One time I had the bright idea of turtling the enemy’s base in Starcraft. We typically didn’t expand very fast, so rather than building bunkers around my own base, I built them around the enemy. He was very surprised when he sent his first SCVs out to look for new mineral patches.

Like this example, turtling can be an aggressive strategy. It’s essentially a way of gaining battlespace access – you grab land and then hold onto it, rather than rushing an amorphous enemy. The Terrans in Starcraft are an inherently turtle race, with tanks that become more powerful when they’re static, and bunkers that protect otherwise weak troops, but you still have to be dynamic to win. The walking barrage, with two lines of siege tanks moving forwards one after the other, was one of my favourite tactics against the AI.

That’s called towering, and it is a well established and hated practice in games such as Warcraft 3.

Like this example, turtling can be an aggressive strategy. It’s essentially a way of gaining battlespace access – you grab land and then hold onto it, rather than rushing an amorphous enemy. The Terrans in Starcraft are an inherently turtle race, with tanks that become more powerful when they’re static, and bunkers that protect otherwise weak troops, but you still have to be dynamic to win. The walking barrage, with two lines of siege tanks moving forwards one after the other, was one of my favourite tactics against the AI.

On Street Fighter – I agree with Gwyn; You can pick up and button mash successfully in five seconds flat, specials make sense in a few minutes and you can get the basics of cancels, parries, ultras and the rest within twenty minutes, then it becomes a question of easy to pick up, hard to master. Considering most game tutorials last at least ten to fifteen minutes, I don’t think it’s fair to claim it’s crawlled up its own arse, it’s more honed it’s arse over two decades to a razor sharp weapon of balanced perfection.

The player who moves forward and grabs the map always wins in an RTS as far as I know, and why would it be any different?

Also, “I love to turtle” has always meant “I can’t play an RTS properly” to me. You kind of like building stuff, but don’t have the speed or tactical prowess to play at a normal level, so you just play a more simple and static game.

Though I guess most people mix things up a bit – no need to be an extreme rush-er, turtler, boomer.

Turtling on TA was only really effective on a map like Metal Heck where all the floor was Metal – one of the resources.

Then you could compete with the Rushers army – but still need an army of your own to compete, as if you have enough of an army, you can literally walk straight through their defenses, losing some units, but many making it through, weakening the turtler.

I have a weak spot for any leader who’ll shoot his own men before the enemy does it. :D

Also basilisks were just pure overkill.

http://www.netstormhq.com/

Check it out – I play it from time to time.

And to trade all the shiny cool of deep striking Terminator squads and drop-podding Dreadnoughts or the Avatar of Kaela Mensha Khaine, or the Bloodthirster of Khorne, or the Squiggoth for some men with tanks? Pfft.

SFIV on the other hand is enormously complicated, with timing-based focus attacks, focus armour, focus cancels, armour breaking EX attacks, two inversely proportional power bars, and (most confusingly) all the old characters with completely different balancing, so now Guile’s crap and Dhalsim’s amazing (the opposite of the original SF2 order).

It’s always been folly to suppose that fighting games became too complex to play. At the end of the day, it’s just two guys trying to knock each other out using as much or as little technique as they fancy. Despite the huge tactical and technical depth of SFIV (more than any other series entry by far) you can still beat the arcade mode using only sweep kicks if you want.

2D fighters never got complex, they just lost their casual audience when Tekken appeared and made them look old hat. From there it became clear that only the fans were buying them, so the fans were catered to. Somewhere along the line this became non-fan journalists proclaiming that the genre was up it’s own arse. Maybe it was, but if it was then SFIV is carrying on a proud tradition.

SFIV is an absolutely brilliant game though, of course. If it wasn’t then I wouldn’t care enough to point out when people are talking rubbish about it. Hopefully arcade sticks will be back in stock bu the time the PC version is released!