Supreme Commander Talk

Sorry guys, I was in New York City on a less-than-24 hour trip, so I haven’t been able to update the site in just over a day. And in the short time that I was gone, my oh my, look at all of this new Supreme Commander news! I would be remiss not to point it out.

First up, there’s an update to the patch notes for v3223. Apparently some additional changes were made by the developers that weren’t communicated to the staff assembling the release notes. The following changes were also made in patch v3223:

• Fixes an exploit that allowed players to enable shields on the T2 UEF Gunship when used in conjunction with a carrier.
• UEF Heavy Gunship: Weapon 2 damage reduced to 82. Veterancy damage reduced to match reduced damage.
• Cybran T2 Point Defense: Veterancy damage reduced to match reduced damage of previous tuning change.

The shield exploit obviously needed to be fixed (now if only they’ll fix the pause/upgrade/duplication exploit). As for nerfing the Broadsword and Cerberus, was this really necessary? We’re talking about the two non-Aeon factions here. They need all the help they can get :-P

Next up in Supreme Commander news, we have a review by CNN (!??!). I didn’t know CNN was into game reviews at all, let alone hardcore niche titles like Supreme Commander. If anything, you’d think they’d be writing reviews about mass market bland titles, like World of Warcraft or Command and Conquer 3. Whatever; the more exposure Supreme Commander gets, the better.

As one would expect, though, the CNN review does miss the mark on several counts. For one, they seem to have problems with basic math, as evidenced in this statement: “Supreme Commander takes place in the 37th century — the year 3844.” Yeah, that’d be the 39th century, not the 37th century. The review does a decent job of explaining the basics of the game, but trips over some of the particulars regarding ACU upgrades. If you’re going to be that specific, at least be right. The review correctly points out that Supreme Commander is very demanding in terms of hardware, but points out Supreme Commander’s greatest weakness as a strength: “A so-so tutorial is designed for those new to this genre, yet many will find that it doesn’t provide enough guidance — especially for a tough game like this with its smart A.I.” Smart A.I.? What game are they playing?

So while I appreciate CNN’s foray into the game review arena, I guess my advice to them would be, don’t quit your day job …

And finally, we have news that Gas Powered Games is working on a 3rd party map vault for GPGNet to be released in April. It’ll be like the replay vault, but rather than browsing through replays, you’ll be able to browse through maps, download them on the spot, and then play them in singleplayer or multiplayer. I cannot emphasize how awesome this feature will be. To my knowledge it’ll be the first time any game has incorporated 3rd party content this tightly. It will put all of those other games — where you have to go to websites, download stuff, and install it manually — completely to shame. This more than makes up for the lackluster world map feature that everyone quickly forgot about a day after its release.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 31st, 2007 at 12:02 am by Cyde Weys and is filed under News. Keywords: . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.