Josh Coady

This may be old news, but I just noticed the domain the order page for SC2 is none other than CM2. https://www.combatmission2.com/sc2_order.html Also, thanks for posting about the review for SC2 (which I completely ignored), but I did look into the game afterwards and am going to give it a try. With most games having demos, reviews aren't as necessary anymore. I'd much rather play a game than read a review (with two exceptions: PC Gamer reviews of games that receive 20% or less which absolutley hilarious and for those times when you get bored at work/school/whatever). On another note, the waiting for news here is not that bad, new for Half-Life 2 was sometimes more than a year between bones, but in the end it was a great game and I dont hear anyone complaining, "so what if its a great game, i'm choosing to miss out on it just to spite Valve for not releasing info on a regular basis".. -Josh

E3 is May 10-12. -Josh

I'm pretty much in the same camp as Coaxial_Puppet. I'm mid-20s and my wargaming interest is mostly WWII, although I really liked operation flashpoint and have played a Korea game as well, but right now I'm back to WWII (highly fictionalized) playing Silent Storm. Like a lot of others, I got my start in wargaming with SL and then ASL. Maybe the difference with the younger crowd is that we're more likely to play a variety of genres. My favorite games are Half-Life and its "War of the Worlds" sequel. I also liked Far Cry, Knights of the Old Republic, the Civilization games, Need for Speed, Homeworld, and Freespace. Will I buy SF? Probably, but I'll wait 6-12mos for the price to come down. Would I buy it right away if the setting was WWII? Not necessarily, but it'd definitely be more tempting. I think the appeal of WWII is that it is simply more epic and grandiose than current warfare. I think there is a more emotional connection to that setting than to other settings. Thats not to say that I wont play SF and enjoy every minute of it. -Josh

That's the funniest thing I've read since Jerry Taylor asking The Register to turn off the internet because he was getting email.

You can get a decent gaming machine for under $500 (assuming you have all the extras already: case, monitor, keyboard, hard drive, etc.): AMD 64 3000+ ~ $100 MSI Socket 939 M/B ~ $120 MSI GeForce 6600 VC PCI-E ~ $120 1GB RAM ~ $100 This setup can play most games on high graphics, next-gen FPS on medium. In 2-3 years, or spread over the next couple years, add on more RAM, a newer VC, and a faster processor. With the add-ons/replacements you'll spend another $300-$400. Total cost for a machine that can play most games that will ever grace it's hard drive at high detail for the next 5-6 years: $700-$900. At least, that's my plan anyway. (And it's quiet as well, the lowdest thing is the DVD drive when it's spinning.) -Josh

I'm 26.. bought CMBO and CMBB based on PC Gamer reviews and a play through the demo. I also enjoy COD, KOTOR, Civ4, Freespace 2; but have yet to find anything that really compares to Half-Life. For strategy games I do prefer CM to starcraft and other RTS although Rise of Nations was great. I also enjoy the occasional M:TW game but usually only play the turn-based part which makes it risk but with more detail. Anyway, as others have said, I also tried to get wife my into gaming, but the only thing she really liked was adventure games like Myst and Syberia (and I got her hooked on watching Star Trek and playing Catan). My eldest son is also 6 and his favorite games are memory, connect 4, checkers, skip-bo, and parcheesi. He'll soon be ready to learn chess and cribbage and he keeps bugging us to teach him Settlers of Catan. This thread has gone a little OT but I dont mind since it gives a little personal insight into CMers on the boards that you dont normally get. -Josh

KOTOR is simply [K]nights [O]f [T]he [O]ld [R]epublic It's set 4000 years before the movies and has a better than average plot.

I agree. Oblivion is looking great. The Morrowind games are a little too open ended for my tastes though. You should also check out Kinghts of the Old Republic and Silent Storm.

It was what they believed, but even before CMx1, they were proved wrong during beta test. The game is for Mac and PC (different floating point libraries, a rounding error in floating point means a live or dead tank ) and even between various PCs the results where not the same (maybe this was at the time of the various Pentium floating point bugs). So each CMx1 movie file includes all the computations which are done on only one computer. I guess it will be the same for CMSF, or they would not worry about file size. [/QB]</font>

Very generally speaking, and this depends on how it is being coded, all that needs to be passed around are the actions taken (give unit X command Y), the variable changes (e.g. new wind direction), and the seeds for the random numbers. Then the rest of the calculations should come out the same even if run independently on the other player's machine. The map, models, unit psychological history, etc. should already exist on both player's machine as part of the game install. So, instead of passing along the turn (replay and all), you just pass along the parameters to generate the turn again on the other player's achine. Again, this is overly-simplistic, but in theory that's how it could work. As an aside, I'm one of those who think PBEM would be a nice feature to have, but would probably never use it. The majority of my time will probably be spent playing the solo campaign and after that solo QBs.

He may not even realize he can buy the game without putting on pants to leave the house. Once he does, his support will undoubtedly swell to the point of incipient madness... </font>

Actually it's more of a budget issue. I tend to wait for games to drop off their initial $50 price tag and pick them up when they are somewhere between $10 and $30 (depending on how much I want the game). Sometimes I buy from amazon for full price because we get amazon certificates for doing market research surveys. Anyway, if I had more money for discretionary spending, I'd buy it as soon as it was released. (all this assumes the initial price will be greater than $30)

I just noticed that the current top story on CNN.com is the following. I will add myself to the list of people looking forward to this release and will buy it as soon as it is available from gogamer.com, amazon.com, Target, or Wal-Mart.

I agree with everything here. Because of the computer picked jeeps and halftracks I started picking my own side, but that still left the opposition wanting... It would be nice to select a general force composition whose units were randomly selected by the computer. -Josh

I was thinking this would be a good solution for even a 2-player game. I think of it as a cross between PBEM and TCP/IP. You could call it persistent TCP/IP. The downside is it would require BFC (or some reliable third party) to have a couple of servers to support it.