Got a little present for ya

If any of you got that reference in the title, you have suddenly become awesome. Congratulations. xD

The 'Real-Time Strategy' game has only been in existence for 15 years, but it has become one of the most popular genres of all time, second only to First Person Shooters, if my sources are accurate (MMOs get a lot of publicity, but there are simply more good RTS games than MMO. It also helps that several MMOs began as RTS games. :P). You've probably heard a lot about them, you've probably even played some of them. But what do you really know about them?


Age of Empires A-
Commonly reputed to be one of the oldest RTS game series' in history. You battle your way through history by taking control of various armies and beating your oppenents to a pixelated pulp. It's a good game: fairly imaginative, yet reasonably historically accurate (assuming you don't activate any of the cheatcodes this game is full of). However, it has a fairly shallow learning curve, I didn't really have much difficulty beating it at all when I first played it. AoE is a great game to start with, if you're testing the waters to see if you like RTS games.

Battle for Middle Earth A
One of the most widely-known and widely-played RTS series' ever created. Based off of Tolkien's Middle Earth, and inspired somewhat by the movies (more of the former than the latter, thankfully), BfME walks you through various portions of Lord of the Rings history. The first game, I must say, did not impress me that much. The units were rather unimaginative, the base construction format was quite restrictive, and the storyline was simply a rehash of the movies. The second, though, more than made up for the first's blunders. While the main battle system stayed the same, the units, upgrades, and base construction options were redone much more to my satisfaction. And finally, we have the BfME II expansion pack... Rise of the Witch King. This is personally one of my favorite RTS games of all time. It takes you through the Witch King's rise to power (the Witch King, for those of you who don't know, is the Lord of the Nazgul, aka the guy with the spiky helmet in Return of the King). While I don't really like a lot of the Angmarian units, they are certainly more thought-out and well planed than most of the other races in BfME.

Universe at War B+
Universe at War is basically your generic RTS. It starts off with Earth being invaded (like that's never happened in any other games :P) by an advanced alien race called the Hierarchy. The Hierarchy is actually an alliance of several conquering alien races who decided they needed more elbow room, so they invaded the Solar system. Using a combination of biotechnology and plasma weaponry, as well as ships that resemble Covenant technology even more than the concept of the Hierarchy itself does, they attack and pretty much wipe out every country except, you guessed it, America. As the Hierarchy is closing in on the White House, and about to take it, random blue portals appear in the middle of the air and start spitting out robots. These robots, led by a Gundam named Viktor piloted by a girl named Mirabel (ok, so it's not actually a Gundam, but it looks... nevermind), storm across the White House's front lawn and whup some alien patooie. At this point your control switches from the humans to the Novus civilization. Some unspecified number of millenia ago, the Hierarchy destroyed the homeworld of Novus. While all biological life on Novus died, their robots lived on, vowing to fight the Hierarchy in any way they can. The Founder, which definitely does not look like Optimus Prime with capacitors where tires should be, founded the Novus army and found a piece of Novus DNA, from which they cloned Mirabel, the last surviving biological lifeform. Many battles ensue, and eventually your control switches automatically over to the Hierarchy, where you discover that an aging robotic general is becoming discontent with his eternal lot in life. After he was killed on the battlefield, his consciousness was transferred to a robotic shell so he could keep living, and he's getting rather tired of constant war (as would tend to happen after hundreds of years of it). Your first mission with him is to invade Egypt, where one of your walkers (a la War of the Worlds) accidentally shoots a pyramid, which sends out a distress beacon which awakens the last alien race in the game: the Masari. The Masari are basically a race of... race builders. They created the Hierarchy untold eons ago, and the Hierarchy eventually fought and defeated the Masari. The surviving Masari, in their city-ship Atlatea, came to Earth, where they started humanity and acted as our gods for who-knows-how-long. Somehow after sleeping for hundreds of years on the bottom of the Atlantic they can speak our language perfectly with British accents, but that's another story. Anyway, the game itself is interesting, but it's not exactly original intellectual property. Interesting gameplay, well-developed factions... lousy storyline. :P

Empire at War A
Note: I can't comment on the expansion pack (Forces of Corruption) because I haven't played it :P
Empire at War filled pretty much the only game niche that Star Wars hadn't yet touched: RTS. When you start the game, you pick your side (Rebel or Empire), and fight your way from the events leading up to A New Hope through the end of the movie. As the Rebels, you start by following Captain Raymus Antilles (no relation to Wedge Antilles) around, and end by hunting down and blowing up the Death Star (you can wait for it to come to you at Yavin IV, but it'll blow up every other planet in the galaxy first. Believe me, I tried :P). As the Empire, you start by following Darth Vader around, and end by... blowing up every planet in the galaxy (at least those occupied by Rebels). The gameplay and the units are VERY well thought out, they exemplify the individual quirks and strengths of the two factions extraordinarily well. The learning curve is enough to keep you from winning every time on Easy, but it'll always keep victory close enough that you want to keep trying. This game comes to me very highly recommended, and I return it to you the same way.

Command and Conquer A++
Ah, the mother of all RTS'... literally. The first ever RTS was Command and Conquer (the original), made in 1995 by Westwood studios (later absorbed by Electronic Arts). The Brotherhood of Nod wants to take over the world, the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) wants to keep that from happening. Throughout the whole game, the resource they're fighting over is Tiberium, this magic green crystal that's randomly started popping up that can be made into pretty much anything. When Command and Conquer II: Tiberian Sun comes out, things have gotten a bit worse. Tiberium is spreading rapidly, and no one knows how to stop it. Nod wants it to keep going, saying it's the catalyst for the next stage in human evolution, GDI recognizes it as the environmental threat that it is. The leader of Nod, Kane, suddenly comes forth with two aces in the hole: the Tacitus, a magical orb of extraterrestrial origin that tells him how to utilize Tiberium for various military measures, and CABAL, a supercomputer he uses to help run the war. You can probably guess the story; Nod is defeated (again), CABAL turns against Kane (and the rest of humanity, but that's a different story), and the Tacitus is captured by GDI. Fast forward 30 years to Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Tiberium is still spreading, having covered approximately 80% of the Earth's habitable surface in varying densities. Nod rises again, still under Kane, and tries to get the Tacitus (or at least info gleaned from it) back. They succeed and start World War V. While they're fighting, an alien race called the Scrin comes out of nowhere and starts beating on both Nod and GDI. The Scrin initially seeded Earth with Tiberium 50 years ago to terraform (Scrin-form... whatever), and now they're back to finish the job. Whooo. They get beat off, GDI saves the day once again, Nod once again goes into hiding, beaten but not broken. I would say something about the next game, Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, but I don't really know much about it. Ask John Hicks, he's in the beta for it.
As for the gameplay in C&C, it's outstanding. Each game has a different innovative battle system, each one better than the one before it. I don't really have the time or energy to write about each one, so I'll just say you should play it. This game series gets my highest possible recommendation.

That's all I got for now.

Regards,
Spam