The first violent game I got was Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and I’ve always been a fan of the series. When you talk about top-down RTS (real time strategy games) you can’t do so without bringing the behemoth of a series that is C&C that really does define the genre. It’s fast-paced, generally balanced, and easy to get into and out of. And the series distinguishes itself by continuing to have proper filmed cutscenes with real actors, which is something that I definately appreciate. It really enhances the story of the games which is very reasonable (can be surprising at times). The series has had several story lines going simultaneously (explained very well at the Wikipedia article); some are related to each other and others are entirely independent. The main tiberium plot started in the original C&C, continued in Tiberian Sun and its expansion pack, and I was excited to hear of its continuation in this latest adventure. In the immortal words of the GDI computer, EVA, ‘welcome back, Commander’. That line is quite possibly the best line in any video game I’ve ever played, when timed correctly and said in EVA’s computerised voice.

Story/Plot/Characters

The basic plot is that a crystalline alien substance, toxic to humans, arrived on an asteroid on earth in the 20th Century and has been spreading ever since, by converting normal matter across the planet into more tiberium. It turns out that because it draws valuable minerals out of the ground in doing this, tiberium is an extremely valuable source of energy and cash. It is the main resource of the games. The Global Defence Initiative (GDI), originally something set up by the UN that has become a global superstate, aims to research and understand tiberium to the extent that its infection of the world can be reversed, while the Brotherhood of Nod led by the enigmatic Kane (who appears to die at the end of every game and always resurfaces) believe that tiberium is a wonderous gift that heralds the next stage of man’s evolution, and so aims to spread it. By Tiberian Sun‘s expansion pack Firestorm, various forms of tiberian flora and fauna have developed, and by Tiberium Wars whole swaths of the planet have become uninhabitable. Then half way through the campaigns (there is one for each side) in this game an alien race arrives and begins a takeover of the planet. Maybe the theories of GDI scientists about tiberium being a terraforming substance for an alien invasion were right.

While the atmosphere of a world slowly suffocating under the tiberium menace is well portrayed in Tiberium Wars, there are elements missing. Tiberium only comes in simple crystalline forms rather than things such as tiberium veins, and tiberium lifeforms only put in a minor appearance. The Forgotten, a group of mutants that are the results of failed Nod experiments to create tiberian super-soldiers, only have a token involvement as well. To me this harms the games continuity and doesn’t allow it to follow on so well in the slow degradation of the planet.

The characters in Tiberium Wars are as forceful as ever, but I feel it is a shame that few have been carried through from the prequel. Granted, many were killed off per the story (although I suspect this was mainly because getting the actors back for the expansion pack wasn’t easy), but it’s not quite the same without the character representing the player, Commander McNeil, and the overall GDI leader, General Solomon. On the Nod side, while the charismatic Kane is back and is as fanatical about his crazed religion as ever, the classic Commander Slavik isn’t present (I don’t know if he is killed in Firestorm; I never completed the campaign). On the AI side, GDI’s EVA unit doesn’t make as big an appearance. Its cool and collected tactical analysis has been replaced by an energetic intelligence officer, which I don’t think is as effective. The lack of Nod’s famous CABAL computer is adequately explained by events in Firestorm. Overall the characters just haven’t been as memorable as in the prequel.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Tiberium Wars is very much more of the same, but that isn’t a bad thing: classic C&C RTS gameplay is of an excellent pace, is very accessible and has a good depth of strategy. You build up a base and get a steady economy of tiberium mining, you construct your units and you launch an attack. However, I felt in the campaigns of this game there was less variety in the missions: almost all involved this basic procedure of building up a base and large squad and then pushing forward. This is in contrast to the prequel in which there were many missions without a base at all, when you would lead a small squad deep into enemy territory to achieve various objectives. To me this seemed to present a greater challenge because once you have established a foothold, as the RTS genre doesn’t seem to be able to escape from, a tank rush will pretty much guarantee victory. This is particularly apparent when playing GDI because their Mammoth Tank is in my experience very much overpowered. You can find your tiny base being overwhelmed by enemy assaults, but once you have a tech centre and war factory and have enough cash to build a few mammoths and build their railgun upgrade to make their weapons more powerful, you’re pretty much safe because you can just place a mammoth at each point the enemy is attacking you from and little gets through.

There are some welcome improvements however. Units can now, for a price, call in a transport to take them to another location on the battlefield which is very convenient. Bases can be expanded by sending out small vehicles that establish outposts, rather than simply building a line of power plants or constructing an expensive mobile construction vehicle that deploys into a construction yard. Superweapons are at last genuinely super and are something to be afraid of, rather than a minor annoyance when the same building keeps being destroyed.

While GDI remains a side with a strong, continuous and unique character, and the new Scrin faction is effective and follows the hints dropped in the prequel, I am dissapointed by how Nod is portrayed. It has become at least partially a terrorist organisation instead of an elite religion which relied on high technology. While it retains these elements, it also introduces suicide units and cheap, numerous militants and I don’t think this is what Nod should be in terms of its place in the C&C Universe. Carry-throughs such as the classic sound of a charging Obilisk of Light (which still scares me, I was young when I played the prequel) are very welcome however.

Presentation

The graphics in Tiberium Wars are superb: when two armies come crashing together and start firing their high tech weapons, everything looks fantastic. I only really care about graphics when they are either exceptional or are spoiling the game because they are so poor, and both of these situations are rare for me: I don’t mind very much what a game looks like. But in C&C 3 they are very well done.

The music in the game is also very good, with good sound effects for weapons. The way a lot of these have undertones of the previous game helps to enhance the feeling of the tiberium-infested planet.

Conclusion

Not as good as the prequel as a complete package, but a very good sequel and continuation of the series. Well worth buying.

I put my components list together with the help of PhilKC from freenode but as I left it in an online shopping basket over several days, several items went in and out of stock. Eventually when I ordered both the motherboard and graphics card were out of stock and so the wait began. I will spare you the details of having the expected dates changing around and e-mails contradicting my order details view, but in the end I ended up ordering my motherboard and a nice new keyboard elsewhere. So I ended up building during an incredibly busy school time, which is far from ideal. In addition to these purchases I got a 21″ CRT monitor off eBay for just ~£23 bringing my total to around £720. I am still at this point trying to work out how I am going to get this monitor home from its location in a nearby town.

The actual physical building of things went pretty much trouble free. The most difficult parts for me were attaching the CPU to the motherboard and applying the heat-conducting grease which is a fiddly task, and I was concerned that things were getting too hot and that I had done it wrong. Phil was a great help over IRC and we decided that it was sufficiently safe. I soon found however that my case really doesn’t have enough space for wires and wiring up my floppy drive (which I left disconnected until after I had stress-tested my memory) and hard drive was incredibly difficult. I got the floppy cables the wrong way at first and so this had to be fixed. Fortunately, I only needed to rotate the end that was easier to rotate… At this point, everything physical is done except for the power LED and USB ports on the front, which don’t seem to be working. Annoyingly, my motherboard doesn’t have the capability to have a system/case speaker, which is something I was very used to using for beeping at me when I received messages on IRC.

Windows installed easily enough, for playing games, except that I had to go find a USB keyboard as the installation didn’t like my PS/2 one, but it works fine now. I have strengthened Windows up with anti-virus and the like and got it fully up-to-date. However, my intention had long been to use Ubuntu as my main operating system and also leave some space free for another flavour of Linux. After battling to get the live cd to run, it was clear that all was not right. As I find with my NSLU2, my router does not provide nix systems with the right DNS servers so I have to reconfigure this on every startup. That is not a huge problem: what is is the huge effort required for my graphics card and Ubuntu to make friends, allowing me to use Ubuntu’s fantastic visual effects, provided by Compiz Fusion, which makes windows bounce around and fade and desktops rotate on a nice cube. My graphics card chipset, the nVidia 8800GT is specifically not supported by Ubuntu and so I had to use various workarounds. It was not particularly fun, and upgrading to the next major version of ubuntu is going to be a pain, but I am quite happy to have the pretty effects.

All that is left for me to do at this point before I can wire Zephyr (named due to my naming scheme of Greek gods, goddesses and letters) into my desk is to transfer the data from my old 80GB hard drive that I have had for about five and a half years. This is far, far easier said than done, and at this point everything across the network that I have tried has failed. It may be that the only way to successfully transfer the data is to physically move the HDD into my new computer, but I am loath to do that if it can be avoided. I need all my saved games, but data is held on my NSLU2, so there is no real rush to get this sorted.

Since my family have converted completely to Linux at my father’s house on the main computer, we have been using Ubuntu with great success. The ‘just works’ philosophy is very effective at converting people to using free software. Ubuntu is the distro with the most chance of breaking Microsoft’s hold on the market. On a desktop system I cannot be fiddling around getting things working when I need to get things done, especially with how busy I am these days. Also if I need to demonstrate Linux this is definately the best choice (especially since you can get free CDs that look professional and also work as live CDs). The Ubuntu philosophy is a strong, socialist one (I think so anyway) and thus I am certainly likely to keep it around, even if some of the handholding I disagree with.

Ubuntu is of course based on Debian, the nice rock-solid old distribution with great stability and dependability. Due to problems with Debian not being up-to-date so much of the time, I don’t think I would ever want to run it as a local desktop or workstation, but for servers Debian works and thus it is always a good choice. It is efficient with its installs, generally keeps itself running, and doesn’t require a lot of effort to admin. It is running on my nslu2 and I have been most happy with it. So I think my reasons for not using Debian would be purely the advantages offered by Ubuntu and Gentoo: ‘just works’, and pure leet factor (read: more fun, and teaches more about nix).

This brings me onto Gentoo. Gentoo differs from the above in that it is a source-based distribution, in that it compiles all applications in order to install them, rather than downloading binaries. The idea is that your system runs the more efficiently on your hardware and doesn’t have unnecesary packages installed, slowing things down. Gentoo is designed to be appropriate for pretty much any task by being so highly customisable. My research has told me that in the main for most systems there is not a huge discernable advantage to this approach, and that long compile times can get annoying. But one thing remains about Gentoo for me, and that is its power to teach you about Linux and your computer in general, and how much cooler/leeter it is. This attracts me to it very much.

At this point then I intend to get a great deal more experience with these three and then perhaps make an ‘episode 2′ post, perhaps narrowing things down further. Or I may end up staying with these three. One thing that I am pretty certain about is that I have narrowed all the distributions down to these, and so I can now concentrate my efforts on learning more about them. Gentoo’s temptation of improving my general Linux knowledge, for someone like me who avoids zealousy, is something I must persue further.

Writing LaTeX in a normal text editor works, but it is better to find an app that will check your syntax, highlight brackets and the like, and then compile into a finished document at the press of a button – effectively an IDE. So I started using TeXnicCenter on Windows which is rather nice. I would recommend it for beginners. I would suggest that readers make use of Google primarily for learning the language – there are tutorials dotted around. I intend to write my coursework up this way after Christmas – it makes it look very professional when done right. Then I will get gnuplot (not actually GNU, by the way) up to draw graphs, but I am not sure this is allowed.

Yesterday I found myself on Ubuntu and wanted to write up some revision notes for physics so I fired up the package manager and installed a selection of LaTeX GUIs, and through this discovered LyX, a rather nice one. It is actually a complete environment where you are not required to use any code at all, although a knowledge of how the language works helps. Through this I produced a rather pretty overview of the course so far that I intend to use just before the exam for last-minute revision and something I can add to and complement over the revision period. Also for me doing revision this way is more fun because I do love the beautiful typesetting. So, if you like maths or mathful science, learn LaTeX or get a copy of LyX.

I have opted to yet again redesign my website, seanwhitton.com – I think this is about version five. While this blog is presently as it has been for some time due to the comparative difficulty I will have trying to convert the blog’s complex template to the new layout, the new site didn’t take me too long to re-layout and I am pleased with the result. I did a direct transfer of the old site to the new by simply replacing the old template with my new code and this means that not all pages look quite as they should. Since I now have a site map on the home page, I was tempted to add some more pages to the listing and thus I have some things to fill in. It seems I naturally have site content now without having to work too hard to make it up which is a good thing. This blog has always been my main source of writing and so I aim to transfer this over eventually. It will be far from easy, however. My new design is supposed to be easy to use, simple and clean, so I would appreciate any feedback on whether it is this.

About a week and a half ago I decided to purchase a ‘slug’ or what is actually called a Linksys NSLU2. It is a device designed to serve files with a built-in FTP and web server, that can easily be mounted on network machines. The idea is to add storage to a smallish network that can easily be accessed. However, since the thing is based on Linux anyway is has been hacked somewhat by fans and is now officially supported by Debian – in other words, I now have a mini-server with low power consumption that I can run useful things off and leave on all the time. It took me some time to get it working because my router was feeding it false information meaning it couldn’t properly connect to the Debian mirrors to get hold of the operating system files (I had to open another shell and edit /etc/resolv.conf manually). Getting the router to forward web, SSH and FTP ports was not easy either. Now it is running, with its cute 120GB WD Passport Drive, absolutely fine and you can see a picture here. I am very happy with this purchase.

I have decided to actually be a proper unix geek and learn how to use vi(m) efficiently. In general I use it on SilentFlame only because nano isn’t installed, but I realise that I am wasting keystrokes and vim is a good idea. I just need to work through vimtutor methodically and try to use the different methods presented where they are going to speed me up most. I need to get used to editing my site and other such things in SSH as it is a lot easier. Eventually I could of course set up Wikipedia to use vim for all editing, but this may be a bit far. Not sure at this stage – still trying to absorb.