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News: Total Annihilation Now Available for Digital Download

Posted on : 16-03-2010 | By : | In : News

Hardware:

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It’s a good time to be a Supreme Commander fan. Supreme Commander 2 was just released and now Stardock’s Impulse service is selling Total Annihilation for $9.99.

Total Annihilation was a real-time strategy game released all the way back in 1997, considered to have been ahead of its time and which won considerable acclaim from critics. However, the game never gained quite the foothold or presence that Starcraft did in the minds of the average gamer, and remains mostly a forgotten classic, only living on in occasional critics’ lists of favorites and in the free Spring RTS engine, an attempt by fans to clone the original Total Annihilation’s gameplay (anything with a Gundam RTS mod deserves mention).

Supreme Commander was a “spiritual successor” to Total Annihilation, an attempt to bring its massive scale of combat, large selection of units, an interesting economy/base construction model, and the crowd-pleasing nuclear superweapons back into the minds of gamers, and it being re-released at the time that Supreme Commander is getting its own sequel allows fans to relive history as they step into the future.

More importantly, though, Total Annihilation’s early geometric 3D mecha are simply way, way cool. Most early 3D is considered terrible by the standards of today, but the low-poly units of Total Annihilation seemed to have been designed with the day’s limitations in mind, and thus they still hold up today as somewhat abstract art. The tanks and mecha in Total Annihilation ooze style out of every jaggy line.

Both games feature a “Commander” unit, a giant mecha, which uses atomic-level manufacturing to build an entire economy on far-off planets literally from the ground up, which is an interesting inversion on how mecha usually are used in games: the “Commander” is more or less the player character, and while their large mecha is by no means weak, it’s a central unit because of its production capabilities, and not because of its arsenal, which as a mecha fan I always thought was a nice way to work the idea of a “hero mecha” into an RTS, because you can relate to the Commander mecha’s role as, well, a Commander on the battlefield rather than as simply a powerful named “hero” unit as exist in most other RTSes.

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Comments (2)

As much as I love TA. With spring out why bother with this. If it helped fund a better SupCom3 I’ll buy 2 copies of this TA. I was let down to a degree with Supcom2. While a good game I was hoping for something equally as complex as the first.

I can’t say for certain who owns the Total Annihilation rights, and thus I’m not certain who “gets” what part of the money you spend to buy Total Annihilation, whether it’s Gas Powered Games (the devs for Supreme Commander and a company made up of ex-staff of the Total Annihilation developers), but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the original game.

Sure, you could download and play one of the Spring games that plays like Total Annihilation, with improved graphics, but ultimately what you would be playing is an updated clone of the original, and not the original itself. As I talk a little bit about in the news segment, part of the appeal of Total Annihilation is the graphics capabilities of the time, and how they successfully used what was available to their advantage. I can see an argument where you might disagree with me, but I believe playing the game in its original format is part of the experience.

I also have to admit a bit of love for the Stardock guys and their Impulse service; while Valve’s Steam service generally works better and has better deals, Impulse also has their own unique deals and I try to pick up whatever is priced to move at either service. That way I don’t feel like I’m putting all my eggs into one basket, and also keeping both services competitive.

Stardock also wants to develop a new Star Control and a new Master of Orion, so they’re certainly welcome to any money I have on-hand to give them:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20998

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