When, nearly a year and a half later, on July 22 of last summer to be exact, I was about to finally put together my uberPC, the first thing I did was seek out fresh information on the game in order to decide where exactly I should place it on the mental to-play list of my comeback to PC gaming that I was making, and what I found out, literally within minutes, was that it should be number 1. And here I have no better way to convey to you, dear reader, my amazement at what I discovered than to copy-paste my exact words from the forum post I made that day [
> ] :
"I've just spent an hour or so looking at new videos and reading up on the game. It's not even that I can't believe what I am reading — I can't even believe what I am seeing in actual YouTube footage. I half expect someone at the end of the video to come out and say 'Hahaha, you thought this was real, but it's just a prerendered video we made to take the piss out of you lol'. It really is that good. Or at least it seems that good — because I am finding it extremely hard to believe there is not some catch somewhere in all of this. Every single thing I see or read about the game is a dream come true. I have zero negative things to say about it — and if you've been reading my forum comments for a while you'll realize this doesn't really happen. Even the artstyle and setting are growing on me, and the music, the colors, the unit and building designs, 'Galactic War' lol, everything...
It's perfect. I have half a Videogame Art review in my head already written and I haven't even played the game. It's going to take an insane exertion of will to keep myself from playing it this weekend when I finally set up my PC. The worst part is that there is no official release date beyond 'when it's done'. How am I supposed to hold myself off from playing it when IT'S SITTING RIGHT THERE ON STEAM and I've no idea when it will be ready? So what I am going to do is start from the beginning of the
Total Annihilation campaign, then move on to its expansions, and then the SupComs and their expansions, plus a ton of multiplayer on all of these games, and hopefully all this will keep me busy for a few months until
PA is ready. That's the plan at any rate. I've never played any of these games before, so this is the correct way to go about it anyway. I followed the Westwood/Blizzard/Ensemble/GSC branch of the RTS tree, you see, instead of the Westwood/Blizzard/Cavedog/GPG branch, because the original
Total Annihilation (where the second branch split off from what I consider the 'main' branch) seemed flat and boring to me at the time, compared to
Age of Empires. And it still looks flat and boring compared to AoE, but when I see how far its successors have come, and when I also hear that the original game has been modded to work with high resolutions and 5,000 units caps, lol, I am willing to sit down and give it a serious try. I did play the first 2-3 missions of its campaign on my laptop a few months back, and I was pleasantly surprised by them. It's no Age of Empires, but it's very playable and certainly looks promising."
I spent the entirety of the next day and many hours over the next week reading through the official
PA blog, the
PA forums, and all the interviews and AMA threads I could come across, and even registered an account on the official forums [
> ] and started obsessively reading everything in them and posting in them, something I haven't done in a forum outside of
Insomnia in years. Naturally enough most of my threads exploded in giant aneurysm-inducing shitstorms, with derailings and lockings and admin-warnings flying left and right, and so on, and all of this has been amply documented in our
PA thread here for those morbidly curious enough to look for it; but the point is that my investment in the game reached such a height (with several hundred posts in the
PA forum within a mere
couple of weeks) that on August 8 I couldn't take it anymore, trashed the plan to play through
TA and
SupCom first, as well as my reservations for playing Early Access games at all, and gathered a bunch of people from the forum, started my very own videogame and
PA clan, and launched into several entire MONTHS of some of the best gaming I have ever experienced in my life, a period which is still ongoing, and which I sincerely hope, dear reader, that it will never end.