Countless hours of real-time strategy

I just got off the telephone after three hours of reminiscing with good friend Relly Carpio, a reporter of Inquirer.net’s gaming blog, hackenslash. While much of our conversation was about friends, family, and college life, about an hour had been about video games we used to play—and play a lot (for obvious reasons; we are video gaming journalists, after all).

To make a long story short, Relly and I arrived at the same conclusion: that we are both video game junkies. No, no, not that. Hehe. We found out that aside from countless hours of stress-relieving rounds of Counter-Strike, we (me, Relly and the rest of our, uhmm, peer group) also loved trashing one another in a number of real-time strategy games.

Let’s see … hmmm … there was Command and Conquer. I wasn’t really fond of this game. Wondering why? Because I got my behind beaten so many times that I simply refused to play it about a month after its installation. Haha, sore loser. Fortunately, I fared better in Command and Conquer: Red Alert. Maybe those times I lost to my friends weren’t so bad after all.

We also played Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Starcraft, and Age of Empires. The most memorable real-time strategy for both Relly and me, however, was Total Annihilation, a gem in developer Cavedog’s crown.

Total Annihilation, according to our friends at Wikipedia, is a futuristic real-time strategy game for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, created by Chris Taylor and Cavedog Entertainment, and released on September 30, 1997, by GT Interactive. It was the first to feature 3D units and terrain, a significant achievement in the days before graphic cards with hardware-based 3D acceleration became commonplace.

For me, however, Total Annihilation meant countless hours of multiplayer mayhem. Countless hours? Yes. Picture eight friends playing the game from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. everyday for about a year. Add to that the fact that we had day jobs, and you’d get the picture.

Aside from endless battles, one memory comes to fore when I think about Total Annihilation. What is it? Well, you have to watch this video to find out:

That’s right! It’s the opening video of the game. I like the voiceover and the timing of the video to the voiceover and background music. For those who couldn’t understand the words, here’s a copy:

What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines escalated into a war which has decimated a million worlds. The Core and the Arm have all but exhausted the resources of a galaxy in their struggle for domination. Both sides now crippled beyond repair, the remnants of their armies continue to battle on ravaged planets, their hatred fueled by over four thousand years of total war. This is a fight to the death. For each side, the only acceptable outcome is the complete elimination of the other.

Ahhh, simply a classic.