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BattleZone (1998), Sacrifice, & other hybrids

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Listening to Ep#274 (mail call) and Rob's fond reminiscing of Sacrifice, I was reminded of another similar game of that mold. I got a copy of Battlezone with the Gateway PC I had as a kid (along with some non-strategy games) and played the heck of it. 

 

Admittedly, the orders interface wasn't great, as it relied on moving from the WASD to the number keys, but trying to shoot and command at the same time was rarely a good idea in-game anyway. The setting was also pretty ridiculous, but it does make me wonder why there haven't been that many similar games, or ones that used a similar interface...

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DoubleFine were streaming Brutal Legend the other day and it really made me want to pick it up again (I haven't played since it first came out on 360). Hits on all the things I loved about Sacrifice plus I love the setting/art/music/Jack Black.

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BattleZone was a very weird premise -  wasnt it US vs USSR space race with the special metal and alien tech.  Thematically though the space travel and planet settings worked great with the necessary fog of 3d games of the time (RE: Venus levels)  We had two computers that were manageable and could play multiplayer with my brothers - extremely satisfying to jump out in pilot mode and snipe a huge tank, steal it, and smash the other person's base

 

Sacrifice is one of my all time favorites, i always flip-flop about getting it from GoG - but finding someone to play against would be a challenge to organize

 

 

On the BattleZone thought - did you play Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising.  It was more of an action/squad game and less base building, but hits that frustrating control scheme exactly; land, water, and air!  It felt a lot like a tech-demo at the time, I think it came bundled with a lot of Voodoo 3DFX cards at the time.

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Battlezone is one of my favorite games ever. Great atmosphere, fun combination of FPS and RTS and it's just freaking cool to be a NSDF Astronaut flying your spacetank through the mists of Venus to battle to battle Soviet Cosmonauts. I was also in that age where clunky interfaces weren't really a problem, just hurdles to get over.

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Battlezone is definitely in my top ten. My favorite part was the sense of isolation and vulnerability after getting ejected from an exploding tank and having to walk back to base or wait for a pickup. I replayed a good chunk of it last year, looks surprisingly good at 2560x1440.

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Never played Antaeus Rising. Could be good for a lark. There seems to be enough games of this type for an episode?

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At the risk of repeating myself too much, I wanna mention Kingdom Under Fire as a game that mixes TW style tactical battle with Dynasty Warrior kind of action.  To bad that it's for Xbox though and thus is very hard to come by nowdays.

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At the risk of repeating myself too much, I wanna mention Kingdom Under Fire as a game that mixes TW style tactical battle with Dynasty Warrior kind of action.  To bad that it's for Xbox though and thus is very hard to come by nowdays.

 

Also the first game was a RTS released for pc, which some maps where more light rpg/heavy combat with heroes.

 

Another game with a curious mix, was Rise and Fall Civilizations at War, on of the last game done by Stainless Stell (also they did the Empire Earth series) which also had Rick Goodman as the main designer. it was a bit of RTS (with the Empire Earth zoom levels) and a bit o Dynasty Warriors gameplay (during short times you could take control of a hero). However I did find the demo to be huge letdown, while the rts part was ok and DW part missed almost everything that would make a good DW style of game.

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Yeah I too actually played the demo but it just didn't play out well at all (contrary to King Under Fire on Xbox).  I just recall heroes just played too powerfully so I just ignored army and soloed everything?  Like the AI couldn't handle Cleopatra's range bow attack spam.  Just typing that last sentence made me giggle lol

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Battlezone

Sacrifice

Brutal Legend

Hostile Water: Antaeus Rising

Kingdom Under Fire

Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War

 

Yeah, that's definitely enough games for an episode...

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Anybody ever played Uprising? Very cool action/strategy hybrid that i played a whole bunch of as a kid, but It seems like one of those games that just nobody really remembers, i never see people talk about it. (It does not even have a wikipedia page.) I remember actually liking it a tiny bit more than Battlezone.

 

Looking into it now, apparently it got a couple of sequels, one more than i thought it got. The sequel i did play i remember being fairly unimpressed by, but i remember that first game pretty fondly.

 

Kinda loved the whole thing about teleporting units from your production queues straight into battle, you just needed line of sight, either from your personal tank or one of your base citadels. You could still issue orders to units afterwards too, i believe. The game wasn't just skipping the hard part. I believe you could also teleport them back out and cash them in.

 

There's a decent little power allocation mechanic on your tank too, and a whole bunch of weird weapons.

 

 

Some random footage from youtube. (Warning: It's loud.)

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Golgotha from Crack dot Com had a promising demo before its development stopped!

 

 

It was a pretty typical RTS, but you had a big tank that you could take direct control of to go bust some heads.

 

edit: oh my god, this music. 

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For the sake of thoroughness, another action RTS i remember from around the same time as Battlezone and Uprising that hasn't already been posted about here was a Microsoft-published game called Urban Assault. I remember only playing a demo of that one, but it seemed neat and still seems to have a bit of a following.

 

 

Another thing that has always, always stood out as a little odd to me was an old and actually very cool top down action game from 1998 called Future Cop LAPD. Its multiplayer mode, and stop me if this sounds familiar, has you playing as a hero unit in a symmetrical arena filled with defense towers and factories pumping out automated units, with the objective being to push your way into the enemy's base.

 

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