Say what you like about game developers in the ‘90s, but they at least knew how to name their games. Look at any list of releases from just about any year in that decade and you’ll find any number of punchy, pithy, interesting-sounding titles. Doom, Warcraft, Civilization  - of course the fact that these games are all classics lends their names a certain familiarity and ease with which they roll off the tongue, but you’d have trouble convincing me that Command & Conquer wasn’t a genius name for the game that popularised the RTS genre. It’s three words and five syllables elegantly structured in such a way that they almost perfectly sum up the product they’re attached to. They’re catchy. They stick in the mind. They’re memorable, so much so that twenty years later just saying them will evoke fond memories of that opening GDI beach assault. They also evoke something that’s been a little bit lost in the intervening two decades; an attitude towards strategy that I wouldn’t exactly call more thoughtful or relaxed, but certainly slower. Starcraft popularised an emphasis on frenetic micromanagement that gradually became dominant throughout the genre, to the point where even the later C&C games aped it (to their great detriment), but there’s a lot of people out there who miss the older, more languid style of Command & Conquer, and would very much like it if somebody made a modern game in that now almost-retro style of RTS.

The good news is that this game now exists. It’s even made by Petroglyph — a studio staffed by some of the last Westwood veterans in the industry — so you’d expect it to nail that old-style RTS feel. And it kind of does, I guess. It’s just that… well, the bad news is that the game is called…

Grey Goo.

Roll that phrase around in your mouth a little. Feel the taste of it on your tongue. Grey Goo. Grey. Goo. This is not a title that brings to mind a resurgence in classic RTS; I’m not saying it’s impossible to use the word Goo when naming your game, but that game had damn well better be a whimsical puzzler a la World of Goo. It’s an inherently comic word, both onomatopoeically and because its meaning is just a few steps removed from the childish high point of watching Noel’s House Party on a Saturday evening. Where Command & Conquer sounded authoritative and decisive, Grey Goo just sounds faintly ridiculous. (Indeed, it gets even more ridiculous in the mission cutscenes, when exquisitely rendered CGI characters utter such immortal lines of dialogue as “I won’t rest until every drop of goo has been destroyed!”) I know they’re trying to tap into the modern zeitgeist of those depressingly regular hysterical news reports wherein science goes mad and creates out-of-control nanobots that will consume everything, but it really does boggle my mind that, like Mass Effect 3’s ending, the name Grey Goo made it through an entire company’s worth of people without anyone standing up and saying “This is really goddamn stupid.”¹

So right from the offset Grey Goo is operating with a serious credibility deficit, which is a shame because it’s the best game Petroglyph have made . If you’re aware of my opinions regarding previous Petroglyph games this may seem like faint praise indeed, but I do mean it; it’s the first Petroglyph game I’ve played that I didn’t fall out of within three missions of starting the campaign. It does a decent job of fusing older concepts I last saw in C&C (you can build walls in this game, for crying out loud) with newer innovations such as three very asymmetric factions who each have their own super-unit lurking at the end of the tech tree. It follows the same C&C structure of having face-to-face mission briefings interspersed with nice CGI cutscenes that function as your reward for completing a mission. It even has an outstanding score by Frank Klepacki which is easily the best work he’s done since Red Alert 2. And yet despite all this, despite the obvious care and effort that’s gone into preserving some of that old C&C feeling while simultaneously trying to move this antiquated portion of the genre forward, Grey Goo still feels incredibly underwhelming.

More than any other Petroglyph game, Grey Goo is a reasonable collection of decent-to-nice ideas that really don’t come together. The factions are each designed to be quite distinct in terms of playstyle: you’ve got the Beta, who are probably the most “traditional” faction, all bullets and walkers and artillery with a visual aesthetic that’s full of belching smokestacks and whose gimmick is that they can mount most of their units onto walls (and onto the Beta super-unit) as turrets; the Humans, who field very gleamingly high-tech robotic units (a nice touch is that there’s maybe three actual humans in the entire game because they’re supposed to be explorers, although they certainly don’t seem to have a problem with letting their drones slaughter other intelligent species for them) and who can teleport their structures around to where they’re most needed; and the Goo, who are going to need a whole other paragraph to explain them because they’re so non-traditional.

The Goo faction is probably the most innovative part of Grey Goo. You start the game with a single Mother Goo, a huge amorphous blob that you promptly plonk down onto one of the catalyst pools that function as this game’s resources. The Mother Goo won’t gather those resources and convert them into spendable currency like the other races do; instead, the catalyst feeds the Mother Goo directly, causing it to grow both in size and hitpoints. Once the Mother Goo hits a certain size threshold it can hive off parts of itself into either Small or Large Proteans, or another Mother Goo. These are all varying sizes of amorphous blob, but they’re all fully mobile (albeit a bit slow), can climb cliffs and other usually-impassible terrain with ease, have a caustic attack that damages any enemy units they touch, and — most importantly — can be converted into other more conventional types of Goo unit at any time. This is unfortunately the part where the innovation breaks down somewhat, as the need for the Goo to have units to fulfil all of the stock RTS unit roles means that a Goo-tank is still a tank even if it stomps around on six legs rather than tank treads, but it still results in a faction that plays dramatically differently to the other two. The Goo is far more mobile than the Beta or the Humans and can shift its Mother Goos around with ease (and in fact the Goo AI is a massive pain the ass because it abuses this ability to the utmost), allowing it to quickly take over most of the map and start pumping out units from every catalyst pool it can get its tendrils on; but the flipside of that is that the Goo has no base structures of any kind and is entirely reliant on its units to overwhelm the enemy.

Now, aside from the mobile Mother Goo units there’s nothing particularly unconventional about how the Goo plays — or at least nothing we haven’t seen before; it’s a faction that takes a lot of inspiration from Starcraft’s Zerg as the side with the cheap swarm units that it can pump out very quickly. The Mother Goo and the Proteans make them different enough to be interesting, though, as it’s a rare example of a game mechanic servicing a theme rather than a design goal and having it all work out fine in the end. The other two factions are much more overtly artificial in the way they play — there’s no good reason for the Human buildings to require a connection to power lines that are manually constructed by the player, except that that’s their gimmick — which I do think hurts them a little bit as playing them is an experience that’s more-or-less indistinguishable from Universe at War, which was the last time Petroglyph tried to resurrect the old-school RTS. The Beta and Humans are well-designed in a clinical, forgettable sort of way,  with nothing about them that sticks in the mind other than the Australian accents sported by the Beta. Command & Conquer was a game about near-future warfare using mostly conventional human weaponry, yet I still remember stuff like the Hand of Nod and the Obelisk of Light. I feel like a game about far-future warfare should have allowed Petroglyph far more latitude to make fun, memorable units and factions, and yet I couldn’t tell you the name of a single Human or Beta unit besides the Beta Commando – and that was just because he kept popping up on the holophone with his name helpfully stencilled under the screen.

That’s not so much a problem for how the game plays, however. I won’t remember anything except the Goo in a year’s time, but that’s a failure of theme rather than mechanics, and as far as mechanics are concerned the Humans and the Beta were engaging enough to keep me playing throughout their campaigns. The part where the failure of theme does start to bleed over into the mechanics, though, is in the visual design of the units. Being able to instantly identify a unit based on its silhouette and movement is a very important element of any RTS both for the controlling player and for the player fighting against it, and Grey Goo has the same problem that the Supreme Commander games did in that this is pretty much impossible because everything looks the same. In SC’s case it at least has the excuse that you’re viewing the action from a thousand feet up where everything looks like a tiny dot on the landscape, but there’s no reason why every single one of the Human units should be a crescent-shaped hovering robot². Yes, the details are different, but you don’t have time to zoom in and visually inspect units for fine detail when you’re in the middle of a raging firefight, and so you end up being reduced to identifying units based on size alone – or in my case, you bypass the problem by only ever building one type of unit: tanks.

If you wanted to play a game where you hunker down behind your base defences building up an irresistible force of tanks before sweeping over the paltry enemy forces, then Grey Goo pretty much has you covered. I guess this is somewhat fitting for a game that consciously wants to be a throwback to the series that invented the tank rush, and it’s not like it doesn’t make an effort to spice things up a bit with Starcraft-style mission objectives, but it does render the various things the game does to try and move this style of RTS forward a little bit moot when the most effective strategy is still to construct 30 tanks and then do an attack-move order into the enemy base. They make it so easy for you; base defences are really, really powerful and can only really be taken down by artillery, which the AI seems a little reluctant to field; while the new walls block vision and must be destroyed before you (or the AI) can even see what’s behind them, making it trivially easy to set up an impenetrable killing field. You can try to play proactively by seizing control of vital points on the map with groups of specialised units, but unfortunately the AI doesn’t give a shit about resources (it doesn’t appear to use them in campaign missions, judging from the number of bases I took down that still had full resource pools when I’d completely exhausted mine) and will continue to spam wave after wave of troops at you that will gradually wear you down. It’s best to just let those waves break against the bulwark of your defences — which you can at least repair in between attacks — whilst constructing an unstoppable tide of tanks, which despite what the tooltips say, are good against all unit types and not much less effective than artillery at taking down buildings. Then you do that attack-move, and then you win.

Now, I can hardly complain about this. I bought Grey Goo because I wanted something that was deliberately reminiscent of that old-school style of RTS gameplay, and Grey Goo certainly delivered on that count. Its failing was not really one of design; all of the bits and pieces you need to make an excellent C&C game are present and correct, and it even does something pretty new and interesting with the Goo faction. In terms of theme and character, though, I’d struggle to name a less memorable game I’d played in the last year. It’s the classic Petroglyph problem: their previous games weren’t particular slouches when it came to design either, but they were seriously lacking in the degree of vision and polish required to make a disparate collection of design ideas come together into a coherent whole. Grey Goo is no different. It’s a decently-made game that’s missing a soul, and it’s difficult to come up with a pithy, punchy title summing up your game when your game is about nothing in particular, really. Which is probably why it got lumbered with Grey Goo. Mystery solved.

The post Thoughts: Grey Goo appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The post Sunday Soundtracks. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This may end up being slightly incoherent. This is partly due to the fact that I’m writing this at two in the morning on sod-all sleep, but mainly it’s because Tiberian Twilight makes me so angry that it’s kind of hard to think straight.

While I was playing through this I got quite a few PMs on Steam to the tune of “What the hell are you doing?” Tiberian Twilight certainly seems to have a reputation as a shitty game, and after completing the Nod campaign I can tell you that this reputation is richly deserved. I knew going in that it would be bad – although I did not quite understand just how bad – but I did it because I felt I owed it to the series to see it out to the end. Watching Joe Kucan ham things up as Kane is as integral a part of my childhood as grazed knees in the playground are for other, less psychotic children. And after the utter nadir that was C&C 3, surely the only way left for the series to go was up?

Okay, I’m going to give Tiberian Twilight just the tiniest glimmer of praise to begin with. C&C as a formula is something that’s not just stale, it’s downright putrefying at this point. If they were going to do a fourth game they needed to change things up a little bit, and it’s actually kind of interesting to me how similar the some of the broad design principles are between this Tiberian Twilight and Starcraft II, a game which succeeded in rejuvenating a formula that was certainly dated, if not quite as tired as C&C’s. To their credit, the developers of C&C 4 did recognise that something had to change. It’s just that where Starcraft II’s approach in everything bar the storytelling was one of refined excellence, Tiberian Twilight instead rushes in, seizes the wrong end of the “change” stick and proceeds to beat itself to death with it.

As a result, the few genuinely good ideas Tiberian Twilight has are mired within a horrible morass of poor animation, crappy visual design, and audio that is by turns bland and ear-meltingly bad. And even if all these things were not true, the core gameplay these good ideas have been bolted onto in the first place fucking sucks. It’s terrible. Tiberian Twilight may actually be, pound for pound, the single worst RTS I’ve ever played.  I’m casting my mind back over the years in an attempt to think of a competitor for the title, but while I have certainly played strategy games that were poorly designed or painfully bland I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one that sabotaged so many of its core concepts with such reckless abandon. Base building? That’s gone. Resource gathering? Screw you, there’s no economy in this game. Teching up? It’s almost comically one-dimensional and is almost completely out of your hands anyway.  C&C may have needed a shot in the arm, but instead the developers have cut and cut away at it like a gaggle of drunken surgeons until all that’s left is this mutilated, unrecognisable corpse.

Tiberian Twilight’s gameplay revolves around a thing called a “crawler”. You start every game looking at a grid that demarcates your deployment zone, into which you can call exactly one crawler. The crawler is a mobile construction vehicle which can be one of three types – attack, defence and support – and the type you pick will determine which units and abilities you get to play with during the mission.  This isn’t the worst idea in the world, although I seem to recall Kane’s Wrath doing something rather similar so it’s not exactly original, but things quickly nosedive from this relative highpoint when you scour the map for a decent location to set up a base only to quickly realise that there isn’t one. There are no resources in Tiberian Twilight; the only things limiting what you can build are time and an arbitrary supply cap, which means it doesn’t matter where you set up your crawler. That’s one of the key elements of the RTS just chucked out the window. I wouldn’t have a huge problem with this if they’d replaced it with something good but the thinking behind it seems to have been – well, base building and resource gathering slows down the game so we’ll just get rid of it, with no thought given to the massive impact this would have on every other aspect of the gameplay.

The crawler can pack up and move at will while still building queued units on the march. If this sounds like it might be kind of fun, trust me: it really isn’t. In practice you just walk it up as close to the enemy as you dare and start having it spew out units in their general direction. Hunting down CPU crawlers is a truly mind-numbing business because the computer has absolutely no problem abusing the crawler’s mobility to its fullest extent, keeping it mobile almost the entire time and just setting it down every so often to vomit out a fresh batch of troops. They haven’t just lobotomised the base-building element here; this is a complete removal of the brain of C&C, a game which was always more about supply lines and the economy than it was a collection of soft and hard counters. Those are in the game, by the way, but good luck trying to decipher the awful UI and visual design trying to figure out what is going on. In order to find out what a unit does you have to mouseover its icon in the build menu because there’s no chance of being able to tell just by looking at it. “Cannon; good against medium units,” says the tooltip. What’s a medium unit? Everything in this game is so overproportioned and cartoony that just about anything bigger than an infantryman could be a medium unit. Lasers are good against heavy units, apparently, but tanks apparently do not count as heavy units. Or at least not the tanks I was fighting. Other tanks, maybe, but this particular type of tank not so much. Nothing has a descriptive name, instead plumping for cryptic nomenclature like “Initiate” or “Redeemer” that don’t tell you a damn thing about what the unit actually does.

Now, Starcraft II did something similar but it was at least vaguely intuitive and you unlocked stuff gradually during the course of the campaign which gave you time to familiarise yourself with your units at a manageable rate. Here, nothing works the way you expect it to, and the game makes absolutely zero effort to teach you because they’ve removed tech progression from the game as well, instead plumping for a baffling XP system where you level up for winning missions and you unlock more units with each level. This has catastrophic effects on both the player’s ability to assimilate unit roles and the developer’s ability to design a balanced mission; I am reasonably sure I played missions where I was expected to have a unlocked certain unit that would have made things easy for me, except because I hadn’t ground out enough XP to level up I had to do things the hard way. At least that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why Tiberian Twilight is so utterly and incredibly difficult. The CPU has access to units and tech tiers that you don’t, as well as multiple crawlers, and it has no problem using them to grind you into the dust. Playing through Tiberian Twilight’s single-player campaign was an exercise in mad frustration until I dropped the difficulty down to Easy, and even then getting through a couple of the missions was like being trapped in a waking nightmare.

The singleplayer is complete garbage. Really, I don’t even have the words to express how bad it is. Tiberian Twilight is the steaming stream of effluent pouring forth from a fossilised industry that is almost completely devoid of good ideas or the talent to implement them effectively. Even the music is completely out of place when put in the context of the game’s lineage, sounding more like something out of Battlestar Galactica than the weird fusion of industrial and electronica that the first C&C deployed to such good effect. But hey, surely the FMV sequences provide some relief, though? That’s basically what C&C is all about, right? Corny FMV sequences?

Ahahaha. No. That would be assuming the people behind this travesty understood what made C&C’s cutscenes so fondly remembered when their frenzied hacking at the actual gameplay very much indicates that they don’t understand the series at all. I’m not going to write too much about the cutscenes except to say that not only have the they jettisoned their prior B-movie joie de vivre in favour of something far more po-faced and boring – they actually take themselves seriously, which is by far the worst thing a C&C cutscene could possibly do; did nobody learn from Tiberian Sun? —  but there’s now an association between the words “Joe Kucan” and “ham” that goes beyond the quality of his acting. Far be it for me to criticise somebody for having the temerity to age in the fifteen year gap separating the first Command and Conquer and this game; however, when you’re playing the immortal leader of a world-spanning cult it does become a bit of a problem.

Bleurgh. I really, really hate this game. Even if it wasn’t a personal insult to my childhood I’d hate Tiberian Twilight’s guts. There’s just so much I haven’t mentioned – the awful maps, the identikit captureable buildings that all look the same, the storyline that never ever explains what the fuck is going on, the inexplicable decision to have the player’s wife call them over and over and over, breaking into what I assume are encrypted military communications channels to simper and cry and tell the player she loves them – but which I don’t even want to think about any more. It’s a weird, unholy confluence of a tired license and terrible game design which showcases the absolute worst aspects of each while strangling any nascent good ideas in the crib. For god’s sake don’t buy it. Don’t play it. Stay as far away from it as you possibly can. If you don’t you’ll only encourage them to make C&C 5, and given the series’ current trend in quality it’d suck so hard it would, in fact, open up a gravitational singularity which would consume the Earth and everyone on it. Another C&C game or the continued existence of the human race. It’s your choice.

The post Thoughts: Tiberian Twilight. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m going to do something slightly more long-form here, both because I have insomnia and because the Red Alert series is something I remember through a rose-tinged nostalgic fog. I’ve mentioned before how watching Joe Kucan ham things up in Command and Conquer is as inseparable from my childhood as scraped knees in the playground are for normal kids. I was eleven years old at the time and had no disposable income, so my experience of it was via the highly convoluted method of the GDI disc being borrowed from one of my brother’s friends and played on a Risc PC - which my parents had bought in the charmingly deluded belief that it would be used for educational purposes – that could only emulate an IBM PC operating environment and consequently had no sound. I didn’t care. For somebody whose previous gaming experiences consisted of some pirated Atari ST games (the Atari ST was the poor man’s Amiga, although I didn’t know that at the time) and some stuff for the Archimedes that was coded by one guy working out of his bedroom, watching full-motion video featuring actual live actors intercut with primitive CGI was a damn-near religious experience, even if the actors were curiously mute.

It helped that the game was pretty good too, of course.

Anyway, one year after Command and Conquer and my parents finally get a Windows 95-capable machine. Three months of constant nagging later and I find Red Alert sitting under the Christmas tree. Red Alert is the first PC game I actually owned myself and I probably invested more time into it than I ever did into Left 4 Dead, a game with 200+ hours on the clock and counting. The missions were very long-form; it was very rare you’d get one that could be completed in less than half an hour, and some of the end-game tussles took upwards of two. That Red Alert managed to remain entertaining even during these marathon slogs is not a misapprehension brought on by youthful naivete because I revisited the game many years later, older and wiser, and found that while the glacial build times were getting very dated the way the missions and campaigns had been put together was damn near timeless. The cutscenes were played completely straight; this meant they were completely awesome to my twelve year-old self, and now that I’m all growed up I can see the knowing hamminess in the performances that gives them a whole new charm. And then of course there was this amazing advert that showed on TV at the time:

Fast-forward four years and Red Alert 2 came along. I didn’t like it very much, because it eschewed the straight-faced nature of the original’s cutscenes for high levels of camp. I didn’t “get” Red Alert 2 until Yuri’s Revenge was released a year later in 2001 (a vintage year for expansion packs, what with Throne of Bhaal and Lord of Destruction) at which point everything clicked: Yuri’s Revenge featured a plot, missions and units so utterly insane that I couldn’t help but love everything in it, from the mission where you go around Hollywood recruiting action heroes to fight for you to the final cutscene where Yuri gets eaten by a dinosaur. It lacked the oomph of the original, but with the expansion pack thrown into the mix it was a perfectly worthy game.

Unlike the first game, and maybe even the second game, Red Alert 3 isn’t going to be creating any fond childhood memories for anyone any time soon. In fact as far as childhood memories go, Red Alert 3 is like that one time I tried to open a gate with my face and gained some highly attractive facial scars. The psychological wounds incurred in the course of battering my way through the Soviet campaign will never heal.

This piece of shit needs to be assessed in two parts as with all Red Alert games: the cutscenes and general ambience of the thing, and the actual game. First, cutscenes. Red Alert 1 was almost completely straight-faced. Red Alert 2 set phasers to “Camp”. Red Alert 3 tries to do camp as well, except it misses by several dimensions and ends up in this strange sort of cartoonish realm where I really don’t give a fuck. The truly bizarre thing is that there are more than a few bona-fide B-list actors[1.It pains me that I have to call Jonathan Pryce B-list but his choice of films when he’s not working with Gilliam has been absolutely fucking abysmal, so B-list he is.] in it yet they are too good for this material. RA 2 had plenty of B-listers – Udo Kier, that guy that played the President – and they looked completely at home with what they were doing. This on the other hand is material that Tim Curry cannot ham into interesting-ness¹, which is an excellent indicator of just how bloody terrible it is. Even George Takei – a man I saw doing panto last year and who showed every indication that he was having an absolute blast – looks totally and utterly bored to death. It’s not even a question of dialogue. I don’t go into Red alert games expecting gripping dialogue, but I do expect something that is fun to watch. This is why RA 2 gets a pass from me, because while I was annoyed at the change in tone at the time it is irresistably entertaining in its own way. RA 3 doesn’t even manage that. The main problem, I think, is that instead of amusing over-acting interspersed with action-packed CGI cutscenes – which are the hallmark of every C&C game ever except maybe the third one which I’ve completely blocked from my memory – whoever made Red Alert 3 thought it would be an excellent idea not to bother with the action-packed CGI this time around and instead make every single cutscene into two people sitting behind desks talking at the player. I honestly don’t know why the developers thought this would be engaging at a-

Oh yes. Did you really think I was going to let this pass without comment? It’s not like you can possibly avoid it in the promotional material for the game (the above image comes as a poster in the box copy so that thirteen year-old boys can furtively hide it under their mattresses) and I actually feel kind of embarassed I spent money on something so shamelessly sexist no matter how cheap the game or how good the word of mouth. And no, I don’t care that it’s all done with a knowing nod and a wink; the only way this would be even remotely acceptable is if it was somehow satirical, and that it very definitely ain’t.

So the cutscenes are deathly boring and an insult to an entire gender to boot. What else does this “game” have to offer us. Well, one area in which it has departed from series tradition is in its jettisoning of any sort of coherent story, and this is something that leaves me scratching my head because for an RTS a series of missions that have a structured progression that adheres to a storyline is a very, very hard thing to fuck up. You start off small with some basic units and structures, you gradually drip-feed more to the player as the campaign progresses, you make the bases they have to crush gradually more elaborate, you spice things up with the odd non-base-crushing mission, and then you finally culminate the campaign with the most sprawling base yet to provide some sense of epic denouement. If you’re going to deviate from that formula you’d better be doing something genuinely groundbreaking like SC2 or DoW2. But no, RA3 doesn’t bother with any of that stuff; my first base-crushing mission was functionally identical to my last base-crushing mission, and by the end of the Soviet campaign I had yet to play a mission that did not require me to crush a base. This is half of the reason why the gameplay is deathly boring as well as the cutscenes. The other half is the gameplay mechanics themselves.

Yes, unfortunately the C&C 3 mechanics I loathed so much are alive and well and living in Red Alert 3: every unit moves at roughly 200mph and the rock-paper-scissors dynamic is so pronounced that everything dies to its counter in about two seconds. At first this makes progressing in a mission a soul-destroying journey because your attack forces are getting trashed every couple of minutes by a computer that just spams stuff at you willy-nilly; in this situation the winner is the person who gets bored last, and since the CPU is an unfeeling machine it has a decided advantage in this scenario. Then, then you get Kirov airships, which are basically just a big “I WIN” button when enough of them are massed together since they’re the first unit that can actually soak up some punishment from the units that are designed to destroy them. The sad thing is, it’s not even like you can send in other units with the Kirovs to take down some of the anti-air threats since they’ll die almost immediately, thus making Red Alert 3 a strategy game that is almost completely devoid of strategy.

My experience of the Red Alert 3 campaign was therefore a series of uninspiring missions preceded by bland cutscenes performed by bored actors, and I was completely unsurprised when the damn thing booted me straight back to the main menu upon completion as a final insult. I was actually getting a bit worried that every game I wrote an opinion on ended up provoking a reaction of fair-to-middling enjoyment – even accounting for selection bias – so playing Red Alert 3 was wondrously affirming in a way: there are shit games out there. I just don’t often play them, is all.

——————————————————————————

The post Thoughts: Red Alert 3. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.