Did I mention I haven't built a base? While some may be thinking... well, it doesn't sound much like an RTS to me, I can only reply... thank you Relic for removing the tedium out of this genre. I start every 20 minute mission with the same troops, who are now slightly stronger from the last mission, and use tactics, cover and the ever rare retreat to beat my enemy instead of amassing troops for 30 minutes so that I feel confident I can take out the other side. Relic didn't stop pleasing me there though, because they added boss fights to almost every mission and alleviated my other harp against the genre -- that defeating the enemy should be more involved then blowing up some buildings after the enemies are dead.

I can't tell you how freeing this feels. Finally I can enjoy this genre. While I'm still a little slow when it comes to all the key commands, the focus on tactics over units really has me hooked. So much so that I'm going to give World in Conflict a go, which I hear has a similar quick to fight feel.

Now remember when I said there were a few exceptions to my RTS hate? The exceptions all come from Blizzard, specifically Warcraft III and Starcraft, which I spent many of my younger years wasting my days on. Having played through DoW2 I can now only wonder if my experience with Starcraft II will be sullied by this experience. While I know Blizzard will have a great story waiting for me, I don't know if I can suffer building up a base or dealing with 100 units on the screen again. While I hope that's not the case, I also can't imagine how it could be a Starcraft game without those kinds of amassing of units.

In any case, suddenly I'm really excited by RTS games again. If you have any recommendations leave me a comment. I've got World in Conflict and Company of Heroes all queued up.

This week I'm mostly taking those core CSS changes and implementing them throughout the actual HTML on the site. That means I basically go through each and every page on the site and massage the new style into the old templates. It's pretty tedious work, but after having thrown together the original Giant Bomb in only 6 weeks it's nice to have time to spend fully on making the site prettier, instead of worry about functionality. Coonce is helping out as well, helping me out with the backend stuff that I can't do on my own. I'm very excited about everything, so much so that I've been regularly showing up back at the office after dinner to attack more templates. Right now I'm waiting on my local database to rebuild so I figured it'd be a good time for an update.

While I'm doing this Ethan is working on a MAJOR gallery/image management redo. The new stuff is all drag and drop and well... impressive. Basically we're banishing checkboxes from image management and trying to better define galleries and in turn fix a lot of those tools. Those changes will likely make it into the site before mine and will come in handy to some of our bigger image uploaders. Andy is working on some additions to our search functionality and working on requests from the API forums.

Mostly the things I'm most excited about is showcasing the crew downstairs content a little better. I think if you don't check the site everyday you can miss a lot of the funny vids they add to the site daily. Right now we do a pretty poor job at promoting vids, news, guides and user reviews on the game pages. I've reworked those pages the most and it's nice to see VInny's stuff float up better. In general I'm just happy with the way things are actually looking from a cleanliness perspective. I've tried to cut down the length of our pages without losing content. It's not the easiest thing to do, but I've spent a lot more time on font sizing and line heights this time to make things in general more readable.

In any case, that's what I'm up to. I'll likely add some screenshots to this post in a half hour or so when my local database is finished rebuilding. I guess that just leaves me raiding the vinyl collection at the office till the db is built. Right now Jackson Browne's Running on Empty is on.