A post tangentially related to game design

I said it was coming.

To quickly get anything you may actually be interested in out of the way, I promised publicly viewable work would be released at the end of last week, and I would be able to unleash such a thing upon the world right now, sadly I'm waiting on some stuff from Balai. Admittedly I have only communicated this need to him today. Within the last hour or so. This may mean that the delay is, in fact, still of my own doing, but I digress.

Now that is out of the way, have some incredibly one-sided opinions. Enjoy!

Over the last handful of years EA have been trying their very hardest to remake, repackage, reinvigorate and resell my childhood to me. To be honest, I'm cool with it. Kane's Wrath I especially enjoyed, a game all about a bald, charismatic madman prophet? Sign me up!
Their latest news may have made me pee a little.

I grew up on a diet of 'Command & Conquer' and 'Dungeon Keeper', I spent many a cold, lonely night weeping over their demise, so needless to say I am ecstatic about their Resurrection. Dungeon Keeper not only as an MMO, but an MMO made by a chinese developer - as opposed to it's original country of origin, our very own Britain - does make me more than a little nervous, but if EA continue their current trend of, you know, making games, rather than sticking to their age old tradition of releasing disc-based bowel movements, then maybe, just maybe it could work.

I played the demo for Red Alert 3 this week. If presented with this game with no prior knowledge of it's name, I would most likely believe it to be C'n'C Generals 2, a copy modded to feature Red Alert inspired units admittedly. Although unlike the original Generals, this is a game that I actually enjoy, I'm not sure why but I never did manage to get into that game. The controls to the previously mentioned 'Command and Conquer 3: Kane's wrath' were surprisingly good, and yes, I am refering to the Xbox 360 version of the game. With Red Alert 3 it immediatly feels like it was developed by one of EA's different studios (regretably, I can't be bothered to check if that is actually the case), they are aware of the interface used in Kane's Wrath, they have probably even had it explained to them, but the controls in RA3 feel very... different. I would like to stress that I do not mean worse, I merely find it a little jarring to find that most of the buttons have been re-mapped and have to completely re-learn allot of tricks I previously learned, heck, as far as I can tell certain features, such as setting waypoints, no longer exist. I have to say though, between the absolutely awesome new duds for the Tesla Trooper and the ability to have an attack dog and an attack bear go at each other's throats, I'm sold. God, I am such a consumer whore sometimes.