Last week we spoke to Relic Entertainment’s Jacen Torres about upcoming RTS Company of Heroes 2, which we’re more than a little bit excited about.
Torres told us about the tactical depth that comes from focusing on
small-scale infantry combat, the new ‘truesight’ dynamic line-of-sight
system that they’ve created for Company of Heroes 2, and the historical
importance – yet relative under-representation – of World War 2′s
Eastern Front. Check out the full interview below.
Our full preview of Company of Heroes 2 can be found in this month’s magazine, on sale now. We’re also giving away a free copy of the original Company of Heroes with every issue.
I
have to start this with a warning, then a little tantrum, a few insults
and a dash of paranoia. Apologies to those of you who already know what
I’m going to say and are either fine with it or all raged out – you
guys can skip this section.
Diablo 3 can only be played online. You can play it on your own or
co-operatively, but neither mode works when Blizzard’s servers are down,
and neither mode is fun when Blizzard’s servers are slow. In my six
days of playing it, I got disconnected twice and experienced unplayable
lag five times, each time when my own internet connection was working
fine. At times, the servers were down for hours.
That’s pathetic. There are valid reasons for forcing multiplayer
characters to play online, but none for excluding an entirely offline
single player mode. If you don’t have a connection you can reliably play
multiplayer games on, don’t buy Diablo 3. Skip the rest of this review.
Blizzard have chosen to exclude you completely, and I’m genuinely
pissed off by the hostility and callousness of that decision.
For the rest of us, it’s worth knowing that the £35 price for Diablo 3
doesn’t mean you’ll always be able to play it. The game itself would
have to be phenomenally good for all this to be worth putting up with.
The Diablo games are simplified top-down RPGs: you click on a
monster, and your guy hits him with a satisfying thwunk. If you’d asked
me what made the repetition compulsive beyond that, I’d have said two
things: the agonisingly tough choices in which skills to pick each time
you level up, and the excitement of finding a fantastic rare item.
In Diablo 3, both those things are gone.
You never make any permanent choices about your character. Each time
you level up, you get access to a new skill, and you fit these into an
increasing number of slots. Eventually you can have six equipped at a
time, and between fights you can put any of 20-odd skills in those
slots. Every level 30 Wizard has access to the same skills as every
other level 30 Wizard, the differences are just a question of what they
currently have equipped.
It takes a while for your range of possible skill combinations to get
interesting, particularly if you don’t realise there’s a hidden option
to remove some of the baffling restrictions on what you can combine. But
when it does, about two hours in, it gets really interesting.
Every level up brings a new skill or two, and every new skill can be
the foundation of dozens of different character builds. Experimenting
with new abilities, and strategising about how to combine them with the
others, is the game. A seemingly feeble skill sometimes spurs
you to try it with others you’ve shelved, and discover an entirely
different playstyle that works in its own way. And a powerful one
sometimes mixes with something you’ve been using for hours to create a
spectacular new tactic.
As the Wizard, I liked to stick with a set of area-effect spells that
freeze and shatter huge mobs. But once I got Disintegrate, a magic
death ray that cuts through whole ranks of enemies at once, I was able
to ditch some of the others to focus on survivability: teleportation,
invulnerability and reactive ice-armour to chill attackers. It’s
incredibly satisfying when a new tweak like that turns out to be
effective, and your playstyle ends up feeling like an invention.
Part of the reason for that, and a lot of the meat and complexity of
this system, is in the runes. Like skills, they unlock at predetermined
levels. But they offer an optional modification to a skill you already
have. I can tweak Disintegrate to fire from both hands at once, hitting a
wider path of targets, or channel it into one beam while smaller rays
zap anything that gets close to me while I fire. Both are magnificently
powerful in different situations, and I loved figuring out which one
gelled well with other skills.
By a certain point, the difference between your Wizard and mine isn’t
your Wizard, it’s you. The skill/rune combinations you’ve picked from
the billions of possibilities are an expression of something very
personal about the way you like to play, and that makes it easy to get
attached.
It’s a fascinating test lab for skill combos, but what makes it more
than an intellectual exercise is the sense of power. I said the Diablo
games are about hitting a monster with a satisfying thwunk – the rest of
the series, the rest of the genre, has now been utterly out-thwunked.
Each Diablo 3 class has an astonishing tactile pleasure to it.
The Barbarian is convincingly physical: all his attacks involve
massive effort and ground-shaking impact. When they connect, monsters
aren’t just toppled: they’re cannoned, decapitated, torn apart.
The Wizard feels like an electric detonation: every crackling blast
of energy has the sense of something pent up being released, into
enemies that spasm, blacken and split.
The Demon Hunter is a backflipping tactician, forcibly rearranging
the battlefield to leave everything trapped in a dazed clump, to be
butchered with a spluttering stream of fire.
The Monk is a human projectile, appearing at each enemy with a fist
already in their flesh, then snapping through the rest of the mob in a
rhythmic strobe of precision blows and showers of blood.
And the Witch Doctor spits flaming bats.
It’s as much the noise as the look: the sound for each attack is
perfectly judged to suggest something excitingly potent. They even
change depending on the Rune modifying them: an explosive one for the
Wizard’s Shock Pulse adds a quiet charging noise before each release,
suggesting an unseen payload of power.
And the feel is more than aesthetic. Most of Diablo 3′s skills are
very specialised, useless in some situations but devastating in others.
Apply four or five of them to the right kind of enemy in the right
order, and the effect is more spectacularly destructive than anything
I’ve seen in a game like this. Armies are ripped apart, whole
ranks explode, blood fills the air, the earth shakes. When a sight like
that is the result of a build you’ve personally designed, it’s a
satisfaction like nothing else.
Weirdly, only a handful of these skills actually use the weapon in
your hand. In designing these intricately configurable storms of damage,
Blizzard didn’t have room to incorporate what you’re holding. Three of
the classes never even swing their weapon – it exists only as an
abstract damage number to multiply their effectiveness. To a wizard, a
bow is the same thing as a staff.
For other items, too, it’s hard to care about the banal stats they
offer. You do find incrementally better kit, and there’s an inherent
addictiveness to that, but the excitement of finding something truly
remarkable is almost gone. There’s not nearly enough variety in either
the type or effectiveness of what you find, and the significance of
stats is fussily abstract: +93 strength has no effect on a Monk’s
punching damage, because that’s not her ‘primary attribute’.
The only place I found dramatically better items was on the new
auction house, which also seems custom-built to destroy the thrill of
finding anything good in-game. With such a vast playerbase, of course
hundreds of people have found the absolute best item for someone of your
class and level, and of course that flood of supply has made it all
affordable. At every level, pocket change could buy me a weapon twice as
powerful as the best I’d found. And the one time I did it, it rendered
loot irrelevant for hours.
Blizzard plan to let you buy and sell items for real money soon, but
that feature’s not in yet. I’m no longer worried that it’ll undermine
the excitement of finding your own loot – there’s not much left to
undermine. It just isn’t the core appeal of Diablo any more. But
luckily, there’s plenty to replace it.
Beyond levelling up, there is a sense of discovery and
reward as you play through Diablo 3. It comes from the world. Each of
its four acts is a new land to explore, and each land is made up of
sprawling, beautiful places.
The soft-focus textures and scribbly detailing often make it feel
like you’re walking through concept art, in the best possible way. Each
region throbs with a new colour: autumnal fields, dazzling sands,
burning pits, and more exotic themes I can’t spoil.
Any time there’s a drop, the view below is staggering. Sometime’s
it’s just a gorgeous landscape, but later there are sprawling cities and
backdrops of action and violence that show more going on in the world
than your own quest. It’s a constant pleasure for the digital tourist,
and these jaw-dropping settings give your journey a sense of drama and
adventure the series hasn’t always had.
Adding to that feeling, there’s a range of interesting scenes you can
stumble upon between objectives. A conspicuous corpse, a cryptic note, a
lone tombstone, or a land-locked shipwreck can lead to an Event: a
small isolated story that usually ends in a horrific onslaught of
creatures.
Diablo 3 never runs out of hideous things to throw at you, and the
variety is amazing. Each act, and sometimes each zone, is dominated by
several species of creature you’ve never seen before, all horrible and
entertaining to fight in a different way. It’s not hard to make a
monster look ‘hellish’, but it’s impressive how many new and
increasingly freaky ways Diablo 3 pulls it off.
However spiky, vicious and tough the horrors get, they’re always
satisfying to kill. And some have neat little tricks. Giant vultures
circle, refusing to swoop within attacking range until you’re busy
fighting something else. Giant wasps spit streams of their young at you,
slow but unstoppable, forcing you to dodge. Boss creatures can summon
walls of rock wherever they like, blocking your attacks and sometimes
intentionally penning the two of you in, mano-a-bosso. They’re varied
further by mobs of Champions and Minibosses, Diablo staples that provide
walking difficulty spikes.
But what makes them really extraordinary, and the perfect foil to
your ridiculously powerful character, is the scale. Some are so big it
takes a moment to register that they’re even attackable, and others
swarm in numbers that fill the screen. Smashing through these skittering
hordes in a spray of rent meat and chitin is exhilarating, spectacular,
gruesomely heroic.
Even the boss fights aren’t awful – a genre first, as far as I can
recall. Rather than simply being absurdly tough, each is properly
dangerous. The challenge isn’t to tank their damage while you chew
through a towering health bar, it’s to move quickly enough to dodge
certain death.
Those particular fights are better with friends, and co-op is
beautifully seamless: it’s one click to join someone who’s currently
playing, and one more to teleport to their side, mid-fight. You can also
revive each other when down, which leads to some dramatic rescues –
despite the negligible penalty for respawning instead.
But in longer sessions, co-op sometimes feels like an awkward fit.
There’s a very intentional focus on story this time, but almost no
systems to make that work with more than one player. If one person skips
in-game dialogue, it’s skipped for everyone with no warning, and often
no way to get it back. Even with cut-scenes, there’s no way to vote on
whether to skip them, and no voice-comms to discuss it. All of which
makes the online-only thing more baffling.
It’s a phenomenally good game, immediately fun to play and enduringly
compulsive, albeit for very different reasons than the rest of the
series. But it comes shackled to this pointless, damaging restriction.
Should I give it a punitive 0% for that? That’s not terribly helpful
if you want to know how good the game itself is. Should I ignore it
completely and give the game the score it would otherwise deserve? I
can’t quite do that. I’m just less excited about owning Diablo 3 when it
lags out and kicks me off from time to time.
There’s an easy way to resolve these dilemmas. If you’re a friend,
and you ask me whether you should get it, I’d ask if you have a fast and
reliable connection. I’d make you aware of the problems beyond that,
slander Blizzard a bit, then say this: God yes.
Carbon Games have announced
that AirMech, their isometric action/strategy hybrid, has just entered
closed testing on Steam. Early access is available to anyone up for
liking AirMech on Facebook or Google+.
AirMech mixes arcade-style twin-stick shooting with hands-on strategy
elements. You control a mech that can turn into a jet, allowing you to
transition between ground and air combat at any time. In the air, you
can also pick up and fly your units around. A version of the game is
available to play online right now.
The Steam version of the game will include new features, but beyond
achievements Carbon Games aren’t willing to announce anything yet.
Airmech dazzled our Neanderthal brains back in January
for being a full game that ran in a browser, so having it arrive on a
more traditional service like Steam should help us cope with this scary
new future we live in. That said, we’ll totally accept a scary new
future if it involves fighter jets that turn into giant robots with
swords. Fingers crossed.
The second beta release of LuninuX OS 12.00, an Ubuntu-based distribution with GNOME Shell instead of Unity, is now available for testing: "The
decision to bring pure GNOME to LuninuX OS in the second release Beta
has proved beneficial - you will find many improvements, such as speed,
responsiveness, stability and less resource usage. The login prompt is
GDM and there are three sessions, GNOME Shell, GNOME Classic, and GNOME
Fallback. Many of the applications included is Firefox, Banshee,
LibreOffice, Liferea, GIMP, Cairo Dock, Docky, WINE and most of the
multimedia plugins. If there is a problem with the auto-login for the
live mode, select a session and type 'luninux' as the user name and
leave the password blank, then login." Here is the brief release announcement. Download: LuninuXOS-12.00-Desktop-i386-Beta-2.iso (1,350MB, MD5, torrent), LuninuXOS-12.00-Desktop-amd64-Beta-2.iso (1,505MB, MD5, torrent).
Every week, Richard Cobbett
rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from
lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. In the third part of Star Trek
Month, it’s time for a trip to the Federation’s darkest corner – the hub
of politics and intrigue that is Deep Space Nine.
Deep Space Nine is almost the anti-Star Trek. Where the others were
fervently optimistic, it was realistic. Its Captain lied and cheated and
did back-room deals to get the job done. Its crew included a former
terrorist, a genetic outlaw, a thief, and a lost member of the baddies
with a tendency to forget his loyalties. It showed that the Federation
had dirty-tricks divisions, that even Paradise isn’t perfect, and that
there is no more horrible sight in the universe than a greedy Ferengi in
drag.
Most importantly, it remains the only Star Trek series so far to
really dig into the implications of the seemingly utopian Federation.
What happens to those of us who aren’t perfect? What happens in the face
of a threat that can’t be conveniently dealt with in an hour – or 42
minutes, including adverts? Sure, Babylon 5 covered much of the same
ground, but much of the fascination of Deep Space Nine was seeing how
Star Trek specifically fared in the ‘real world’ when the chips finally went down.
(It’s also the only series in history whose creators specifically
released counterfeit merchandise, just to give collectors everywhere the
pleasure of holding it up with a hiss of “It’s a FAAAAAAKE!” Or so I encourage you to believe, tell your friends, and add to respectable wikis everywhere.)
But what of the games? Surely they’re just as brilliant as the show? Yeah. About that…
'Station Log: Today I met the most boring person ever.' 'Hey, I'm RIGHT HERE!' 'I am aware of this.'
The problem with a series like Deep Space Nine is that, much like Babylon 5, it was one of the first mainstream shows to really do
plot arcs and story development instead of being largely individual
episodes written for syndication purposes. That makes it tough to slip a
story that actually means anything into the mix – but worse,
means that developers have no idea what the state of play is actually
going to be like when the game comes out and thus what the players will
be expecting.
Though it wasn’t ever likely to be this…
As a counter, in The Next Generation, you could be fairly sure what
the status quo would be. There may be a few changes here and there, like
Troi becoming a command officer or Worf’s backstory being revealed, but
those are minor details. Picard would be giving speeches, Riker would
smile smugly and Troi would still crash the bloody ship. The Next
Generation was conveniently reliable like that.
Deep Space Nine on the other hand was anybody’s guess. The premise,
of a small mining station that becomes a hub of importance with the
discovery of a wormhole to the other side of the galaxy on its doorstep,
soon went from ‘alien of the week’ stories to all out war. Every season
was different, from the weak opener with episodes like Move Along Home
and If Wishes Were Horses to the political upheavals of the second. As a
specific example, it wasn’t until the third series that it was revealed
that there was a hostile empire called the Dominion on the other side
of the wormhole, and that idea itself wasn’t invented until almost a
couple of years into the show. Even so, any attempt to use the wormhole
to tell stories that didn’t factor this in was going to seem silly. And
Deep Space Nine was anything but silly.
(Probably the worst ever case of this was for Farscape: The Game,
which was atrocious anyway, but really suffered particularly from being
set at the end of the first series and so focusing on stuff that hadn’t
meant a damn thing to the show for literally years. Its plot can be
summed up as ‘a mysterious forest appears on a planet and for some
reason you care’. Only it was even duller than this sounds…)
Couple this with the fact that Deep Space Nine was an acquired taste
that split Trek fandom with its attitude, and it’s not too surprising
that there weren’t many games. In fact, there were exactly three on PC,
all with a certain “What the hell do we do?” feel of desperation
dripping from them. There was another in development, simply called “The
Hunt”, but it got cancelled and only exists now in this preview. It doesn’t look very good, though, especially the bit where Science Officer Dax has an arse on her chin.
Ah, Ops. A little bigger than on the show. And with far more people called suCKmyCOLLECTIVE_89
There is one way to take a trip round Deep Space Nine though, in a form you may have missed – Star Trek Online.
It’s free to play, and while I don’t particularly like the game itself,
it is worth finishing the tutorial, closing the quest screen entirely,
and heading into the Bajor system to check this bit out. You don’t need
to level up or do any pre-requisites to board. Just fly there and dock.
Arriving, you’re first warned that some work has been done to the
place – this is developer Cryptic’s way of saying “don’t expect
perfection, fanboys!” – and the cast of the show aren’t around, but
visually it’s pretty good. You can go shopping on the Promenade, and
visit the upper level to check out the wormhole. You can head up to Ops,
where you’ll probably see a random bunch of people jumping on the
consoles like gibbering monkeys, and visit Sisko’s office to check out
his baseball. Like the rest of the game, it’s all a little oversized,
but the sentiment is there. You can also beam down to Bajor proper if
you want, where a cute custom ground region awaits your crew, and one of
the missions involves walking around on DS9′s hull. There’s even a
whole episode of the in-game story devoted to a dropped thread from the
show – a fleet of invading Jem’hadar ships eaten by the wormhole.
Not to be crass, but I'm not sure that's enough... ah... polygons for Leeta.
Ah, the Promenade. Two levels of shopping, but mostly geeking out.
What you won’t find in Star Trek: Online’s version of Quark’s Bar
though are the Holosuites – which are much the same as The Next
Generation’s holodecks, only with the understanding that no matter how
enlightened they are, no people with a machine capable of creating any
fantasy in the universe are going to just fight the Battle of the Alamo
and pretend to be Victorian governesses and the like. The main cast
never really indulged, but it was understood that not all of Quark’s
customers were so restrained – one episode’s B story was entirely about
an alien trying to get him to make a virtual love-doll of Kira, the
station’s first officer, and a woman doomed to always be described using
the dreadful word ‘feisty’.
Sadly, building a room capable of creating anything in the universe
proved beyond Star Trek Online’s designers – the wusses – so forget
about having a hot stardate, milking the franchise, cleaning out
Jeffrey’s tubes, whacking off with Weyoun, penetrating the galactic
barrier, implanting a Trill, turning O’Brien smiley, touching Q’s
finger, worshipping the Celestial Temple, spooning like Cardassian
voles, making first, second and third contact, using the Vulcan kegel
pinch, riding a runabout, venturing into the pink wormhole, fondling
your Tribbles, bumping Pakleds, making Odo splash on the floor, adopting
the Emissary position, distributing some ketrasex-white, waltzing with
Bashir, relocating some Space Seed, warping to fourth base, giving Bones
double-duty, doing the Efram Cochran, promoting the bald Captain,
digging into fresh gagh, being fingered by the hands of the Prophets,
giving it the old Badda-Bing Badda-Bang, communing with a couple of
Bajoran orbs, getting some glop-on-your-stick, engorging holosuite
safeties, going to subspace with the Dominion, lapping the habitation
ring, jerking the Kirk, docking at Deep Space Sixty-Nine, buggering a
Borg, or setting phasers to spunk.
At least for now. Maybe in a future expansion pack…
Welcome to Derp Space Nine.
There are three official Deep Space Nine games. The third of them is
the easiest described – it’s a really buggy, not very good strategy game
called Dominion Wars
with little of note to really say about it save that it exists and is
deservedly forgotten. To fill some time, I shall hum a little. Dum de
dee de dum.
The first proper attempt, Harbinger, was an adventure game designed
to test the limits of human boredom. You play Envoy Nobody of the Planet
Nobody Cares About, on the way back from Operation: Whatever. The trip
is rudely interrupted by an attack by drones that even the Daleks would
make pepper pot jokes about, and you end up crashing on an almost
deserted Deep Space Nine.
Hello? Anyone there? Should I come back later? Like... in 2012?
What follows is one of the most sterile, tedious adventures ever,
with a cast that look like they were digitised based on action figures
rather than the actual actors, and the kind of voice-work that doesn’t
quite feature Captain Sisko going “Station Log: This morning I woke up
and decided to spend the day not giving a shit”, but really gets close
at times. It does at least feature Avery Brooks as Sisko, along with the
actors for Dax, Kira, Odo and Quark, but even their presence only helps
so much in a plot with so much padding and so much excruciatingly
tiresome technobabble delivered by a main character who sounds like he’d
be more comfortable filing tax returns than saving Deep Space Nine.
To make matters even worse, the dialogue is endless, the drama
non-existent, the animation hyper-limited, and instead of music,
Harbinger opts for a constant ‘woomph woomph’ ambient thing that acts
like white noise. They should use this game as a sleeping aid. For the
dead.
I have a Borg teddy bear bought from the Star Trek Experience, and even I'm calling bullshit on that.
The closest Harbinger gets to being fun is in a B-Movie kind of way.
One of the hardest puzzles in the entire game is walking round
Operations, which uses a Myst style first-person control scheme with
controls designed by Satan. Without a word of a lie, you can be trapped
next to an open door because you can’t find the bit of the screen that
turns you towards it, and actually navigating is toe-curlingly insane.
The only reason to endure it is to realise that yes, you really do end
up fighting a race called the “Tarragan” – the most dangerous herbs in
the galaxy! (Sadly, they don’t have thyme travel.) It’s like every
Christmas came at once and all you got was a mountain of coal!
Here’s your friendly neighbourhood Let’s Play. How long can you stick it out?
Yeah. I can’t outright say that nobody involved with this game cared
even a little about it, but that’s very much the vibe you get from it.
It completely wastes the show’s canon wherever possible, and the only
reason to play it at the time was that it was at least a way of
wandering around the station. Now, it’s so boring that if you used it as
a frisbee, your dog would fall asleep instead of catching it.
Ah. Captain, it appears our universe is incompatible with modern graphics cards.
By contrast, the second game – The Fallen – hasn’t aged well, but was
an extremely solid release. It was weighed down by having one of the
worst names and box designs in spin-off history – just check out this awful thing – but was an acceptable Unreal powered shooter for 2000.
Story-wise, it takes place in the sixth season of the show (of seven)
and features most of the cast. Avery Brooks didn’t show up, and was
replaced by a Sisko apparently ordered to actively not do an Avery
Brooks impression, while Colm Meaney (who played the station engineer
O’Brien) was punished for his non-appearance by forever knowing he
inflicted one of the worst Oirish accents ever on an unsuspecting world.
Every line his replacement speaks ends on a silent ‘Faith and
begorrah!’
Ah, so that's what happened to Leeta's polygons...
The main plot is fairly complex if you don’t know Deep Space Nine’s
backstory up to this point, but I’ll try to sum it up quickly. Before
Deep Space Nine was Deep Space Nine, it was a Cardassian mining station
called Terok Nor, where the oppressed Bajoran people were forced to
process ore to buy both food, and the essential little brushes required
to get gunk out of their pesky nose-wrinkles. When the Cardassians
finally withdrew, the Federation took over the station with a mind to
helping the Bajorans recover from the brutal Occupation and sign-up –
only to have a giant wormhole open up right next to the planet that
instantly turned it into one of the galaxy’s most important tactical
locations.
The wormhole turned out to be home to a race of mostly nice
god-aliens called the Prophets – a bunch of swirly confusion balls who
pretended not to know about linear time, but were pretty clearly just
dicking with everyone. However, over time it turned out that there was
another set of not-so-nice god aliens who had been banished from the
wormhole for constantly dismissing everything. For this, they became
known as the “Pah!” Wraiths, and condemned to labour forever on Bajoran
high-streets as baristas in a chain of coffee shops called “Costa
Mojan”. Or something like that. It’s been a while since I saw the show.
Tell Ensign Jones that next time he screws up, reporting it by singing 'Ops, I did it again' will result in his death.
Anyway, The Fallen is about them and their worshippers’ attempts to
set them loose, and it’s your job to stop them. Mostly, this is done
through standard third-person shooter methods – but not without a few
quirks. For starters, you can choose to play as three different
characters, Captain Sisko, first officer Kira, and token Klingon Worf –
and each gets their own path through the game and style of playing.
Sisko spends most of his time indulging in a mix of puzzle solving and
shooting, Worf shoots everything and smashes them over the head for good
measure, and Kira bounces comfortably between exploration and using the
power of the Death Note to execute criminals. Something for everyone
then!
As with STO, arguably the best bit is ambling around Deep Space Nine
itself between missions – with a few of the actual characters like Quark
and Garak and Morn in residence rather than a bunch of new people you
don’t care about. There’s not a lot to do, but you can check out
Quark’s, visit the Bajoran Shrine, and get around a hell of a lot more
easily than in Harbinger. There’s even a few people there. Not many, but
some! And some is always better than none, except in MMOs where people
suck.
Here’s Not-Sisko in action for the actual game part though. Enjoy the
awful acting, the inevitable third-person crab-walking, and those
‘beautiful’ early 3D environments from the era before people learned to
program lightswitches and complicated geometry in the Unreal engine.
It’s tough to say that Deep Space Nine ‘deserved’ better. Even during
its run, it was the show that nobody really expected to get an awesome
game out of, and the attempts faded from memory incredibly quickly.
Still, at least it got a couple. More than you can say for Babylon 5.
Next week, Star Trek Month concludes with… ugh… Voyager. Can the most
insipid of shows without the word ‘Enterprise’ in the title lead to
some of its most memorable games? Maybe. And while the high points are
pretty well known already, it may not even need an elite force to make
it so.
Last week we spoke to Relic Entertainment’s Jacen Torres about upcoming RTS Company of Heroes 2, which we’re more than a little bit excited about.
I
have to start this with a warning, then a little tantrum, a few insults
and a dash of paranoia. Apologies to those of you who already know what
I’m going to say and are either fine with it or all raged out – you
guys can skip this section.
Carbon Games have 
