PC Zone magazine told me that this game was just as good if not better than Command & Conquer. Well, I bought the game on the strength of that review and guess what? It was fricking SHIT.
What bad RTS games and mediocre CnC clones were YOU stupid enough to buy back then?
Z was bad? I don't know, seemed like a pretty neat game to me. The setting was awesome. It's not really C&C either
>Z was bad?
Yes, a lot.
>C&C babby still seething 26 years after being filtered by Z
lol
You should've demo'd it before buying
Never liked it because it was too intense.
Sectors changing ownership all the time, forced stretched too thin almost always, very small margin for error of any kind, levels/stages needed to be cleared in a certain way like it's a puzzle game.
But otherwise it's a beautiful game and maybe the height of pixelart on the PC.
>Sectors changing ownership all the time, forced stretched too thin almost always, very small margin for error of any kind, levels/stages needed to be cleared in a certain way like it's a puzzle game.
So basically you hate it because it requires...strategy?
Git gud homosexual.
I don't like it because it's closer to a MOBA game than a regular RTS. Just not my cup of monster energy drink.
You have no idea what the frick you're talking about.
Stick to mobile games, they're better suited to somebody of your diminished capacity.
If you actually played RTS game back in the day and then played Z you'd definitely know what I'm talking about.
You obviously don't.
you're trying too hard
Are you completely incapable of having a conversation with a human being?
Z wasn't bad at all.
War Wind was bad, but somehow it's still not forgotten.
War Wind had cool world building and art, but holy frick was it a pain to actually play it. I went back to it recently and got fricked on the first Eaggra mission instantly. It's the little things like your workers automatically walking through damaging fences when they're harvesting that make it so unpleasant to play.
Dark Reign is often overlooked.
I think it's closest to the gameplay and aesthetics of the original C&C
I owned Dark Reign and quite liked it. I think the fully 3D sequel is a much more forgotten game.
Dark reign was more advanced than C&C, the thing is that activision always had a shitty marketing department, and Pandemic left to EA
>Z
>bad
Ask me how i know you chug cum by the gallon
Tribal Rage was pretty bad, but at least it was amusing to have Cthulhu cultists fight rednecks and Elvis impersonators
Even the positive reviews for the Steam re-release are almost all "shit game but my nostalgia says it's good" tier.
I haven't played it in ages but I remember it was ok. The RTS minigame in Space Rangers 2 was pretty much an unlicensed remake of this game.
Epic's forgotten RTS attempt. The tracker soundtrack is still great, but the gameplay was a bit lacking and the pathfinding was shit. The card system was a mixed bag. On one hand it could be fun, but it basically removed some of the skill when anyone could just draw "Death V" or whatever it was called and nuke everyone on the screen attacking your base.
I still played the shit out of it as a kid. I wonder what a reboot of it would look like if a different developer was tasked with it.
Scratch that, it was Vision Software that made 7th legion, not Epic.
This one and Ion Storm's Dominion: Storm over Gift 3 were the most infamous IIRC. Dominion bombed so hard it damaged the hype for Deus Ex.
Dude, Dominion's development was wild.
Dominion originally belonged to a company called Distant Thunder. They made a mech simulator game called G-NOME set in the same universe. It was supposed to have next-gen AI developed by former DoD employees. It also suffered from a lot of development issues and ended up just being a shittier Mechwarrior 2 with no customization.
Distant Thunder would then develop Dominion, but surprise surprise it also suffered from a lot of development issues, and the company would eventually go under and get bought out by Ion Storm. Dominion would get shown at e3 which -- for its time -- had mind-blowing graphics and scared the shit out of a little-known small-time dev there you might have heard of them; Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard was showcasing their upcoming StarCraft game, which looked like a shit purple WarCraft 2 mod at the time. People called it "WarCraft in Space." Dominion's demo made Blizzard sweat so many bullets that they totally redid the game and made it into what we know today.
What they didn't know was that Dominion's e3 demo was TOTALLY FAKED. I don't mean like modern e3 where they photoshop some screenshots here and there, or show a scripted alpha build. I mean the ENTIRE DEMO was made in video editing software and was not real at all. There was no build of the game, and they could pre-render whatever they wanted. That's why it looked so good. StarCraft 1 and its expansion would then become one of the greatest RTS games of all time, right up there with Command and Conquer. Dominion would release to be a meh-tier 3/5 C&C clone.
Dominion made StarCraft.
Any screenshots of those early build of Starcraft and fake Dominion?
Also, I still remember how huge the PR campaign for Dominion was. For months all video game magazines were full of it.
picrel is a screen of what StarCraft looked like at the time. Someone uploaded a video of the Dominion e3 demo here:
Thanks a lot, that's some very interesting stuff.
Huh, I thought it was only guys from Cryo who faked their screenshots for press-releases.
looks cool, kinda glad they went with pre-rendered graphics though
This and Real War were probably the worst RTS I ever played.
Same here, played it so much. Never quite got the game though. The cards were weird. But the style and the soundtrack were so damn good.
I still love just looking at old RTSs for their cool unit and building designs.
There was something about the artstyle and aesthetic in 90's sci-fi strategy games that I can't put my finger on, but I miss it. I think it's a mix of hardware limitation, the use of LARBS in pre-renders, and artstyle philosophy. It just looks so distinct from modern science fiction designs. The designs could be detailed, but not overdesigned. They didn't go crazy on the bump maps (probably couldn't.) They also tended to be kind of dark and edgy in the fun way.
frick i mean NURBS not LARBS
What is NURBS?
Think curves with control points as you can use in drawing programs, but also working in 3D so they're surfaces.
You can then have perfectly rounded shapes in your renders and it's still used a lot in CAD.
Dark Colony had a lot of that style. Unfortunately it was all style over substance.
Dark Colony is still the best depiction of what happens when nobody with any scruples goes to war without any restrictions.
I guess I just like cool tech designs, like there are mecha nerds, military tech nerds, etc. But yeah, those designs also had benefit of being detailed, but also colorful / shiny because they were made in the 90s and came before global lighting.
modern games have global lighting and have incredibly shitty contrast, they both overdetail everything and mute colors, so as a result everything is both too busy and kind of blurs together. I find it hard to even understand what's going on on the screen in Starcraft 2
I remember playing this with a friend on his dad's pc. The cut scenes were pretty gruesome
Blizzard's Shattered Nations
oh and here's a webpage that has StarCraft screenshots throughout its development:
https://blizzardarchive.com/pub/Images/Screens/Sc1_2/clean.html
I really liked Z. I had the demo and being a consolegay it seemed like a completely new genre, don't think I ever managed to clear it though. I got a copy of the full game a while later and had fun with it. I wasn't able to clear more than the first few levels playing normally but cheat codes were fun too. Playing it with a controller feels suboptimal but it was still very enjoyable. I replayed it a few months ago and managed to clear the whole single player easily enough.
A few tweaks could make it a whole lot better. Sensible camera hotkeys are just one thing that would make a world of difference.
The later missions felt more like timed puzzles than actual tactical encounters.
Also the remaster is utterly shit, they fricked up a lot of things, from the control scheme to unit AI. Apparently, the sequel (Steel Soldiers) is similarly fricked.
>The later missions felt more like timed puzzles than actual tactical encounters.
My experience wasn't really like that. The closest was L17: Car Park. You start at top right and opponent is top left. Lower left and lower right are large areas with a single entrance containing a bunch of factories and empty vehicles. I beelined for lower right and pushed into lower left so they never really had a chance to get up and running there. If there is an intended way to do that level it's probably not all that different.
Most other levels I managed by taking factories, building a solid line of defence and slowly taking the rest of the map with overwhelming numbers. There were maybe two maps where I ended up losing almost all of the map but was able to barely win anyway by going straight for the enemy fort with a single large force.
Haven't played any of the sequels of remakes, not least because I haven't heard anything good about them.
I purchased it 25 years ago but it wouldn't run.
I've enjoyed it.
>CMDR. ZOG
Man, times used to be bold back then.
Earth 2140 is probably the worst I’ve played. Weapons seem to kill everything with equal rapidity, buildings are frick off huge, you have to frick around with finding the exact spot to place mines without any on screen indication of where the resource nodes are (just on the minimap). The art is bland, the story is nonexistent, etc etc. Its the only RTS I ever played where it felt like they were deliberately making stupid design decisions for laughs.
Incidentally, I believe one of the developers of Warcraft 2 talked about how the original method of getting oil was to use a tanker to cast a sonar spell and guesstimate on minimap where the oil is, and it wasn’t visible on the main screen. They took that out because it was stupid. It’s funny that Earth 2140 ended up doing something similar.
Oh, and the music is totally nonsensical. Forgot to mention that.
I haven't played anything from this series, but I remember the later games had good word of mouth. 2150 in particular had a decent following, altho I also heard it's a turtling-oriented game.
Better than C&C, no. A bad game, also no. It's alright, pretty fun even
the most underrated RTS of the late 90's
I never figured out how to play this as a kid. like I didn't even know how to build anything and was too stupid to look up a manual or anything.
I loved KKND2, always felt it was starcraft set in the fallout universe. Awesome intro too.
Forgot pic.