RTS

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Playing Zombie Master I experienced an emotion I’d never felt before in a multiplayer game: Fear. Normally found exclusively in single-player games, fear requires a build up of atmosphere and level of immersion not normally found in the online FPS world. The game in question started like any other, a bunch of guys merrily laying into a horde of zombies with assorted firearms in a shooting gallery affair common to just about any online zombie game of the last ten years. There was even laughter as zombie ragdolls flew through the air. But slowly the humans went down, surrounded and outnumbered. Imperceptibly at first, things started getting claustrophobic. Ammunition became scarce. Finally, only two of us remained. We were surrounded. Then the guttural scream from the next room signified the death of my comrade who had 'just gone to look for ammo'. Suddenly I found myself alone in the darkness. A malignant intelligence was watching my every move, plotting my demise.... I felt scared.

When I was playing the original Command and Conquer, back in 1995, I remember thinking "wouldn't it be cool if all those tanks and soldiers that I'm controlling were real people, running round a 3D battlefield, playing in first person?" I wasn't the only one to think of this. Over the years a few other games have attempted to mix FPS with RTS, but they all seemed to be lacking something. None were on quite a big enough scale for me. Nobody tried to grab the idea and really run with it. But with Empires, after years of disappointment, I'm finally playing the game I dreamt of as a teenager.

Once upon a time, in the dim mists of prehistory, there was an Apple II game by Silas Marner called RobotWar, in which you programmed a robot warrior to fight AI bots, using a programming language quite similar to Apple Basic. The basic gameplay became C Robots, in which you code your bots in, naturally, C. Since then, there's been a whole geeky subculture of bot-coding games -- but since to code you need to be, well, a coder, the audience is inherently limited.

Spuds is, fundamentally, an attempt to take the RobotWar dyanamic, replace coding with a GUI to shape behavioral routines for your robots, and bolt on a single-player, level-based game that poses challenges of increasing difficulty, requiring you to develop new bot routines to address them. (You can also host a multiplayer game.)

Dwarf Fortress is an amazing game. I mean "amazing" at the level of Sim City and Civilization, as amazing to encounter today as they were when first released. I'm not sure I can offer higher praise.

And yet--it is also frustratingly difficult to get into, and utterly obtuse in terms of its UI.

Dwarf Fortress is a game from an alternate universe. Clearly, no one in his right mind would have created it in our own. I deduce this from its main characteristics, and I think can very clearly describe the alternative universe it came from--let us call it "Earth B."

Defense is boring, right? Attacking is action, advance, and victory; defense is static. You sit there and hope for the best. No war was more boring than World War One--unmoving defensive trench lines for four long years. So a priori, you might think a game named "Master of Defense" would be, ah, less than scintillating.

Actually, it's quite cool.

Trash is pretty much a two-man project--but in looking at it, you might well assume that it was a triple-A title from three or four years ago. That is, no, it doesn't have the huge number of units on the field that we see in big-studio titles now, nor models with as much detail, but it still looks pretty damned good.

And beyond that, it is intelligently designed, with a slew of clever ideas that informs you at once that these guys have played every RTS title in creation, and are intent on creating a game that goes one better.

The Dark Legions is a surprisingly polished RTS game developed from a "lone wolf" developer--Marcell Baranyai did almost everything, from its 3D engine to its graphics and sound design, a pretty amazing effort.

A sidescroller? Sorta; Steam Brigade's ultimate heritage is in games like Rescue Raiders. You and your opponent have bases at opposite sides of an area; you build units at your base, they move horizontally across the screen (which you have to scroll to see the full play area), and the ultimate objective is to take out the enemy base.

Old school gameplay, in other words but, well, very nicely implemented.

Pax Galaxia starts out as intergalactic sumo wrestling. No, it isn't two prodigious BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters) trying to shove each other out of a gravity well. As the admiral in charge of a space fleet based in a given star system, you order your ships to hit certain force points in the galaxy and, ideally, drive your enemies progressively away from your end of the galaxy. In the tradition of other so-called real-time strategy (RTS) games, your opponents (artificial or human) are making the same kinds of moves at the same time. If you pay attention to your defensive lines, you can quickly push the enemy back and extend your "beneficent" influence across the simulated galaxy. If you aren't careful, your fleets and empire can quickly shrink to nothing.