WHAT??!?!? You have not played TA?

Get it at GOG.com last day at 2.99

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/total_an ... nder_pack/

Playing in TA without zoom, on 640x480 resolution without widescreen? Please, spare my eyes... It's better to pick up one of Spring TA games, IMO.

TA scales just fine to modern resolutions. I still play every now and then on my 27" iMac, and it works just fine at 2560x1440.

:lol: nice try troll. Almost got me...almost

The Spring game Balanced Annihilation is free and pretty much true to original TA gameplay.

Also mentioning because it's awesome, the game Zero-K represents a further evolution of TA and is well worth trying (although quite different from original TA).

I haven't touched it because I understand it still uses material from TA which may not be legal? Is this true?

Over 57? Good heavens, that must be like 58 or something!

Who decided that "over 57" was a sensible metric? Are they saying it's better than Heinz canned products?

May not be legal may be strictly true, but Total Annihilation is pretty much abandonware and I nobody's making money on it so I doubt anyone would care.

Also even if Atari or whoever decided they wanted to shut it down, it would just be a standard cease & desist, the end users wouldn't be in trouble and the developers would only be in trouble if they didn't cease and desist.

There's a precedent for this happening, when Microsoft shut down an unofficial Halo mod for Unreal. But then a couple of days later they announced Halo Wars so evidently the cease and desist was due to a clash with a forthcoming cash-cow.

You are welcome . Actually, it's rather suprising for 1997 game to scale on modern tech so well...

There's never been any legal problem in the last 7 years or whatever. BA has a lot of OTA content, but ZK has been progressively replacing/removing TA content... I don't know if they got it all yet but they must be pretty close, it doesn't play like TA any more.

You can still play TA these days; I've played it this year. You might want to get the 500 unit 'patch', or the 5,000 unit patch...

Might as well try the 3.9.01 beta (community) patch, it has a 1500 unit limit built in and offers other features such as better path finding, built in demo recorder, music from MP3s rather than the CD, alt tab crash fix and more.

^
Was going to post this myself.


Also, spring is no longer a good way to see what TA was like. It's just grown to far apart from the original game. Anyway, as was said before, the game scales well with modern systems, so people may as well try the original.

TA is most definitely NOT abandonware, I got it from Impulse last year for $10. Many ways to purchase this legally on variuous digital distribution sites.

http://www.gog.com/gamecard/total_anihi ... ander_pack

Would have been cheaper at $6. Plus it comes with a music patch that they made, not sure if Impulse comes with gog's patch or not.

I wouldn't say Balanced Annihilation is true to TA gameplay but it is similar. I think people forgot how TA played during the progression from TA -> XTA -> AA -> BA.

As for legal Balanced Annihilation still uses a lot of TA content which is quite iffy but there is some disclaimer about needing to own TA. They are currently working on a replacement for all the content with apparently few gameplay changes.

Zero-K is completely free of TA material so I think it is fine. Code GPL, sound licences agree with Linux distro standards, models and art is all dev and community created. You can see the influence but then again you can see the TA influence in Supcomm.

You know it still amazes me that a 15-16 year old game like TA has a really great resolution independence implementation, and still scales to monstrous resolutions across multiple monitors. Too bad the internal game scale is locked to fixed number pixels instead being relative to the screen size, which results in very small, hard to click units.

Even today many games still stumble in implementing resolution independence, specially consolefied games.

Kudos to whoever went the extra mile to implement that.

The joy of TA for me is what an enjoyable competitive game it is. People have been experimenting for 15 years and still find room to develop new styles.

TA Spring had potential but the pro players abandoned it after 6 months and went back to OTA. The earlier versions of xta were hard to play (really exponential resourses) but skillful. AA and it's successor BA were really defensive, noob friendly mods. Not necessarily on open maps but too many people played on choke point ones 8v8.

Ironically this is a genre thing more than anything else. With a RTS, smaller unit icons is a tactical advantage, so most players don't mind shrinking stuff down, and in fact prefer it. Shrinking things down, makes low res images look better. This makes for a win win situation.

This doesn't work for a FPS, if you make people into ants, it gets downright silly to try to aim headshots at them. So with any FPS game, a 15 year old game is doomed to look horrible.

I still play Quake 2 from time to time and that is also from '97