Enguzrad

Original War is a Czech RTS with RPG elements. It had it rough in the world. It was released not long after Yuri's Revenge expansion for Red Alert 2 and some people were comparing it to RA2 (even though these two games are very different). Commercially, OW wasn't a success but in my opinion it has many rather unique aspects which make it well worth of having the word "Original" in it's title. Let's start with the story. The Story Original War is loosely based on Jeschke Wolfgang's The Last Day of Creation. The novel tells a story of Americans building a time machine in order to steal oil from Middle East before humans even evolved. The game has a similar premise. Instead of oil, everything revolves around newly discovered substance named siberite (after the place of origin - Siberia). Siberite has some interesting properties which makes it a catalyst for cold nuclear fusion. Simply drop it in water and the hydrogen in it fuses into helium releasing more energy than you will ever need. Americans do not build a time machine here, they find it during the first world war in Siberia. A device of unknown origin, which uses siberite as a fuel, transports anything on approximately the same spot approximately 2 million years in the past. And it's one way only. Of course, an expedition is sent with a goal of mining the siberite and moving it to Alaska. Simple enough, you just need to keep an eye on hungry prehistoric predators. The problem is that once your character arrives in the past, people start to shoot at you, and they talk Russian. The thing is you already succeeded in your mission and these Russians are from different future. In their future Americans hold all the cards thanks to Alaskite but Russians found some really old remains of modern technology in Siberia including the time machine and small amounts of Alaskite. They put two and two together and start sending troops and heavy armor in the past to protect their Alaskite deposits. Throw in Arabian sheikhs who worry about oil loosing it's value and you get a three faction war with saber-toothed tigers running around. The campaign is very character and story driven. The amount of people sent back in time is limited, therefore every person is important and this can be seen in both the story and gameplay design. There is an American campaign and Russian campaign. Arabian campaign was planned but never made because of unsatisfactory sales. Both campaigns are connected to each other with certain events and there is one big decision which branches campaigns into two paths. There are also plenty of small choices which doesn't change how the story continues but do change certain details. The Enviroment I would say that OW's graphics still hold up really well. Backgrounds for the maps were made by hand with hexagonal height map underneath. The flora is very varied and there are animals ranging from fish to mastodons. In addition to the varied enviroment, every faction has a distinct look to their clothes, buildings and vehicles. Together with the excelent music from Michal Pavlíček, the game has atmosphere like no other. Even if you have no interest in RTS games, I would like to encourage you to listen to OW's soundtrack. Apart from looking good, enviroment also affects gameplay. Trees are obstacles which can be removed, hills grant more vision and range, rivers and swamps slow down units, tigers kill units. The Gameplay As I said earlier, every person is important in this game. Forget about barracks spewing out one soldier after another and buildings just rising up from the ground. You have a handful of people and you have to order them around to build structures, collect resources, research technologies and assemble vehicles in the factory - and then to drive them. To help you with this you get an ability to queue orders for your units. You can queue almost anything, leaving your units to perform tasks on their own giving you plenty of time to pay attention to something else. And when that is not enough, you can also slow down or speed up the game and even pause it and give orders while the game is paused. The game has in total 4 resources - shipments, oil, siberite and energy. Oil and siberite is easy, you just need to find deposit and build a mine on it, it will never run out. For energy you will need power plants - solar, oil or siberite. That allows you to power more advanced structures. The most interesting is the shipments. These are crates filled with useful materials sent to you from the future. During the game you will hear a lound bang, that is a sound of shipments materializing somewhere on the map, you just have to find them before the enemy does. The fact is, the game has actualy 5 resources. The last one are the people themselves. They do everything around your base and they do get better at it. Every character has 4 skills which levels up as he does appropriate tasks, these are military, engineering (for buildings), mechanical (for vehicles) and science skills. You have to order your people around to do the necessary research, base building and eventualy attacking the enemy. In the campaign, you will meet a good number of characters, each with their own personalities, commenting on what is happening in the game and having some character developement. The dialogs are great and their personality sometimes leak into game mechanics. A great example is in a mission where your character leaves to join a different faction and a certain character will reject joining you based on who else is coming with you. When it comes to the actual weapons your characters can utilize, you have quite a lot of faction specific technologies as well as shared technologies. There are snipers, lasers, invisibility, remote and computer controled vehicles, hidden cameras, flamethrowers, remote controled explosives, drugs, small guns, big guns, double big guns, rockets, hacking, radars, rockets which can slow down time and teleport units, bulldozer, hovercraft, vehicles filled with explosives and of course the siberite bomb which can level the whole base - in comparsion RA's nuclear missile looks like a weapon of mass disappointment. The vehicles you build are made of 4 components - weapon, steering, chassis and engine. As long as the chassis can support it, you can put together any combination of components, making just the right kind of vehicle for the job (or the worst kind). Last but not least are the Apemen. These human ancestors can be persuaded for your cause making them into capable workers, soldiers, living bombs or even drivers. Yes, you can nail an Apeman to your vehicle, stick some wires into its head and send this freak of science to the frontlines. The Problems Alas, even such a great game as this one is not without its problems. While the real strength of this game is in the campaign (the story is great, characters are memorable, missions are varied and have secondary tasks for extra medals) the game has no skirmish, only multiplayer. The multiplayer is just tacked on, the game is obviously balanced around the campaign which makes americans stronger than other factions and certain weapons are outclassed by others. But these balance problems are not severe enough to break the multiplayer. What breaks it are two words - Synchronization Lost. This game has very bad net code. Players dropping from the game is a common occurance, modding makes it worse. There are also certain quirks to the game, like unit's tendency to change direction as least often as they can while moving from A to B, which leads to different path than a straight one, which can lead to unintentionally getting your units in range of the enemy (the pathfinding is not really bad, actually it's very good, it always finds a direct path even in complex enviroment, units just like to follow the grid). And of course, the voice acting... The Czech voice acting is both excelent and hilariously bad. The bad goes mainly for the random supporting characters which you see only in one mission and never again, while the good voices goes for the recuring characters. The English voices are in my (probably biased) opinion worse. The tone is often completely different and some of the main cast are just awful. One of the reasons why the game did so poorly in the west. The Conclusion Original war is not the best game I played, but it definitely is my most favourite. It has that kind of atmosphere which is just right for me, an uncharted world of the past with an alien mystery to it. I have been part of the community around this game for many years, made some good friends, got involved in some modding... but we don't play much anymore. The support for this game is just one guy in Scotland. He does a hell of a job keeping this game running but the game's source code doesn't make it easy for him, being written in Delphi in a mix of Czech and English. Original War is still alive mainly thanks to our fellows from Poland. They are the ones who still didn't give up on the multiplayer and they keep modding. The biggest mod which they work on is our own official Arabian Campaign we never got. Getting what is left of the original cast to voice it would be like a dream come true. But I guess it's better to be informed than to live with false hope. Also the astronomical clock in Brno looks similar to the time machine from the game. And one of our energy distributors is named EON. Coincidence?

Found the first one! It's Knight of Knights, popular freeware action game released in 2009. I see my memory of it was a bit hazy, but close enough.

So I have been putting together a list of games I played in the past for a while now. Most of what I remembered I could find, sometimes I just randomly find something I know I played (mostly old freeware stuff) but then there are games which I can describe quite well but I still just can't find them without knowing their name. So I would like to ask for help with a few of these: 1) It's a 3D hack and slash from top down (or close to isometric) perspective. Visualy it looked like an asian game, not realistic but stylized, models were low poly (somewhere on the level of final fantasy 7). I presume it had english translation. It ran on Windows XP (or maybe even Vista). I played it sometime between 2003 and 2010. I think the game had option for cooperation on one machine (so two players on one keyboard). You could select from different characters with different abilities. It was a fantasy game so the characters were warrior, paladin, mage etc. I think the levels were small and could fit whole on the screen, there were some monsters to fight but I don't remember how do you progress to other levels (door? kill all monsters? survival?) and I don't remember if there was any character progression. 2) I believe I played a demo of this one. It was a 2D game from top down perspective where you control a train. You could connect to different railroad cars, some had guns. Map was made of different rail paths and the goal was to destroy enemy railroad cars and trains. There was also a way how to repair (might have been using a train station). I think the game setting was sci-fi and the trains might have been robots. Graphics were colorful, not realistic. Played it around the year 2000 or later. It ran on Windows 98 or XP.

Submarine Titans, Jazz Jackrabbit 2, AvP 2... really, I would say any game which is still commercial should get a digital release, even if it will be just the original copy without any compatibility improvements. Apparently, the US Air Force offered free download of Area 51 for some time, the site doesn't work now. Yet that version of the game can be now found around the internet, but I don't think it is freeware, only that it was a free download. The point is, it means that there is a sort of digital release of Area 51.

Remember this game? I do. I remember seeing an article about it in some magazine before it came out. It looked really cool, action RPG with sci-fi and magic in a world full of demons. I liked that idea so much that I bought it not long after it came out. What I got though was a bit disappointing... What it turned out to be, is basicaly a more action oriented but otherwise pretty standard MMORPG without open world but with a singleplayer mode. I played singleplayer for a bit and then went on to play something better. Some years later I found out about something called Hellgate Global. An updated Hellgate London made into free to play MMO. I tried it, played it for a bit, but drop it when I got to a point where you need a ticket for passing to the next act. Recently I picked up my original copy, installed a Lost London V mod for more fun and played through the whole thing as a Hunter. When playing singleplayer, Hellgate London felt to me like Diablo with guns, at least when it comes to game mechanics. You go through locations which are either static safe stations with NPCs, or generated streets, subways, sewers etc. filled with enemies. You kill stuff, do fetch/kill quests, level up, get better gear. You don't have any say in progress of the story and you don't do any decisions excluding what piece of gear is better. Combat itself is about aiming (unless you use weapons which don't require you to aim well) and using abilities. Enemies don't do much besides attacking you, difficulty comes mainly from their numbers and stats. Let's say it's nothing special and it gets boring quickly. The game tries to shake things up a bit with a turret and squad commanding section but it seems rushed and you will be glad to have it behind you. Unfortunately you will see the squad command interface again at the end of the game, where you get a big mech suit and instead of driving it directly you have to give it commands in topdown view. Mine got quickly shredded by demons because it can't hit enemy too close to it and I continued on foot... What is more interesting though is the world of the game. Yes, the locations look similar to each other but the design of the monsters is quite interesting. You get your standard zombies but then there are monsters which range from "weird" to "kill it with fire!". Of course the impact is much smaller after you kill a few hundreds of them, nevertheless, we have some proper hellspawn here. Also if you take the time to read through NPC quest talk you will find some interesting stuff here and there. There is the standard "problem here, go kill", some experiments going bad, drink brewing, fetching various things for various purposes... There is also a series of quests about helping a hunter to set up his date in such a way that he won't get killed by hordes of demons but his crush gets enough stuff to kill. Later on the game gets a little selfaware with NPCs which basically says to you "you can't fail a mission can you?" and "oh, you are the guy who does everyone's job for them, ok, do this tedious job for me." Of course, most interesting is the main quest. It's a big hunt for Thruth with cryptic messages which neither I nor the NPCs understood. You will do some infection cleaning, saving templars from doing their duty of following their glory-hungry leader into fight they know is suicide, having fun with the Oracle and at the end going through trials, defeating the game cover and getting a twist ending. There are also some memorable characters and even though most of the information is delivered in form of a text, NPCs also have few voiced lines from which some of them are a bit fun. My favourite would be lines from vendor in Covent Garden Station, the delivery of his voice actor is just excelent. The more notable NPCs I can remember would be a guy who constantly swears like this **** and one of his quests is to find 2 "gold ****iens". You will also meet the huntress from the trailer who sacrifices herself with a grenade, but somehow survives that... What surprised me was that her quests are about finding out how the hell did that happen (again, little selfawareness). Just a little silly that she goes to do detective work 20 years after it happened. But of course the most memorable NPCs are Lucious Aldin and Techsmith 314. Aldin is just crazy, and it's awsome, especially with Techsmith 314 on the side with his commentary. Techsmith 314 himself is just walking tragedy, so much bad happens to him and he blames it all on you. And he's right, if it weren't for you trying to save the world and gluing Oracle together he wouldn't get his mind raped by it and wouldn't have to suffer the pain of having a demon inside his head (and you as well, Lucious transports you inside Techsmith's head). And if you do his missions at the end he will properly thank you by flipping you off. To sum it up, I like the world of Hellgate London. It's just too bad that the game is such a grindfest. For anyone interested in playing singleplayer I recommend trying the Lost London V mod. It helps a lot by increasing size of inventory, vendors refresh their stock instantly and enemies drop more rare stuff. Merging original 6 classes into 3 is nice as well. My only complaint would be that some of the levels are just way too big but the mod has addons which allows you to change level size to normal.

Actually, what I would like to see is someone making a proper sci-fi FPS which would still be fun. I did play Planetside 2 for some time in the past and while I liked it, I couldn't help but to notice that the weapons and vehicles and most of the technology overall is pretty much equivalent to WW2. But when you look at current military technology and what is planned for the future, it looks like it's just the same old war reskinned to look futuristic. I know why developers do this, because sitting somewhere piloting a drone or shooting someone with practically hitscan almost recoiless laser weapon would be boring and with low room for skill, but I believe it could be done so it would still be fun to play, although it would play very differently than our current modern first person shooter. I think that the game could get the necessary skill from how players use their tools and their countermeasures against other players, that it wouldn't be as much about keeping your aim on his head fighting recoil of your gun but more about finding the guy first and creating an opening for a clear shot. Regarding the Meelis13's idea, I like it, giving room to less known parts of history could bring more WW2 games without being just more of the same. You could also make a bit of a spin off with game focused mainly on resistence movements during WW2, which would probably be more stealth and dialogue oriented. Honestly, I would be interested to see a game set in our history, but with our mythology being real. We have tons of different fantasy worlds but I don't know about a game which would build a world just on european mythology, or any other, they usually just take thing here and there and put them in their made up world. A game set in the time of Thirty Years' War where you could encounter fexts on battlefield would be awsome. (fext is a type of an undead, from slavic mythology)

I always had too much ideas for games to be able to make any, so just a few from top of my head: 1 Imagine DayZ, but with triffids instead of zombies. The game world would have a lifecycle, when server starts off it would be like in the book, blind npcs around, few triffids, players with healthy eyes and a lot of things to loot. The thing is there would be a finite amount of drops in the game world and time would be measured by how much loot is left. The more players search for supplies the faster game goes to the end. Which means less npc, less and worse loot and much more triffids around as time goes on. Once the loot gets depleted, there would be a set time (few days, week?) before the game ends, evaluates effort of players and starts anew. Players would be able to join into progressing game, join into groups and would be able to end it early by achieving some victory conditions (like developing a biological means of disposing of triffid menace) wich would give them rewards for the next game and they would get into some top survivor list or something. Like in DayZ, players are able to attack each other and if there would be some skills and leveling, would have an exp loss upon death and they drop their gear but they can respawn again. I would put triffids there because for one it makes more sense for them to grew in numbers as time goes (unlike zombies, those would peak somewhere in the middle and then they would die off eventualy) and killing triffid is very different from killing human, so you would have to carry something to deal with both players and triffids. 2 STALKER, but in chemically contaminated zone. STALKER is definitely my favourite shooter. This one time I saw some short series on Newgrounds which I can't remember, but I got an idea of making pretty much the same game but in an area full of deposits with hallucinogenic gas. No one would bother to clean it up for some reason so it would be just abandoned and guarded like zone. I would like to see game which is able to subtly manipulate you, because often when there are hallucinations in games they are very obvious. 3 Second person perspective, sort of. You know how game looks from first and third person perspective. The second player perspective is looking at yourself through eyes of someone else who is physicaly there. How would it work is that you would have a combination of 2nd and 1st person perspective but the first person perspective would be very limited. Imagine this: You get kidnaped, they operate you and connect your vision to a killer cyborg, then they put you into an undeground complex and let you lose with the cyborg hunting you so you can try to escape. You would basicaly see what the enemy searching for you see, you would also have a short range first person vision which shows outlines of objects around you (So you would see what cyborg sees with lines on top of it which shows on what you are actually looking at - it's supposed to be your sense of touch). You also hear as normal. Then it's just about making a clever AI for your hunter and giving you enough stuff to do. You sight is crappy but you know where exactly your enemy is, well if you can recognize the enviroment. I can imagine having two views on top of each other could get nauseating but as a game it could work.

Bad news, I got stuck. I asked the founder of Ellipse Studios about ownership of Submarine Titans and he confirmed that they sold it to Strategy First. Which means they got it this whole time and they do nothing with it... And since their support ignored me when I asked about the game, I doubt that asking them again will change their minds about rereleasing it. Does this count as killing a game?

Finding the game for download wasn't hard for me, only the legit copies are hard to come by (or let's just say in limited quantity). Killing explorer.exe was my solution as well, and changing resolution in game solved my framerate issue (for the duration of the mission). But recently I found a workaround using ddwrapper with colorfix and ddraw emulation settings turned on. Now the game runs on my 64bit Win 7 without any issue. http://bitpatch.com/ddwrapper.html Also I was preparing to make an update here, so I guess this is as good time as any: I tried to contact people involved with the game to find out more about what happened to it. First I tried to contact Strategy First support but I just got ignored. But then I managed to get contact on one of the game designers, Craig Thomler, and he replied to my email. I'll quote here what he said about the game losing it's support: He also said that rights for the game would be in the hands of publisher. But Strategy First doesn't have Submarine Titans in it's game list so I suspect it's probably more complicated, because they sell many of their games on their website, even some really old ones. He didn't reply to my reply yet. From what I found he is very active and therefore probably busy. But one week without reply seems like a bit too long. I think I'll try to send him another email and get from him at least some more contacts.

I think I would like it the most in Sins of Solar Empire universe as one of the Advent. Sure there are wars between factions and some unknown threat from which Vasari are fleeing but living an ordinary life on one of the inner worlds wouldn't be bad at all with the technological advancement, open mind to augmentation and easy information sharing through PsiTech. I would probably end up as a researcher of some sort. For the enemies, any hopeless and terrifying situation will be good enough - Von Braun in System Shock 2, mars base in Doom, USG Ishimura in Dead Space, Sillent Hill in Sillent Hill and the list goes on.

Allright, this one is the most obscure game I know of and it is not hard to tell why. First of all, it was released only in Czech language, that alone makes it an unknown title in most of the world. But despite the game being in my opinion very good, it is not known very well around here either. That is because it was released as freeware sometime around year 2001 so it was distributed mostly on CDs, with collections of other freeware titles and demos, which are an extra in gaming magazines like Score or Level. I first found about it from a friend as a kid, I played it a bit and then forgot about it. Some years after I remembered it but the CD with the game was already lost. So I tried to search for it but only thing I could find on the internet about it was cheat codes. Later someone uploaded an installer for it and even made a youtube video. I of course immediately downloaded it, played it and finished it and I still have the installer file for it. Urtica ][ - Angelo is a turn based RPG made by four people. Most of the work was done by Jan Dřevíkovský and Svatopluk Nevrkla, some of the level editing was also done by Vojtěch Dřevíkovský and music was made by Michal Nevrkla. Funny thing is I have never heard the game's music. The installer file I have doesn't include music and I remember that the version on CD also didn't have any music. A little talk with one of the developers has explained this. Turns out that they had some music for the game but there was too little of it and it would get repetitive, so they didn't include it. A predecessor to this game - Urtica I - was a school project. It had been lost to time but some of the ideas were reused in the sequel. Anyway, once you start up the game you are welcomed by nice little menu. Strange thing about the menu is that it doesn't use a window. It cannot be selected by Alt-Tab and it can't be found on bottom Windows panel. But the game itself does. If you select New Game and write in name of your game you get into character selection screen where you get some traditional characters to select from like druid, paladin, necromancer, knight, assassin etc. But you can also create your own character using included character editor file: Here you can select your avatar and spend your starting points on various stats. The first column from the left are basic stats like strength and endurance, then there are skills with various weapons and magic schools. There are also special skills which increases how many experience points you need to level up but they give you special abilities which gets better with every level, most of them are really good. For example "Talent in trading" skill increases how much money you get from selling stuff and decreases how much you pay. At 10th level you end with always selling for full price and buying for almost nothing. That could be gamebreaking but fortunately money doesn't play big role in the game. Interesting thing is that you not only give a name to your new character but also you type in your profession. That means you can run around the world as anything you want - witcher, idiot, hobo... You might also get few titles to your profession and end up as XenoArchHobo. The game itself looks rather simple: Game is divided into four screens. One is the game world in top left. To the right is your character's statistics and in bottom right is your inventory. The rest of the screen is for displaying combat messages and dialogs with NPCs. The game is turn based so when you do something which takes a turn, everything else moves as well. Now, some of you might already be thinking about Ultima and, even though I never played any of the Ultima games, just looking at the screenshots I see that there are similiarities with the older Ultima games. Hell, Urtica even uses two square brackets as number 2 just like Ultima ][ does. Controls are predefined and cannot be changed as far as I know. There are keys for movement, keys for actions like picking up an item, examing an enemy etc., then there is a key for switching between game and inventory screen where you can move items and do something with them (eat, read, drop). Finally you have a key for spell memorizing. What you do is that you type in the magic formula and if it's correct and it's a spell in your spellbook you can assign a key F1 to F8 for it's casting. The spell is then also shown on the border between game screen and stats. You can also give orders to your minions ranging from "go here" and "follow me" to orders like "stop following my orders" and in case of undead even "explode". Finally there are also some keys for shooting with a bow, stealing, operating mechanisms, deactivating traps, and other special actions. All magic formulas are in latin. There are spells like a spell for pushing away the opponent - APAGE - roughly means "begone!" or "away!". Others are done in similiar fashion and can get quite long, for example this one is for creating undead minions from dead bodies - EXTREMIS MALIS EXTREMA REMEDIA. Spells themselves have a nice variety, there are of course the usual combat spells like lightning bolt, fireball, meteor shower then there are a bit more interesting combat spells like ball lightning which moves around and attacks enemies, rising undead, animating trees (and growig new trees on unoccupied tiles) and quite a good number of more utility oriented spells for example teleportation, transformation into bat, invisibility, various buffing spells and a spell for creating potions from ingrediens. Last thing I would like to mention regarding game mechanics is food. Next to your hit points, mana, weight and money is a food counter, every move decreases it and you can replenish it with food, visiting an inn or there is also a nourishment spell. Once it gets to zero you start losing health with every move. At some places in the game food can be a bit of a problem, specificaly in Warp where there is I think just one source of food so you are always returning back to it and together with respawning enemies there... you just don't want to spend too much time there. Anyway, the game has the usual solid leveling system, increasing an attribute of your choice with every level, has a good amount of different items and equipment with various bonuses to wearer, interesting spells and great variety of enemies. The game is also filled with funny dialogs (not that the game is filled with jokes but rather it's the way these dialogs are written what makes them funny) and even though it follows a linear plot it has many sub plots on the side and makes you do some choices and pick sides - that shows up mainly in quests for guilds which on some places goes against each other and you can satisfy only one side. So, the plot. You start in a village where you were born and where you are studying under the guidance of your mentor. You were studying in catacombs for months and talking to villagers it becomes clear that things changed. Roads are filled with goblins, wolfs went bonkers, no caravans can get through and thats bad for business. On top of that your mentor wants to see you, gives you an evil amulet and sends you south to find out more about it. As you go on you will figure out that there are bad guys who want these artifacts of evil to resurect the god of chaos and you have to stop them and destroy the artifacts. Looks like a basic good vs evil plot, but in reality it's not that simple and there is a nice twist to it. One neat thing, what the game does, is that at the end of the game you can read through your story as told by a historian who is born after the events of the game and collected information about your deeds. And as it sometimes goes, some of your actions have quite an unexpected impact on the future. If you understand Czech language, you enjoy RPGs and you don't mind the game being turn based, I say give it a go, you won't regret it. However if you don't speak Czech, you probably won't ever play this game. But if you are at least interested a bit in the story, I took the time to translate the ending of my playthrough which tells the whole story with pretty pictures. It is of course full of spoilers but because you won't ever play this, it shouldn't matter, so enjoy. Read about the deeds of Enguzrad, the mighty XenoArchMage: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cfytklujpn1hjzd/enguzrad%20en.rar?dl=0 And that's all folks, but before you go I have a little puzzle for you:

C&C Red Alert 1 Let's take NOD and GDI from Tiberian Dawn, rename them to Allies and Soviets, take half of the good things about NOD like flamethrower trooper and obelisk of light and give it to Soviets and give them new aircraft too. Well, Allies could use something new, how about some ships? But that could be too strong so let's give Soviets some submarines to keep balance. Congratulations, you just have one side with best armor, best infantry, best aircraft and best anti-armor defense against other side which has good navy... You know what? I think it's not very fair, so let's make expansion and give Soviets tesla troopers and missile subs. And Allies gets a mechanic to repair their armor, because they are loosing tanks all the time (wonder why, maybe it's those tesla coils who keeps one shoting them). But it's not just about balance (Allies can win against Soviets, they are just very limited), I don't find campaign to be much fun either, after Tiberian Dawn where you had a very memorable character of Kane, you don't get much here. There is also no tiberium which means that map affects gameplay less than it could. I've played almost every game in the C&C series (with exception of C&C4 and generals, but including Mental Omega mod for RA2) and from what I played RA1 is the worst of them, but it has one redeeming value - it has the best soundtrack in the series. Dragon Age: Origins I can't grasp very well what I don't like about this game, I guess I could say it's a combination of a number of factors. In general, I don't like when enemies level up with your characters. Usually it means fighting the same enemies over and over again and when you have hard time with certain part of a game, you can't outlevel it. And then there are things which irritates me, like that there is not much gear or money to get my characters some decent equipment, that there is bunch of characters but I'm still going to use the same three for the whole game so they are there just for talk, dialogues are ok but when it comes to decisions I felt like there is not enough options to reason with characters. My main problem with this is in Redcliffe Castle where you have an option to travel to Circle Tower to get mages for ritual but leaving possesed kid in castle for several days seems stupid to me so I go with blood magic which of course greatly pisses off certain characters... Let's just say I played the game twice and didn't finish it twice. Funny thing is I recently played Shadowrun Dragonfall which is almost the same thing gameplaywise and I really liked it. It probably helped that I'm more for the sci-fi than fantasy. What I liked in Dragon Age though was the Fade part where you have to wake up your party and defeat the Sloth demon. It was a welcome change of pace from the regular combat. I think I'll give the game another chance in the future, get on with easier difficulty setting, not care about what characters in my party thinks and just breeze through it for the story.

Submarine Titans I remember playing demo of this game as a kid and recently I have rediscovered this overlooked game from the year 2000. It's a real-time strategy situated in the future where a collision of Earth with Clark Comet causes enviromental changes which destroys most human communities on land, melts down the polar ice causing rise of the sea level. The only one who survives this disaster intact are undersea colonies build before the collision. Here is a screenshot of the game itself: There are three playable sides and basic gameplay has some resemblance to StarCraft but there is quite a lot of additional features. The three sides are the White Sharks, the Black Octopi and the Silicons. The backstory The game itself is in isometric view and looks very nice. In the background you can often see various sea animals just swimming around. My only complaint would be that because the faction color pallete of ships and buildings is the same they often blend in together. The weakest point of the game is it's user interface. You can't issue a queue of commands or waypoints and while you can create groups of units and bind them to numbers the interface doesn't show what kind of units are in selection unless the group has only one type of unit. The interface shows it's age here, but it has a few neat feautres like a scouting command (unit moves to marked location and when it is damaged or sees an enemy it returns back to original position), zooming out the game and rotating the game - rotating and zooming is not something often seen in 2D strategies. What makes the game special Overall it is a very interesting game filled with features which not only make every faction in the game unique but would also make for a very interesting multiplayer experience where these features would come into full use. The singleplayer campaign is not very interesting because there are practically no characters but there is at least good mission variety ranging from simple destroy enemy to goals like capturing certain structure or unit and gathering resources. The game's good soundtrack helps too. How to run the game On todays versions of Windows you can encounter few problems with the game. Namely wrong color palette and low framerate. You can find some solutions to this problems on the internet. For the color palette issue the most reliable method suggested was to stop explorer.exe process and run it again after you are finished playing. I didn't find anything related to framerate issues but I found out they can be solved by changing resolution while in game (in an actual mission not just in main menu). However these solutions are awkward to use. What you should do is downloading ddwrapper: http://bitpatch.com/ddwrapper.html Put it into your Submarine Titans folder and change ColorFix and ForceDirectDrawEmulation equal to 1 in the aqrit.cfg file. This solves both issues without the need to kill explorer.exe or do anything else. Worked for me on my Win 7 64bit machine. Closing words Unfortunately the game is no longer distributed. The only place you can buy it is places like Amazon where are few used copies and one unused copy on sale. Product details confirms that the game has been discontinued by manufacturer. According to game's manual, the developer of Submarine Titans is Ellipse Studios, game has been distributed by Infogrames and Strategy First published it. By my own effort of contacting some of the people responsible for game's development I found out that the game sold poorly and quickly lost it's support. Ellipse Studios closed down and the ownership is now in hands of Strategy First. Well, on http://www.strategyfirst.com/ there is a list of games but you won't find Submarine Titans there. Strategy First currently sits on the rights for it and does nothing with it, not even selling it. The playerbase is also next to none. I found only one fan site (http://www.submarinetitans.com/), which constantly changes hands and hosts either none or even content unrelated to the game. I tried to put that fan site into waybackmachine.org and found out that this url was used for a web site about that game in 2000, then in the next few years it probably has been taken down and recently (July 2015) someone used that url and put up his own little site about Submarine Titans. But now even that humble website is no longer there. There are some mentions about the game but most of them are really old, although I found some recent posts on neoseeker.com forums. It seems there are also no walkthroughs or guides on the internet, only the manual, suprisingly enough it can be found on the Strategy First website, here is the link: http://www.strategyfirst.com/app/webroot/files/files/Sub%20Titans%20Manual.pdf I think it's safe to say that this game is in the state of being abandonware.

Well yes, after all we are thinking with our brains which are made in certain way, shaped by instincts and experience and different lifeform could think completely differently. Just because something makes logical sense to me and seems undeniable doesn't mean it's true, unless it can be proved like physical laws of our universe. But then can you tell what is actually true when you have to perceive everything with your eyes, ears etc. which are part of the universe you are observing and can be deceiving? But that would be for other topic and I don't want to digress too much. My view on this might be pessimistic but I don't really see myself as a pessimist. If I saw only the worst in everything I would be already dead or something. Also violence and drugs are of course effective ways how to keep one in line . Anyway, we are still on the same spot, you presenting the same arguments and I saying that you are right but it doesn't change anything about the main point of my thinking. I think it would be best to wrap it up, it was a nice discussion but I already spoke my mind and there is really nothing new I could add to this.

Almost, it doesn't have to end, it probably won't, there is no reason why things should cease to exist. It's just that I see no point to it and more importantly I think there can't be a point to it. We can as well figure out our purpose in the universe, create civilization spreading out across the galaxies, even become godlike and going beyond laws of this universe. But for what I ask? You could say we will see once we get there, but then what is next. Going forward and forward without an end. Maybe it's about the journey, an endless journey. Some of the people who posted here said that "immortality blows", and I agree. You could say that the neverending reproducing makes life immortal.

Let's say there are two universes which cannot interact with each other in any way. Then one universe holds no meaning to the other. It's existence doesn't change anything. And I'm expanding this by saying that this one "universe" holds everything that exists. I'm starting to feel awkward by repeating myself. But I can't help it when I understand your arguments as that they are trying to prove meaning in existence of things with regard to their interactions inside universe. Which I have already acknowledged that existing things have meaning in relation to each other. And If you are not referring to that, then I have to be missing something.

That. I said meaning of a thing is tied to other things, not just humans or even sentient beings. Basically I'm saying that something has a meaning if it's important for something else. I'm talking about view from the outside. You are right that whether things exist or not the meaning is there, or at least was there. If I'm not entirally wrong by making parallel between meaning and importance, then I think that existing things are important only to other existing things (the importance gives meaning to it's existence, no matter how big the importance is), so the entire Existence is basically important just for itself, things inside it gives meaning to each other but on their own they don't have any. There is nothing outside for which what exists would be important or meaningful. At the end things exist for the sake of existing, they both have a meaning and have none depending on whether you look from the inside or the outside.

That isn't quite accurate summary of what I tried to say. That seems more like just saying "nothing has a meaning because a said so". I'll just make a last atempt and give an example. Let's say internet. Existence of Internet definitely has a meaning, we made it to share information and it does just that, from small things like getting data from point A to point B to higher goals like helping us develop faster. Thus it's meaning is tied to humans. Existence of humans has it's own meaning which is tied to something else in the universe which is tied to something else and so on. So we get the Existence - a system which includes everything that is (don't know if there is a better word for it, can't say just universe in case there is more then one). In hypothetical situation when nothing exists the meaning of things which did exist is lost too. So I say that because the meaning is tied to the Existence, then things don't have a meaning on their own, without other things which give it a meaning. Only here I make an assumption that the Existance has no meaning, because there is nothing more outside of it which would give it a meaning. Maybe I'm just unable to properly explain it, due to fact that English is not my first language or because I know only little about existential nihilism and the like. It's just what I came up with on my own when I had nothing to do so I thought about meaning of life and such.

Fine, but then most of this thread wouldn't pass as a valid theory either. It is still an opinion though, and I gave mine with some explanation of why do I think so.

Yeah, the interchangeability of those words makes a bit of mess in this. It would have been better to at least define them first. Anyway, would you care to explain why it is not a valid philosophical theory?

I didn't say life has no purpose, only that it doesn't matter. I also don't really see any knots here, just a simple conclusion. When there is nothing, there is also nothing what can say that something matters. So in the big picture it's no real difference between is and isn't and nothing here has a meaning. Unless someone manages to prove this wrong my view on this topic won't be much different.

I think the purpose of life is to exist. You are born, you reproduce and you die. And your children are repeating this process, just as animals do. Is there any reason which would give meaning to all of this? There could exist one. But I think that the existence itself has no meaning. If what we do or might do is important for something then our life has a meaning. It matters whether or not we exist. But what if that something doesn't exist? What if nothing exists, no physical matter, no energy, no space, just nothing. I believe there is no need for there being anything. The existence is important just for itself alone. Therefore, because existence has no meaning, the universe has no meaning and life has no meaning. If it exists, it has no meaning, including God. So for me it's more of a question whether is life worth it. Joy vs pain situation. If you wouldn't live you wouldn't feel pain but also you wouldn't get any enjoyment. On the other hand, even if joy largely outweighs pain in life and you are enjoying it, when you don't exist you won't miss it, because you won't be even able to.

I might mention some better known games, but I didn't find a mention about them in this thread so just in case. Not mentioned yet Incubation: Time is running out Most of the tracks sounds the same, although they fit the game well. But, there is one track which is quite different from the others: Title music: The odd track: You heard the First Contact, you heard the most of the game's soundtrack. The Incubation of the Insect Nation exists in two versions, I prefer the first one. Anyway, .ogg files of those two tracks from GOG version of the game: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9o8ggkwl2cr6zft/Incubation_music.rar?dl=0 Majesty: Fantasy Kingdom Sim One of the tracks: Full soundtrack from Majesty Gold HD version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tx1d34rc7jaxxzm/majesty_music.rar?dl=0 Knights and Merchants Just what would one expect from an middle ages RTS: KKND 2 Post-apocalyptic RTS. This track is probably the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mECdES52F_Q Submarine Titans Now, this one is an abandonware. Well made sci-fi RTS with submarines and alien submarines, didn't see similiar theme anywhere else. Good soundtrack as well, different between playable sides: UFO Afterlight Third game in series of games with similiar concept to X-Com. Most of the soundtrack is good: Shogo MAD What deserves a mention is the intro music: Orion: Prelude Also known as Dino: Horde. Never got bored of this one: Planetside 2 Different themes for the sides in conflict. Don't like much the TR ones, but VS and NC are great: NC: VS: Sins of Solar Empire Rebellion Got some good tracks, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-C39cQ_q2g I noticed you can buy the soundtrack on Steam. Settlers 4 I think the whole soundtrack is great, especially Viking themed ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXdZ5bcmQyY Already mentioned Age of Wonders The closer to the source the better. Original .IT files from my CD copy: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jsodd4vmm53qfgm/AoW_music.rar?dl=0 Creeper World 3 Someone already posted a link to youtube, and this game has really amazing soundtrack. I just want to add that you can download the soundtrack from Knuckle Cracker website: http://knucklecracker.com/common/extras.php Stalker SoCh Must not forget this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCNlqMgnvo