Quick Look: 8-Bit Armies

Worst nuke ever lol.

So, I don't want all RTS games to be C&C clones from now on, but I got incredibly tired of the Blizzard model that got prevalent from around 1999 and onwards, and which seemingly also created an insurmountable fence around the genre, pretty much only making it an e-sports thing which few who weren't into super-competitive stuff could get into, which in the end also pretty much killed the genre for close to a decade.

All I want is that at least a few developers go back to when the genre was enjoyable to a large chunk of the (PC) audience and find a new direction to go from there, and I think Petroglyph could potentially do that.

in his 8-bit sleevies?

"I'm feeling confident"

We've all felt that way in an RTS, Dan... and then you die. Your new name is icarus.

weren't voxels supposed to be the future of 3d graphics and not a funny looking gimmick?

To be fair, we're reaching a point where "what's old is new again". Thanks to everything under the goddamn sun having to be balanced around being an "e-sport!", finding an RTS in the C&C style is damn near impossible.

I don't think there's anything wrong with re-visiting nostalgia like this as long as it is very honest for what it is doing, and isn't trying to sell it for an egregious amount of money. Obviously I wouldn't want EVERYONE to start doing this, but I don't know of any other C&C clones out there right now, so I guess it seems fine? Correct me if I'm wrong.

I do think that focusing on the e-sports angle is always a weird choice. It's an incredibly small percentage of players that ever take the multiplayer of an RTS or fighting game very seriously, so while I think they should put effort in to make it reasonably balanced and well conceived, the gaming audience really only supports maybe like a dozen competitive multiplayer games that actually have a sizeable player base and audience.

StarCraft 2 being hyper competitive helped make it more popular than RTS may have every been. The social nature of MOBAs and their focus on team based cooperation is what killed the game/genre. Another Universe where League of Legends never came out would've left SC2/RTS on top of the world.

Also seeing a sort-of "back to basics" for a genre that died more suddenly than any in recent memory is a far cry from an industry self-cannibalizing its way to irrelevance. MOBA destroyed RTS, any glimmer of life left in the genre is enough to get me hopeful.

"I think he out Ryckert'd you." Classic outcome to a Dan scheme.

@williamflattener: I was mostly joking, it's something Austin is fond of saying. I'm not going to pick a fight with a bona fide linguist, haha!

Green on Green, bit hard to see some units compared to the landscape at times but neat overall.

I am laughing so hard this video is a gold mine when Dan thinks he has it all going and rolls out of his base it is all laughs after that

Don't quote Internet memes in your video game. It doesn't matter if they're used ironically; it doesn't matter if they're really old ones; it doesn't matter if they are originally from poor translations of other video games; it's always a bad idea.

@steveurkel:Hahaha totally! I knew something was up when no-one else was attacking, Dan didn't scout at all unfortunately

A quick trip to twitch.tv, xbox live, or a few matches of just about any moba will quickly change your opinion on that matter.

@backstabuuu: I simply meant it's a dumb thing to get hung up on; but I deserve the reproach for using unnecessarily hyperbolic language.

Total Annihilation is still playable today or grab something like https://springrts.com/ with Balanced Annihilation or Zero K for a similar feel.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being excited about a game like this, even if it's mostly just a nostalgia trip. It looks fun enough and this style of RTS has more or less disappeared off the face of the earth. That said, I don't particularly care for the way this looks and would probably rather just play the actual C&C games, which I have woefully low experience with.

The 8-bit thing is dumb. And I AM going to get hung up on it.

8-bit has a meaning. It is 8 binary bits. It is not a term you can throw around to mean whatever you want. It has a literal, technical, definition.

So happy to see a new C&C styled RTS getting released in this day and age.

@hatking: Honestly, I don't really understand the sentiment of "video games are fucked".

The reason that Dan and Drew were so excited about this game being so similar to games of yore is because those games were amazing, and clearly the duo had spent a lot of time with those games. I don't think that a game replicating the style and mechanics of a video game series which has long been dead is necessarily a bad thing.

Red Alert came out in '96, with Red Alert 2 four years later in 2000. That is two decades ago and sixteen years ago respectively. Trying to get these games to run properly on a modern machine is going to be a head-ache to say the least, and I think it is fair to say that games which have replicated that style are few and far between.

Yes, we all want every game to be unique and creative in it's own right, and the idea of repetition in the industry is a very big worry, especially with remasters and the likes becoming so popular, but I personally think that games like this are exactly the type of tribute to the games of old that we need. No one makes games like these anymore, and accessing any of those old amazing Command & Conquer titles is super hard.

I recently tried to install and boot up Tiberian Sun on my PC, and it would barely run. The experience was such a head-ache and so far removed from what I remember when I was five, six years old that it is often not even worth trying to revisit these titles. Games like the one this video is about help people like Dan, Drew and I relive those old, classic RTS experiences, albeit with a different art-style and tone.

They're used for some amazing fluid/gas effects work in film so my guess is the amount of particles needed for that stuff is too complex for real-time rendering in games currently.

I'll say there were numerous voxel based games in the late 90's that did way cooler things with it than 8-bit Armies does. That includes Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 which used a combination of sprite and voxel graphics (buildings and infantry were sprites, all vehicles were voxel based), with pretty detailed graphics and lighting.

Bioware's debut game Shattered Steel from 1996 used voxels to create landscapes with destructible terrain, and the tech still looks fairly impressive today, I think.

Novalogic were the masters of voxel graphics, managing to get detailed landscapes with reflective water in Comanche in 1993, and they used the same tech in the Delta Force series.

Some of the BUILD engine games also used voxel graphics for furniture and stuff like that, Blood was a pretty noteworthy example.

@yellownumber5 said:

It's understandable that through smart iteration and a bigger budget (marketing included) Command & Conquer (and Warcraft 2) made the big leap for the RTS genre in the mid 90s, but I agree that it's somewhat unfortunate that Dune II doesn't get a mention often enough in these discussion since, in my opinion, it's the most influential game among the genre overall by doing it first and doing it well. It's certainly one of the earliest games I actually remember playing as a 7-year-old on a 286, and the reason why I became enamored with the genre, and gaming overall, in the first place.

@rossco81: I think this sort of ties into what I was saying in a different comment. I think we have a very serious 'latest and greatest' problem in the industry. It's awesome that new things are coming out, and I want there to be more. But the weird abandoner mindset that results in games becoming unplayable by any legals means is pretty insane. It's ridiculously prevalent among games that are considered classics, and that's a thing that doesn't really exist in any other medium. Sure, there are films that are rare and records that carry high price tags, but they're typically niche items that only super fans and collectors chase, not pieces that some might consider integral to a medium's vocabulary. In video games pretty much anything before 2001 is going to be some sort of headache to play--heck, without the right equipment anything before 2013 might be problematic. I guess where I diverge is that I don't think the solution should be to remake those fundamental ideas over and over again in an effort of preservation, but rather to actually make those older significant projects more accessible and widely available. It's ridiculous that watching Citizen Kane would be as easy as a trip to the library or a search on Hulu, but playing Earthbound in its original state, up until 2013, would've costed a pretty penny and a bit of luck.

Yeah, they made original games because pretty much every game made then was original, because there weren't that many games out in total.

I could care less about calling retro style games the correct number of "bits". If the thing was actually held back to be identical to what would have run on an 8-bit or 16-bit system, nobody would even give it a second look.

However, I hate those guys who make the "8-bit version of such and such popular movie", because they always look drawn and styled exactly around genesis or SNES era games, so there the misnomer bothers me more.

THAT'S NOT EIGHT BITS

Honestly the biggest problem with this game is the lack of unit voice lines so memorable that they're still burned into your brain 20 years later

(Yes, I understand they don't have the money for that. That was just part of the charm of the C&C series, that's all.)

@rossco81: Origin sells all 17 games in the C&C series for like £25. Was your problem with a disc install or something? I replayed Tiberian Sun a few months ago on a new windows 10 machine and have played on windows 7 before also, so I don't think the games should theoretically be hard to access.

The reason its called 8 Bit Army, is the allure of alliteration, although it's not alliteration.. eh..SHUT UP!

"You're being attacked"

"No I'm not."

I don't know why but this made me laugh pretty well.

gettin real tired of the use of the phrase "8-bit" on the steam store.

This is actually a good game though, I would have completely ignored it if it wasn't for this Quick Look.

@existence: I was just excited to see those words on this website! I'm the only descriptivist party-pooper I know so I'm always glad to see this stuff in the wild. Cheers. :)

The Blizzard model worked because it advanced the genre and created (for practically the first time) balanced gameplay in a genre that was noted for being heinously unbalanced for the majority of the time.

What you're suggesting is actually literally what killed the genre, stagnation, C&C clones, RTS games that had no real interesting deviation when it came to resource models or unit control, or base building or management.

In fact, the only real RTS games that deviated from the incredibly stagnant model of the 90's are titles like Company of Heroes which encouraged more fine micromanagement and focus on logistics and made resource control a significantly more central and interesting proposition.

Games like Grey Goo, 8 Bit Armies, Act of Aggression, the new Homeworld, all miss the point, we absolutely DO NOT need RTS games like they used to be, RTS games being too much like what they used to be is the biggest fucking issue, almost all of them are some incredibly shallow knock-offs of either Starcraft, Age of Empires, or C&C, those are the repeating models you CONSTANTLY see in new RTS games, with the rare ones emulating Total Annihilation.

And what does the genre have to show for it? Boring games that play exactly like games from twenty years ago with better production values and improved ease of use.

There's no innovation, we need wildly different RTS games that actually take the genre in new directions instead of constantly dwelling on the past.

I feel like an old man and an asshole simultaneously for saying this but that "A winner is you" comment actually stopped me from buying this game. I don't know if it just feels lazy to me, or out of touch, but it rubs me the wrong way so hard I have a hard time caring about the game itself.

I just have to say, the soundtrack is rad and Frank Klepacki is still killin' it. Some real good C&C vibes.

dan is very good at this game lol

Wish Drew was still at GB so he and Ryckert could do a C&C playthrough.