I wanted to play Lost Planet and Gears of War on a 100-inch projector screen with other people online, and lacked the attention span - also because of other things going on in my life at the time - to devote the necessary time to properly get back into the strategy genres.
#Total annihilation spell ps3#
When I finally left Japan in December of 2006 I still didn't get back into strategy, because the 360 and PS3 had just been released, and ushered in a new era of flashy first- and third-person action games which were hard to ignore. Let's just compare it to other games within its genre in this essay, which is a pretty involved task on its own, as you are about to see, and once we are done with this you should be able to better understand why, as of this writing, I regard it as nothing less than the fourth best game of all time. But let's leave those explanations for the appropriate theory essay, and let's abstain from comparing PA's genre to other genres here. Or how a bicycle can, under certain conditions, go faster than a motorcycle (when the bicycle is a modern carbon fiber racing one and the motorcycle is the first or second motorcycle ever built).
#Total annihilation spell full#
Since the strategy genre is actually located pretty low on the tree of gaming, I will have to explain to people how a low-hanging branch on a tree can actually reach higher than a higher-hanging one (when the higher-hanging one is still too young to have attained its full length). It will be hard explaining why this game stands so high on my list of top 100 videogames. The genealogy of my genre preferences pretty much goes Defender of the Crown, Civilization, Dune II, Grand Theft Auto III, and finally Far Cry 2 (at which point free-roaming achieves its most immersive form by moving to the first-person perspective). It was only with the release of Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 that the action genres started realizing their true potential, and it was only then that free-roaming action came to the fore in my playing habits and became my favorite genre. For my favorite genre since the very beginning of my involvement with videogames has been strategy, and, with the introduction of Dune II in 1992, its real-time subgenre. But this is actually pretty much the opposite of the truth, if you define complex strategy games as the opposite of simplistic action ones (and all action games are, compared to strategy games, "simplistic" to an extent - even the most complicated of them). A year later I would start Insomnia, and since I mostly played Japanese action games when I made it, the early years of the site were focused on those genres, which, coupled with the popularity of the Arcade Culture essay, gave people the impression that those were my favorite genres. It was just that in February 2004 I moved to Japan for three years, and naturally enough focused my attention on Japanese console and arcade games during that time.
![total annihilation spell total annihilation spell](https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.1821059900.9254/ssrco,lightweight_hoodie,womens,grey_lightweight_hoodie,front,square_product,x600-bg,f8f8f8.1.jpg)
That's an 11-year absence from the genre: had I got bored with it during that long break? Not at all. The last proper RTS games I played prior to getting into Planetary Annihilation this past August were Cossacks: European Wars and Age of Mythology in the autumn of 2003.
![total annihilation spell total annihilation spell](https://64.media.tumblr.com/b051cd8aee945d50bde78053751ca49a/tumblr_pruen3gkN61wv5i5io1_1280.png)
The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirits will hover over the ashes. Videogame Art: Planetary Annihilation (2014)