Back in high school I played a real-time strategy game called Total Annihilation. It was set in a futuristic scifi universe and had a unique twist on resource management: the infinite variety.
While the computer AI sucked, my friends and I would still spend days building fortresses and forces of doom, unleashing wave after wave upon one another into the wee hours of the morning. The music was also superb thanks in part to prodigy Jeremy Soule.
Anyways, Chris Taylor, the guy who created it, eventually went on to create his own gaming studio that was later bought by Microsoft. Over the past few years he has made a couple of innovative games in the action-RPG genre along the lines of Diablo, called Dungeon Siege.
However, his latest project is in essence, the spiritual successor to the original TA and it is aptly called Supreme Commander (in TA, the main unit was a robotic commander that used nanotechnology to create automatons). And its music will be once again written and composed by Jeremy Soule.
It was unveiled for the first time at E3 this past year and won ‘Best of Show’ for the RTS category.
Here is the E3 trailer and here are videos of Taylor discussing the play-by-play of some in-game action (1 2).
I mentioned Valve’s upcoming title called Portal yesterday.
Today, they released a teaser video of Team Fortress 2, a remake of a great game.
As you can tell in the video, the characters are somewhat cartoony, along the lines of The Incredibles. Turns out they re-announced its release (scroll down) at the end of last week, as it had been originally developed with “more realistic” models along the lines of the original.
As a side note, I use to play the original version for Quake non-stop back in junior high — I am surprised I managed to even pass my classes. And while TFC for Half-Life was pretty fun as well, I never got into Quake 3 Fortress.
And lastly, GigaOM has an interesting analysis behind Valve’s broadband-game distribution system called Steam. Turns out to not only be efficient in terms of preventing cheating and piracy, but also very cost effective.
I aced both my oral and written comps today. Got a gold star and will hang it on my refrigerator.
Turns out that the majority of the top videos on YouTube (as measured in the number of views) are user-generated by your average Joe.
This is hot on the heals of the announcement that the popular video-hosting site now serves more 100 million videos each day, most of which are embedded clips at MySpace.
Some commentators have compared this surge of success to Napster and that the looming specter of “copyright” lawsuits is quickly approaching (they were actually sued earlier this week).
Here are a few more interesting clips:
- Human Space Invaders
- A 1970’s ad for flying to pre-revolution Iran
- CNet put together their “Top 10 tech-related clips at YouTube“
