(no subject)
Things going on in my life:
I had a probability test today that I think went pretty well. I studied long enough for it.
Two of my professors are out of town, so I don't even have to go to class tomorrow. It's awesome.
I've been playing Red Alert 3: Uprising. I feel like it's been getting a bum rap from fans and reviewers. It doesn't have multiplayer, and a lot of people are faulting it for that. But it's like someone at EA went "Quick! We have to make an expansion just for this 'Nat' guy! Include everything he could possibly want!" I don't play multiplayer (because I'm absolutely terrible at the game and couldn't hope to compete against other humans), and if you give me a set of weird challenges involving goofy characters, I'll be hooked for hours. And that's exactly what the expansion gives me.
The Red Alert universe gets stranger and more glorious with every new iteration. This version includes such great things as a soldier that can freeze other units while quoting Arnold from Batman & Robin. I kid you not. The unit even has a bad Austrian accent. It's probably my favorite new unit just for the novelty of it. Some of the other units are pretty insane, though. The big story when the game was about to come out was the Empire's Giga Fortress and how it was intentionally overpowered, but let me tell you right now, the real story is not the Giga Fortress. No, the real deal in this game is the Harbinger Gunship. Jesus Christ, the Harbinger Gunship. It's a plane that flies around in a circle and kills everything underneath it. You know that plane from Transformers that attacked Scorponok? Yeah, this thing is one of those, but it fires a fucking laser cannon instead of sabot rounds.
The game has a "Commander's Challenge" mode where you get to fight against several goofy commanders. You've got Moskvin, the hilariously sociopathic Soviet commander who never met another commander he didn't want to kill; Oleg, a simple commander who tries to utilize giant war bears for Mother Russia... to eat; Ric Flair... err, Commander Hill, an old dude who acts suspiciously like a professional wrestler; Takara, who proves that in Japan, the dress code for female military officers consists of a bikini and a jacket; and Giles, my personal favorite, a pompous British guy who embodies every single stereotype about Britain imaginable. They're pretty fun to beat up on. Some of the challenges are of questionable fairness, and the AI is unable to counter some simple strategies (such as building just a few air units in a map where the AI specializes in artillery), but it can still be pretty challenging and fun.
The campaigns, however, are pretty short. I just beat the Allied campaign in pretty much one sitting. The campaign missions seem to be harder than the ones from RA3, though sometimes the challenge comes from unfair surprises. For instance, in the final Allied mission, you're initially fighting against Takara and her incredible cleavage, but once you defeat her (and it's not hard to defeat her), an ally turns on you and you immediately have to begin fighting them. The problem is that the minute Takara loses, the new opponent shows up behind your base with about 150 units. Literally within the first few seconds of turning on you. The first time this happened, I got utterly annihilated since I had put most of my money into developing Harbingers to blow Takara back to whatever whorehouse she came from. Then my friend showed up with about a zillion planes and blew up my Harbingers. So I had to watch as a million tanks and a Giga Fortress rolled into my base and reduced it to rubble.
Unless you'd lost in this stage before, there's no way of knowing what's coming, ergo there's no way to know that you need to put a hundred units behind your base to fend from an attack that comes from a part of the map that has not been revealed yet. It's sort of a cheap tactic. But I prevailed by amassing my forces and absurdly pointing them toward the edge of the map.
Meanwhile, I have yet to defeat the final Soviet mission because it engages in an equally cheap tactic. Your mission is to annihilate these factories, so you amass your forces and send them out to do battle. But then, without warning, a Future Tank, this huge, super-powerful monstrosity, gets teleported into your base. So you have to quickly withdraw your forces so you can keep your base from being leveled.
I can't even complete the first Empire campaign because you're only given a transport that can disguise itself and told to "rendezvous" with the Soviet forces. I'm not sure what that means, and I have yet to figure it out. Every time, my transport gets destroyed.
But the bottom line is, cheap tactics or not, the game is pretty fun and I like it. They could keep putting out expansions like this and I'd keep buying them, so I guess they've accomplished their goal.
I had a probability test today that I think went pretty well. I studied long enough for it.
Two of my professors are out of town, so I don't even have to go to class tomorrow. It's awesome.
I've been playing Red Alert 3: Uprising. I feel like it's been getting a bum rap from fans and reviewers. It doesn't have multiplayer, and a lot of people are faulting it for that. But it's like someone at EA went "Quick! We have to make an expansion just for this 'Nat' guy! Include everything he could possibly want!" I don't play multiplayer (because I'm absolutely terrible at the game and couldn't hope to compete against other humans), and if you give me a set of weird challenges involving goofy characters, I'll be hooked for hours. And that's exactly what the expansion gives me.
The Red Alert universe gets stranger and more glorious with every new iteration. This version includes such great things as a soldier that can freeze other units while quoting Arnold from Batman & Robin. I kid you not. The unit even has a bad Austrian accent. It's probably my favorite new unit just for the novelty of it. Some of the other units are pretty insane, though. The big story when the game was about to come out was the Empire's Giga Fortress and how it was intentionally overpowered, but let me tell you right now, the real story is not the Giga Fortress. No, the real deal in this game is the Harbinger Gunship. Jesus Christ, the Harbinger Gunship. It's a plane that flies around in a circle and kills everything underneath it. You know that plane from Transformers that attacked Scorponok? Yeah, this thing is one of those, but it fires a fucking laser cannon instead of sabot rounds.
The game has a "Commander's Challenge" mode where you get to fight against several goofy commanders. You've got Moskvin, the hilariously sociopathic Soviet commander who never met another commander he didn't want to kill; Oleg, a simple commander who tries to utilize giant war bears for Mother Russia... to eat; Ric Flair... err, Commander Hill, an old dude who acts suspiciously like a professional wrestler; Takara, who proves that in Japan, the dress code for female military officers consists of a bikini and a jacket; and Giles, my personal favorite, a pompous British guy who embodies every single stereotype about Britain imaginable. They're pretty fun to beat up on. Some of the challenges are of questionable fairness, and the AI is unable to counter some simple strategies (such as building just a few air units in a map where the AI specializes in artillery), but it can still be pretty challenging and fun.
The campaigns, however, are pretty short. I just beat the Allied campaign in pretty much one sitting. The campaign missions seem to be harder than the ones from RA3, though sometimes the challenge comes from unfair surprises. For instance, in the final Allied mission, you're initially fighting against Takara and her incredible cleavage, but once you defeat her (and it's not hard to defeat her), an ally turns on you and you immediately have to begin fighting them. The problem is that the minute Takara loses, the new opponent shows up behind your base with about 150 units. Literally within the first few seconds of turning on you. The first time this happened, I got utterly annihilated since I had put most of my money into developing Harbingers to blow Takara back to whatever whorehouse she came from. Then my friend showed up with about a zillion planes and blew up my Harbingers. So I had to watch as a million tanks and a Giga Fortress rolled into my base and reduced it to rubble.
Unless you'd lost in this stage before, there's no way of knowing what's coming, ergo there's no way to know that you need to put a hundred units behind your base to fend from an attack that comes from a part of the map that has not been revealed yet. It's sort of a cheap tactic. But I prevailed by amassing my forces and absurdly pointing them toward the edge of the map.
Meanwhile, I have yet to defeat the final Soviet mission because it engages in an equally cheap tactic. Your mission is to annihilate these factories, so you amass your forces and send them out to do battle. But then, without warning, a Future Tank, this huge, super-powerful monstrosity, gets teleported into your base. So you have to quickly withdraw your forces so you can keep your base from being leveled.
I can't even complete the first Empire campaign because you're only given a transport that can disguise itself and told to "rendezvous" with the Soviet forces. I'm not sure what that means, and I have yet to figure it out. Every time, my transport gets destroyed.
But the bottom line is, cheap tactics or not, the game is pretty fun and I like it. They could keep putting out expansions like this and I'd keep buying them, so I guess they've accomplished their goal.