Way back before the dawn of time (i.e., the year 2000) I played a mess of RTS games. One of the most notable of these was Starcraft which I played an undue amount of. What killed it for me was when I realized that I was losing matches because I didn't micromanage the first minute well enough. That sucks.
Enter Total Annihilation.
I dunno if the time was right or whatever but I ended up playing even more TA than I did Starcraft and I never really bored of it (just got distracted with other games, then jobs). In fact, from the time I started playing TA, I've upgraded my main machine in these denominations over the last decade or so: Celeron 300A, PIII 733, Athlon 1333, P4 2533. Each of these has subsequently been ground to a screeching halt by that one game released in 1997 and modded to the moon and back. And it's still fun. Lots of people didn't like TA, however, because it was less action, more strategy, and was 3D rendered in software right around the time that everything had to be 3D accelerated.
Enter Supreme Commander.
Supreme Commander (for those who have no idea what I'm talking about) is the spiritual successor to TA headed by the same dood (one Chris Taylor, not to be confused with my recent student of the same name) but at a different company and with uber modern requirements. I suppose that as a true spiritual successor, it will need to bring yet another three generations of machines to its knees and by all accounts it does so.
So after having pre-ordered it, I built a new machine. In fact, I got the game before I got the parts. The final upgrade straw was that my old machine wouldn't ever have enough video card to run the game (GeForce 6 minimum). This is the first reasonably cutting edge machine I've ever owned to the tune of about $2K (running Vista, but that's a rant for another day). I built it yesterday, got it all configured and downloaded and patched and almost usable and went to play Supreme Commander for the first time. After roughly ten years of antitipation I've now been stuck in the patching portion (done in the background) for, oh, the last two hours. On a blazingly fast machine. That was built specifically to play this game. On my extra premium 3Mbit connection that's normally really nice.
I'm convinced that the universe hates me.
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