2009-02-27 Dune 2
by Vasil KolevOne day I might be a chapter in some textbook on psychiatry.
(for example, for my endless modesty)
In the last 8-9 years I played almost no games. Excluding at some points playing through the whole Descent Freespace (which has a good linux port), tetris, one weir period of desktop tower defence and, of course, some multi-player Doom 2 (they don’t make games like this any more… when we played it multi-player with 4 people, on the first half hour the floor couldn’t be seen because of the dead bodies on it).
After which in the last month something came over me, I installed dosbox and played in it warcraft 1 and 2 (human campaigns, orcs aren’t that interesting to me). The games were nice, but then I installed Dune 2 and decided to play it on the big machine (which is core i7), so it would play better under the dosbox…
(this is ridiculous. I need a machine that’s magnutudes faster that the one I used in the old times to play the game without getting glitches in the music. I’ll finally dig up a sound card from somewhere and will run the old zadnik.org (which is an ex-doom, e.g. one of my old workstations) for stuff like this)
Dune 2 is a great game. Might be old, 320×200 only, not have control on more that one unit at a time or or contextual right-click, etc., but has a gameplay that gets to you, incredible soundtrack (by Frank Klepacki and Dwight Okahara, I downloaded it last night), story and a lot of small nice details (like how some of the trammel units leave trails in the sand). Also the units don’t suffer from excessive intellect (unlike warcraft 2, which have the ability to get directly in the middle of the other side’s army).
The other thing better in Dune 2 are the dreams I have afterwards. While playing something else for a long time I also have some (well, not like the hallucinations I had in school after two days playing Descent), but the stuff I dreamed last night was just wonderful (including how the boss of the of the other side was a vulture, which I was strangling at the end). Tonight I intend to finish it and try it with another house (I’m playing Atreides right now).
(interesting moment, in Dune 2 it’s far harder to use the economic attack tactics, e.g. to leave the other side without access to money, because of the way the spice is distributed and how the harvesters are carried around)