on it in
unencrypted format. People really need to learn to wipe their drives
before tossing their PCs)

Geez. Did you find anything good in their HDDs? ;)

Are you implying that I snooped around that hard-drive before doing
the proper thing and deleting the contents of the drive? Why, I never!
;-)

(but all sorts of stuff, including photos, scans of drivers license,
credit card numbers, documents with government ID, etc. Were I evil, I
could have done Bad Things with that information. DELETE YOUR DRIVES,
people!)

That's nuts. I always encrypt my drives!

So, you're not a RTS fan?

>

I play them. I enjoy them. They're not my favorite genre, but I don't
dislike them in general.

>

I'm a bit less sanguine about action/strategy RTS games, where you
have to take on the role of one of the soldiers on the battlefield and
order your troops from a ground-level perspective. I find it messy and
overly complicated. Even though several games -- "Battlezone" (1998)
or "Hostile Waters: Anteaus Rising", for instance-- rose to prominence
based on the mechanic, I think a lot of their success came from the
novelty of the idea rather than its workability. It's a concept that
is better left in the dustbin of history, as far as I'm concerned. ;-)

So, you didn't like RTS games like Dune, C&C, WC, SC, AoE, etc. I love those.

No, that's not what I said.

Well, except "Dune". I never really liked that one. Too crunky in its
design. RTS weren't worth playing until C&C/Warcraft, IMHO.

Dune 2 was so awesome on my IBM PS/2 model 30 286 10 Mhz PC. I tried to
replay it, but gah its controls were awful adter playing modern RTS
games. One unit at a time?!

But I played the heck out of the C&C series, enjoyed Warcraft, played
Age of Empires (and Rise of Nations), and a whole bunch more. I'll
admit, I was never a fanatic about the genre, and I almost never
played them online. Mostly, my strategies revolved around turtling up
and making pretty bases, then building the biggest army and sending
them en masse to wipe out the baddies when they got too annoying.
(playing it sort of like SimCity except with annoying neighbors ;-).
Some engaged me more than others; for instance, I quite enjoyed the
"Ground Control" games, and I found the "Battle for Middle Earth"
games much more satisfying than even I expected. But they always
played second fiddle to more other genres I enjoyed more: FPS games,
or RPGs, for instance.

But the ones I enjoyed most were the ones where you had a god's eye
view of the battle and not the one that also required you to control a
unit on the ground, like "Hostile Waters", "BattleZone", "Sacrifice"
and -apparently- "Empire of Ants". I just don't find the hybrid mix of
RTS and FPS/TPS a good mixture.

Ah.
--
"When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise." --Proverbs 10:19. Not :) after the mid afternoon 30 mins. nap with :( news (old buds moving, hi bills, USC lost again, etc.).
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