Evening Reading: RTS Madness!

Every 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!