Update: cheaper Ground Control bundle here, but only for Britons.
Quite a few people sent in comments about classic, resource-free, 3D real time strategy Ground Control being on GoG.com. It’s interesting to see the game up there for a number of reasons, not least because the original game was actually freely distributed by Vivendi for quite some time. Of course with Vivendi disappearing into the ActiBlizzard merger there’s all kinds of funny things going on with the ownership of their games, their distribution and so on. Rebellion – the chaps who are making the new AvP game – now own Evil Genius, Ground Control, Empire Earth and Lords Of The Realm, and they’re distributing them via that aforementioned digital download service. I suspect a few of you will have something to say about all those games, but Ground Control was a particular love of mine, and I wanted to say a few things about the GoG bundle, and why it might actually still be worth a few dollars.
I’ve spoken at length about the original game in the past, and you can check out my retrospective from eighteen months ago just here. The game has not aged well technically – the highest res is, I think, 1024×768, and it now looks crude, although it still boasts a certain minimalist sheen, and a beautiful toned-down aesthetic. Few games even seem to attempt this kind of anti-interface now, and that’s a shame. It’s also slightly underwhelming in terms of some aspects of its campaign – there is no skirmish, only LAN multiplayer – with the pace and wobbly narrative building up to an anti-climax.
The reason for this unsatisfactory ending was unclear at the time, as the game just seemed to roll to a halt. But the difficult-to-find Dark Conspiracy expansion largely solved that problem, with the opening two missions being among the most dramatic I’ve ever played in an RTS. The opening mission of Dark Conspiracy is about as surprising as I can remember an in-game RTS game being before the games of the past couple of years: it’s genuinely seat-of-the-pants stuff, with a carefully executed mission boiling over into an ambush, and finally a rolling crisis management that I totally didn’t see coming. The rest of the campaign finishes off the story that the original game started, and finally gets you somewhere. If there’s a reason to get hold of the game now, it’s because the original game was never whole: Ground Control was one of the few titles that was genuinely, ultimately completed by its expansion.
Ground Control and Dark Conspiracy together are the complete package, and Dark Conspiracy wasn’t given away for free back when Vivendi was promoting Ground Control 2. For anyone looking to go back, or to try out this beautiful little RTS for the first time, I can say that $6 doesn’t seem unreasonable for the pair, finally, fortunately, reunited.
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I had GC2 but never really got into it. Then I reinstalled it on my new(er – C2Duo) PC and everything ran at hyper-speed levels, making it unplayable. :(
Mmm the artillery. GC artillery is probably still my favourite unit ever put in an RTS. Pretty, satisfying and effective.
Much as I love DOW2 and much as it feels like a worthy successor to the likes of GC, ‘Swoosh-bang!’ just doesn’t quite match up to the glorious arcing artillery contrails of GC.
Just FYI, the Ground Control Anthology, which contains both Ground Control 1 + 2 + expansions, is on direct2drive.co.uk for £4.95
http://www.direct2drive.co.uk/333/product/Buy-Ground-Control-Anthology-Download
@Gap Gen/Heliocentric:
OK, cheers.
I’m sure I tried pegging it, but it was a long time ago.
@pignoli
Ever play Company of Heroes? You’d really dig the artillery units, they look and sound so great.
>Aldo
For games running too fast, try this:
http://www.massgate.net/read.php?123129,279752
I have to say that out of all the RTS’s I have ever played, Company of Heroes is the most advanced, most fun, and most polished.
Now, I will still play other RTS’s for the nostalgia factors, but CoH is definitely my favorite. Except for that silly Tales of Valor expansion. I will not be wasting my money on that.
Another GC fan reporting in, loved the game the tactics the minimalist UI, the camera controls, the universe, the manual was cool too giving a backstory to the characters and vehicles used in game.
I also like that the religious faction (order of the new dawn) were the more technology advanced of the two sides which isn’t usually the case in scifi. That and the game had proper female leads who weren’t the atypical big tits and revealing outfits.
The story was a bit ropy in game but it was enjoyable overall & a great tactics game.
I cant say them same for the sequel though it was deeply disappointing the game seemed like it was never meant to be a GC game in the first place, time jump into the future abandoning all the characters and factions from the first and bring in aliens and the big tits in red latex outfit female lead of the Terran faction. It was a mess of a game.
If anyone from Rebellion are reading this please ignore Ground Control 2 and fork the game with your own storyline from the events of GC1.
If d2d is cheaper and gives away the sequel then the post should be changed. Gog get too much credit some times.
£5 on http://www.direct2drive.co.uk
$20 on http://www.direct2drive.com
They should have remained a colony.
What’s sad is that that isn’t just the weaker dollar.
@MC: Cheers for the recommendation. To be honest, the WW2 setting of CoH put me right off (just bored with WW2, really bored) so I never played it. Might well pick it up for a couple of skirmishes though if I see it going cheap with the expansion on a digi distrib service any time soon.
You owe it to yourself to play coh, just try the demo. Its a masterwork, i am very excited about relic’s next real rts, they understand it so very well. Once you have tasted the pace and flexibility of company of heroes multiplayer other rts seem frankly rubbish. Much kisses relic.
I need to add that you can buy the retail anthology triple pack for £10.
Men Of War > CoH.
I’ll take your word for it, despite owning the title i can’t get it to run smoothly on my low end system and my high end system is terribly far away, coh runs fine mind you.
Jim, have you played Myth II?
If you don’t like ww2 you could try Dawn of War 2 , IMO it is much better than COH and the single player campaign is fandamntastic.
@Teo Myth I and II both AWESOME games. my best friend in middleschool -> highschool and I used to play online for hours and hours every day. He created a way to turn dwarves and those lightning throwing guys ( can’t remember what they’re called any more lol) into long range artillery ! :P He’d have the dwarves throw their “grenades” and then have the wizards shoot their lightning just at the right time, launching the molatov cocktails VAST distances. So far that on the biggest maps he could hit me with them a few seconds after the game started if he got lucky. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one to do that but still it was awesome/annoying as hell when my troops get slaughtered a few seconds into the match. He pretty much beat me every single time but I still enjoyed playing it.
On an interesting tangent – Myth 1/2 just got their final patch a couple of weeks back.
http://projectmagma.net/
Among such fantastic features as auto-downloading mods and maps for multiplayer when required, it now supports high-res terrain textures (a pack of which are included) which makes it look a lot sharper on modern machines.
Also, you can now play Myth 1 (cutscenes and everything) in the Myth 2 engine, along with that new patch.
Are the Myth mutliplayer servers still up and keeping track of people’s ranks? I had no idea that game was still going O.o I had the CDs until my wife threw away my entire collection :P
Just tried the free version again. I assume that if the problem persists in 3 different systems – the latest one being essentially a brand new build (if not parts) – that it must be a game bug, instead of anything to do with drivers and whatnot. But who knows? Might be some kind of anal audio codec conflict…
On Topic: on the other hand, do so had made my fall in love with the damn thing all over again. 12-page essay due tomorrow be damned!
@Railick – the new servers are. The original servers shut down ages ago, but have long-since been replaced by fan-run replacements.
Universe and Story by some of the people who wrote Homeworld’s Universe and Story – Ground Control’s background is far deeper than would have been necessary for a normal RTS.
@DK – as far as I’m aware, most of Homeworld (and Homeworld Cataclysm)’s background fluff was written by one Arrin Dembo. She’s the one that did the Ground Control backstory as well.
Biggest thing she’s done is the backstory/fluff/novel (yes, novel) for Sword of The Stars, which is remarkably great.
I think she was a fluff writer on Arcanum as well.
The first Ground Control is a great example of a very fine tactics game. Yes, I say tactics, because once you punched out, what you saw was what you got. No new units, no reinforcements. The sequel, however, was a bog-standard RTS, with the same expansion mechanic that had been previously employed in the Z series (and was later on used in WH40k: DOW and add-ons).