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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 16:22:51 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Microid's 2024 Empire of the Ants demo came out yesterday!
Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:22:45 -0400
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On Thu, 17 Oct 2024 23:28:01 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Oct 2024 23:55:43 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:
>
>> >Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> >On Wed, 16 Oct 2024 02:12:02 +0000, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic,
>> >> >Ant wrote: 
>> >
>> >
>> >> >>https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287330/Empire_of_the_Ants/
>> >> >>And I'm still too busy and using an old video card (MSI NVIDIA GeForce 
>> >> >>GTX 750 Ti (N750TI-2GD5/OC; 2 GB of VRAM) so I can't play it for now. :( 
>> >> >>Maybe I will finally play it in a decade when it is free and have better 
>> >> >>hardwares. Ha! :P
>> >
>> >
>> >> On Tue, 15 Oct 2024 21:29:03 -0600, PW
>> >> <iamnotusingonewithAgent@notinuse.com> wrote:
>> >> >Maybe we should all chip in and get Ant what he needs to play his
>> >> >family game.  Or maybe Spalls will find something good at the
>> >> >dumpsters for Ant.
>> >
>> >> The dumpsters have been sadly quite empty recently. I think the
>> >> building staff is on to me and hoarding the good stuff for themselves
>> >> inside rather than leaving it on curb. 
>> >
>> >Did your previous good stuff include good video cards though? :p
>> >
>
>> Actually, I once found a complete system with a GeForce 790GTX and an
>> i7 processor; it wasn't top-of-the-line stuff even at the time, but it
>> was still a pretty decent gaming rig. 
>
>Ha, that video card would handle this game well than my old card. ;P

It was -still is- a quite capable system, despite it being over a
decade old at this point. Certainly it could handle a lot of my
mainstay games (<cough>Truck Simulators</cough>) well enough, and even
a lot of the more modern titles, if at reduced graphics levels. Which
says less about the power of the machine and more about the state of
modern gaming.

But mostly I keep it around because it has easy-swap SATA bays which
makes it useful for whenever I need to test / wipe hard-drives. No
need to open up another computer, or fiddle around with external drive
chassis; I just slip the drive in the caddy and I'm good to go.

>> (It also had its hard-drives complete with all the user data on it in
>> unencrypted format. People really need to learn to wipe their drives
>> before tossing their PCs)

>Geez. Did you find anything good in their HDDs? ;)


Are you implying that I snooped around that hard-drive before doing
the proper thing and deleting the contents of the drive? Why, I never!
;-)

(but all sorts of stuff, including photos, scans of drivers license,
credit card numbers, documents with government ID, etc. Were I evil, I
could have done Bad Things with that information. DELETE YOUR DRIVES,
people!)


>> >So, you're not a RTS fan?
>
>> I play them. I enjoy them. They're not my favorite genre, but I don't
>> dislike them in general. 
>
>> I'm a bit less sanguine about action/strategy RTS games, where you
>> have to take on the role of one of the soldiers on the battlefield and
>> order your troops from a ground-level perspective. I find it messy and
>> overly complicated. Even though several games -- "Battlezone" (1998)
>> or "Hostile Waters: Anteaus Rising", for instance-- rose to prominence
>> based on the mechanic, I think a lot of their success came from the
>> novelty of the idea rather than its workability. It's a concept that
>> is better left in the dustbin of history, as far as I'm concerned. ;-)

>So, you didn't like RTS games like Dune, C&C, WC, SC, AoE, etc. I love those.


No, that's not what I said.

Well, except "Dune". I never really liked that one. Too crunky in its
design. RTS weren't worth playing until C&C/Warcraft, IMHO.

But I played the heck out of the C&C series, enjoyed Warcraft, played
Age of Empires (and Rise of Nations), and a whole bunch more. I'll
admit, I was never a fanatic about the genre, and I almost never
played them online. Mostly, my strategies revolved around turtling up
and making pretty bases, then building the biggest army and sending
them en masse to wipe out the baddies when they got too annoying.
(playing it sort of like SimCity except with annoying neighbors ;-).
Some engaged me more than others; for instance, I quite enjoyed the
"Ground Control" games, and I found the "Battle for Middle Earth"
games much more satisfying than even I expected. But they always
played second fiddle to more other genres I enjoyed more: FPS games,
or RPGs, for instance.

But the ones I enjoyed most were the ones where you had a god's eye
view of the battle and not the one that also required you to control a
unit on the ground, like "Hostile Waters", "BattleZone", "Sacrifice"
and -apparently- "Empire of Ants". I just don't find the hybrid mix of
RTS and FPS/TPS a good mixture.