OS Wars

READ THIS FIRST

I wrote this close to two years ago, and it was essentially in response to an argument I had with a rabid linux fanboy who was in an IRC channel, hence its strong anti-linux bias and deviation into “seriously fuck linux” towards the end there. However, I feel it still holds up and I do sometimes link people to it as an intro to any argument. Also, I totally call linux an OS when it’s a whole stable of OS’s. Oh past Tom, you did not understand that at all.

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Mac VS Windows is one of the oldest fights on the internet. It rages on personal pages, in IRC channels, on forums, in IM clients. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t swear allegiance to an OS, and they’ll proudly parrot the company line when it comes to the competitors. It’s pervasive, it’s all-encompassing, and it’s incredibly fucking retarded.

Now, I’ll daresay some of you are sniggering amongst yourselves, waiting for me to proclaim my out and out love for Linux, the third most widespread choice for an OS. Well, you’re going to be waiting for a long goddamn time, because Linux is in many ways just the same as a Mac or a Windows machine, with the added disadvantage that the people who tend to preach about it also tend to be arrogant, elitist fuckwits. In every Mac/Windows debate, there’s always one guy who feels it necessary to proclaim he’s using Linux, and that it’s infinitely better than your conformist, capitalist OS’s. The guy who’ll belittle you for using a system that dares to have any kind of GUI, or user friendliness. The fact that your system doesn’t require users to have an intricate knowledge of programming to turn on is an outright insult to him, and he’ll tell you loudly and clearly.

The thing is, in that last sentence there, I’ve fallen prey to the exact same logical fallacies that befell the others in the OS debates. By simplifying a system down to its most basic, it’s easy to pick holes in what is a perceived weakness, regardless of how the system deals with it. For example, a common point against Macs is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible to change the core options of the system beyond a superficial point. This is bullshit that has been propagated for so long that it’s become an accepted fact! It’s entirely possible to change system settings for a Mac, just like Linux doesn’t need a degree in computing to run.

The OS’s themselves are largely innocent. Bar the intensely frustrating “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC” advertisements, and the expected bitch-talk between developers, they co-exist. They’re for different markets, different uses, and they know it. You don’t go to windows for largely creative endeavours, and you don’t use a Mac for business. You wouldn’t run a server off a Mac, but you wouldn’t get a 5 year old starting on Linux. There are differing uses for differing OS’s and this fact has apparently soared over the heads of pretty much everyone.

I’d like to take a moment for sheer self-indulgence here, and rant about Linux users. The majority of you are largely inoffensive, quiet computer users, trying to get things done in a way that you like/want. I can understand that. Hell, I’m doing the exact same thing right now. But there’s a few of you, a tiny, vocal minority, that has taken it upon themselves to become paragons of purity and light, and shine the beams of Linux upon us poor mortals inflicted with Windows or Mac. I’ve been told by more than a few people that Windows is beyond redemption, that it’s inherently evil, that Microsoft (often hideously abbreviated to M$) hates users. I’ve seen articles by otherwise sane people declaring that ease-of-use is the enemy, and that having software that simplifies matters is terrible.

The line of thinking here is that everyone using a computer needs to be fully skilled in its use, and entirely capable of high-level computer wizardry. This is an idea borne of spending far too much time in the presence of other people skilled with computers, and not enough with people who don’t quite get them. It simply does not make sense for someone who only uses Windows for Excel to have to learn a substantial amount about computing to make it work. How does this help the user? Someone who spends a small amount of time using a computer, doing basic things with it. Why on earth would they need to know more than the basics?

This is in part due to the incredible elitism that we nerds tend to have about computers. There is a very widespread misconception that we “own” the internet, or that we’re the true custodians of computing. As much as nerds do generally control the websites, and as much as we tend to be the ones running the servers, usage of the internet has become far more widespread, as has computing in general. You don’t own it. You don’t run it behind the scenes, and you do NOT have any kind of claim to be the rightful users of the internet or computers.

Now, I’m fairly certain at least one person will go “But surely someone using a computer should know how it runs? What if something goes wrong?”, or even “If you don’t know how to use computers, then you don’t deserve to use them”

To the latter: Fuck you. You’re exactly what I’m talking about. Do you know exactly how to fix your car? How every part of it interacts, and how it can be fixed? No? I didn’t think so. Nobody denies you use of your car for not completely understanding it, that would be ludicrous. But you expect the same to apply to computers? You’re a dickhead, and you should take a long, hard look at how you interact with other people.

For the former, I’ll use the same car analogy. You know enough about cars to fuel one up, and make it go, right? There’s not much else you need to know, because that is all you need it to do. Just like with cars, the use of computers is often quite limited in its scope. The users don’t NEED to know the intricate details of the system, because there’s no REASON for them to know the intricate details of the system.

That kind of turned into a rant about Linux users, so let me drag you back to the central topic.
WOOOOOOOOSH

Ok. If we take that there’s three central operating systems, Mac, Windows and Linux, then the most rational, fair approach to take is:
“Each system has its own advantages and disadvantages. Each system is not inherently inferior or superior in every aspect, and each system is tailored to use by differing groups of people. The competition between OS’s is pointless at best, and non-existent at worst. I should look at the strengths and weaknesses of each system and carefully consider which is most suited to me before I invest time and money into one”
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I wouldn’t mind a bit of discussion about this, it’s an interesting topic that tends to be over-dramatised.

Alright, so

I haven’t really written anything here, and that’s mostly because I’ve stopped writing anything at all. Don’t really have a reason for it, but it’s what’s happened. I used to hope that this site would get a bit of traffic and some regular readers, but in the three years since it was created I’ve kind of changed my mind on that. As of right now, the plan is essentially a way to store and maintain the various things I’ve written and will write. I am going to try to write a bit more, but I fully expect to slow down again once school starts back up and I have things I actually have to do.

So, what’s going to change? Not much. I’ll post some stuff I forgot to post here before, and more stuff will hopefully get posted.

Mount and Blade: Warband

Mount and Blade: Warband is, in its most basic form, the Total War series For Men. Forget the pomp and circumstance of commanding hundreds of men from a floaty platform in the sky. Forget watching your men die and thinking “Oh well, there’s more where that came from”. In this game, you’re down there fighting, hacking your way through the enemy, leading the charges, fighting off sieges. In this game, it’s your ass on the line. For all that you’re a commander, you’re also a soldier, and you’re expected to fight alongside your men.

The issue is: Your men? Untrained peasants. You’re barely better yourself. So you’ll trot off to the woods to find some bandits (because that’s where bandits live), and you’ll go to lay the smackdown on their merry asses. And your men will be killed. And you will be knocked unconscious, and dragged around for days. And when the game thinks you have learnt a lesson in humility, it will set you free with, if you’re lucky, the clothes you were wearing.

It’s easy to quit here. In fact, it’s easy to quit anywhere. This never stops being a hard game. But for those who persevere, you’ll get more men. And you’ll train them. And you’ll find those bandits, and you’ll kill them. And those you don’t kill, you’ll sell into slavery. And you will rejoice. It’s that kind of game. You’ll build an empire. You’ll fight kingdoms. You’ll lose to kingdoms. You’ll triumph and fail in the face of adversity. And you’ll love it.

Visually, the game is… disappointing. To say the least. It would be graphically disappointing in 2005. The men look like men, the women look like men. The horses look like horses, which do look a little bit like men. The textures are low-res, even on the highest graphics, and my crappy laptop could easily run the game on full everything without any graphical lag. Depending on how important graphics are to you that’s either fantastic or godawful. After a while you’ll learn to deal with it, but it can be a little confronting when you first fire it up.

Combat is, for the most part, a thing of beauty. I’ve never seen a game handle battles so well. Fights unfold and roll across the landscape, short brutal curb-stomps, long, extended brawls, and the messy, chaotic, confusing clusterfuck that is two armies engaging. You’ll rejoice over every enemy killed, regret every ally lost, and fight for every inch in a siege. It’s incredible. The connection that this game inspires in you to your avatar is something unmatched in any game I’ve played before.

However, it’s a little weird to think about. My big dude would wander out of battle having killed literally half of the enemies on the field, covered in blood, relatively unscathed. Once you get to the point of having high-level armour, you’ll not even notice the arrow through your chest. Or head. Your horse will be killed under you, and you’ll get up and brutally murder the twenty men who shot it. The point I’m trying to make here is that by the end of the game, you are essentially playing as a goddamn abomination. After a year of in game time, my character had killed over two thousand people. Two thousand. With an axe. Probably grinning like a goddamn madman too.

There’s another side, too. Once you start to gain control over a few villages, maybe a castle or two, you get the ability to upgrade and maintain your own kingdom, or become part of a larger one. You can trade barbs with other lords in kingdom politics, preside over your own lords as king of your own territories, or ask for a lady’s hand in marriage to get in good with her dad. It’s obvious that thought has gone into the less bloodthirsty parts of this game.

Not enough, though. At times it can be frustratingly shallow. Want to adjust taxes in your kingdom? Nope. How many people live in your city? No idea. What kind of trade is influencing my weekly rent I receive? Too bad, there’s no such information. It’s the same with the romance. Want to have a kid, start a dynasty? Not gonna happen. Want to find out about the woman you’re going to marry? You get to know what poems she likes and who her parents are. I’m not joking.

I’d like to take a moment to just have a quick rant about the romance system. You get invited to feasts in your kingdom once you get to a certain social status, where you get to meet ladies and tell them they’re great. They think you’re pretty great too! Then you meet them a few times, tell them a poem which they may or may not like, there’s no way to know. And then if her dad likes you, marriage happens. If he doesn’t, you elope or find someone else. Romance!

It’s a hard game to recommend. Not because it’s bad, but because it’s the kind of game that people will either love with a passion or despise. It’s not a game you can play for a few minutes, either. It’s the kind of game that sucks you in, slow-feeds you a constant stream of goals, and then watches as you relish in your victories. And they will be your victories. The game is a testament to the very idea of non-linearity. I dropped 40 hours into it over four days when I first got it.

If you’re the sort of person that’s always wanted that extra bit of control over the fights in your RTS’s, if you’re the sort of person who’s played kingdom management games and wanted to have a more… direct say in policy administration, this is for you. If you’re a goddamn maniac who wants to cut down swathes of villagers with an axe, this is also for you. Just don’t go in expecting the world, and you should be happy with what you get.

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is, for all intents and purposes, the epitome of the sandbox game. You can spend hours running around punching people, driving cars off cliffs, stealing 747′s and flying them into buildings, and attaching people to poles with your super-duper-physics-breaking-grapple gun, and it does all of that well. The place where the game falls down is, well, everywhere else.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

You play Rico…. something, an American agent with a strangely South American accent, who’s destroying everything in the island nation of Panau because the current dictator isn’t playing nice with Uncle Sam, and is hiding his vast oil fields away from their use. Rico is sent in by the Department of Blowing Shit Up to fix things, and proceeds to do this by, well, blowing a lot of shit up. The governments hold over the island is represented and removed in the form of buildings, which you destroy to symbolically represent the removal of their control over the area.

This is where my biggest issue with the game comes in. Almost everything you destroy to help give the people power back is something they’d need to become independant. Water towers, petrol tanks, communications equipment, I’m honestly amazed​​​​​​ at the way the game rewards you for crippling any chance they have of survival​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​. I mean come on, water towers? Really? They’re hardly spreading the ideology of violent fascism, it’s supplying vital clean water to a community! But no, it’s got the governments logo on it and therefore must be exploded.

The voice acting is just impossibly bad. As mentioned before, Rico has an accent that’s never so much as seen Northern America, and the accents of the people who live there are so thick that its often impossible to understand them. Not that you’d really want to understand them, because the dialogue is just as atrocious, veering between clichéd and ridiculous to foreshadowing so obvious that its essentially just told to you straight (Sloth Demon is the guy you’re after. No, that’s not a spoiler, because you would have to have had serious head injuries not to immediately see that. On the other hand, you might like this game a hell of a lot more with a concussion). Characters are barely fleshed out, with the most developed character being a woman who you constantly have to save because, well, she’s a woman and therefore incapable of doing anything other than cooking.

There’s one scene that really summed up my feelings on the game. After rescuing the Distressed Damsel just mentioned, you’re relaxing on the beach with your stereotypical Texan friend, the woman you’ve just saved, and a Russian woman wearing a skintight leather motorbike suit. On the beach. While relaxing in a lounge chairs. The Texan is roasting a pig. The Distressed Damsel is still a little Distressed. You stride around, having a ridiculous voice, while the ridiculous plot comes up with ridiculous ways to get you to blow more shit up.

The only real saving grace for the game is that the blowing shit up is often fantastic. While the gunplay can be a bit uninteresting and surprisingly detached, the explosions are fantastic, and the afomentioned grappling hook is rife with possibilities to cause mayhem. Hang someone by their foot off the side of a building! Catch a 747, zipline up to it, throw the pilot out, then parachute out in midair and attach him to the bottom and then watch the pair fall to the ground together! Once you get the hang of it, you can use your parachute and grappling hook as an impromptu way to get to places, and it can be quite fun dodging between trees as you fly down a hill chasing that ice cream truck you wanted to steal but accidentally attached a bystander to. At its best, it reaches the same levels as GTA in terms of a real, immersive world, which has accidentally let in a well armed psychopath.

But eventually you’ll get tired of that, and decide to do the story missions, and all the complaints come flying back in. Missions are often unfair as hell, and especially in the places where you have to chase someone down, there’s only one way to get things done, which really clashes with whats otherwise a completely open playground. Towards the end of the game the missions get increasingly detached from the story, and the army gets so overpowered you’ll spend more time running than you will doing the fun things. I suppose it’s kind of fitting that the last mission is essentially just you blowing shit up.

If you’re after a game where you can just mess around in a gigantic sandbox, blowing shit up and fighting off a gigantic number of helicopters, then you’ll love this game. If you’re the sort of person who values story, setting, consistency, or characterisation, this is not the game for you.

 

Fallout: New Vegas – Hardcore Mode

So, I recently managed to get my hands on Fallout: New Vegas, and after playing through it one and a half times, I figured now was about the time to start inflicting my ideas about it onto you, the reader. This is gonna take the form of several posts covering a few different points of the game, presumably over the next week or so. I’m going to assume a base level of knowledge about the game’s setting and genre, purely so that I can get to the meat of the discussion.

First off, the biggest addition to the game since FO:3, Hardcore Mode. This was probably the biggest draw I had to actually pick the game up, because back in the last game I played with a mod which was almost the exact same. The idea is that rather than just having to deal with the enemies and watch your health, you also have to monitor your hunger, thirst, tiredness, as well as​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ radiation poisoning. Essentially, it adds an element of realism that was otherwise missing, and to be honest, it really feels like something that should have been a core gameplay mechanic anyway.

But it’s just nowhere near as brutal as it should be. In FO:3 I acclimatized to having to have three square meals a day, constant drinks, and a manageable sleep schedule, and after a while it became a fairly important part of the game, just as much as the story and shooting. Finding food and fresh water was a constant worry, and often resulted in agonising treks to places where I’d stored supplies. Planning actually became important, and my choices had weight. I could live or die based on where I decided to go, and I loved it.

And then along comes F:NV, promising a mode which does all that and more. I can’t express just how happy I was to hear about hardcore mode, it seemed like the perfect direction for the series to take. It’d make it harder, sure, but immersion would go through the roof and it would be a better game for it. I was excited. I wanted it to go as well as it could because,​ I’d seen just how effectively it could be implemented,​ and what an impact it could make. And the mod I’d used​​​​​​​ was fan-made, imagine what a professional developer could do!

And then I played it. I did the tutorial, I walked around, I explored. I spent about 2 days of in-game time pissing about doing nothing, waiting for the game to go “OI, you are going to DIE if you don’t eat soon.” What I ended up getting was a message saying “Oh hey, you’re kind of thirsty. I guess.” Two days of nothing and I was still a functioning person. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement.

There’s just no consequence to your actions. Water is in such huge supply that you’ll never get beyond the first stages of thirst, food is everywhere so you’ll never go hungry, and radiation is exceptionally rare in this game, so you can afford to just get doctors to remove it. What happened? This was supposed to be Hardcore mode, a way to truly test your skills in a barren wasteland. A constant struggle to live, fighting against the hordes. Instead there’s a stripped-down, cardboard cut-out version of what I wanted, and it’s more annoying than if they’d just not included it at all.

I think the main reason for my disappointment is the name. Hardcore mode suggests an experience that’s a hell of a lot more, well, hardcore. If it’d been named Survival Mode, and the focus had been on just a tad more realism, I’d be fine. I might even be praising the decision to include it. But it was just such a disappointment to play and realise that it wasn’t going to be as brutal as I’d hoped, and it really ruined a decent portion of the game for me.

Also the achievement didn’t unlock for me when I beat the game. AAAAAAAAAARGH

 

Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a city-building simulation, in which you control a bunch of dwarven alcoholics as they try to carve out a living in a world full of inventive and painful ways to die. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​You start off with a tiny expedition team, and through a combination of beer, hard work, and beer, you’ll eventually manage to create a huge, thriving fortress, one which is the envy of all other civilizations. Or, more accurately, you’ll die. All your dwarfs will die. A lot. It says a lot about the game when the motto is “Losing is fun!”

Because DF is brutal. Constantly, unforgivingly brutal. In the two or so years I’ve been playing, here is an very compressed list of some of the ways my dwarfs have died: Thrown off a cliff into lava. Head knocked off by the arm of a dead goblin. Fell down 8 flights of steps. Leg kicked off by a zombie horse. Went crazy, took all his clothes off and jumped in a lake. Had both eyes shot out by goblins and fell onto a spear.

You see what I mean. When you first start playing you’ll be shocked by the sheer number of ways that the game is prepared to kill you. To be honest, the game doesn’t really have any way to win, only a myriad of ways in which to lose.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Eventually, something is going to happen which causes a riot, or a fire, or an accidental lava flood, and the game will look at you, shrug its shoulders, and say “Oh well. Why not try setting up over here? Looks pretty awesome!” (note: this is usually a volcano). ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And there’s just such an amazing level of depth throughout the whole game. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Every creature has detailed body information, from a giant spider’s eight individually breakable legs, to the exposed rib-bones of a skeleton gopher. The creator of the game (the ONE creator) is planning to actually model individual blood vessels in the future, presumably just because being able to break individual bones is just not pointlessly in-depth enough.

When you load up a new fortress site and start digging, it’s up to you. Do you want to make a huge underground cavern? Go ahead. Want to create a gigantic tower that’ll make all the men in a ten kilometre radius feel impotent? Sure, make it out of soap if you want. The game hands you a dump truck full of toys and lets you do whatever the hell you want with them, and the result is a game with a level of freedom unmatched by anything else out at the moment. Minecraft? Nowhere near it. Fallout: New Vegas? Not even close, and you don’t have to pay for this.

That said, this game is not for everyone. The unforgiving gameplay, the learning curve, the interface which hates you, it’s a game which takes a lot of effort to get used to. However, if you can make it past all that, you’ll find a game that is quite simply the best of its kind to date, and its something that everyone should try at least once. Definitely worth the download.

 

Empire: Total War

120 colonial musketeers creep slowly through the woods, trying to make as little noise as possible. Their orders are to get behind enemy lines, and to launch an attack on their undefended rear whilst the front is engaged. However, as they walk, a storm of gunfire breaks loose all around them, cutting down almost half of their number. The air is filled with yelling and screaming, and the order to return fire is hastily barked, although not hastily enough. The ambushers are gone as quickly as they appeared, replaced by an ominous rumbling in the distance. The commander pulls his men together, and they wait for the next assault, ready to fight for their lives. Unfortunately, that’s when the cannonballs hit. None of them are heard from again.

Welcome to Empire: Total War.

E:TW is very much a game of two halves. There’s the Risk-style campaign, where you’re able to use diplomacy, trade or military might to conquer to known world. However, this is offset by the fact that military might is – as usual – the only thing that works, whilst the other options are just background things to do whilst saving the money to buy more men with guns. There’s obviously been a lot of work put into the non-military side of things, such as the new way in which you deal with other countries diplomatically, but it’s still far too vague for it to be any real use in nation building, and it just isn’t as fun as the fighting.

The other half is the actual realtime fighting, where you control an army fighting another. This has always been the centrepoint of the series, and it’s still a massive amount of fun. However, the few updates there’s been since the last game really aren’t that noticeable or well implemented. Naval battles have been added, and they’re so unbelievably slow that despite the utter beauty of a ship slowing tipping and sinking, and despite the fact that it’s actually very tense once the cannonballs are firing, it still takes over half an hour for the ships to reach each other. That’s not a joke, it literally can take up to half an hour. That’s half an hour of NOTHING. I cannot express how boring that is. I spent half an hour waiting for my ships to actually fight the other ships.

Once you’re actually on the battlefield, the game feels a lot more in its element. The artillery fire is suitably apocalyptic, feeling like a rain of death upon your enemies, and watching your soldiers fire upon an unexpecting enemy is still an awesome feeling. Cavalry charges look epic, and have quite an effect on the poor bastards getting hit, and grenadiers explode infantry in some exceptionally well rendered bangs. Everything looks and sounds right, and for the most part, it feels right too.

But then there are times where it all falls apart. The AI is slightly better than previous games, but there’s too many instances of absolutely retarded behaviour, of men with swords trying to charge men with guns, of men with guns ignoring the cavalry hacking their way through their line, and of cavalry running back and forth between their friends and their enemies, and getting shot to bits as a result. It’s been one of the worst problems the series has faced, and it’s really starting to get annoying. To be honest, I suppose it’s just nitpicking. It’s still a great game, and the battles can be utterly epic at times, with thousands of men streaming across abandoned fields and buildings, artillery booming, and cavalry charges blasting through defences.

It’s certainly a fun game, and one that I’ve been playing a lot. It’s just that if I were to compare it to a few of the previous games, there’s been very little changes actually made to the things that matter, and the game fairly reeks of wasted potential. As much fun as I’ve had with it, I wouldn’t play it over Rome: Total War, and as a result it’s hard to recommend.