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rbandrewsWent over to Tucker's house this evening and played some board games with he, Chris, and Mike. Lost Puerto Rico to Mike, then I (barely) lost Nexus Ops to Mike, then I won Hamlet and lost Hamlet to Tucker in the fastest games of that I've ever seen, and then Industria where I lost but wasn't the worst, which was a new experience to me. Eventually I'll understand what's happening in that game, and if that ever occurs I'll be unstoppable. Or at least competitive.
I've been playing video games more than normal recently. I'm almost done with Sam & Max Hit the Road, and I've rediscovered NetStorm. S&M is a delightful Lucasarts adventure game, from way back before Lucasarts games started sucking (I would like to state that said sucking is not being done by Gladius. Gladius rules). It's got the characters from the Steve Purcell comic, who are a straight-man dog in a trenchcoat, and a psycho crazy rabbit. Together they solve crimes! It's hilarious, and playing this I can't believe that graphic adventure games are dead.
Which makes a decent segue to NetStorm, which has only one thing in common with that: it's dead. The leading NetStorm site brags that at its height, NS had never fewer than twenty players online! Like Moonbase Commander, NetStorm was too good for its audience. I'm going to be saying that a lot in this post, in fact, because there are many ways in which NetStorm is like Moonbase Commander: they're both RTSes but not really, they both have territory control as the emergent most important element, they both have a great degree of strategy emerging from the interplay of very few units, and they both made their authors thousandaires and the companies that created them chapter-eleven-aires.
The general theme of NetStorm is that you control these floating islands, and attack other floating islands. You play the role of a priest for a religion that worships weather (not odd for a race which lives entirely in the sky) and you're trying to capture your opponent's priest and sacrifice him. Your opponent, through the wonders of 1997 interweb technology, is some guy on the "net". Play on the net, beat your opponents with storms. NetStorm.
Every time you win a battle, you get a new unit to use. You have your choice of which two or three of the units you know about to use in a battle, from the maybe twenty or so that there are. All the units use one of four types of energy: sun (which is any type), wind, rain, and thunder. To build a building, you place it somewhere where it's in the radius of a power source, and it builds itself. If it's a gun it decides what to shoot at, and fights all on its own. You just tell it where to go.
"Where to go" is anywhere on your island, or on the end of your bridges, which is where the territory thing comes in. You place bridge segments off your island and connect to other things. Bridges must match up exactly, and they're odd shapes, so you can't make a straight ordinary bridge. If you're fast enough at solving the bridge puzzle, you surround your opponent and limit his expansion, because bridges cannot cross. If they're unanchored, though, they crumble and fall, and you can blow holes in them if parts of them are buildings.
The buildings are all very clever, and interplay well. The cheapest is the sun disc thrower, shich shoots at anything in a very small circular radius. There are guns which shoot anything on a line with them, there are whirligig bases which launch tiny flying things that bomb other buildings, but get destroyed easily by the sun disc throwers, and so on all the way to the thunder cannon, which shoots very powerful bolts a very long way, but you decide the single direction it shoots in when you build it. Most of the game is the buildings; the only units you can control directly are the golems and whatnot, which just mine or carry things (like stunned enemy priests). It's like Warcraft but playable: you never have to split between managing your base and trying to fight a battle.
When first released, the game had some serious problems (easy ways to cheat mostly), but now it's eight years later and it's not so much a big deal. Also, the game is now free, as abandonware. I highly recommend it.
I've been playing video games more than normal recently. I'm almost done with Sam & Max Hit the Road, and I've rediscovered NetStorm. S&M is a delightful Lucasarts adventure game, from way back before Lucasarts games started sucking (I would like to state that said sucking is not being done by Gladius. Gladius rules). It's got the characters from the Steve Purcell comic, who are a straight-man dog in a trenchcoat, and a psycho crazy rabbit. Together they solve crimes! It's hilarious, and playing this I can't believe that graphic adventure games are dead.
Which makes a decent segue to NetStorm, which has only one thing in common with that: it's dead. The leading NetStorm site brags that at its height, NS had never fewer than twenty players online! Like Moonbase Commander, NetStorm was too good for its audience. I'm going to be saying that a lot in this post, in fact, because there are many ways in which NetStorm is like Moonbase Commander: they're both RTSes but not really, they both have territory control as the emergent most important element, they both have a great degree of strategy emerging from the interplay of very few units, and they both made their authors thousandaires and the companies that created them chapter-eleven-aires.
The general theme of NetStorm is that you control these floating islands, and attack other floating islands. You play the role of a priest for a religion that worships weather (not odd for a race which lives entirely in the sky) and you're trying to capture your opponent's priest and sacrifice him. Your opponent, through the wonders of 1997 interweb technology, is some guy on the "net". Play on the net, beat your opponents with storms. NetStorm.
Every time you win a battle, you get a new unit to use. You have your choice of which two or three of the units you know about to use in a battle, from the maybe twenty or so that there are. All the units use one of four types of energy: sun (which is any type), wind, rain, and thunder. To build a building, you place it somewhere where it's in the radius of a power source, and it builds itself. If it's a gun it decides what to shoot at, and fights all on its own. You just tell it where to go.
"Where to go" is anywhere on your island, or on the end of your bridges, which is where the territory thing comes in. You place bridge segments off your island and connect to other things. Bridges must match up exactly, and they're odd shapes, so you can't make a straight ordinary bridge. If you're fast enough at solving the bridge puzzle, you surround your opponent and limit his expansion, because bridges cannot cross. If they're unanchored, though, they crumble and fall, and you can blow holes in them if parts of them are buildings.
The buildings are all very clever, and interplay well. The cheapest is the sun disc thrower, shich shoots at anything in a very small circular radius. There are guns which shoot anything on a line with them, there are whirligig bases which launch tiny flying things that bomb other buildings, but get destroyed easily by the sun disc throwers, and so on all the way to the thunder cannon, which shoots very powerful bolts a very long way, but you decide the single direction it shoots in when you build it. Most of the game is the buildings; the only units you can control directly are the golems and whatnot, which just mine or carry things (like stunned enemy priests). It's like Warcraft but playable: you never have to split between managing your base and trying to fight a battle.
When first released, the game had some serious problems (easy ways to cheat mostly), but now it's eight years later and it's not so much a big deal. Also, the game is now free, as abandonware. I highly recommend it.
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