Supreme Commander - NEW screenshots from IGN

Rise of South Park: Cheesy Poof Command.

Oh wait, that was just a good dream I had last night.

Another shitty South Park game? Couldn’t have been that good of a dream.

What part of “dream” do you not understand?

Uh… you said you had a South Park game in “a good dream last night”. I said it couldn’t have been a “good dream” because the South Park games are, in my own opinion, bad games. Did I offend somehow? Because I didn’t attempt to insult you personally.

The thing the screenshots (and the coverage, at least so far) don’t give a feel for–or even a hint about, really–is how you control everything. I see no interface and lots and lots and lots of units on some very large maps, and it seem to me that it could be okay or it could be awful, depending on the how you control your armies and the pacing of the game. I know that interface design is one of Chris’ strong points, so I’m hoping he’s got some out-of-the-box idea that makes it all manageable. But the screenshots sure don’t show it–they just look sprawling and chaotic. It’s tough to make sprawling, large-scale battles like that play well.

I have high hopes because I loved TA, back in the day. But nothing I’ve seen so far gives me much of a feel for how SC will play, and the screenshots don’t really sway me one way or the other.

No infantry = no sale

They are called K-Bots.

No cheese = no sale.

No, no offense. It was a joke :-) The point is that whatever the South Park games may be in reality, in my dream there was a good one. Dreams are not bound by reality. Or at least, mine aren’t!

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.”(javascript: copy_to_clipboard(‘quote.text’);)
E.B. White

Likewise

Oh, okay. Trust me, it’s not humor I’m trying to analyze, just threat. “… Do you not understand?” generally means some other guy doesn’t respect my choice of Street Fighter or Warcraft character in another forum.

Heh. Indeed - no.

There’s just so much cool stuff coming out. You’ve got this, and Spore. I can’t remember such an exciting time in PC gaming to be honest.

If this is at least as good as TA, I’ll be all over it. I have to say that I don’t understand how TA could be so good, and Dungeon Siege so bad; just as I can’t understand how Xenogears was so good, and Xenosaga so utterly nauseous. But this is the only RTS I’ve anticipated since Kohan II (which I never played, consequent to universally poor impressions), so I hope it’s worth the wait! The screenshots are certainly cool.

Give me a break! A few rabid Kohan 1 fanboys badmouthed the game, that’s all. Kohan 2 was an excellent game and got generally very good reviews.

Yeah, I agree. The new ones seem a lot more sterile.

I do think the unit details look alot less detailed in the recent screenshots, but the 3d camera completely blew my mind because now you can actually see the size and scope of the maps… it will rock because of this!

etc

I’d suggest the older ones look a bit fake when you see the new ones.

I doubt they were taken from inside a working build.

Gamerankings.com:

Kohan II: Kings of War
Publisher: Global Star Software
Number of P/Reviews: 151 PC 80.9%
Kohan: Ahriman’s Gift
Publisher: Strategy First
Number of P/Reviews: 59 PC 81.6%
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns
Publisher: Strategy First
Number of P/Reviews: 111 PC 84.4%

I don’t tend to place to much faith in game reviews; they give crazy-high scores to Final Fantasy 7, and terrible scores to other games that are very good, with the scores correlating only to marketing muscle. But in one case, I pay close attention: When a sequel gets a lower score than the original. Normally, reviewers inflate the scores of anticipated sequels regardless of their quality, so if a sequel scores higher - it means nothing to me. But when a sequel scores worse, I remember buying TA: Kingdoms (74% versus TA’s 89.7%) and Star Control 3 and I shudder. Why is the score worse AFTER inflation? The 81 could mean “F-, but our magazine hyped it up so much we can’t give it below a B, or we look like fools.”

Other instances:
Deus Ex (91.5) versus Deus Ex 2 (83.5)
Xenogears (91) versus Xenosaga (83.8)
XCOM (93.6) versus XCOM2 (86) and 3 (85.6)
HoMM III (87.7) versus HoMM IV (79.6)

(unfortunately Gamerankings does not have enough old reviews for a safe comparison of Privateer 1->2->Freelancer or Star Control 2->3 [GameRankings lists 3 higher, but on a tiny sample size])

I’ve played every game I listed (except DX2, as its craptitude was painfully obvious from forums), and bought almost all of them. There is no doubt in my mind that not one of the sequels earned its C+ to B; they were all artificially bouyed be their stellar successors. TA: Kingdoms was not terrible, but simply mediocre; and its C is fair. Otherwise, everything is at least a letter grade to high - and many of them are just pure crap.

My point is that game review scores don’t correlate well with game quality, and they are often useless when studied in isolation. But in every case I have ever tested, a sequel with a lower score than the original was not worth playing. Furthermore, in most cases, a seemingly small drop in score conceals a massive drop in quality - for the same reason that a $100/plate 5-star French restaurant serving crappy food will get 4 stars instead of 5, while a cheap Mexican restaurant serving the best Mexican food in the state can’t possibly get more than 3 stars, though serving bad food would drop it to 1.5. And the same reason France still considers itself important, because Napolean killed a bunch of people centuries ago. Most people look at reality, but see what they expect to see.

Back on topic:

Wow. I keep expecting to see thousands of JarJars in one of the pictures, and then I remember, this is a game and it just happens to have movie-quality visuals. Not in every picture, but in many of them.

Saber Cherry, you’re welcome to play or not play whatever you like according to whatever rationale you like. But however you choose to spin it, you’re dead wrong that Kohan 2 was greeted with “universally poor impressions”. It was a fantastic RTS that suffered really poor treatment from a bunch of jackasses who violated NDAs, placed unreasonable demands on the design, and generally fucked over the developers at Timegate every chance they got.

“Universally poor impressions”, my foot. It made my top ten list and I think most RTS fans agreed it was quite good. If you like, I’d be happy to point you to some impressions to that effect.

-Tom

I’d be happy if you could point me that way. I’m simply claiming that published reviewers, on average, thought it was worse than Kohan 1… and that’s true. I don’t have an agenda, I’m not looking for reasons to dislike a game I anticipated, and I haven’t based my conclusion on unhappy beta testers, unless they’re colluding with the game media industry.

Kohan was my second-favorite RTS ever. Did you find Kohan 2 to be superior to Kohan 1? That question is open to everyone who played both, by the way.

The problem is that the units in those screens have terrible textures. Those look like the hand-drawn shading from pre-3D DOS games.

With better textures, those screens would be fine.