I also have to stress that, as somebody who doesn’t enjoy the RTS genre that much, Multiwinia is a blast. I’m terrible at the whole resource management, and the ridiculously quick structure building. Absolutely useless. Multiwinia strips the RTS genre down to it’s bare minimum, and makes it pure fun, and very easy to get into. And if you’re not good at the strategy bit, either, you can play some mindless King of the Hill. Rocket Riot and Blitz is for me though.

Also, Tei, there is lobby chat now (and has been for a while), the settings DO save (and always have), and what’s wrong with the browser?

I happen to just have played through Darwinia, though, loved it, but I haven’t gotten to Multiwinia yet. For $10, you’ve got to just grab it up — such a great dev

This is going to go hideously OT now, but you did ask:-

Little Big Planet. The concept is awesome, but user made content is generally 99% utterly ill conceived trash most of the time, as any perusal of The Sims or the Movies websites will testify. Now that’s not to say giving people these tools is bad, far from it; its entirely worth it because 1% will take those tools and make something fantastic, and I’m all for the democratisation of creativity. But simply giving someone a paintbrush won’t magically transform them into Michelangelo over night. The legerdemain to LBP lies in the fact that the levels included in the game have been polished and honed over months and months by the games designers using serious man hours. How much of your spare time do you think you’re realistically going to need to set aside to achieve vaguely comparable results? 2 hours? 4 hours? 260 hours? All to make a 5 minute long console locked 2D platform level? Most people will have great ambitions (enthusiasm over thought) initially, but when cruel reality kicks in then the appeal will rapidly wear off.

There’s a common misconception that design is something that comes upon one in the moment much like poetry (looks at Keiron), but the reality is all good design comes through the application of 3 core principals, Concept (the theme), Components (the individual elements that relate to the theme) and composition (the relationship of those components to each other and as a reflection/transmitter of the theme.). Enthusiasm tends to centre around Theme (OMG let’s make an Indiana Jones level!!!) and components (Woo Hoo!! Rolling Boulders!!!), but generally fails when it comes to composition (No!!! the steps are way too big, shit so is the rest of the Tower…damn it…) without serious forethought and planning.

Which game was that?

put that control scheme in a tanks game, and I will hate you

I agree, I didn’t like holding down the mouse to make a radius, just like most Console RTS, but after an hour or so I actually like it a lot. It does grow on ya, as it did for me. Although I would rather select units by the traditional way, I’m pretty sure they did this since most of the battles don’t require a lot micro management. Setting your officers to tell the other Darwinians where to go takes care of most of the “go here” issues.

Also, they probably made this decision since this is coming out for Xbox 360, so I would imagine that had something to do with it, to keep it all the same. Maybe they’ll patch in the traditional unit selection method for PC, I don’t think that would be much of a problem though.

Incidentally, I base this decision on having now tried the single-player, which was a feature so un-advertised that I didn’t even know it existed when the first demo came out, despite that demo not having any multiplayer options.

Final note: Why oh why do you do price-drops on Steam but not on your own site?! $10 is tempting, but Steam is such a pain. I’d happily give that money directly to you, but the game is more expensive on your own site :/

Of course i was wrong. But with MW at least i feel i can get better.

I hope the best to Introversion. You should have released a

Mebbes getting a few games going on the RPS Steam group would be a good way to enjoy it more. Ima head over there now infact and have a see. I am fairly awful at it, so if anybody’s up for an easy victory they should come along too.