Archive for September 2nd, 2011

In the latest Of Phalanxes and Hydralisks*, my strategy gaming column on Gamespy, let’s look at how the best games break.

The earliest example I can recall is Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares. You’re trucking along, playing a great 4X space opera, when annoying ships start to gradually trickle out onto the map, messing up stuff and then leaving. These are the Antarans, a malicious extra-dimensional race of jerks with ships way more powerful than yours. And they don’t stop coming.

Read the column here.

* Are you accustomed to that title yet? Does it no longer sound tortured and awkward to you? Me either.

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Note that it’s not Archon. Like that game up there, which is a whole other way to travel through time. It’s Achron. Like Ohio. This time travel RTS is challenging in terms of saying the name without thinking of the classic battle chess game or the Ohio city. In terms of graphics, gameplay, and its drawn-out tedious campaign. In terms of wrapping your head around its cool ideas.

…unfortunately, cool ideas don’t sell games until they’re implemented into cool games.

Read the review here.

By the way, I did some math. The Gamepro editor who stuck the editor’s note at the top of the review, which kind of spoils the joke by explaining it, thinks Blizzard is going to publish one Starcraft sequel every two years for the next decade. That’s a good one!

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