First off, I must apologize to any horse fans out there. While passable, I often can’t help but feel that my hands are trying their damnedest to draw very skinny cattle instead of horses. The last thing this strip needs is a horse that says “moo”. Actually, that’s kinda funny.

Come to think of it, sometimes my humans look like skinny cattle, but that’s probably just glandular.

Because I quite simply didn’t have enough games either in my backlog or quickly approaching release, I went out and became one of the last people on the planet to purchase a copy of Half-Life. I just had to try out this Natural Selection thing. Quick summary: it’s a RTS (Warcraft, Command & Conquer) and FPS (Doom, Quake, Half-Life [duh]) fusion, of sorts. It’s aliens vs humans, and one player on the human side can view the battlefield as if it were a RTS, build structures, arm his troops, etc. I’ve been waiting for a game like that for a long time.

Natural Selection pulls it off pretty well. Oh, there’s some issues with a few things. The Commander’s interface seems slightly unpolished in a few places and the Marines get a minimap of dubious helpfulness (you get a section of floor plan, but there isn’t even an indicator of where you are on the map, much less waypoints). As is the case with many things, however, it seems that the largest drawback of this game is that you are forced to play it with other people who have an annoying tendency to request nice, powerful, expensive weapons with the express intention of getting themselves instantly killed.

Not to be ignored, the Alien side has some nifty tricks to combat the advantage the humans get from their Commander. Plus, they’re set up in a way that cooperation doesn’t require much chatter. It’s a much quieter affiliation to play, especially if anyone on the server has a microphone / headset.

In all, I approve. Here’s hoping other games start expanding on this. I’m still hoping to some day control a GDI Infantryman escorting my buddy in a Mammoth Tank when a deep shadow falls over us as a giant cursor passes overhead on its way to drop a waypoint in the middle of the NOD base.

Or Allied / Soviet. Whatever, I’m not picky.

Somehow, the player-visible giant hovering cursor is an important part of this hope.