What you see to the left is the box art for “Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty”. (In case you couldn’t read). Starcraft 2 is the sequel, obviously enough, to “Starcraft”, a game released 12 years ago. While I really (read really, really, really) want to go out to the store and pick up a copy, I’m going to hold off just a bit. Despite that, Starcraft 2 has me reminiscing all about the various strategy games I’ve played and loved, and so without further to do, I present the history of real time strategy games, as played by Paul Kwiatkowski.

I got into RTS games sometime in 2000. I don’t remember exactly when, but I was 10 years old. My family had lunch at another families house one Sunday, and I ended up watching their high-school aged son play Age of Empires 2. Somehow I was familiar with the type of game, though I’m not sure from where. Something about that game flipped a switch in my head, because after seeing it played, I absolutely had to get it. I remember being absolutely floored that buildings caught fire, at unit formations, and even the awesome music. That day I observed the Franks being played, and thought that their throwing axemen were the coolest thing ever. To this day, I’ll play the Franks, whenever we pull out this game.

I began to hunt for Age of Empires 2, and came to a terrible realization: our old Windows 95 computer wouldn’t be able to hand AoE2. Luckily for me, the same research to find Age of Empires 2, led me to Age of Empires. Age of Empires featured much of the same gameplay, and had nearly as much charm. Waiting for it to arrive from a younger Amazon.com was a test of patience. Upon arrival though, holy. cow. Looking back, nothing about AoE is particularly incredible, but back then, it was absolutely amazing. If I had to pick one feature that made AoE the greatest thing since sliced bread, it would be the included map editor. It was tremendously easy to pick up and learn, and allowed for creation of just about anything. Over the next couple years, I created an absolute ton of maps. My favorite back then was a map meant to recreate the first scene in the Fellowship of the Ring. It was a battle with so many units the computer chugged along at less than 1 frame per second for 2 minutes before gaining a little speed.

While AoE dominated the games I played in the first couple years of the last decade, it was by no means the only one. I had 2 friends who had Age of Empires 2, and we’d play that game all the time. At least, we did, until one of them told me that he “had the coolest game ever, it’s called Starcraft”. Apparently this game was awesome because you could put bats that were on fire into bunkers, or something like that. Turns out you can indeed place Firebats in bunkers. Starcraft quickly took play priority from Age of Empires 2, and held onto for a long, long time. Starcraft again featured a slick map creation tool, and that, along with its campaigns and expansion, provided a ton of ’stuff’ to do. Many many people remember Starcraft for its online play, and I almost feel like a bad citizen saying that I barely played it online. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but that back when we first played it, not every last computer in the house was connected to the internet. When we finally did play a few online rounds, the predictable happened- we got steamrolled. To this day, I’m great at RTS campaign, local games, and games with friends. I’m just awful against the people you play online.

In the next couple years, I managed to acquire Age of Empires 2 (better computer ftw!), and kept playing Starcraft. A friend gave me Command and Conquer: Red Alert, and despite being older and less refined than what I had been playing, it was a fun look at older RTS games.

From 2002 to 2004, several friends and I played Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings tabletop game. Playing this further introduced us to the world of Games Workshop, and specifically Warhammer 40,000. I remember being absolutely pumped for Relic’s ‘Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War’ in 2004, and that excitement was absolutely deserved.

Dawn of War at first felt tremendously alien from the RTS games I had been playing. While it certainly wasn’t the first “new style” RTS game, it certainly helped to usher in a new style of RTS design. Classicly, units were controlled individually, resource gathering was a major part of the game, and micro-management wasn’t crucial for victory. Dawn of War introduced resources that are gathered while going on the offensive. It utilized early cover systems, and made extensive use of micro-management. In addition the game placed troops in squads, instead of out on their own. This was partly due to the world of 40k, but also a design decision. Squads could be buffed up, had abilities, and could have leaders assigned to them to make them even more powerful. The reinforce-on-the-go mechanic also meant that you no longer needed endless build queues at your base.

Enough about its mechanics, Dawn of War was just insanely fun to play. Part of the reason I love these games is the amount of teamwork they allow for. Dawn of War was no exception, and allowed my brother and I to work together (Space Marines and Eldar) against AI’s or players online. Few things make you appreciate your brother more than calling for help because Chaos troops are getting ready to destroy you and seeing an force of Eldar teleport in and obliterate them. High five John.

Relic’s next game after Dawn of War was ‘Company of Heroes’, which despite following the ‘this game is about war!’ trend of Word-of-Word naming (see Medal OF Honor, Call OF Duty, God OF War), is an amazing game. It takes the ground work for new generation RTS games laid in Dawn of War and runs with them. In Dawn of War, ‘cover’ meant put troops in a pit, so they are in ‘Heavy Cover’. In Company of Heroes, cover means, well, cover. Units are smart, and lie down behind walls, hide in buildings, crawl on the ground, and will find new cover once theirs is destroyed! Oh, thats right, everything can be destroyed! To someone without RTS experience, I know that statement might as well be “Everything is Blue!”, but a seasoned fan would have been blown away. If you don’t understand the sheer awesomeness that is total destructibility, you need to play this game. Bad.

Company of Heroes is simply a blast to play. It has well paced missions, great story, and some of the best gameplay of anything in the last 5 years. Typically RTS single player campaigns lack re-playability, but CoH does. There is one mission in particular where you set up a defensive force to repel a German attack after D-Day. This mission is one of my favorite in any game, of any genre. Ever.

After the success of Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, Relic released the awesome ‘Dawn of War 2′. While not as innovative as its predecessor, or as acclaimed as Company, Dawn of War 2 is still an epic game. It cut down greatly on the amount of troops the player managed, and feels more like a 41st millennium ‘Dungeon Siege’ than an RTS. However, it’s still a strategy game, and it makes use of all the cool stuff Company of Heroes did. In addition to the ‘hunker down’ type of gameplay, there are many powers, and lots of armor and weapons to acquire. It has been compared to Diablo, and rightfully so. New loot is always fun. The idea for RPG elements in an RTS isn’t Relic’s though. While I don’t know for sure, I’m willing to give the “RPG-RTS” origin award to Blizzard, for their Warcraft games.

Which brings me to the last item I’m addressing today. Warcraft 3. I played it a little back in 2003, and now in 2010 I’m playing it again. It isn’t the first Warcraft game to give hero units powers, but it is the one that made doing so extremely popular. A lot of games can’t survive aging. They start to look worse and worse, and play poorly. Warcraft 3 is one of the few games that has aged almost perfectly. The game still feels as fresh and fun as it did back in 2003. Oh, and LAN is awesome too. John may not be able to teleport his Eldar in, but he can send in a squad of Night Elves to save my helpless farms from the Scourge. Being from Blizzard, Warcraft 3 is my current Starcraft 2 substitute. Sure, not the same, but it still has “Blizzard loves this” written all over it.

And that concludes my loving homage to the RTS genre. Now if someone wants to hand me a copy of Starcraft 2, I’ll add a section, and be eternally grateful. If not, let me know how it is.

The Contracast Show Notes Doc- now shows are much easier to spot

I’ve been doing a lot of multi-part docs lately, and so far highlighting each segment with colors has been awesome. It is much easier to see the actual size of the text, and feels better to stare at than only black and white. To each his own, but I recommend segmenting off docs with colors now.

In other news…

I’ve been busy at work, and at work I do a lot of writing. Thus, a lot less motivation to write all the time for this site. Contracast was first delayed due to exams, then to apathy, then to a conference. Now we’re just being lazy. Expect a new show before Sunday.

Note: The handful of images I was hosting are deleted, I still have originals, so everything that is missing an image should see that image restored soon.

This is Contracast! Join us as we talk about the Jason Chen saga, Blizzard’s awesome HQ, Homemade Snickers Bars, HDR Wallpapers, Becoming Iron Man and more!

App of the week: Quest Tracker

Contact Us
Paul: Site, Twitter, Facebook
Mike: Twitter, Facebook
John: Twitter, Facebook

Contracast on iTunes
Download Link

This ended today.

Facebook has now linked pages to do interests; removing the “pages” section of one’s profile, and giving context to your interests. Now instead of being taken to a search, the vast majority of interests redirect to a Facebook page. Clicking on “Kill Bill” doesn’t show me a list of search results, but instead takes me to the page for the film. Also, you can rearrange items, such as to “show off” a particular item, and place items of higher interest in immediate view, and others a click away.

As you can see, the new thumbnails provide a very quick look at the interests of the person in question. I moved a few things around to make sure it worked as it appeared to, and it absolutely did. This new format is endlessly better than it was, and does away with hyperlinks that are simply explanatory text. I had introduced my interests before with a simple “I enjoy”, which by default became a link.

This new layout greatly increases the usefulness of interests on the site, and reduces the hassle the links used to be. Clicking on “Lost” shows me that 5 friends also ‘like’ the show, and doesn’t show me any fan pages.

Interests was one of the last truly lagging portions of the site, with users totally unaware that what they typed would become links. This redesign has done a lot to reduce typos, and add a professional quality to profiles that wasn’t there.

Although every major change to the site stirs up a legion of half-hearted dissenters, I doubt this one will have the same effect. The only real debatable change was pushing the interests further down on a profile. Personally, I love this change. It places greater emphasis on the more important “quotes” and “about me” areas. These have been renamed “Bio” and “Favorite Quotations”. Before now these most telling sections were hidden under a mass of links to whatever one listed as interests. Now they are the first major feature on a profile. No matter how much you can tell about me by my favorite films and music, my hand-written bio and quotes tell you far more.

I’m honestly interested again in visiting friend’s profiles, and I have to think that these changes will prompt people to review everything they have posted and modify the content appropriately. After all, now that your bio carries more weight, changing it from a one-line blurb about how fun you are to a decent description should seem like a good idea.

I first got the notion to start podcasting in late 2008, when listening to Scott Johnson’s “Extra Life Radio”. The show had 3 or more hosts, and featured discussion about a myriad of geek-oriented things. I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to recreate the show with my friends, and placed it on my “Summer Project List” (or SPL).

May came, and no podcasting took place. I knew I wanted to get it going, but it kept getting pushed aside for more pressing things. I did start blogging a lot, which has gone hand-in-hand with podcasting ever since. After much research on how exactly to do what we wanted to do, we sat down and knocked out our first 30 minute episode in the middle of June. It took around 4 hours to figure out how to set things up, and then another 2 to edit the show.

Over the next couple months we got better and better at doing Contracast. Editing went from a painstaking chore to a simple 5 minute task. Hosting was initially awful, but I found archive.org and was saved. Putting the show on iTunes felt like a major achievement back in October.

From October to March, not much changed. We recorded shows when we could all get together to do so; which was unfortunately fairly rare. We kept vowing to do the show live, but always vowed it would be the next show. In March we made two major advances on the show; creating a dedicated Twitter account for Contracast, and beginning to broadcast live.

At the time of writing the Contracast Twitter account has 485 followers. By following people who talk about podcasting, I’ve been exposing people to Contracast who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of the show. Since I started marketing the show on iTunes I’ve seen a very steady rise in iTunes downloads. The show also has gained a lot of fans, and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that we were starving for beforehand. Doing the show live has also been great; it forces us to not put it off, and lets us see how our audience reacts to the show in real-time.

We’re obviously going to continue with live broadcasting, and I will continue with the Twitter campaign. Yesterday I set up my room like a decent little studio, as it’s likely going to be the home base of the show this Summer. I set up a camera and streamed music for a few hours while getting it all configured, and that started me thinking about what exactly I’d like to do with streaming this Summer. So to stop stalling-

I’m planning a 3 hour block of live content, likely broken down into 3-5 shows, for one night a week all Summer long.

Contracast would be part of this block, as would be several other undetermined shows. A dedicated Summer movie show would be fun, as would a music show. The goal is to provide a solid block of entertainment for people to tune in to. We would very likely set things up something like how the Twit network does- basically showing off things on screen, and featuring enough of a visual experience to make watching the show worthwhile.

I’m very excited to announce these plans; almost as excited as I was to release the first episode of Contracast. I’ve had a tremendous amount of fun podcasting over the last year, and doing something like this is very appealing. However, we’re putting out content for an audience, not for us. If there is anything you want to see (and hear) about from this block of shows, let me know! Contracast has always hovered between 30 minutes and an hour, meaning there is roughly 2 hours of content to fill. I’m not concerned with the length of the shows we’ll be recording, so even if your idea will only take 1 minute, by all means, share it!

I Set Up My Old PC!
There’s something special about my old WinXP gaming PC. I found it under such random circumstances that I’ve always loved having it around. For those who don’t know, and that’s likely most of you- in early 2006 I happened into a venue called “GameLAN” on a quest for a specific energy drink. We were told that the place was closing, and not just for the night- for good. Noticing all of the computers I asked if they were selling them. The next morning, in the rain, my brother and I loaded a mid-tower rig with a window, a 19″ monitor that weighed at least 60 pounds, a desk chair, and accessories into my tiny car. It no longer has any use being back in Winston- as everyone has laptops now. So I brought it, its blue lights, and accessories down to Charlotte. Right now it’s on my desk, serving as something of a media PC. There’s something about having 2 computers on my desk that makes me feel like business is getting done, even if it isn’t.

I’ve Got Ideas…
I don’t see any reason not to set up a few websites and campaigns this summer. At best I’ll make a few dollars, and at worst I’ll gain experience. I brainstormed and came up with around 8 different sites that I’m thinking about working on. Most fill a certain niche, and one in particular has tremendous potential. Without giving away any specifics, I can say that it is a community review resource, providing an accessible look into an under utilized medium. I’ll need a hand with some of these sites, so if you are looking to get some experience marketing a site, write some guest articles, or get a cut of whatever profits I’m able to pull in- contact me.

I’m Learning HTML
Thanks to W3Schools It’s coming back to me. I still need to learn an absolute ton, but I’m working on it. After HTML I’m moving into CSS. But one thing at a time.

I Need a Nap…
See you later…

This week we talk iPhone 4 almost exclusively, because it’s biggest thing there is to discuss! Read up here.

HP Slate hands on: Gizmodo.

Contest: The iTunes reviews contest continues, thanks to no reviews being written. Seriously guys- write review, win mouse. That simple.

Contact Us
Paul: Site, Twitter, Facebook
Mike: Twitter, Facebook
John: Twitter, Facebook

Contracast on iTunes
Download Link

Welcome to Contracast 31! This week we’re talking new apps, Avatar on home video, conferences, html, Microsoft Kin, a FREE MOUSE, and more!

Links for you: BMW spy camera, Palm for sale.

Link of the Week:W3Schools.

App of the Weeks:Opera Mini, We Rule.

Contact Us
Paul: Site, Twitter, Facebook
Mike: Twitter, Facebook
John: Twitter, Facebook

Contracast on iTunes
Download Link