Gaming like it's 1999

In a fit of retro-gaming after seeing the buzz for Supreme Commander, I reinstalled Total Annihilation today. They're claiming it's a "spiritual" successor to TA, since Atari owns that intellectual property and they don't want to give it up to Chris Taylor.

Total Annihilation rocks, even after all these years.

What still works:

• Musical score is great
• Commanding units—command queues still haven't been equaled in newer games
• Giant fighting robots!!
• Lots of the big explodo
• The depth and breadth of units (flying, walking, driving, building, defense, walls, hovercraft, artillery, cloaks, power units, reactors, radar, sonar, naval vessels, amphibious vessels)

What doesn't work:

• The voiceovers (bombastic doesn't even cover it)
• The story's a bit... weak
• Two sides are balanced by being basically the same
• No deformable terrain (dammit, if I have artillery, I wanna blow up a hill!)
• Such a large array of mostly similar units that there is no reason to build a lot of them

Speaking of Chris Taylor games, I see from the perfectly cromulent blog of Pete that Uwe Boll is making a Dungeon Siege movie. Terrifying. DS was a pretty good alternative to Diablo, but I'm not sure I'd sit through two hours of either if they were non-interactive. Let alone a projected 3-hour running time.

All this is basically me trying not to think of Justice O'Connor retiring. I'm looking forward to which nutjob Bush will nominate, though part of me is still thinking he's going to go with Condoleezza Rice. The only bright side is that this probably means that Bolton's recess appointment to the UN ambassadorship won't go through, for fear of poisoning the water. On the other hand, what with the price of gas, Afghanistan, and the judicial retrospectives, they might slip it under the radar as their Friday surprise.

It's probably time to go blow up some more robots, I guess.