Hello everyone,
Day 13 … Gotta admit, the tireds are still with me (4 working days left to break) so this might be shorter. Mind you, I’m also short on screenshots for the games … What’s behind the door today ?
It’s the Republic Cruiser today. I think this is the one we see for a short time at the start of Episode 1 before it has a Rapid Planned Disassembly courtesy of the Trade Federation.
What are the games there ?
Supremacy / Rebellion (different name in UK due to a different game) came out around 1998. I was supremely hyped for this one. I was looking forward to a grand strategy game combining the Galactic War in Star Wars with being able to do the more tactical engagements.
And it may have worked too … if not for those meddling… Nah. It was a good idea for a game but the execution wasn’t great.
You had the galaxy spanning map, broken up into sectors with a cluster of star systems within. You’d have industrial planets, shipyard planets, resource planets contributing to an economy that would support your growing military.
It was an asymmetric setup too, with the Empire having big scary fleets and the Rebels needing to build up or run away. It also had the idea that while the Empire had a fixed seat of government in Coruscant, the Rebel base could be moved around the galaxy.
The game had characters which drove the gameplay in their own ways as well. They could recruit, run bases or ships and execute commando missions.
The game appeared to have the lot. It even had a tactical battle engine the likes of which I don’t think had been seen before in a PC game of this era.
Yet it failed. I gave it up reasonably quickly and moved back to Master of Orion 2. It was bland and boring. And a waste of the concept. A shame too because if they had pulled it off, then it would have been an excellent game.
The other game up there is Star Wars Empire At War. I actually rebought this one a bit later to try it out again. (I couldn’t find the disc !)
There’s another cautionary tale here with the Steam offerings for old games. It does not include the manual in soft copy. You need the manual because it tells you the unit strengths and weakness. This is a game from the Rock Paper Scissors era of strategy, where all of the units in games would be set up as hard counters to the other units.
So as well as not telling you how to play the game, you would be denied access to the info required to win at the game.
The lesson here is to be extremely wary about acquiring old games via Steam. There’s probably been little to zero effort gone into making them run on modern machines. Good Old Games are a decent alternative but they’ve moved away from bringing back old games and on to being a publisher for New Things. Sadly they’ve lost some of their soul along the way, including indulging in some of the nastier marketing tactics around That Big New Game.
Empire at War ?
So it’s another grand space strategy game again, this time with either the asymmetric (Empire strong, Rebels weak) start of Supremacy / Rebellion or more balanced starts.
It had a ground combat layer …
There were a whole heap of new units invented for this because they needed to balance what we’d already seen in the films.
However … I can’t remember why I dropped the game the first time. I might have gone straight back to what I knew and enjoyed, which was Master of Orion 2. It looks like it came out in 2006, which was a really bad time for me psychologically … I’m not going to go into that.
I suspect I went straight back into World of Warcraft !
I do know why I bounced straight off the game when I looked at it again. There was another bad porting issue, where the tutorial phasing had broken. Instead of a slowly flashing red/blue in the tutorial for things you couldn’t do yet, the red/blue flash was ultra quick. The kind of ultra quick flash that can cause head problems …
So after a little research into that, I figured it wasn’t an issue I could fix any time soon and went straight back to Stellaris.
So today’s couple of games, Supremacy/Rebellion and Empire At War, were a couple of games that should have been great but something went wrong somewhere along the way.
Great concept was broken by flawed execution. If I talk about Star Trek Birth of the Federation at some point (it’s on The List), then that game has the same problem to a worse degree.
In other news … I’ve been in the Internet Spaceship again over the weekend, making my way to the edge of the galaxy.
This is the last shot of the Searching For Dragons in the original configuration … The next few bits of the route are going to be a bit awkward so there’s been a small refit to eke out a bit more jump range.
That’s a Herbig Ae/Be type star. Looks pretty much the same as the other stars, there’s a few things that Elite Dangerous doesn’t know how to draw properly yet. That aside, it’s still one of the prettiest games I have.
That’s where I stopped for the day. Body said it wanted a break and the next parts of the trip will be interesting times … if they’re even possible with what I have.
We shall see !
In the meantime, stay safe, be well.