Game/AI

Supreme Commander

Jeff, Adam, and Greg, welcome to the blog! Tons of great stuff in the preceding posts, which I'll comment on when I have the time.

I posted this a few days ago but decided to remove and revise it, so I apologize to anyone for whom this looks familiar.

Some fine folks I used to work with are working on a brand new game, and it looks spectacular.

Normally I try not to make public comments about other peoples' games, but I think I'm OK in this case, since I'm saying good things about a game that I'm pretty sure I've been waiting my whole life to play.

There are some games that make you think about games in a whole new way, and Supreme Commander's spiritual predecessor, Total Annihilation, is one of them.

TA is not a typical real-time strategy game in the mold of games like StarCraft or Age of Empires. It's really a very different kind of game, and it's not immediately obvious the first time you play it. It's one of the few games I actively push my colleagues to play because there's so much to be learned from it (all entirely in the name of research, I assure you ...)

Some of my most cherished gaming memories are of TA game sessions -- games so epic in scope that even now they seem more like alternate lifetimes than games. In particular, I'll never forget the many tender moments when I was crushed beneath the iron boot of GPG's producer, Jake McMahon, in massive, eight-hour games of TA.

Imagine, if you will, Yours Truly in a role something like the protagonist in a War of the Worlds movie, always one small step from extinction, and Jake in the role of the seemingly omnipotent invasion force, always building, crushing, expanding, encircling, occupying all positions on the map simultaneously, such that any attempt to push Jake out of any part of the map is like trying to kick a hole in the ocean.

Imagine, if you will, a game which begins with building just enough solar panels and metal extractors to start one's base, and then planting your very first radar tower barely 3 minutes into the game ... and seeing Jake's forces smeared across the minimap like so many flakes of new-fallen snow, already populating every available acre of the terrain.

In short, his kung fu is strong.

My hat's off to the Gas Powered Games crew. I want to take this opportunity publicly congratulate GPG for making the game they've always wanted to make ... and I've always wanted to play.

Supreme Commander is going to rock my world.

Posted by PaulT at July 15, 2005 02:15 PM