Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="Senor Barborito"][quote name="Ray, of Light"][quote name="Monty Cantsin"] Hitting the ball hard isn't the <i>point</i> of tennis, it's the point at which tennis <i>begins</i>. If you're playing someone who can hit hard then being able to hit hard is the entry fee you have to muster before the actual game, the deep game, the interesting high-level game even starts. In an RTS, clicking fast and knowing what beats what is the exact same thing. [/quote] At one end of that "entry fee" spectrum are the Corewars family and Everquest; at the other is, say, Quake. As the entry fee climbs, the deep game becomes more legend than reality. What you said holds, but Korean-level RTS matches are more Quake than Corewars, and I can see why someone would find that unsatisfying. The genre's demands -- 'real-time', 'strategy' -- could be met with far less clicking than goes on today. I like the idea (which I conceived, just now) of Starcraft with scripting hooks, so that you're free to automate as much of the game as you like. You could download canned scripts ("StarScripts", I call them) and let your big brain compensate, or climb the (real-life, sort of) "tech tree" by writing fancy-ass, elite scripts. If nothing else, it would silence a lot of crybabies. Ray![/quote] Not that it matters, but, yeah . . . I was reguarly breaking the top 10 in 5,000 player tourneys in Quake at age 17. Made a good bit of pocket money playing 48 hour weekend tourney binges in my senior year of high school. I had terrible aiming and reflexes compared to most of the other people I was playing towards the top but I could scare the fuck out of my opponents 1 on 1 by listening to their patterns and sometimes missing certain items that were 'must-have' on the given pattern I was running. Misdirection + use of sound = appearing from someplace I wasn't supposed to be and surprise the opponent constantly. It broke up a lot of people's rhythm while playing against me and allowed me to compensate for merely decent 'skillz.' There was a sort of strategy to Quake that you could play with quite a bit and really use to fuck with people's heads if you were careful. I'm nowhere near that good now so it's actually more fun. Starcraft, on the other hand, went from an enjoyable RTS to a tug of war in slightly under a couple of months after I found it thanks to the min-maxers. Honestly broke my heart to watch it happen because I knew I was a fairly good player (not great, but I could hold my own) beforehand and I always approached it like chess. That got wiped out quick. --SB[/quote]