2822

Odium is actually really, really good, IIRC.

2823

It’s available on GOG (Odium/Gorky 17).

2824

I have it installed right now. I’ve only gotten through a few screens.

2825

Geryk and Shadow Watch from back in the day. Includes bonus Odium coverage. In the olden days, there was some really good stuff here other than that contributed by Tom.

Blizzard was at ECTS, with private showings of Warcraft 3, which was little changed from its E3 showing back in May, and their new venture, the multiplayer online RPG, World of Warcraft. With Westwood immersing their fans into a 3D C&C world with Renegade, it’s no great surprise to see Blizzard following a similar path. A while back, there had been rumours that Warcraft 3 was going to be 3D, with a heavy RPG element. That didn’t happen, but it seems a few of the shelved ideas have carried forward into World of Warcraft. It’ll be massively multiplayer, it’ll offer you the ability to play as creatures of any one of at least three races (human, orc, or tauren), and it certainly looks and sounds exciting. Those of us who suffered theBattle.net woes with Diablo 2 will be anxious to know how a repeat of that debacle will be avoided. Unfortunately, one solution might involve more resources on the server side. And that probably means pay per play fees. It’ll likely be 2003 before we see the game released, so there’s plenty of time for Blizzard to work on it.

I remember theorizing that WoW was a whole different ball game and it was up in the air (with me) as to whether they could translate their RTS success…

2826

Oohh, great article, never saw it before, thanks Tykenks!

2827

Seriously, any newish folks should browse the actual front page if only for nostalgia’s sake. A lot of great stuff. (This should be shouted from the rooftops. :) ) Geryk had his own site with lengthy and excellent game analysis. Great, dry wit as heard on some of the FoS podcasts. I wish those were archived somewhere.

If Tom is listening, I wonder if there is anyway to hit up Brooski for those and store them on Qt3: The Website, somewhere.

2828

Heh, I usually skip the front page and go right to the forums, but I’ll take a look. Thanks Tyjenks!

2829

Oh yeah, I have not bookmarked the front page for years. You can find all Tom’s stuff posted around here or on Fidgit, obviously. I am not sure when the focus shifted to the forums and whether the focus on interesting, lengthy analysis or the lack of time caused the move away from Qt3 being a gaming “website”. I am not lamenting the change at all at this point. The forum points most of is in the right direction of the good stuff.

ALright, enough derailing lovefest.

2830

Shadow Watch was so close to being great.

The thing that killed it for me was that the metagame was rubbish. You could make choices that would influence the story, but the story was randomly generated and your choices didn’t matter. You could choose who to bring on each mission, but the number of enemies you’d encounter varied with the size of your team so it didn’t really matter what kind of team you went with.

2831

I pretty much agree with that. It is not like I beat the game to death then, but it is a perfect candidate for GoG.

2832

I actually got back into AOWSM recently. I bought myself a netbook a few months back and have been trying all the old games on it to see how well they work. It turns out that the original 1.3 patch for AOWSM removed the CD check. Then later releases of the patch re-instituted it. I never knew that. But, having dug up a copy, it makes it perfect for the netbook.

2833

I also need to finish AoW: SM. I’m on campaign scenario 9 if anyone wants to catch up and chat about it.

2834

Well the campaign didn’t impress me that much - it wasn’t bad, better than AOW2’s, but nowhere near the epic quality of #1. Some of the scenarios you can find online are really fun and challenging though.

#1, I made a point of replaying at least once for every single combination of choices you could take through the storyline. Whoever they had writing it really knew their stuff.

2835

I loved Age of Wonders so much. I only played it hotseat though. Has anyone played Age of Wonders in both single player and hotseat multiplayer? Am I setting myself up for disappointment if I get it again, just for the single player?

I just remember some epic battles in multiplayer. Despite 3 of us trying to defeat the AI on the hardest setting, all 3 of us eventually got wiped out in multiple games. One of my favorite features about Age of Wonders was that you could make your hero a wall-climbing fool who hopped over into the enemy castle and kicked ass in hand to hand combat. And you ran the risk of getting your hero killed, thereby ending your game. I never could get into Age of Wonders 2 because in that one, you could only be a wizard who stayed at home and cast spells. You couldn’t actually have a daredevil hero who could mix it up and do foolish things and get himself killed.

2836

Incubation was awesome. I still have my copy (and expansion/sequel) on my shelf - wonder what it would take to get running. It was all glide-based, if I remember right.

2837

This is such bad timing for this release though. They should have come out about 2 or 3 weeks ago, along with Elemental. Right now, I’m waiting for Civ 5. So the Age of Wonders games will just have to wait until next year.

2838

First of all, against the AI, in any AOW you’re pretty much guaranteed to win if you do nothing silly. In #1, once you get your hero’s attack and defense stats maxed, and give him Life Draining, he can literally take out the entire enemy army in one go without ever being really at risk. Maybe if you were up against a human player using Incarnates or something, there might be a risk, but I never played #1 in MP. This actually sorta spoiled the campaign for me the first time I played it, because I let my hero get too powerful and the later scenarios just consisted of me running straight across the map towards the enemy commander, killing him, and ending the mission, over and over. This is only really possible because in #1, you don’t lose mobility in defensive fighting the way you do in #2 - #2 and SM make it possible to overwhelm even ultra-tanks with boatloads of immunities if you just have enough cannon fodder to throw at them. But in #1 you get those two counterattacks every single time an enemy unit attacks, and if you have life draining you’re making up for any damage you’re taking, and it just isn’t possible to find a way to lose if you’re doing it right.

#2’s wizards/heroes dichotomy doesn’t ruin the “heroes running around kicking ass” fun stuff. The heroes you recruit can have exactly the same effect as the commander did in #1, you just need to be sure to back them up with regular troops to be safe. The wizard ends up being just an afterthought - he’s a part of the scenery; he casts global spells and summons and as such he’s just infrastructure. The heroes are the ones out there doing all the interesting stuff.

Overall the combat balance in #2 and SM was much better than in #1.

2839

Yep x2.

I tried a few years ago and had no trouble, but then at the time, my PC was 5 or 6 years old, so that could have been a factor in having no trouble.

The Wilderness Missions. Fun stuff.

2840

Yeah, but you’re talking about leveling up your hero over multiple scenarios in the campaign. The campaign wasn’t playable in hotseat multiplayer, and that’s the only way I’ve played. So each time we created new heroes for our individual scenarios that we played. The game only shipped with 2 maps that could accommodate three human players and enough AI opponents. So we used to play those same 2 maps all the time. We won a couple of times, but we lost a few times too. We certainly never got to a point in those scenarios where our heroes were even close to having their attack or defense stats maxed. That’s probably only possible in the campaign, I’m guessing, where you can carry over your hero to other scenarios.

2841

You’re right. I never played the game that way.

I can’t imagine having played AOW1 and never having played the campaign. It was a really good campaign.