I sat down today for a nice long session of Dune 2000 on the PC, something I haven’t played in about a year. Didn’t get online or anything, just played a local multiplayer skirmish against several computer opponents and maxed out everyone’s budget and tech and went at it for a while. With a twist. I love the music from Dune 2000, but I tend to play long, drawn out ground battles of bloody attrition…and the 11 or 12 tracks of music tend to start looping after a while. So I turned off the in-game music and loaded up Winamp with a huge playlist of appropriate soundtracks, but nothing blazingly obvious (i.e. anything with, say, the Star Wars or various Star Trek themes), set Winamp going and alt-tabbed back to the game. The effect was impressive – there were a few times where the music really seemed to dovetail almost scarily with what was going on with the game. When the “Sub Chase” music from The Abyss soundtrack kicked in, I thought, “Wow, somebody’s in trouble.” Turns out I was in trouble! They were in my base, killin’ my dudes! (Eerily enough, as I was in their base, killin’ their dudes, and effectively wiping one of my three enemies off the map, something operatic came up and had the same effect as, oh, say, Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”) I began setting up my usual endgame – and this also works in multiplayer, so pay attention – of setting up a second base on a land mass near the most powerful enemy’s base, building a repair pad there, and then airlifting a ton of tanks and other mobile units there fresh off the factory floor. Now, none of them really need repairs, but airlifting the lot of them to that repair pad puts your tanks on the enemy’s doorstep before they have time to get a massive ground defense rolling back into your path. (Better yet, while all this is going on, it’s a grand idea to sneak an engineer into their base and take over their repair pad, so you can start airlifting mobile units right into Grand Central Station.) Sadly, my buffer runneth under shortly thereafter, so that battle was forfeited – I guess the game plus Winamp may have been asking a little too much of the machine. I’m definitely going to give it another try though.
I’d really forgotten how much I love that game. I still think it’s the pinnacle of RTS design and playability. (Just keep in mind, the same folks, now under a different name, are making Star Wars: Empire At War.)
I sat down today for a nice long session of Dune 2000 on the PC, something I haven’t played in about a year. Didn’t get online or anything, just played a local multiplayer skirmish against several computer opponents and maxed out everyone’s budget and tech and went at it for a while. With a twist. I love the music from Dune 2000, but I tend to play long, drawn out ground battles of bloody attrition…and the 11 or 12 tracks of music tend to start looping after a while. So I turned off the in-game music and loaded up Winamp with a huge playlist of appropriate soundtracks, but nothing blazingly obvious (i.e. anything with, say, the Star Wars or various Star Trek themes), set Winamp going and alt-tabbed back to the game. The effect was impressive – there were a few times where the music really seemed to dovetail almost scarily with what was going on with the game. When the “Sub Chase” music from The Abyss soundtrack kicked in, I thought, “Wow, somebody’s in trouble.” Turns out I was in trouble! They were in my base, killin’ my dudes! (Eerily enough, as I was in their base, killin’ their dudes, and effectively wiping one of my three enemies off the map, something operatic came up and had the same effect as, oh, say, Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”) I began setting up my usual endgame – and this also works in multiplayer, so pay attention – of setting up a second base on a land mass near the most powerful enemy’s base, building a repair pad there, and then airlifting a ton of tanks and other mobile units there fresh off the factory floor. Now, none of them really need repairs, but airlifting the lot of them to that repair pad puts your tanks on the enemy’s doorstep before they have time to get a massive ground defense rolling back into your path. (Better yet, while all this is going on, it’s a grand idea to sneak an engineer into their base and take over their repair pad, so you can start airlifting mobile units right into Grand Central Station.) Sadly, my buffer runneth under shortly thereafter, so that battle was forfeited – I guess the game plus Winamp may have been asking a little too much of the machine. I’m definitely going to give it another try though.
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