Victory is mine!*

[errantember]

Just finally finished the Core Contingency on Total Annihilation on Hard. After having played through all 50 missions, I now feel qualified to evaluate it's modding potential. :)

Actually, I haven't been totally lax in my Peace Initiatives. I've gotten several tools for disassembling and creating Units in TA. The models are quite complex, with individually articulated parts, like arms, legs, and turrets, and all those relationships have to be scripted to even put a unit on the screen. I've successfully managed to pull apart the individual bits of an Arm Brawler, but that's about as far as I've gotten.



* Or at least, the multi-consciousness-overmind I serve.

Comments

[jb-27.livejournal.com]

R.e. playing through on Hard: I play most video games through on Hard the first time I play them. My experience has been that Hard usually works out to be more enjoyable than Medium difficulty. Instead of cruising through the first few easy levels, and only really having to get good at the 75% or 80% mark, you have to get good right away, and then stay good. For me, this makes for a more fun game. The problem is that once I spend all that time playing through on Medium, I'm really unlikely to play through again on Hard, so I just crank it to Hard from the beginning and get my ass kicked a lot.

This doesn't work as well for puzzle and strategy games, where the Hard levels may require mental gymnastics that the Medium player just doesn't have, and won't develop because he or she is losing so much. I'm thinking of games like Civilization here. If I jumped into Civ on the harder levels, I'd lose so definitively that I wouldn't be able to tell what I was doing wrong, and I'd never get better. On the other hand, when I played through the original Splinter Cell, or when I played Oddworld: Stranger's Odyssey, the straight-to-Hard strategy worked out well. Those games, the basic mechanics are straightforward enough that it was more a matter of working out how to use them more effectively.

Just blabbing... but I told another video-game-playing friend of mine this idea, and he liked it enough to adopt it, so now I mention it whenever it might come up.

It definitely depends on the game.

[errantember.livejournal.com]

It really boils down to which would be more fun, playing through once on medium, then again on hard, or only playing on hard to begin with. One can tell with most games pretty quickly. On TA, I played the ARM missions on medium, to get myself back in the groove of the game, then the Core mission on hard all the way through, which was, as you said, pretty challenging.

I seem to recall that Dark Forces II was too much for me on Hard. The storm troopers all became like Michael Jackson, dancing around to quickly to hit.

[denshi.livejournal.com]

Great scott! Someone still plays that?

It's still considered...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

...to be one of the best strategy games of all time. It certainly has the most staying power. And the fact that it's so moddable means people keep coming up with new versions.

Re: It's still considered...

[denshi.livejournal.com]

I loved the everlivingshit out of that game in, fuck, 1999? Something like that. What's new with it? What would you recommend, and can I run that shit on OSX?

Re: It's still considered...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

Actually, I played the entire ARM set of mission on OSX under emulation using Virtual PC 7.1. If you have an Intel machine you could run it using whatever Windows emulation they have. It so old that it runs at full speed even under PPC emulation on my 1.2 Ghz PPC machine.

Re: It's still considered...

[denshi.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'm more or less of a nerd to read ARM as that low-power chip from England. Anyway, will look up whatever virtualization is current these days.

Re: It's still considered...

[errantember.livejournal.com]

I've supported ARM processors for our Codewarrior for Palm OS platform. It would be funny to change the ARM logo on TA to the ARM logo from the processor consortium.

*gasp*

[oracle-tx.livejournal.com]

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that somebody knows the ARM processors, but when I worked for them I'd tell people where I worked and almost everybody gave me blank looks.

As for modding stuff, make sure you get the downloadable units that Cavedog put together, a few of them do some things that none of the earlier units did, so there may be some script fragments that are useful for your mod, including things like resurrection of destroyed units from scrap piles and a mobile unit that deploys into something stationary.

Yeah, TA still rawks.

Re: *gasp*

[errantember.livejournal.com]

Sweet! I'll have to check it out.

I just got done playing my first skirmish with Core Contingency, and was definitely confused by many of the new units.

I was *not* confused, however, by my ability to create Krogoths. :) Two of them were marching through the enemy base before I was done.

Next time I'll have to play on Hard.