Supreme Commander

Chris Taylor is an evil genius. That's a term of admiration and jealousy I use to describe people who do things that make me slap my head and say "Why hasn't someone else thought of this?" Other members of the league of evil genius' are: Joss Whedon, Gene Roddenberry, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

After playing the release version just a couple of nights now, I can say that it has impressed me a great deal. I won't go into all the details of the game, as you can read reviews of it just about everywhere.

One of the features I really like about GPGNet (the multiplayer service for the game) is that it provides a mechanism for downloading and viewing game replays from other people. I always liked the original Tribes and Myth for this feature. Nothing can improve your game strategy like watching how better players win games. These replays are very small to download, and can be quite a kick to watch.

A replay gave me one of the most chilling experiences I've had in a video game. I was watching a 2vs2 game with four very good players. It was a very long game as everyone was going for the highest tech before fully committing to any battles. I watched from the big picture view and tried to follow what was going on, but there was just too much to see everything that was being built. The action was just beginning to heat up with some Tech 3 weapons struggling to gain the upper hand in the middle of the map.

All of the sudden the game kind of goes silent, and a female voice comes up very calmly and says "Strategic launch detected."

I literally felt the hair on my neck stand up. I quickly scrolled the view back out to the strategic view and sure enough, there was a nuclear missile already coming up through the upper atmosphere. In fact, the top of the arc was so high it wasn't possible to keep it in view from the highest view angle. After a bit the missile started to drop towards the enemy rear area, and there was another eerie silence as it made its final descent. The results were spectacular. A portion of one players base was wiped out in a spectacular fireball.

However, due to the number of units and size of the map, the nuke didn't end the game. I could feel the tempo of the game shift, however, as the opposing side went into a frenzy of activity. The big thing they did was begin building strategic missile defense systems. For the next few minutes it was an arms race, as the one player sent first single, then double, and finally triple salvos of missiles towards the opposing bases. However, the opposite player had built his defenses quickly, and the game moved back to the ground war, and bigger and nastier weapons were built. In the end, the game was won by the guy who didn't build nukes, but it was clear that the wrong defense would have lost the war very quickly.

I highly recommend trying out the demo. The game is nothing short of spectacular.