A Trip Down Memory Lane: One Player's Journey to PA

Greetings, all!

This thread is exactly what it says on the tin; after the Livestream yesterday, I felt compelled to wax rhapsodic.

Be warned! Here be anecdotes!

I fell in love with RTS in middle school. My first RTS game was Dune II, on the Sega Genesis (yup -- I played my first RTS on a console). Dune II introduced me to the idea of choosing a faction and commanding armies in real time (it helped that I'd enjoyed the Dune setting ever since watching the David Lynch film and reading the books).

Then my family got a 166 MHz PC running Windows '95, and I sampled the seminal titles of the genre: Command and Conquer, Red Alert, and Warcraft II. For me, C&C defined, refined, and streamlined what an RTS could be: sleek and high-tech, with high production values. Red Alert refined that formula for multiplayer.

Then came Starcraft and Total Annihilation.

Though I was never competitive, I loved Starcraft because all three races felt distinct yet balanced: regardless of the race I played, I felt like I had the tools to do the job. Likewise, the production values were off the charts (I have rarely heard such good sound design) and the three races resonated with me. I had been anticipating Starcraft since reading a preview for it in a magazine I bought at a book fair, and I bought Starcraft the first day it came out; I was not disappointed.

Total Annihilation was a completely different story. We picked up Total Annihilation on a whim at Costco, and I hated it at first.

Why? Well, almost at once, I found that Guardians/Punishers were a good way to turtle, but squinting at the screen to click on units as they emerged from the fog of war gave me a headache. Furthermore, the combat music didn't kick in correctly (our CD drive was too old), so for someone used to the pulse-pounding techno of Command and Conquer, Jeremy Soule's haunting violins were a tad depressing.

Then something happened.

First, I discovered you could target things by clicking them on the minimap, as long as you had radar. Headaches gone! Not only that, but the relationship between radar, radar stealth, and fog-of-war piqued my interest.

The second discovery? I began to notice the little details. The way tanks rocked in different directions, depending on the direction in which their turret was pointing when they opened fire (a feat I have not seen replicated ever since). The way units tilted as they went over rolling hills. The way aircraft banked and swooped in ways that put air units in other games to shame. The way gravity affected artillery shells. The way the screen shook when units exploded. The way you could shoot the bad guy's base from your base. The way the commander represented you on the battlefield.

And, of course, the way the rate-based economy changed everything.

The final thing that changed my mind? I gave the entire soundtrack another chance, and it absolutely blew my mind: "Warpath," "The Forest Green," "Ambush in the Passage," "Charred Dreams," and "Death and Decay." Whew!

I'll confess, I became a bit of a TA hipster. I felt like I knew about a game that was prescient, years ahead of its time, and I loved to mouth off about it, to watch jaws drop. I suppose there's more than one way to acquire cultural capital.

There have been other RTS games since then, of course. I really enjoyed Emperor: Battle for Dune: it had exceptional production values for graphics, sound, and music. I became relatively skilled at Warcraft III, to the point where I knew every single damage and armor type, and my micromanagement was excellent. Homeworld utterly stole my heart, to the point that I even gave the sequel a try (not a worthy sequel, in my opinion, but it had its moments). And I played the hell out of Command and Conquer: Generals.

I was fortunate enough to hear about Supreme Commander right before its release (I practically got high on the E3 2006 trailer), and I managed to get my friends hooked on it as well. We had some great times, and I actually managed to become rather good at the game (basically, I read _PINK's advice about Moar Tanks and combined it with advice to keep my economy at 90% at all times).

I even enjoyed Supreme Commander 2, a lot more than my friends did: though I hated the departure from a rate-based economy, I loved the pathing, the art style, and the utter simplicity of unit choice. I even enjoyed Howard Mostrom's soundtrack, particularly the way he used string instruments and snare drums.

Starcraft II... well, I enjoy watching it, not playing it. The original game took huge strides past its predecessors, but Starcraft is no longer cutting edge, and Starcraft II is little more than an updated clone of it, coasting on presence of an established fandom and shamelessly emulating other contemporary texts (just listen to the soundtrack some time and compare it to the soundtracks of Firefly, Michael Bay's Transformers, and Mass Effect -- which is a shame, really: Blizzard went from leading to following). The production values are actually remarkably low, particularly in the field of sound design, and game balance is... ritualized: Starcraft II seems balanced only when played in very limited ways.

So here we are. My friends and I eagerly await Planetary Annihilation, not just as a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, but for its own sake: it's looking to be a damn good game

From where I'm sitting, the Planetary Annihilation developers appear to be dedicated to being on the cutting edge of game design -- not to appear cutting-edge, but to honestly improve the genre. Let me count the ways:

• Scale: battles with thousands of units across multiple procedurally generated planets simultaneously
• Smooth, efficient pathfinding across spherical bodies (!)
• You can choose your own start location
• Deemphasis on finicky little tasks
• It's available for PC, Mac, and Linux
• Client-server architecture for multiplayer games
• Modability -- I don't mod, but I like the fact that it's designed to be modded
• Rate-Based Economy Mark III (here's hoping the devs really nail it this time; signs point to yes)
• You can annihilate planets

So, yeah, I'm excited.

Are you? What's your story?