Roborant: entry

Ladies,

It’s been a while. I’ve hopefully got a nice big ballbuster of a post in the tubes, but I’ve got something more important to tell you about.

I got Steam. I know, I’m many many years too late. That’s not important. Because for all those years, there was nothing that could pull me hard enough to get it. Nothing that could entrance me to adding yet another little icon to my taskbar.

But all that changed last week.

Those of you who pay too much attention to my posts, or who have exceptionally keen memories, will remember my fondness for the Dawn of War franchise of RTS games. For those who don’t, I would sum it up quickly by saying that DOW is the only game I have played which could be called a serious successor to Starcraft. Admittedly, the core game on its own isn’t much better, but its popularity won it 3 expansions over its 4-year life, and once you have those you’re looking at something much more. Starcraft blazed the trail, and its still fun to whip it out. But if that Starcraft style of RTS play appeals to you, then you’ll never want to go back after playing DOW.

There are simple advances. Have a large army in SC and want to know the health of more than the first 12 units? Too bad. In DOW, your individual units are placed into squads with an overall health rating. And if you produce more than 12 squads (again filling up the onscreen space), it’s a simple keystroke to cycle down the units until you’ve seen them all.

But things get ever so much better. With all 3 expansions you’re looking at 9 balanced playable races to SC’s 3, with some of them (such as the Tau [my little favourites]), having branching tech trees, thereby making them really 2 different races at Tier 3 (theoretically boosting the number of possible races even further).

So anyway, you might be able to tell that I love this fucking game. It is unquestionably my favourite title for PC of all time (and I don’t think its really fair to make comparissons with console titles, especially in RTS).

Sooooooooooooooo

When I did my usual weekly round-up of Penny Arcade a few weeks ago, I read that Dawn of War 2 is slated to hit stores this month. I immediately dropped everything else, and went to the official site, which has remained an open tab in FF ever since.

If you think you might be down for some good old RTS action, give the site a look-over. They’ve got some cool videos (both gameplay and cinematics). If that gets you hot, they’ve even got a link to an HD download of a test match between some developers. And if you’re into that sort of thing, the forums are very active (from what I can tell from the few I’ve lurked).

And if you’re still turned on, you can take the last step: There is an open multiplayer beta going on unil the day the game ships, and it’s hosted on (da dada dum!) Steam.

So, please please please give it a look over. If you like it enough to give the beta a shot, please add me on Steam (Hell, add me anyway. I don’t really know what its good for except for launching DOW2).I don’t have any friends aside from Wolfgang, and he doesn’t want to play with me. The beta is mostly 3on3 matches, and it would be great to have a couple of friends who I could game with.

My email (for anyone who doesn’t know it) is a clever anagram of my own name:

Lineman (dot) macK (a la) gmail (dot) com

Oh and, full disclosure, you also need to get a Games for Windows Live ID. Which if you have a hotmail account, is the easiest thing in the world. I think. Since I already have an Xbox Live account, I didn’t need to really get into that at all.

Also, speaking of demos, betas, successful franchises, etc.  Granite (and any interested others):The Resident Evil 5 demo dropped on Xbox Live the other day. I picked it up and it looks pretty slick. You should join us Xbots soon and check it out.

The Fear2 demo came out at about the same time. It was an odd experience playing the two one after the other when I DLed them, but F2 only made RE5 look even better.

But I must be moving on. If I can tear myself away from the online ball-smashing long enough, I’ll keep spinning up that new post.

Toodles.