What did I buy ?  Dawn of War 2: Retirbution. 
 
Well I've been playing XBOX 360 games pretty exclusively for a couple of years now - ever since my PS2 got shoved on the back burner.  I think the last game I played alot on the PC was Battlfield Middle Earth.  The thing is that is one genre that I don't think ever translated to control pad very well - yet I used to be a big player of RTS.  Before my RTS days I used to play Warhammer 40,000 a lot on the table top.  A friend of mine has been commenting about getting back into modelling and painting armies and playing again on Facebook recently.  It brought back fond memories... 
 
So first of all I start looking into what the current rules set is like - and... Ahem - things have changed somewhat. My old armies conisted of a seriously flawed Tyrannid Swarm which I did start to rectify as I was playing the last time I was playing (It had only Tyrannid Warriors, Genesteales, a Lictor a Carnifex and Hive Tyrant in it - The lack of cannon fodder to protect the powerful troops meant it was a bad army.)  The thing is I wasn't a great army builder - the thing is my selections tended to be based largely on what I could actually motivate myself to sit down, model and paint.  After a long discussion with a veteran army builder who owned all the Codex I switched to Space Wolves and we devised a high point/low model count army that might be playable.  I even finished painting the army!  It was Logan Grimnar in Terminator armour with 5 Wolfguards in Terminator armour - all with a powershield and three of them with assault cannons... Then Bjorn the Fell Handed.  Apparently that's no longer a legel army! To top it all after scrambling around in the loft for an hour I couldn't even find te bleeding models anyhow... 
 
So what next? 
 
I look at all the current Codex and think about who I could play - Space Wolves seem still a bit meh!  Eldar not my cup of tea, problems with the Tyrannids are as before, so what Dark Eldar?  Imperial Guard? Then there's the thought of sitting there for hours on end trimming, glueing painting... It's kinda fun to do a few, but when you need to do 40 models most of which are identical it can become irritating... 
 
I read the reviews for the various Warhammer games and Retribution really caught my eye.  It sounded like an online version of the tabeltop war game... 
 
So I downloaded it and had a crack...  
 
So what is it like?  Well it's good, very good... The controls are familiar to any RTS player, the models are beautifully rendered, there's a good selection of armies each with their own campaign and cut scenes.  The available armies are varied, you can choose Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Tyrannids, Eldar or Orks - so something for every taste... I found it a little easy on the first few stages, I'm playing on Normal so maybe it's my decades of RTS playing paying off - I cold try a harder setting, but the levels are well designed in the campaign and interesting... I've yet to try Multiplayer - I suspect that will be the strong point of Retribution. 
 
The thing is though - despite it seeming like a great game, I find it somehow... I don't know 'soul-less' ?  It's almost undefinable, it's a great RTS, but it doesn't give you warm fuzzy feeling you get deep inside, that you get when you've superglued your fingers together, ruined the dining room table with paint and spent an entire Saturday arguing about the minutae of the rules... Or almost having a punch up because some dude basically fields an army and as his tanks are blown up the troops you'd already killed get brought onto the field as reinforcements....  
 
The table top game is great, but it's a lot of frustration, I imagine a lot of this is seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses.  I think I'll play through DoW 2 Retribution and leave my paints and glues in the loft.  Rose tinted memories are sometimes best left as that. 

What did I buy ?  Dawn of War 2: Retirbution. 
 
Well I've been playing XBOX 360 games pretty exclusively for a couple of years now - ever since my PS2 got shoved on the back burner.  I think the last game I played alot on the PC was Battlfield Middle Earth.  The thing is that is one genre that I don't think ever translated to control pad very well - yet I used to be a big player of RTS.  Before my RTS days I used to play Warhammer 40,000 a lot on the table top.  A friend of mine has been commenting about getting back into modelling and painting armies and playing again on Facebook recently.  It brought back fond memories... 
 
So first of all I start looking into what the current rules set is like - and... Ahem - things have changed somewhat. My old armies conisted of a seriously flawed Tyrannid Swarm which I did start to rectify as I was playing the last time I was playing (It had only Tyrannid Warriors, Genesteales, a Lictor a Carnifex and Hive Tyrant in it - The lack of cannon fodder to protect the powerful troops meant it was a bad army.)  The thing is I wasn't a great army builder - the thing is my selections tended to be based largely on what I could actually motivate myself to sit down, model and paint.  After a long discussion with a veteran army builder who owned all the Codex I switched to Space Wolves and we devised a high point/low model count army that might be playable.  I even finished painting the army!  It was Logan Grimnar in Terminator armour with 5 Wolfguards in Terminator armour - all with a powershield and three of them with assault cannons... Then Bjorn the Fell Handed.  Apparently that's no longer a legel army! To top it all after scrambling around in the loft for an hour I couldn't even find te bleeding models anyhow... 
 
So what next? 
 
I look at all the current Codex and think about who I could play - Space Wolves seem still a bit meh!  Eldar not my cup of tea, problems with the Tyrannids are as before, so what Dark Eldar?  Imperial Guard? Then there's the thought of sitting there for hours on end trimming, glueing painting... It's kinda fun to do a few, but when you need to do 40 models most of which are identical it can become irritating... 
 
I read the reviews for the various Warhammer games and Retribution really caught my eye.  It sounded like an online version of the tabeltop war game... 
 
So I downloaded it and had a crack...  
 
So what is it like?  Well it's good, very good... The controls are familiar to any RTS player, the models are beautifully rendered, there's a good selection of armies each with their own campaign and cut scenes.  The available armies are varied, you can choose Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Tyrannids, Eldar or Orks - so something for every taste... I found it a little easy on the first few stages, I'm playing on Normal so maybe it's my decades of RTS playing paying off - I cold try a harder setting, but the levels are well designed in the campaign and interesting... I've yet to try Multiplayer - I suspect that will be the strong point of Retribution. 
 
The thing is though - despite it seeming like a great game, I find it somehow... I don't know 'soul-less' ?  It's almost undefinable, it's a great RTS, but it doesn't give you warm fuzzy feeling you get deep inside, that you get when you've superglued your fingers together, ruined the dining room table with paint and spent an entire Saturday arguing about the minutae of the rules... Or almost having a punch up because some dude basically fields an army and as his tanks are blown up the troops you'd already killed get brought onto the field as reinforcements....  
 
The table top game is great, but it's a lot of frustration, I imagine a lot of this is seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses.  I think I'll play through DoW 2 Retribution and leave my paints and glues in the loft.  Rose tinted memories are sometimes best left as that. 

I remember wanting to have Space Marines but getting swindled into buying a bunch of Eldar off of an acquaintence and getting stuck with those. Nothing wrong with Eldar, and I grew to appreciate them, but I'm pretty sure most of the time I played that game I was playing it wrong, and the kind of money I would have needed to shell out for a proper army would have made me rethink that hobby a lot sooner.  
 
By in large, tabletop gaming was best for me when it was with friends I could argue with in the middle of the night and, you know, beat handily. We played Napoleonics and American Civil War most of the time, but I wound up having more fun with borrowed stuff than I did with my own.  I'm not sure I'd be able to tolerate it as much now, as I'd probably spend most of my time trying to tinker with the rules to make it more streamlined.
 
I wound up being much more into White Dwarf's spaceship battle game Space Fleet before it became Battlefleet Gothic. I really liked their simultaneous movement system.
 
I've not played the new 40K games but I liked the idea that it was based on personalities and small squads. I guess I always wanted that game to be more about individual troopers rather than large armies.

I have a ton of awesome Ork models that I made but never painted. I hate painting so god damned much...But I love modeling...argh!
 
48 grots! I painted 48 Grots! ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Closing in on an Apocalypse sized Space Wolves army myself, but still needs to paint the goddamn majority. Wolf Lord's name is Lulz Dreadpuncher due to his heroics in the field, by punching a chaos dreadnought to death with a single blow, with his power fist.
 
Man, I wish I knew more people who played.

I got into Warhammer 40K because of the first DoW series of games. I thought about entering the tabletop game with a Tau army, but seeing the amount of money I'd have to shell out (let alone the time to assemble and paint the damn things) for the hobby made me shelve that idea. Still, welcome to the Retribution scene.
 
And yes, the multiplayer has been given a bit more focus in Retribution than the storyline, but for what they do have it is interesting.

Re: buying PC games vs. console games... I just realized something today.  I had stopped by Gamestop on my lunch break just to browse.  I went to their new fandangled kiosk thing where you can look at games.  There is NO section for PC games on there when you go to Hot Titles or Browse.  WTF.  No wonder "pc gaming is dying."*