Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes

Here’s another exciting post about gaming! I finally gotten tired of Oblivion, by the way. I never actually completed the game, but I got to the part where you have to protect the Emperor’s son from the invading horde in the city while he goes to light the Dragonfires, which I assume is somewhere near the end of the story. I kept getting killed by the invading hordes so I just started wandering aimlessly around the countryside. :) (I had the most success with a Redguard warrior, by the way.)

After that I played Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Painkiller for a while. Painkiller was fun but it’s pretty repetitive. Once you explore all the levels (which I thought were some of the best-designed levels I’ve seen in forever) there’s not much else to do.

Recently I’ve been playing Company of Heroes, which I downloaded from Steam. It’s yet another real-time strategy game, and it has the same basic gameplay as every other RTS game, but it’s got some nifty graphics and sound effects (and a lot of swearing, woo!) I’ve never been a huge fan of RTS games, because I find it sort of frustrating to keep track of all the units and resources on the map, and I usually get creamed by the computer AI, but this one is fun. I expect I’ll get tired of it pretty quickly, though. For one thing, there is a pretty substantial time investment to play it.

One odd thing about Company of Heroes is the juxtaposition of the fun gameplay and the guilt-inducing cut scenes. During the game, it’s great fun to blow up people and watch them go flying through the air, but when you watch the solemn “war is hell” cut scenes, you kind of feel guilty about having so much fun playing a war game.