Halcyon | flow

Calm and peaceful; tranquil | Continuity and smoothness of appearance

American Heritage Dictionary 4th. Ed.

I had been hearing a lot about this epic-scaled space RTS game for the past couple of weeks, and almost everything I heard was positive. So, I decided to go out and buy the thing.

It turns out that Sins of a Solar Empire is actually a very good game. It's incredibly deep but not difficult to learn. I generally suck at faster paced RTS games that are heavy on micromanagement; Sins is slower paced and the fantastic AI eliminates much of the unit-by-unit micro that kills me in other RTS games. There are also some nifty non-combat means of harassing your enemy, such as outbidding them for the services of the local space pirates, or using propaganda to undermine their culture and win over the citizens of their planets.

This is one of those games that requires a good, long play session to get deep into, and I've only had time to scratch the surface so far. I may post a more detailed review and some gameplay videos later on.

Related Links:
http://www.sinsofasolarempire.com

A new update, nearly a year to the day after the last one? Yeah, I'm amazed too. Don't expect too much though.

I got myself a copy of Unreal Tournament 3, then created a deathmatch map for it. You can find DM-LiftKill in the Game Mods section. Enjoy!

The PC demo of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic was released today (yesterday?) and it seems like a quality game. I got an impression from the initial screenshots that the game was very similar to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, but a quick run through the demo proved that Dark Messiah has a much more interesting approach to combat. I like the fact that you can defeat most enemies using various aspects of the game's nicely detailed environments, without ever swinging a weapon.

I recorded two videos of the demo and cut them into highlight reels showing some fun things from the tutorial level and the cavern level. You can download them on the Gallery page. See the Related Links below for mirrors to download the 1.38gb demo.

This time I've encoded the videos using x264, which seems to have a better filesize-to-quality ratio than XviD. You will need to have a recent version of ffdshow installed in order to play x264 videos. You can download ffdshow here. Choose a mirror for ffdshow under the decoder section; if you're not sure which to get, go with the sse version.

Related Links:
http://files.filefront.com/Dark+Messiah+of+Might+and+Magic+Demo+v10/;5370570;;/fileinfo.html
http://www.3ddownloads.com/Action/Dark%20Messiah%20of%20Might%20and%20Magic/Demo/Dark_Messiah_Demo.exe
http://www.fileplanet.com/166052/160000/fileinfo/Dark-Messiah-of-Might-&-Magic-Singleplayer-Demo

I've completed the tutorial missions in the Company of Heroes beta and tried my hand at a multiplayer game, and I recorded some of the gameplay for your enjoyment. You can find 5 video clips of the game in action on the Gallery page. Four of these are small clips from the tutorial missions, and the fifth is an 8 minute highlight reel showing myself taking a sound beating from a large-scale infantry assault.

I have written a mini-review of this beta release to convey my first impression of the game. You can click below to read it or use the link on the Writing page. Company of Heroes is being developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ. You can visit the official website for more information about the game.

Click here to view the full article.

I haven't been impressed by many of the new PC game releases lately, but this one looks promising. It's a WWII real-time strategy game, which obviously isn't anything new, but it looks amazing. As long as it doesn't play like the dozens of Warcraft 3 clones that have been flooding the market, it has a chance of being a good game.

The multiplayer beta of Company of Heroes was opened to the public today. You can visit Fileplanet to get a beta key for the game and download the client, which is a hefty 1.61gb. You'll have to register with Fileplanet (for free) if you don't already have an account.

I'm currently downloading the client myself. I'll have some impressions of the gameplay posted later after I try it out.