Game comments: Supreme Commander 2

I really love this new Supreme commander 2 game. It has many improvements over the predecessors while keeping the style of construction, epic large scale battles with long range artillery and the same well known factions.

The game itself had many things simplified and automated, like the automatic repairs done by engineers as well as automatic nearest placement of buildings when trying to put them onto an area that is not meant for construction, like being too close to an edge for example.

The single player campaign is not impossible and there is an exact roadmap laid out to see how far there is still to go in a campaign. Multiplayer is unfortunately internet only, but it automatically uses the friends list from Steam, which gets rid of that problem. For me that is a really nice way of doing it instead of having to add the friends all over again like other games do. The building and unit parts flying off when attacked is also a nice twist as well as getting mass resources back from the wreckages as it has been tradition since Total Annihilation.

Some people were of course complaining about this game, but the reality was that it took far too long to build the big things in the previous games or to get started in a good battle. Supreme Commander 2 simplified all of this and made the existing system far better in my opinion. The game is now more fun than the previous games used to be. Long battles can still be fought.

Mixed comments about the new Command and Conquer 4 game

I have started on the new Command and Conquer 4 (C&C4) game shortly after it came out and have the following comments:

1. The game is a little bit unstable and crashes occasionally, especially when accessing the menu items too shortly after the main menu has appeared for the first time.

2. Always having to be on the internet is an annoyance because of connection lost during a solo mission does not allow continuing and ends up with having to replay the mission. This was particularly annoying on the last Nod mission. An offline mode for playing the game on a LAN would be great, especially when there is no internet connection nearby. The fact that some people consider a disconnect as cheating is stupid. I understand why they don't like it if someone disconnects after getting annoyed, but they would never know if it was just a bad connection.

3. Some of the missions are yet again impossible odds and having to be everywhere at the same time. How some of the missions are supposed to be completed in Medium or Hard difficulty is beyond me. Many of them can be done on Medium difficulty, but not all. i am not a hardcore gamer who plays games every days for at least six hours or more.

4. The multiplayer is not bad actually because there is no long base building, the action starts immediately. It is more about micromanagement now. The players in multiplayer stay in the game instead of whoever is eliminated first has to watch for the next 30 minutes to one hour until the game is done.

Steam update getting killed by internet cap stops gaming

A friend of mine had the bad luck yesterday (Sunday, 14 March 2010) that his monthly international internet banwidth usage cap was used up while the Steam game client was doing updates. Steam was refusing to start properly because it wanted to finish the update. This meant that he could not play any games in Steam. No software is made to handle partial updates like this and be happy about it. Either it is a matter of being offline or a matter of being online and not some inbetween state. The matter was resolved by him having to take his PC to me to use my internet connection for teh remaining 2MB. Telkom used to throttle the international internet traffic down to about 800 bytes persecond, but not anymore.

Costume renting website updates

My costume renting website was in urgent need of an update. Last night I finally rewired the menu system a bit as well as split the contact details section into three pages. There was a problem with the menu in Internet Explorer and using lower screen resolutions cut off some text.

The website is also in the process of getting new sections and a shift from ADODB to PDO. Part of the update was the preparation ofr this.