Me and Vondur (long ago) sold our souls to the devil and are playing the expansion, which is absolutely awesome (altho we are playing on different servers): http://jago.pp.fi/images/WOW/AgaUI.jpg 

 

Recreational activity helps rejuvinate a tired, stressed out modder who may be a bit burned out with his project but who is still willing to soldier on inspite of it all (I hope that preempts what I think is coming). 

yeah Im hooked on that atm... Got my paladin up to level 66 so far,all the new areas and content just rocks, Nagrand in particular is beautiful, with all the floating patches of land with waterfalls falling off them, and the bendy trees, great stuff :)

Loving the new shorter dungeons too, I just dont have time for 1.5 - 2 hour runs these days, so spending 45 minutes from start to finish is great.

Also, the different versions of the new tier 4 armour sets is a great idea, now you can really create the character you want to play with complentary gear rather than what blizzard thinks you should have.

raiding ZG with a group of 20 level 65+ players is just really easy now too :) 

Loving the new shorter dungeons too, I just dont have time for 1.5 - 2 hour runs these days, so spending 45 minutes from start to finish is great.

What a chore it could be to complete a dungeon from beginning to the end. That was a great game inspite of the chugging it out time. Though I've played a bit of both Marrowwind and Oblivion, and I liked what I saw, but neither one of those held my attention as long as Daggerfall did. Like you, the time factor is quite a bit different today than back then. 

didn't you uninstall it?

Just sayin'. 

Talking about individual dungeons inside the game. In Daggerfall, the minor mission dungeons were completely randomized but within a limited set of map templates so their was a great deal of monotony. The main mission was pretty good though, with the moody Lord of the Worms lair and good stuff like that. 

I was not a chore, it was good fun, but 2 hours is a long time these days, thats all I was saying :)

It also means its a hell of a lot easier to get dungeon groups together, and there is a load less of "afk for dinner, be back in 20 minutes" just before the final boss :)

Also, you gotta laugh that there is a level 70 dreanei Shaman on my server, that took what 3 weeks? Some people on this planet scare me :) 

they've also made a lot of improvements in the 'follow the npc' type gameplay area.

remember onyxia attunement and doing jb runs? :P

there's a new one like that in CoT, and it's much better. has different save points, so if you wipe, you don't have to restart the whole thing, and doesn't start automatically when you accept the quest, so you don't accidentally have dudes who didn't know start the quest prematurely. 

so I've been playing Company of Heroes pretty much every day at lunch with some other guys here at Raven. I do well sometimes, and sometimes I get owned. We play pretty casually, and our strategies aren't really more advanced than 'I'll go here, then use tanks'...

So it came as a suprise that one of our replays was submitted to be video reviewed by one of our regulars, and it was. I play horribly this game though :(

WMV here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/tohvideo/~5/86597970/ToH-19_Montherme_Madness_2-4-07.wmv 

nice :) 

why did they choose tiny soldiers and boring ww2 setting in CoH? I prefer the bulky spacemarines and and other scifi stuff of DoW, but apparently CoH gameplay is better and has more depth to it

Two guys here are hardcore CoH players.
Some others play CS and Joint Operations (rather yawn) 

Supreme Commander demo came out earlier this week, and I've been playing that like crazy every night. Tons of fun once you break into the thought that you need 5 factories to pump out units, not just one, and 10 or so defensive guns at a position, otherwise 100's of units will simply walk over things. Thankfully, you can easily set up multiple orders and cancel parts of them so you can just set up units to do a ton of shit and forget about them.

Glad to be playing it at work too, since it supports dual monitors, so your main screen can be zoomed into the action and moving your dudes, and the second monitor can be zoomed out to be a 'minimap' and give you a good overall view of the fronts.

Oh, and Giant Spiderbots are just awesome.
http://pcmedia.gamespy.com/pc/image/article/632/632026/supreme-commander-20050707115342377.jpg 

I have to get SC going at work where I have a decent enough PC to run it AND two monitors :)

Everyone else is waiting fo C&C3, but I've irrationally hated C&C since the first game (Warcraft 2 was waaaay better) and don't play many RTS games anyway... only TA, WC3 and DoW when they were new. Never finished the SP campaigns of any of them though ;) 

I dunno about this, I guess I've been spoiled by Blizzard RTS too much, and this is nothing like them so I'm having trouble enjoying it.
There's not much new compared to TA really, there's pretty much no micro management, and the games quickly turn into giant wars where you're looking at little unit icons moving across the map and dying... Doesn't seem to be much strategy involved, just having a fast build order. 

Didn't the demo come out months ago? Or was that the beta?

And, SC = StarCraft.

Maybe SupCom = Supreme Commander? 

dude you got to play oblivion i knw so many glitches hers one a man named dorion in the in the imperial tempel district first find him in his house he is always there bribe him alot then when cant you no more hit him once with your fists then bribe him again so on son but do it only about 5 or 6 6 times.when you are done kill him but fast or he will run then go to his gold and press a. his gold will never go away.dont press take all or the game will freeze but his body will disapear after a few days.i got about maybe 1 million $$$ in about 20 min.but......never mind youll have fun 

fgyykriuiry 

You're just a bit overtaken by the action, theres fukken loooooooaads of strategy involved in supcom, once youve mastered controlling the fuck you doing :P 

If Supreme Commander is anything like TA, there's tons of strategy, don't let the fact that TA always included/allowed actual economic/territory management be enough of a factor to influence the outcome even sometimes without strategy, eclipse that. As for Blizzard, I never saw the point of their games. Seemed a lot like C&C, but without as much action. I'm not a blockheaded action freak, but controlling 12 units only at a time seemed like such an arbitrarily limitation, of the exact kind Chris Taylor wanted to do away with. Also their art style never really flew with me (though Diablo's art style always ruled). C&C was small scale, stylized like a really simple Chess kinda, pretty fun but once TA came out I never looked back. I'm looking forward to Supreme Commander, the whole scope of land/air/sea/submarine, radar/sonar/jammers, would just be so awesome on an even bigger scale than TA. 

playing and mapping for TA. Although Starcraft was/is more fun on a competitive level (in TA, it kind of sucked having 500 units on a side with nearly unlimited resources), maybe supcom will blow my panties off and just make me freak out!!13 

Bought a GeForce 7900 GS for $160, now I can run more recent games - Hitman: Blood Money rocks and runs great at 1440 x 900, 4x AA, 8x AF 

With TA, the engine seems like it's hardware-scalable: obviously, the unit limit was increased by Cavedog from 250 to 500 a while after the release, and larger maps became possible (the original game had like TWO maps that were 64MB, the rest were all less - now 128 MB are the norm), and the unit limit has since been increased to 5,000. 5,000 is basically beyond one's own ability to organize and control even with enqueing (some refinements to the system are hopefully present in SupCom), so essentially TA has had for years now an nonexistant unit limit. Furthermore, there is never a situation, playing with Cavedog-only units, where resources are truly infinite. There is always a way to use or abuse resources, whether that's 500 construction planes (this is possible) or 100 tank factories (also possible) - and the enemy, whose resources may approach or exceed your own, also has these choices. In other words if each side had truly infinite resources it would become fairly meaningless. Luckily that's not the case.

I really like how TA is based on real war. Not as in, your guy gets shot in the leg and has to be flown out and you send an apology to his family, but rather in the emphasis on economics, strategy, and scope. All Blizzard RTS, and C&C games, are tiny, simplified almost arcade-type games in comparison, where you just save up 200 bucks to buy one or two special types of unit that screw the other guy. In these games, you don't need to both outproduce and outmanuever your opponent. It's enough just to do one or two things they weren't expecting and wipe their "base" off the map. In TA, shit can be built anywhere: territory is based on whoever can control it, not arbitrary rules. Aside from Myth, which is entirely different and I worship for entirely different reasons, I have yet to find a better RTS. 

When an "army" is 10 of unit X, and 20 of unit Y, with an air support of 5 planes and you need to blow up the other guy's construction yard to completely fuck him over... how is that strategically related to what you'd do with actual (multiple) armies, production centres, ports, mountains (not wall-like ridges), resource-rich terrain, barren plains, and non-arbitrary unit types (ie, instead of rock-paper-scissors simplicity, it's more just: scout, fighter, bomber, torpedo bomber).

Alright, end TA worshipping rant. I suppose it's ultimately the reason I'm posting here, but when I like a game, I really, really like it. Quake, Rune, Myth, TA, etc. 

was also revolutionary when it was released. I can't be bothered to list all the things TA did before all the other RTS games that were trying to ape C&C managed to do them, but there is a lot on the list, and some things TA did so well (the interface and queuing system), for example) that it still beats the shit out of most games today.

If I had a better PC I would give SupCom a whirl, but as my notebook was creaking under the strain of a 3 player online game when the beta was running I think I will give it a miss for now.

BTW, Tronyn, did you play Blade? It came out around the same time as Rune and was a similar game but with more depth but hobbled by a totally shitty control system. Had posh graphics with real-time shadows and stuff. Personally I thought Rune was way more fun :)