What Would Matt Do

(this is all based off the demo and logical assumptions. All of which are subject to change in the actual game)

I can’t say I’m horribly disappointed. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from the latest C&C, especially after Generals was just mediocre and C&C2 was such a joke. But damn me if I wasn’t hoping for more.

As my good friend Squeaky describes it, “the game is more about action and blowing shit up than ’strategy’”. Now, for him, that’s not a bad thing. For me, that’s a horrible thing. It’s a got damn Real Time Strategy game, not a FPS or some other thing where blowing up stuff is the point of the damn game. There is supposed to be strategy involved, not just building tanks as fast as possible and rushing them. As I was playing the demo and built up some medium tanks and they got pwned by some infantry, I was pretty impressed. I thought, “Wow, they actually added in some rock paper scissors action.” then I upgraded my tanks to have rail guns…nevermind. It completely removes the need to have any infantry, except maybe a few here and there at your base. And yet, there are about 6 or 7 different kinds of infantry you can build…Thanks for all the useless units guys!

And just coming from SupCom where defenses matter a lot, the sillyness of these defenses is horrible. They are worse than useless. And buildings…dear god man. They die in about three seconds to two or three tanks. Which means serious base rapeage. Sweet! Oh wait.

And a now special comment about the level of zoom being locked to the height a three year old can jump…wtf? Sure, your game must slow way down on zooming out what with all of the special effects, but man, they aren’t that great so as to limit me to seeing so little at once. I’m going to let the size of the maps go at this point, assuming they are just a demo thing (if not, you’ll find me gunning for you, because they are damn small).

Overall I’m anything but impressed. Yeah, some of the grahpical effects are cool and the explosions are somewhat fun, but for my money, RTSes aren’t about supar special effects, but about actual gameplay. And there? C&C3 fell down hard.

What Would Matt Do: Try to educate EA about what Strategy means. Or maybe just call C&C3 an RT, skip the S all together.

Dazam!

While I’m still in the New Game Glo™, I’ll go ahead and declare Supreme Commander the best multiplayer RTS I’ve played in five years, maybe the best RTS I’ve played ever. I’m that impressed.

Pros:

• Amazing game play.
• Great graphics
• Actual strategic RTS
• Easy interface for joining multiplayer games.

Cons:

• If you’re computer isn’t top of the line, you’ll probably see some slow downs when not on the lowest settings.
• Single player is boring…at least, the hour I played of it. Very much on a rail and very much you only have this much tech, make it work. Bluh.
• Interface for joining multiplayer games isn’t in-game.

Let me talk about the multiplayer because I’m not really playing anything else so far.

Supreme Commander is amazing. Each game can be very different from the last depending upon the map (does it have water, what are the natural flow points, where are the mass extractors) and, of course, the person you’re playing. This being the beginning of the game, no style is THE style to win with and given the flexibility of the game, I’m imagining/hoping there won’t be a single win strategy like you find in so many other RTS game.

You start by either going into the game and selecting Multiplayer and then GPGNet or by directly loading up the external GPGNet application (my preferred way). From there, like most other RTS games, you can join an auto ranked game, join a custom game, host a custom game, see friends and clan mates online, etc. One cool thing about the GPGNet interface is that when a friend in the same chat channel creates a game, you see a message with a html like link you can click to autojoin the game. That’s pretty nice.

Once you’ve joined a game and it’s started up, you are presented with a sparse looking map, a Commander who just appeared in huge burst of energy (literally clearing nearby debris, sometimes starting forest fires and so on) . Your two pronged goal? Destroy the other player’s Commander (or their base completely). Why do I say two pronged? Because the economy is what enables the huge strategic game that Supreme Commander is. If you don’t keep pushing your Mass gain and your Energy output, you’ll lose. If you don’t manage them both so you don’t end up in a major deficit, you’ll lose. If you don’t guard your base well, you can easily be taken out by having your resources network hurt badly enough so you can’t recover in time to defend yourself.

Thankfully enough, SupCom is all about defense, more so than any recent RTS. You’ve got ground guns at every tech level (the three tech levels in the game reached by upgrading factories so you can build engineers of that tech level, along with other fightin’ units), AA guns at most levels and more than a few options for shielding your installations and troops (and your troops can shoot out of the shields. Very cool). So as you’re upgrading your economy, building your fighting forces, you also build defense around your base, extractors, choke points, etc.

And with all of that, you’ve also got to manage three different factories (Land, Air, Naval) worth of units, all with three tech levels, all with lots of rock paper scissors units. How do you manage it all?

Patrols and queues.

You can put units on huge Queues to build anything. First thing I do when starting a game, for instance, is to start my Commander building three extractors (just by holding down shift as I place them), add four power plants, and a Land factory connected to the power plants for an Adjacency bonus (more later). Then when you’ve got your Land factory started, you can have it queue units it will be building when it’s finally done (once any Factory is started, you can queue up what it will build. So NICE). Then when your first engineers get built, you queue them building more extractors, ground and air defenses and let them go on their marry way (you have to tell them where and what, of course, but they will just keep at until it’s all done…be it 2 or 100 components).

Then with Patrols, you can have your more warlike units ready to attack a moments notice and always be scouting. Want to know when your opponent starts building on a part of the map, just have a scout or an interceptor built from your Air factory patrol that side of the map. Want to have your tanks attack anything that comes along on this entire choke point? Just have them patrol it. They will stop, attack, then go back to what they were doing, assuming they aren’t now dead :).

Another nifty feature is the Adjacency bonus lots of buildings get. Want to make your factories build faster? Build some power plants next to them, so you’ll both get power and the factories will get a bonus to their building speed. Want more mass from your extractors? Build mass storage sites next to them and they will mine faster. Everything just fits together.

That really describes what I’ve seen of SupCom so far, everything fits together. A whole host of features you’ve wished for in other games are in SupCom. “Man, I wish I could build a shield over that supergun so it was twice as hard to kill, but it didn’t stop it from shooting anyone else” Done. “Man, I wish I could have my planes patrol this area and destroy anything that flies nearby.” Done. And so on.

The game is a masterpiece. And I barely even mentioned the combat. So many different ways to attack. From the early rush (which must be well planned and executed since the Commander is a formidable unit on it’s own and handle most early tech level 1 rushes), to the experimental units that only tech level 3 engineers can build, the game is full of possibilities.

Oh, I’d be missing amiss on a really good part of the game if I didn’t mention how the player rating works. Ever been a ranked Chess player? (I have! Because I’m cool! My score? well, don’t ask) If you have, you know exactly how the rankings in SupCom work. If you beat players at your level, you gain a set amount of points. If you beat players higher ranked than you, you gain more points. If you beat players lower than you gain very little points. And the automatching system takes it all into account when doing ranked 1v1 games. Very nice, very simple and very friendly to all skill levels. Play a few games and you’ll start playing players your level everytime you play. And that’s what multiplayer is all about, a challenging game.

Matt’s First Look Rating: Direct Hit (proudly stolen from Daily Radar)

Call me gullible, but I just assumed the ESRB already played the game they rated…apparently that’s not the case:

[..]rather than simply relying on the video demonstrations submitted by developers and publishers as it does currently. It would also “prohibit video game producers and distributors from withholding or hiding playable content from a ratings organization.”

I’m impressed. All these of years ratings and they haven’t actually been playing the games. I can’t decide if that’s offensive or extremely funny. Maybe it’s both.

But now that they’ve decided to play the games they rate, I predict a few problems a couple of problems.

First, the ad is they sent to GamerDad is looking for people that are interested in video games and have “experience with children”. Beyond the oddity of that statement, experience with children (you really think they could have worded that better), they going to get, for the most part, gamers that aren’t hardcore. Which is perfectly fine, except they won’t be seeing all of the game. They won’t be finding easter eggs, and presumably they won’t be looking online for nudie hacks. I don’t have a problem with any of that because the ESRB is way too restrictive, much like the FCC, when it comes to nudity, but allows violence to slip on through…though not as bad as the FCC. The point being though, they aren’t going to see all of the game. Just a note to there playing the game theory.

Second, I can just imagine the ESRB forums filled with video game testers looking for help to get past specific bosses, help with PC game installation and crashes, and general crankiness over the numerous bad games they are going to have to play most, if not all, of the way through. It’s going to make for some really cranky testers.

Third, and maybe most funny, aren’t they going to have a really hard time hiring a big enough force to keep up with all the game releases on all the systems? Game reviewers manage it by hitting the biggest games hardest and getting to the others when they can…but the ESRB doesn’t have luxury. They have to review every single video game released, before it’s released. I imagine all kinds of delays, “We would released a month ago, but the ESRB is still playing our game.” So funny.

This somewhat ties into my being carded at Best Buy a bit back in that these are the guys that put the rating on the box that Best Buy uses to determine if I need to be carded. And I can’t be too annoyed that now the ESRB is going to start playing games. That brings about no small amount of joy in my mind. Something about them having to struggle through all of the crap, having to try to complete all the games they review, brings joy to me.

It’s not that I really dislike the ESRB or anything and I like that ratings on the boxes. It’s a pretty standard fact these days that many parents are on auto pilot and will buy their kids whatever they ask them too. Or let them play whatever. At least this way parents will be a bit more informed. That being said, I’m not 100% sure the ESRB isn’t becoming more and more big brother every day. And I have no idea how much influence they have over what currently gets in games…

I WISH they had nothing to do with it. I wish they didn’t see a game until it was complete and gave it a rating at that point. That way we’d get a rating just fine, but we wouldn’t lose content/features when games try to dumb down to fit into a lower age category. Movies and games both do it, the idea of it just bothers me. There should be some sort of separation there.

What Would Matt Do: I’d get secret access to the ESRB forums and laugh and point a lot as they run into all of the problems us gamers do now.

Ever hear those words growing up? I did, a lot. It was one of our favorite sayings growing up. The ultimate in irony as it were.

And this reminds me of it:

Wow. Just when you think Republicans can’t get any crazier, we find out that the powerful chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, Warren Chisum, doesn’t even believe that the earth revolves around the sun.

Sure, that’s not the absolute craziest thing you can believe (thought it must be close), but the reasoning behind it, the Bible says otherwise, is so funny I can barely contain myself. Think what you will of the Bible, be it the gospel to you, or a book of lessons, or just junk, do me a favor…don’t try to use it prove that science is lying to you. It just makes me giggle.

From the site Mr. Chisum was pushing:

The solar eclipse tableau involving the sun, moon, and earth reveals a truly amazing fact about the universal acceptance of the Copernican Heliocentric Model of a rotating earth orbiting a stationary sun. That amazing fact is this: The Eclipse Tableau exposes as no other illustration does the bald truth that the Helio Model is built purely on assumptions that deny all observational and experimental evidence.

Notice these seven assumptions which are indispensable to the Helio Model in general and are so apparent in the Solar Eclipse Phenomena.

1) It must be assumed that the Sun is stationary in the “solar” system relevant to the Earth (and to the Moon) and that it has never traveled East to West daily across the sky as observed by everyone on Earth throughout all history.

That’s just the first “assumption” that science makes that any fool can observe must be false by watching the sky. Just like at night when you’re driving and you see the moon moving behind the trees…it really is following you.

What Would Matt Do: I can’t but wonder what the fuck is wrong with Texans. Presumably this guy got voted into office, right?

I have to say I’m impressed. I thought the “only if you’ve preordered” policy was bad. Or the annoying, do you want a guide with that, EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU BUY SOMETHING? Or even the, “PC Games? What are those?” attitude was bad enough to drive people away, but somehow Gamestop/EB has managed to out do themselves.

They’ve now got an automated calling system that asks you turn your previously purchased games. I’m not lying. The lovable chaps at Opposable Thumbs give us the nitty gritty.

“We hope you’re enjoying your copy of Twiliight Princess, but if you’re finished with it, why don’t you bring it to the store and trade it in? We’re willing to give you $35 in trade for your copy of Twilight Princess….” I hung up at this point, and try not to curse.

Kudos to you Gamespot/EB, you’ve out down even my jaded expectations. I had no idea you could stoop to such lows, but now I see you’re quite amazing asshat. My the curses of a thousand gods fall your used games section that you sell for $5 less than the original.

Really, I don’t understand why anyone shops are you god forsaken stores at this point. You provide overly crappy service (almost as if you train the people to be anti-customer service reps), you don’t allow people to purchase the games whe they arrive if they haven’t preordered (stab at thee I do!) and you carry hardly any PC games anymore. It’s a fucking travesty compared to what Babbages used to be.

Damn your eyes!

UPDATE: But wait, it gets better.

This policy is insane. Our tipster says at no time does GameStop inform customers that by accepting a “reminder” call they are opening themselves up to solicitation calls. They also offered the tipster no confirmation that his name had been removed.

You can get removed from their list, apparently, but not if want to be called when your reserved game comes in. And oh yeah, they don’t bother to tell you that you’re getting added to their solicitation list in the first place. OMGFG! It boggles the mind that people still shop there.

What Would Matt Do: Maybe some water-board torture? It seems pretty fitting. And on an unrelated note, this is horribly funny.