Oooooh. Gradients

The title of today’s strip is a nod to Lethal Doses, but I probably don’t need to point that out, as anyone reading this has probably either heard of this strip or knows Hot Soup personally. Which is good, because the older Doses strips aren’t currently available on his site, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about you’re largely out of luck. I also stole one of my characters from this strip, but Soup didn’t seem to be using him at the time…

So I’ve been distracted from comic stuff for the last week or so, and I blame Warcraft III– mostly because that’s what I’ve been distracted by, and that’s how this whole blame thing works. On the off chance that you care and haven’t seen this discussed anywhere yet (which is approximately none of you; it’s amazing what my visit logs can tell me about you, buahaha), I shall tell you of my experiences with said Warcraft eye-eye-eye.

I generally don’t read many articles about upcoming games before they’re released; I blame this on an attention span destroyed by playing video games. Anyway, the last thing I’d read on WC3 was specifically talking about a move toward small-unit tactics and concentrating on smaller groups of units heading out to cause micro-managed mischief. It was supposed to be a new evolution in RTS games.

I think they took that out at about the time they took out the Demons as a playable race.

This game plays like Warcraft 2 with 3D models, the Hero concept from the WC2 expansion (which I never got much of a chance to play), and the concept of “upkeep” which means you start gaining gold slower if your army is too big. If you’re looking for the hybrid RTS/RPG Blizzard was talking about two years ago, this isn’t quite it.

That’s starting to sound fairly negative. However, let me remind you that I’ve spent the entire last week playing it. It’s a good game, and I actually enjoyed the single player campaign, even the obligatory “defend the base for xx minutes” missions. That’s quite impressive. For some reason, I thought the Orc campaign was especially fun. Plus, I think this is the first fully 3D game where Ilike the graphics. That is probably due in part to the fixed camera.

One additional feature held over from Warcraft 2 is that the AI will still obliterate you in skirmishes if your skills are anywhere from passable to above average. This seems to be largely because the computer has quite a few more processor-cycles available than humans in which to micromanage its units. This is compounded somewhat by the new Warcraft version of super-weapons, Heroes. While you’re busy trying to get your healers to heal your troops and your mages to neutralize the important opposing forces, it’s very likely that the computer has put your entire force to sleep, levitated your Hero in a cyclone of air, boosted all of its units attack power, and destroyed half of your base.

But you’re supposed to hate the computer. That’s what it’s for.

I don’t generally visit Battle.net because people frighten me. That and I don’t want to find out that the real reason the AI is so brutal is that I suck. So I generally stick to co-op LAN play against the computer where there’s always the option of claiming that the computer cheats.

So I rambled on for two pages about a computer game. I have a webcomic, it’s what I’m supposed to do. Even without readers. It’s like a law or something.