Giant! Fighting! Robots!

Gamespy has their coverage of Supreme Commander up on the Web now.

Um. Excuse me. I think I need to go lie down for a minute.

When Black and White first came out, one of the things that blew me away is that they had the ability to zoom in on an apple sitting in a village, out to a map of the continent. Supreme Commander expands on this sense of scale, allowing you to zoom in on units in the battlefield, or out to a world map. You know, where you can direct forces to target geographic regions.

All games are hyped like crazy before they come out, but this really does feel like taking Total Annihilation (still one of my favorite games) to the next level. There's an interview with Chris Taylor that's worth a read.

GameSpy: Take us back to the concept phase of Supreme Commander. You always wanted to do a Total Annihilation 2, but that didn't work out. What was the thought behind moving to a "spiritual successor?"

Taylor: As a game designer I have my own view of what I think an RTS is all about. When I sat down to design Supreme Commander, I tried to visualize the experience in fresh and interesting new ways. The first was my realizing that although we call this genre "Real-Time Strategy," it should have been called "Real-Time Tactics" with a dash of strategy thrown in. The goal with Supreme Commander was to really deliver the strategy, by opening up the game to an enormous theatre of war, with some incredible, never-seen-before Super Units, that absolutely require the player to think strategically before attempting to deploy them into the field.

I wonder if he's interested in my idea for an RTS, where it's all about sharing and hugs!