Recently I jumped on eBay for the first serious time ever to see if I could find a copy of Total Annihilation.
http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11053&item=8193585921&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW>
Yes, the going price for a copy today is $120+ dollars.
With the first expansion pack (designed to 'complete and balance' the multiplayer game) Total Annihilation became in my opinion the greatest multiplayer game ever.
For a player that could handle the complexity it was just incredibly to play against another human player.
120 different unit types, simultaneous ground, air, sea, underwater, artillery and nuclear battles in parallel (all of which you can individually near-stalemate and none-of which you could neglect). True information warfare with radar and jamming bots competing to enhance and limit your over the horizon radar-only targetting of the larger weapons.
Games that lasted 4-8 hours and required true innovation to break through for a victory.
NO RESOURCE LIMITS!!! You could build unlimited nuclear reactors (optionally stealthed) and then energy-matter converters, leading to unlimited scalability.
HUGE maps, that were something like 100-200 screens wide and which even exceeded the enormous max range of nuclear missiles.
This game is now 8 years old. So on a modern computers, you can run at 1280xwhatever resolution, and a small patch increases the unit limit to 5000 units. Yes, e-frigging-normous armies. And they STILL don't provide any avenues to just roll over the enemy. (Did I mention long range gattling artilery cannons)
In such situations, one tends to resort to saturation nukes (mass strikes from 30-50 nuclear silos can sometimes do the job, but the nuke shields bunkers and mobile-units can punch out 5-6 defensive anti-missile-missiles for each offensive missile) or mass air strikes using stealth fighter-bombers (which are still somewhat easy prey for anti-aircraft).
But the true sign of it being the greatest game ever is that today, 8 years after release, it STILL looks gorgeous to play, and the price on eBay is HIGHER than the original shelf price.
Re: The Greatest RTS of All Time
Mr. Muskrat on 2005-05-30T04:22:54
I wonder what I did with my copy...
Yuri
jplindstrom on 2005-05-30T09:27:31
Reminds me of the
Cannis Rules mod to Red Alert/Yuri's Revenge we play at work at least a couple of times a week.
Excellent gameplay and *lots* of ways to combine different features of the game.
