Thankfully, I don't have long to wait, as very shortly I find myself in a large, finely-catered gaming room filled with ninja-grade PCs and widescreen monitors that could be used alongside the main stage at Glastonbury.
Veering past walls and walls of gorgeous concept art, I can tell that Gas Powered Games is a studio striving for evolution, and I can't wait to get down to business and find out what its latest innovative and exciting RTS effort, Supreme Commander is like to play. "It's where we keep the beer."Ī tour from Chris Taylor is never dull the legendary creator of Total Annihilation is rarely short of enthusiasm, managing to make every corporate meeting room and square cubicle a joy to explore. "There's over 10 terabytes of storage and three cooling systems so the room stays icy cold," he says. "And this is the server room," announces an energetic Chris Taylor, a man who seems to eat, breathe and guzzle gaming alongside his morning Weetabix. I'm Being Given a tour of Gas Powered Games' plush Redmond offices. "I wanted it to tie-in to the fictional universe in a far more meaningful way and I think we've managed to accomplish that" "I wanted the story to mean something," says developer Chris Taylor. Supreme Commander's battles are already as cinematic as some sort of crazy Lord of the Rings and Terminator tie-in, but single-player goes a step further with detailed FMV cut-scenes pushing the story along, excellent voice-acting and a rolling score painting the futuristic war between UEF, Cybran and Aeon.
It could well turn out to be a more than worthwhile distraction from Supreme Commander's already excellent online offering - and luckily we haven't got long to wait before it descends on shops with its awesome epicness. It's a truly exciting concept to see how this Al partner gameplay evolves in the latter stages of the game - esoecially when there's six or seven separate commanders bantering and battling across the battlefield. surprisingly realistically, and uses believable strategy in her commands - sending in transports for sneak attacks and going on bombing runs with aircraft. This objective is accomplished by assaulting a small UEFM island with my amassed fleet of attack-boats. You see, a big complaint in Total Annihilation - Taylor's last strategy opus - was the poor computer opponents, so it's not surprising that a generous amount of attention lias been lavished on this area.Īs a result, my freshly-uncovered Al buddy barks out requests via a Command & Conquer-style video window, ordering me via some impressive voiceacting to distract enemy UEF air forces southwards, so that she can flank them from the top. The epic showboating doesn't end there either, as the map eventually quadruples in size to uncover a whole chain of islands and another pair of Ixittling armies - one friendly, the other not. While messing around in boats (and subs) in the solo campaign, the battles are as epic as ever, with each individual turret on the deck of my hulking destroyer shooting its payload to devastating effect. As Taylor points out, this provides a stream of new missions without changing maps, and certainly looks to be one of the most promising features of Supreme Commander's single-player campaign.
The first map is a small island liarely large enough for my hulking Armoured Command Unit to stomp around, but after completing a few simple build objectives that ease me gently into the resource system, the map expands to reveal a new shore, and then later a second island - effectively tripling the size of the original playfield. I begin to see what the enthusiastic RTS overlord means when I jump into the solo campaign as the alien-fused Aeon - the side Taylor says are hardest to master. Come on, these bases are identical!' Or, more than that, the designers start taking that away from you and start just giving yon liases. "Have you ever played an RTS game, asks Taylor, "where you've got to build your base, you've won the objective and then the next level starts and you build your base again? By the fourth or fifth time you're going. Taylor's latest epic RTS that lets you command armies in the high thousands, and step on trees with armaments seemingly designed in a GoBot factory. Today too, it's also home to grinning development legend Chris Taylor, attempting to feed something called Chartreuse to yours truly, a drink so powerful it was originally invented by Tibetan monks to keep warm in snow storms.Ī few hours earlier though, I'd been introduced to the world's first hands-on with the single-player campaign of Supreme Commander.
And, for today at least, the city of giant UEF faction ice sculptures, 70ft rolxitic drunken frankenstcins and the craziest RTS zoom control you've ever seen.