I don’t usually do teaser posts but I’m really excited about some upcoming features. There’ll be more Borderlands as I go through the conclusion of my achievement saga and talk about both DLC packs. I’m also jumping into a long abandoned genre for me, RTS, with Rise of Nations. The very excellent Troy Goodfellow has invited me to be a guest on Three Moves Ahead and we are using RoN to gauge how accessible the genre is to newcomers and discuss gender gap in strategy gaming. Woo. I’ll be blogging about my experiences as a noob since the last RTS I played was Caesar II. Yes, really. Even there I turned off the combat and treated it as a city sim game. Who likes being invaded when they are building a new coliseum?
Oh, and there’s this thing called OpenAlpha. You’ve probably never heard of it. More video blogs, too. I love writing but it might be more engaging to rant and pontificate on video rather than shove thousands of words at you in a single post. Hmm, I just noticed the need to make new site headers to reflect what I am actually playing these days. I can’t wait to finish Assassin’s Creed so that I can jump to the, reportedly, vastly superior sequel.
Troy Goodfellow, okay, he changed his name right?
Alas, no. I’ve been stuck with this name since the day I was born. And have heard far too many hotel clerks make the obvious jokes.
Wait, Caesar II had combat?
Did you ever play any of the Infinity Engine games (e.g. Baldur’s Gate)? The engine was originally intended for RTS games, and so they share many of the same interface conventions.
Alan, I have not. Having ignored the genre before and since Caesar II I’ll have a lot of catching up to do after RoN! :)
Baldur’s Gate was an RPG, nooblet. ;)
You could have skipped every strategy game and still hit it. But, as Alan notes, the combat plays just like an RTS.