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| Re: Front Mission: Gun Hazard may be an exception to the Front Mission rule by athodyd 04/02/2005, 11:56pm PST | ||||
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FABIO wrote: Got that too, although I've never had the chance to go two-player with it. I'd put it right up with Valken and Gun Hazard, especially with the unique ability to switch robots (and at one point I swear I remember getting into an enemy cruiser as long as the screen and actually flying it around) except the graphics are... odd. It's like everything got run through some weirdo compression format and someone peed on it while it was saving out of Imageready. Also I just played a little bit of it right now and I'm still trying to get the music out of my head.
I haven't actually played the full versions of the various CM games, since I'm always broke when I download the demo and I've always forgotten about it by the time I've got money, but I almost sort of enjoyed the mildly dumb AI because it reinforced how I wasn't actually in direct control of the units and was in fact merely barking orders at a cluster of semiliterate Russians. You should definately check out lasersquad nemesis. It's like X-com mixed with the combat mission model. You each get a squad and plot out combat mission like moves and hit GO to play out 8 seconds. The only real problem is the imbalance between races. Marines wipe the floor with machina, machina decimate spawn, and spawn slaughter marines. Haven't played with the greys so I don't know how they fit in.Actually, at some point I downloaded and played LSN and somehow forgot all about it. I'm guessing it failed to make an impression on me but I get the feeling it may have changed since, so I'll go ahead and grab it again. My ultimate unfulfillable wish for the CM-style simultaneous action model is that it gets incorporated into some kind of massively multiplayer format based primarily on faction-based player-vs-player stuff. You start out with x amount of money that you put into infantry, artillery, transport, WHAT HAVE YOU and develop your unit from there as strictly grunts or special ops with fire support or an artillery company or just a bunch of trucks with guns that can move other guys around faster (my perverse dream in any strategy game being to play the whole thing as a rear-echelon motherfucker). There'd be a persistent world, divided into grid squares--the bigger the forces involved in a battle, the more grid squares would be "activated" for the battle to take place in--and units in neighboring squares can lend artillery support or reinforcements. The factions come in as a way to manage the grid square system by figuring out who's going to be online when to defend what territory and who could do with a bit more money and troops and who is an idiot who can't be trusted to do anything etc. etc. etc. basically for the people who prefer orchestrating a grand strategy over the details of actual individual battles. People who don't want anything to do with that sort of bullshit would just become field commanders with access to more money and resources than usual, along with the ability to boss other people's units around to a limited extent. In other words, the higher ranks are for the people jerking off over their copies of Art of War and the lower ranks for people jerking off over Patton's memoirs/gay poetry. The faction system would also allow the developers to add an ongoing "story" to the universe by issuing orders from the very top of the hierarchy to start futile grand offensives, wars of attrition, rape camps, et goddamn cetera. Probably impossible and ridiculous in a number of ways--the problems inherent in the time system of the simultaneous combat scheme alone (should everything be on one standard time of, say, one minute of planning and thirty seconds of action even when not actually in a battle, how should the preparation of trenches and defenses be handled during "off hours," what kind of AI system or invulnerability or whatevs should be in place for commanders who are too busy having sex and leaving the house to lead their troops in case of an attack) would probably bog the whole project down in the planning stages even before the fuckups and weirdnesses inherent to massively multiplayer games come into play--but its something I like to think about when I'm not busy thinking about how when I'm President of Astronauts everyone who went to my high school better watch the fuck out. |
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