T
here is no high quite
like the emasculated
agony of graphics
envy. It was 2007, I
was 16 years old, and
still fully bound to the limitations of
the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the
bedroom. The hand-me-down
laptop whirring on the desk could
barely handle Battlefield 1942, much
less the relentless tempo of speedy
processors dutifully obsoleting the
seventh generation of home
consoles. Still, I voraciously tore
through the games press, reading
up on the mouthwatering vistas
that were enthusiastically
unavailable on a Dualshock,
essentially as a way to torture
myself. The primary object of my
obsession? Supreme Commander.
Gas Powered Games’ watershed RTS
arrived with exactly one selling point;
this thing was a beast, and you should
be jealous if you couldn’t run it. And
so, I binged the 360p E3 preview
footage of Supreme Commander on
my sad, dinky laptop, which seemed
to wheeze and gag at the mere sight
of all of the quicksilver troops
swarming over the skirmish fields. So
close, and yet so far.
It sounds strange now, but there
was a time in the mid-2000s where
every GPU benchmark was set by the
latest round of RTSes – much in the
same way that Sony shows off new
Playstation tech with rain-slicked
Lamborghinis in a sumptuous Gran
Turismo suite. If you grew up almost
exclusively on consoles like I did, you
became accustomed to this beautiful
heartache when the PC class laps
whatever third-party ports emanating
from the family TV. 2007 was the
apex of the cycle. Here I was stuck
with, like, Mercenaries 2 while theadults in the room ran circles around
us with the finely modelled tools of
destruction deployed by Crytek and
Relic. As I soaked up those titanium-
plated mechs and supersonic
bombing runs of the gorgeous
Supreme Commander dystopia, I
made a private pact that should be
familiar to the many other young
men reading this story. Someday, I
too will dump a ton of my hard-
earned income into a top-tier gaming
rig, and then I’ll never be left in the
dust ever again.
It goes without saying that the
Alienware Aurora below my desk is
more than capable of running
Supreme Commander in 2022. This
machine just chewed through Elden
Ring, Battlefield 2042, and Forza
Horizon 5 without a hitch; I put my
money where my mouth was. There
is something darkly satisfying about
returning to a videogame that was
once a GPU showcase after much
time has passed – much in the same
way a crosstown rival relishes theSUPREME COMMANDER
The demanding RTS runs well on modern machines. By Luke Winkie
NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE
February 20, 2007
PUBLISHER
THQDEVELOPER
Gas Powered Games
LINK
bit.ly/3vfgWbJOLD GAMES, NEW PERSPECTIVES
REINSTALL
LEFT: (^) Look at all those
little guys! Adorable.
ABOVE: This is what
peak graphical
performance looks
like. Or what it looked
like in 2007, at least.
RIGHT: (^) The setting is a
thousand year conflict
dubbed The Infinite
War. Take that,
Warhammer 40K.