Gamemories 2 - The RTS

Hi peeps!

Yesterday I talked a little bit about one of my most favourite game genres called the "RPG". Today I will be throwing another acronym called the "RTS" in your general direction. You're probably wondering "Hmm, that doesn't end with a 'G' so it could be something not game related!". Wrong! RTS stands for Real Time Strategy and I've honestly never given it any thought as to why it does not contain the word "Game". Probably because most people refer to them as "RTS-Games".

I think it was 1993 or 1994 when we upgraded to our first Windows operating system. At that time you could go to a newspaper store and buy diskettes with demos or shareware versions of some games that were out. I played a lot of those. Back then, a game would be divided into episodes and a shareware version of a game contained one full episode! That's a lot more than you can say about the demos we're getting nowadays. Also, the games didn't take up a lot of space so you could easily have 1 diskette with 10 games. Those diskettes could contain, roughly estimated, 1/200 of the date of a regular CD, so if you wanted to make a big game, you would have to divide it over multiple diskettes. That's probably why all the boxes of PC-games were that big. The Windows 3.11 version we had, came on 6 floppy disks.

For the union!

A lot changed when the CD-ROM came into the picture. 1995 Was the first year at school I would experience "Sea-classes". It is a field trip in which the kids from the 3rd and 4th grade of elementary school would go to the coastline of Belgium for 5 days while the 5th and the 6th grade would go to the Ardennes. Fun times and great memories! Especially when I got back home! When I took a look at our family computer, I noticed some new hardware sticking out of them: Stereo Speakers. From that day on it would be bye bye built-in PC-speaker sound and hello midi-stereo sound. My dad got us a Sound Blaster Pro sound card during the field trip and while inspecting the pc a little bit more I even noticed a CD-ROM drive! I think my dad realized how excited I would be about the new additions and he instantly showed me a CD of something.

Syndicate was the first strategy game I've ever played. At that time I still did not know English, but I tried the game nonetheless. It was playable with a mouse. I had never played a game on pc with a mouse until then. It made a lot of sense but I did not think much of it. The games I was used to playing on a pc upto that point were Doom, Wolfenstein and some of those game demos. I will talk more about those and go deeper into the genre they're part of in a later post.

In Syndicate the player controls a megacorporation and has to send agents on missions all over the world. Those missions will grant the corporation funds and assets to ease "taking over the world". The thing I loved the most about that game, was the ability to convert your agents into cyborgs! They even resembled Terminators from a movie I had seen around that time! Until last year, I didn't think there would be a game that could recreate that Syndicate feeling, but more about that later.

We got a lot of demo compilation CD-ROMs after that upgrade. There was one CD that had about 1000 games on it and I made it my mission to try every single one of them. I played games like One must fall, Indiana Jones, Corridor 7, System Shock and Duke Nukem. The game that stood out the most, however, was not one with guns or rapid action. It was a very slow, yet very interesting strategy game about big green orcs with axes and humans with swords! One of the best games I have ever played. Even though it was only a demo, I played it over and over again.

For me, Warcraft was a game I could play forever! Or at least until I ran out of forests and gold mines... It felt like Syndicate but bigger, better, more epic! Funds did not come in after finishing a mission, but you had to use special units to gather resources. Your units got killed? No problem! Just build some more if you had the resources! You had to keep more than just 4 agents alive; You had to protect and expand your base as well! Where Syndicate was all about the "tactical approach", Warcraft was much bigger in scale. I also liked the setting in which the story took place and instantly fell in love with Sword and sorcery. Sadly enough, it was all just a demo.

I think my dad noticed my love for that specific genre. I remember coming back from a family visit in Germany one day and I noticed my dad playing on the PC. The game he played looked a bit similar to that Warcraft demo I was playing all the time. The setting, however, was something completely different! Instead of orcs and humans, you controlled 1 of 2 factions, trying to control the earth. One faction had a military leader, while the opposition felt rather spiritual. I think we all know which factions I'm talking about here;) The Global Defense Initiative and the Brotherhood of NOD

The Command & Conquer-series was a game-series I played a lot over the years. Starting out with the first one and then the expansion pack Covert Operations. It took everything I loved about that Warcraft demo, and increased it in size and variety. Both the factions had multiple units in common, but the special ones were different for each faction. The GDI had the heavily armored APC (Armored Personnel Carrier) while NOD had the Recon Bike: A fast motorcycle, armed with a rocket launcher. Being able to play all the missions, unlike a certain demo, I spent hours, even days playing that game.

Gaming magazines

At around 1997, my dad started buying a gaming magazine called PC Gameplay that came with a CD full of demos, drivers, patches and even addons. In one of its editions, I read about a game called Total Annihilation. We had recently bought a new desktop computer any way and it was the special time of the year where people give eachother presents. One of the presents I got, was that game! I was so excited. I was always playing a demo version that came with one of the PCGP issues.

If there was anything Total Annihilation would become "famous" for, it would be the incredible amount of units and structures. It was also the first game where I had experienced an "infinite amount" of resources.

There were 2 resources: Metal and Energy. If you needed more metal, you would build more metal extractors. If you needed more energy, you would build more solar panels or fusion reactors. It also featured a tiered tech system: Your commander unit was tier-1 and could only build tier-1 structures. In order to upgrade your tier, you needed to build a unit facility and had a construction unit build a tier-2 unit facility and so on. Once we got ourselves an internet connection I would look on the web for more units to download. There were hundreds, if not thousands of downloadable units, all made by deticated communities. Some of those communities are even still active today!

I just realized that I've been flinging some gaming-specific terms at you again without even explaining them. I've talked about units, resources and factions. A strategy game has the player take leadership of a faction in which he controls units and gathers resources in order to achieve his objectives.

A Faction can be a race (orcs, elves, aliens, humans) or members of a specific race that have different goals and ideals (GDI, NOD)
A unit can be considered a player character or a group of player characters.
Resources are materials a faction needs in order to create more units.

Today's standards

Today, there are still games that build upon some of these old principles. As I mentioned earlier in this article, I've found a game that plays a lot like Syndicate. For those of you who are interested by this thought, definitely feel free to check out Satellite Reign. It also has you operate an agency and send a squad of 4 agents out on missions in a big cyberpunk city.

It is from the same minds behind the original Syndicate and brings back a lot of good memories.

If you would be interested in something like Total Annihilation, you could definitely check out Supreme Commander. It actually takes all of TA's good ideas and expands them into gigantic battlefields. I could go on and on about video games, but I've got a feeling that this post is a bit too big for its own good ;)

The next strategy game I will probably buy, is Ashes of the Singularity. Taking a look at screenshots, it reminds me a lot of TA, which I still play from time to time, by the way:)

Tell me, do you like strategy games? Which was the first one you've ever played and which one are you looking forward to?

Thank you very much for reading and until next time. Take care!

Cheers!

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