Evening Reading: RTS Madness!
by Brian Leahy, Feb 25, 2010 5:00pm PSTEvery once and a while, there seems to be a rush of games in a particular genre. Right now, the RTS is hot news, mister. Blizzard launched the beta for StarCraft II, EA's Command & Conquer 4 is also in beta, Supreme Commander 2 hits next week, and the first Dawn of War II expansion pack, Chaos Rising, drops the week after. It's the season for real-time strategy.
All of these titles have different gameplay systems and offer unique experiences. RTS gamers tend to get extremely focused on one game at a time, much like FPS players. It's a sad trend that makes a small genre even smaller. I wish the teams behind the non-Blizzard game all the luck in the world. It's still just in beta, right? How about a Game of the Evening?
Savage: The Battle for Newerth - "Savage was one of the rare attempts at RTS/FPS fusion. The incredible thing is that the gameplay worked, it was stable, it was fast and fun. More incredible is it somehow managed to be not as popular as it deserved to be. The FPS portion included multiple classes while the RTS commander gave orders, built units, and assigned buildings to be built. Each team supported up to 128 players." (LoioshDwaggie)
Daily required reading, Video Games 101:
- Alpha Protocol gets a release date, again.
- Plants vs. Zombies sold a bunch on the iPhone.
- Final Fantasy I & II are released on the iPhone.
- New Battlefield: Bad Company 2 videos make me happy.
Finally, I've spent way too much time today putting random phrases into TranslationParty, which translates from English to Japanese to English to Japanese and so on. Tip: StarCraft-related sentences are particularly amusing. Or this.
Oh, and the last ever (probably not) Day of Defeat: Source Shackbattle is tonight. So go play it with Shackers one last time!
Wargame: Airland Battle trailer details dynamic campaign
Halo 'Bootcamp' confirmed by Microsoft
Weekend PC download deals: Tomb Raider for $14
Game Dev Tycoon studio outlines future plans
Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced already has 350,000 words of new content



When it comes to sheer production values, sheer amount of features, the details, no game beats Grand Theft Auto 4. The scope of the production dwarfs any other game: over 1,000 people worked on the game for over 3 and a half years, doing everything from studying New York city with cameras that recorded city traffic for months, to contacting over 2,000 people just to obtain the rights to the hundreds of music tracks that can be listened to in the game. Price to record a master for each track ran at around $10,000 and that excludes the license and royalty fees. There’s enough content in the game to keep the average gamer immersed for at least 100 hours. There should be, with a budget of $100 million, GTA 4 is the most expensive video game ever made.
O_O
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