guardrails as I was trying to produce
a legion of Mutalisks in various
harebrained StarCraft schemes. Gas
Powered Games was entirely
disinterested in beating around the
bush, and instead allowed players to
prioritise whatever warfighters they
want so long as the energy ratio is
pointing up. Perhaps that’s why
there’s still a small, dedicated
Supreme Commander community
crashing into each other on the
desiccated servers. I became
absolutely terrified to play them the
deeper I got into the campaigns.
There are so many bizarre strategic
curveballs in this game, and that has
undoubtedly consolidated into an
abstruse meta that would leave me
pantless and sobbing against even the
most casual opponents. You really
can build anything, which means you
need to be scared of everything.CAMPAIGN TRIP
That was fine with me though,
because it’s been years – maybe even
decades! – since I sat down with an
old-fashioned RTS solo story. You
know what I’m talking about;
disembodied voices hovering over
NPC megabases, a foreboding
mission timer in the corner of the
HUD counting down to a game-losing assault, the developers
desperately squeezing any potential
varietal out of what will always be a
fairly straightforward premise.
(Destroy the enemies halfway
around the map. Leave no survivors.
Prepare for a crippling
counterattack.) It all took me back to
a happier place. In one level I was
supposed to use an air transport to
hoist a crucial unit over some distant
mountains that bracketed the map
into two theatres. First though, I
needed to rout the mobile anti-air
cannons patrolling the no-man’s
land. Out came the tanks, blasting
through the heavy steel, avenging all
of my doomed pilots. That’s the
sweet spot for me: an RTS objective
that doubles as a weird, rock-paper-
scissors logic puzzle. If it’s been a
while since you’ve indulged in that
erstwhile gaming pleasure, then I
highly suggest coming home to
Supreme Commander.
Honestly, that was my primary
takeaway from the game, as it slowlymorphed from an artefact of GPU
lore to, well, an ordinary piece of
outmoded software. This industry is
cruel to its ancestors, especially
those that once annihilated the
motherboards of yore. In fact, I’d
reckon that most people’s
relationship with Supreme
Commander was one of
inaccessibility – a faint idea of
wondrous gaming superiority,
something to flaunt over the plebs.
All of that macho posturing has
gracefully evaporated, leaving
behind a very good RTS with a lot of
neat systems, coming off more like
an underdog indie project rather
than the harbinger for a new era of
PC engineering. In 2022 Supreme
Commander is ugly, janky, and
hopelessly out of step with
modernity, but at least the giant
robots explode in a nuclear fireball
when they’re killed. It was awe-
inspiring in 2007, and now comes off
kind of quaint – videogames in its
primal adolescent period. Surely it is
only a matter of time before another
high-budget opus laps whatever I’ve
got simmering under the hood,
provoking a stressful search for a
few extra gigs of RAM. That trick
will keep working on me forever,
and I’m all the happier for it.YOU CAN BUILD ANYTHING,
WHICH MEANS YOU NEED TO
BE SCARED OF EVERYTHINGEXTRA LIFE
NOW PLAYING I UPDATE I MOD SPOTLIGHT I HOW TO I DIARY I WHY I LOVE I REINSTALL (^) I M U S T P L A Y
Caption about the
iymage goes in
here
ABOVE: (^) Maybe that’s
just what ground
looks like after a
thousand years of
warfare.
RIGHT: (^) The sheer
scale is still pretty
cool to behold.