Phoenix Online Studios has finally released their first Episode of the The Silver Lining. Which used to be called King’s Quest IX the Silver Lining, until they were forced to change the name. Episode 1 is the first of 5 episodes which are supposedly going to be released from now till next year. From what I hear Episoed 1 is more like an overhyped tech demo with 10 minutes of gameplay. Not mention having a highly annoying narrator. I have not downloaded it because you need to have an account in order to get it. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, but guess what the member’s area is called? The Phoenix Online Fan Club. Once again the arrogance of this group shows through. Word on the street says they are looking at making a commercial project after this. And what better way to harvest email addresses to spam later. In the past they have posted several articles how to make a game before they released anything more than a buggy demo. When they were looking for beta testers, they created a fake demo with intentionally added bugs. It’s not like their demo was bug free to begin with. It seems after 8 years of development I think I can wait some more before I have any desire to try it out.

I tried the demo for Supreme Commander 2 this week. And man what a let down. It’s like Square and GPG turned an original novel into a mass market paperback romance. The first mistake: you have to have Steam to download the demo. I can see why GPG is worried about piracy. But its the demo for crying out loud. And then guess whats next you are forced to watch nearly a whole minute of company logo animations. You better be able to skip it in the real

Their technology tree is the only thing that differentiates it from a futuristic Command and Conquer clone. You cant even queue up units if you don’t have the resources available. You can set a factory to repeat but sometimes you just want 20 light tanks then 5 AA, 45 Heavy tanks. I guess that is too complicated for the average mass gamer. (Which are who they are obviously shooting for. Definitely not fans of SupCom 1. And fans of Total Annihilation well… there’s a reason TA still has an active community.) Engineers can not help others to build structures and only 3 engineers can assist a factory at a time.

There are no tiers either. You have to research technology in order to get unit upgrades as well as the severely weakened experimental units. I really get bored of researching the same techs every single game. Like in WC3 and AOE. They change it up a little bit by having a lot of a choices and having to research the proper prerequisites. Apparently the majority of the gameplay for multiplayer is planning which techs to research first.

The strategic map view is pretty much pointless. Partly because the maps are tiny. The unit textures for the demo at least are super bright and washed out like your playing with model airplanes. I mean bright blue and bright yellow have never went together. The poly count is higher however. And the water doesn’t look half as good as in SupCom1.

Screenshots
Supcom UEF ACU
Supcom 2 UEF ACU
Supcom Waves
Supcom 2 Water

And the story consisted of annoying talking heads bickering. I will still google the cut scenes however.

If you have never played Total Annihilation, Spring or Supreme Commander then maybe this could be a fun game, but for those who have played a real RTS look again. All in all it looks a lot more like a prequel or even a no brand name rip off than a sequel.

I tried out a few lighthearted action games a little while ago. And I enjoyed them immensely.

So I recently heard about a new Lego game in development. Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 is scheduled to be released sometime next year. So I figured I should check out the Lego games they have already released to see if they are as good as I have heard. I found the demos up on Download.com. You can also check Amazon’s pages on Lego PC Games for more information such as screenshots and video. I was able to try the demos for Star Wars II(which are episodes 4-6). Batman and Indiana Jones. The demo for Lego Star Wars I won’t install on XP 64 or Vista, or Windows 7. You have to install it on XP or older and copy it over to the newer OS’s. The Star Wars and Indiana Jones Demos each have a level to play and then the option to free play that level again. Which means you can go through getting all the secrets you missed before with whatever characters you have won up to that point. You can change your character anytime in free play.

The Batman game lets you play as either the heroes or the villains. You also periodically find different suits that give Batman or Robin special powers like demolition suit or magnet shoes. Its good to see a tie with all those old action figures. I always thought they were strange when the tv show never had all those power suits.

In each of the games you can play single player and switch between characters or instead play two player cooperative. Each character has specific moves or powers they can use. To beat a level, one has to switch between these characters in order to play through to end. And there are a lot of secrets to find. Which for me at least are really hard to find. Sometimes you can see a secret area but you have to figure out how to get past the obstacles in front of it.

These games are quite enjoyable. I don’t know why its so funny to watch Chewbacca rip a Lego Storm Trooper’s arms off but it is. The characters have some entertaining moves which allow you to blast your enemies back to bricks. The Star Wars games are older and have some strange bugs and a slight weirdness to the camera views but other than that they run pretty smooth. The graphics look great especially in the batman game. I wonder what it would be like to have a photo realistic Lego game, because they are getting closer to it. Each of the games have similar mechanics but the puzzles are quite different making each enjoyable in its light.

Lately I have been taking a break from learning ruby and working on my game. I beat the campaigns for Warcraft 3 Frozen throne and Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. Though I cheated on the last Warcraft scenario. The population limit really gets to me. They wanted to focus on squad battles, but the battles are often so chaotic you sometimes have no idea whats happening anyway. In the last level you can only have a population of 100 and they have 2 – 3 sides with a 100 each. With stronger units then I can build. Perfect recipe for a fun level. It just got a little irritating by the end with both story lines being predictable and redundant. Warcraft’s was slighter better though. I mean in Supcom the Aeon princess sacrifices herself at the end of the original campaign and at the end of the expansion. I am very glad to hear Square Enix is working with Gas Powered Games on Supreme Commander 2. It sounds like the story should be vastly improved. Apparently a lot of work has been done on optimization as well, so it will hopefully actually work on regular systems. Personally I think it should be considered a bug when it runs really slow on a Core 2 Quad 2.4 ghz machine with 6 gigs of RAM.