freak-o-mator

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About freak-o-mator

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  1. BioShock 2

    Actually its more like "Schroedinger, the (dead) cat". ^^ I finished the game a few hours ago and i really liked the last part of the game, theres some interesting stuff going on there. Im suprised that most reviews criticize the story of Bio2, i thought they did a good job of making "the choice" regarding Little Sisters feel more relevant.
  2. I am not aware of any Cover System in Z... and i finished the game (although it took me a long, long time ). But there are some innovations that also appear in some newer Relic RTS-games: - The map is partitioned into sectors, each with a flag to capture it. There are no ressources in Z except "time", meaning: the more sectors you own the faster your buildings produce new units. - No basebuilding. You start with a single HQ-Building in your starting sector, which you can produce all units. But there are also buildings in a lot of the other sectors. They produce units for the owner of the sector. - Infantry is used in Squads of 2-5 Men, you dont give orders to single infantrymen. - Infantry Squads can pick up Grenades. That gives them the ability to destroy vehicles which they couldn't damage with their regular rifles. Similar to Bazookas in CoH. - You can build a lot of stationary weapons like gatling guns and howitzers to defend your sectors. You can kill the guy manning those using small arms fire (snipers, machineguns..) and send one of your own guys to man the gun. This is also an important mechanic in CoH. In Z you can also kill the crew of jeeps or even tanks (!) and capture them. - On a lot of maps bridges play a big role in Z. You can destroy those with Big Guns and repair them with a special engineer unit. Also a big part of Coh. I dont know though if Z was the first RTS to do this. - There is an APC that can carry an Infantry Unit. That unit can fire their weapons from the transporter. Depending on the Infantry those can be Rocket Launchers, Flame Throwers, etc. Similar to some Transporters in CoH. Overall it was a much more dynamic single-player game than every other RTS at that time. Still a lot of people didnt like it, it think mainly for 2 reasons: 1. It required micro managment. You couldnt just win by outnumbering, so you had to be able to win fights between similar sized armies. That required stuff like staying out of the enemies weapon range. A lot of projectiles in Z move quite slowly so you can often move your units out of the way and avoid being hit. But i think in 1996 hardly any player even thought about doing that... including me I just sent my units towards the enemies like i did in C&C and watched them either destroy the enemy or get destroyed.. the outcome was very unpredictable if you just let the unit AI do its thing. That seemed very random and was frustrating. I couldnt get past Mission 11 or so. After i played games like Warcraft 3 and learned to pay attention to "micro" i went back to Z and it was a much more fun experience. Plus i was able to beat it. 2. A lot of things just are very random Z. If your troops destroy a rock that is in their way, fragments of that rock will fly all over the map damaging units where they land. If a vehicle explodes the same thing happenes. This can lead to crazy chain reactions... sometimes thats funny but sometimes very frustrating if your heavy tank gets destroyed by a flying cactus. Also the unit AI in Z is kind of strange. Different unit types have different intelligence levels in this game. Snipers are supposed to be super smart, the big guys with rocket launchers are terribly dumb. That has influence on path finding and behaviour in battle. But even the "smart" units sometimes behave just stupid. Getting a unit of snipers to take advantage of their higher weapon range is not an easy thing to do and sometimes impossible, they will just run into the enemies weapon range for no apparent reason. Another source of randomness: as mentioned earlier you can kill the crew of vehicles with small arms fire. So if your medium tank drives by a group of enemy riflemen in like 5% of the cases they will just get a lucky shot and kill your tank driver.. and then capture the tank themselves. In a lot of cases this will turn around the battle because a single tank is a big deal in Z.
  3. You can drag-select in Warcraft 1 when you hold down the Ctrl-Key. Noob.