Games and such
In my effort to post all the links in the notables thread, I’ve neglected the review column so here’s a blog post to rectify that. It’s been a conficting month. This quote from Eurogamer sums up my feelings “it’s now perfectly possible to love Sonic and wish he was dead at the same time.”
Dawn of War 2 is fun, and I haven’t even tried the co-op yet. I like the new focus on action, the rpg leveling up and no base building, but I have pangs of longing for the classic rts style. The missions are faster as a result, since you no longer have to build a base before leaping into the action. This makes multiplayer tougher, because there is now more emphasis on getting the right starting build and keeping your units alive. Lose a couple of squads due to poor unit selection or inattention and you won’t have the forces to take back the Strategic Points before the match ends.
Squads are treated as one entity like the first DOW, which makes handling large numbers of troops easy, unless one of your heavy weapons units gets involved in close combat. The rest of his squad then un-deploy their weapons and walk slowly into help him so their squad can entirely be involved in melee, because they’re the three musketeers apparently. Given that they have no qualms firing into a close combat fight at other times and that their firing damage is so much higher than their melee damage, I find this vexing. Telling a squad to teleport to an area that is out of the range of part of the squad can confuse them too.
The game is pretty, but it’s been some time since I played the first one, so it’s difficult to compare. There are some techinical issues though. The game would crash after every other mission, after the autosave had kicked in, so you wouldn’t lose anything except the time taken to restart the game. While only mildly annoying, that’s been patched out thankfully. Any remaining crashes are the fault of my computer.
Also the install screen looks like this: