Thande
Donor
Well, I'm doing control runs, but the purpose of it all is hopefully to find that solutions of my self-assembling supramolecular nanotubes are more viscous than those of isolated monomer.
So yeah.
Cronus Invictus: An Alternate Console Wars (Something a bit different)
- Thread starter Thande
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Well, I'm doing control runs, but the purpose of it all is hopefully to find that solutions of my self-assembling supramolecular nanotubes are more viscous than those of isolated monomer.
So yeah.
Well at least all that makes sense (basically a bigger nanotube being compared to its individual components in layman's terms, correct?). I have to backup a bunch of data and the idiot who set it up must've patterned it on swing dancing.
I have a few questions to ask, looking at the History of Video Gaming Timeline I have:
-Would "Super Mario Broters: The Movie" still be made?
-Again, Zelda voice acting. Would it be implemented TTL without the hilariously bad acting and dialouge from the CDi games.
-Would Gunpei Yokoi still be killed in a car crash?
-How's Sierra doing as a company?
-Does AOL still exist?
-Who was Jack the Ripper?
I'd like to see the answers to most of these questions soon, since 1996 is the year I started gaming, too (Ah, Caesar II. Such memories)
-Would "Super Mario Broters: The Movie" still be made?
-Again, Zelda voice acting. Would it be implemented TTL without the hilariously bad acting and dialouge from the CDi games.
-Would Gunpei Yokoi still be killed in a car crash?
-How's Sierra doing as a company?
-Does AOL still exist?
-Who was Jack the Ripper?
I'd like to see the answers to most of these questions soon, since 1996 is the year I started gaming, too (Ah, Caesar II. Such memories)
Thande
Donor
1996:
The success of 32-bit, CD-based gaming systems running 3D or partially 3D games had largely annihilated the initial CD game genre of FMV adventure games - the poor quality of many of the latter also being a contributing factor, of course. However, 1996 saw the last, belated hurrah of the genre with the release of Ripper by TakeTwo Interactive - a futuristic retelling of the Jack the Ripper legend with a star-studded cast including Christopher Walken and John Rhys-Davies - and Phantasmagoria II: The Threshold Conundrum, a successor to the original Phantasmagoria unrelated save in its horror themes.[1] While FMV was too far gone to resuscitate by this point, these two games had a considerable influence on future developments. Initially both developed for the PC, they were later ported to most of the CD-based consoles, which by this point meant most consoles full stop.[2]
"Dis game...it is un-FUCKING-believable!"
Like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom before it, a game came along this year which redefined the first-person shooter: Duke Nukem 3D, the third game in a previously unremarkable (2D) series. Again like Doom, the game became popular and influential as much because of controversy over its content (violence and misogyny in this case) as its actual groundbreaking gameplay. Duke Nukem was released for PC and ported to the NEC Futura and Sega Radical/Jupiter, with the former port being fairly faithful and the Sega version being criticised for inferior graphics and somewhat broken controls. Nintendo wisely saved its own port for its upcoming 64-bit console "Project Reality", announced earlier in the year: the Ultra Famicom, or Ultra Nintendo Entertainment System.[3]
Duke Nukem 3D
While the Japanese core companies of both Sega and Nintendo had practically forgotten cartridge media by this point, new SNES and Mega Drive games were still being produced by their American subsidiaries (and European in the case of Sega) as well as third-party companies. Sega of Europe enjoyed another success with two more adaptations of Sonic the Comic stories: Sonic: Rise of the Cybernik and Shinobi vs. the Four Elements, the latter being their first non-Sonic release, while Sega of America released Sonic's Adventures on an oversized cartridge, reflecting the fact that the game interspersed traditional platforming action with RPG elements and a meatier storyline even more so than its British rivals. Nintendo of America, responding to this, published Mario vs. Donkey Kong,[4] which received general acclaim from critics but was sometimes considered too much like an inferior port of Super Mario CD to the vanilla SNES. In any case, the companies' leadership were still eager to abandon cartridges and remained nonplussed at the enduring popularity of their 16-bit consoles. In one well-publicised case (particularly within the industry), a Sega of Europe executive faxed a letter written in to STC by one young fan who praised their recent tie-in Mega Drive releases, but was disappointed that there wasn't a Master System port.[5]
None of this really altered company policy much - production of the Mega Drive and SNES both ceased this year, except through subsidiary companies, but it was decided that production of the integrated PlayStation and Jupiter would continue, allowing cartridge media to continue in use. Both Nintendo and Sega underwent something of a reassessment of their core values in response to stories like the above: previously, based on their reading of the Great Videogame Crash of 1983 and how it had destroyed Atari's fortunes, they had assumed that producing videogames was like chasing rainbows, you always had to stay one step ahead of the easily distracted kids and keep waving new flashy things in front of them. The enduring popularity of the older consoles[6] forced them to consider that, while there was still a lot of truth in that for the mainstream audience, their devoted fanbases might disagree. This has been compared to the end of the Silver Age in comic book history, with the end of recycling stories every three years due to the realisation that their audience was not solely composed of kids who'd lost interest by a few years later. Continuity references had always been present in the great franchises such as Mario, but had more usually been for the benefit of the developers as in-jokes than for the player. This cultural shift took a while to become established. For the moment, however, neither Nintendo nor Sega would contemplate new handheld consoles, as for the moment media would have to be cartridge-based (technology not yet being feasible to use disc-based media in handhelds) and both feared the association with what they saw as a storage media of the past.[7] Nintendo's Game Boy remained particularly competitive due to its low price, however, and was revitalised this year by the release of Microbeasts (later retroactively subtitled Microbeasts: Earth), a revolutionary RPG involving collecting the titular beasts and having them do combat.
Ironically it would be Atari, the company to begin the CD craze, that would ignore these fears and release their first commercially successful handheld, the 16-bit, cartridge-based Puma, this year. The Puma was released just one month before Atari's new Microsoft-backed CD console, the Leopard, in August. The Leopard was the first 64-bit console on the market and corrected many of the problems with the Cougar such as its lack of any rewritable memory which had made saving games impossible (at least until an awkward expansion pack peripheral had been developed). The Leopard had memory card slots, like the Japanese 32-bit CD consoles, but at Microsoft's insistence also had a small hard disk to reduce loading times. This drove up the price slightly, but the Leopard still sold well for a variety of reasons. Firstly, its marketing was well handled, and secondly Microsoft's Windows 4.0-fuelled wealth served to produce and buy up several exclusive franchises.Terminal Reality, which was closely tied to Microsoft, released Fury3 X as a launch title with the Leopard. This was essentially a graphically enhanced version of the successful Windows 4.0 shooter Fury3, with additional missions added also. The Leopard's controller, designed around two analogue sticks (movement and camera), was ideally suited for such games and continued the tradition started by the Cougar. The sequel, Hellbender, was released later in the year for both Windows and the Leopard, but the console version was generally considered to be superior.
Fury3 (Windows version)
Microsoft itself produced Hover Racing, derived from Hover!, a short game that had been packaged with Windows 4.0 and had been intended to show off its graphics capabilities.[8] Finally, in one of its greatest coups, Microsoft was able to secure an exclusive console release (though the game still came out on PC) for Tomb Raider through its purchase of a controlling share in the British developer Core Design. The hybrid puzzle/action game proved a killer app for the Leopard, with Mexican-American protagonist Luis Cruz becoming virtually the face of the Leopard.[9]
Meanwhile in Japan, Nintendo had become dissatisfied with its awkward relationship with Sony and was eager to disengage to prevent the possibility of Sony holding it hostage over hardware in the UNES. A new agreement was signed by which Sony would sign over the rights to its contributions to the hardware in exchange for various concessions towards games it would produce for the system. Quite large concessions, but all the same Sony seemed to give in rather easily. Suspiciously easily...
Sega prepared a launch lineup for its new console, which it had decided to call the Saturn in all regions, using the project name as with the Jupiter. The emphasis would be on 3D platformers, with Sonic X-Treme at the head.[10] Rareware was called upon once more to show off the console's 64-bit hardware. The Ecco franchise was returned solely to Novotrade, but Rareware kept Flicky and produced Flicky: The Quest For The Golden Eggs. Around this time, Sega also reviewed its troubled Sonic 3D project. The game had been overtaken by the brief 3D sequences in Sonic Rad and it was decided that its slow gameplay style was unsuited to a flagship Sonic game. Instead it was reworked, with the decision being given to give some love to one of Sega's more neglected franchises, and was eventually released for both Saturn and Jupiter as Alex Kidd in Flickies' World (the game focusing on retrieving Flickies).[11] Because of this crossover, the Alex Kidd franchise was also given to Rareware and they began to develop a fully 3D Saturn game based on it. This was the first game to use Sega's innovation of releasing double-sided CDs, with the Jupiter version encoded on one side and the Saturn version on the other (coloured blue as a gimmick, like all other Saturn discs). This helped get around the problem that backward compatibility proved impossible to integrate (as Nintendo and Atari also found) due to the difficulty of emulating the older 32-bit systems, what with their construction having come in fits and starts meaning they were overly complex.
This year also saw Rareware's magnum opus released on the Jupiter, although by that point Saturn hype meant it was almost eclipsed. Dreamlight was a resurrection of the adventure games of old, starring the boy Edison and his friends in conflict with the pirate villain Captain Blackeye.[12] The game stretched the Jupiter hardware to the limit and was soon ported to the Saturn after its release, with Rareware immediately beginning work on a sequel.
Both the Saturn and UNES had a Christmas release in all regions. The UNES' main release lineup consisted of Ultra Mario Bros., a 3D shakeup of the Mario formula[13] along with Sony's fellow 3D platformer Crash Bandicoot and the enormously successful action RPG Diablo from S&S. The Saturn had Sonic X-Treme, Flicky: Golden Eggs and Westwood's Command and Conquer: Red Alert, an influential prequel to C&C whose original storyline introduced Alternate History to the masses.[14] Nintendo asked S&S to step up development on its own strategy game ideas to stay competitive.
NEC, on the other hand, continued along with its 32-bit Futura, the last and most capable of all the 32-bit consoles, going for the economy and portability market rather than trying for a 64-bit console. It also released the TurboExpress II, a more compact version of its earlier portable, which seized a sizeable portion of the Japanese market due to Nintendo and Sega's failure to compete although it generally lost to Atari's Puma in America. Little did the company know of the approach that would be made to them before long...
[1] This game is somewhat different to OTL's Phantasmagoria II, and rather better.
[2] They are ported to both the 32-bit and 64-bit consoles, though the graphics are basically the same in this case.
[3] The N64 was initially called the Ultra Famicom in Japan and the Ultra N64 in America in OTL, with this later being changed. In TTL the WarpStryke 128 fiasco, even more than the Jaguar in OTL, has discredited the idea of selling a console based on its 'bittage' so Nintendo doesn't do this. It also helps that Nintendo is going up against other 64-bit consoles and wants to create more of a continuity with the NES and SNES.
[4] No relation to the later OTL game by that title.
[5] Based on a true story (as witnessed by yours truly many years ago). Although in that case of course it wasn't about a game produced by Sega of Europe themselves of course. In any case, at the time the Master System still seemed to evoke more enthusiasm than the Saturn...
[6] This was mainly true of the SNES in OTL well after the N64 was released. In TTL Sega doesn't cut support for its pre-Saturn consoles out of one of its transoceanic spats so the same is true of the Mega Drive.
[7] In OTL at this point Sega had released the Nomad and Nintendo would release the Game Boy Advance a few years later, both 16-bit cartridge-based handhelds.
[8] As with Windows 95 in OTL.
[9] Based on earlier plans for the game, which had been in on-again off-again development since 1993; the decision to make the protagonist female didn't come for quite a while.
[10] Sonic X-Treme in OTL was cancelled, resulting in the somewhat absurd situation of the Saturn never having a proper Sonic game.
[11] Thus Sega dodges the major bullet of the execrable Sonic 3D Flickies' Island/Blast.
[12] This is based on the original concept for what became Banjo-Kazooie, originally planned for the SNES in OTL.
[13] Somewhat like Super Mario 64, except actually a bit more conventional, and with more voice acting and textures due to the CD media. Oh, and playable Luigi.
[14] TTL's version of Red Alert has better graphics than OTL's and is less obviously at roots a mod of C&C.
The success of 32-bit, CD-based gaming systems running 3D or partially 3D games had largely annihilated the initial CD game genre of FMV adventure games - the poor quality of many of the latter also being a contributing factor, of course. However, 1996 saw the last, belated hurrah of the genre with the release of Ripper by TakeTwo Interactive - a futuristic retelling of the Jack the Ripper legend with a star-studded cast including Christopher Walken and John Rhys-Davies - and Phantasmagoria II: The Threshold Conundrum, a successor to the original Phantasmagoria unrelated save in its horror themes.[1] While FMV was too far gone to resuscitate by this point, these two games had a considerable influence on future developments. Initially both developed for the PC, they were later ported to most of the CD-based consoles, which by this point meant most consoles full stop.[2]
"Dis game...it is un-FUCKING-believable!"
Like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom before it, a game came along this year which redefined the first-person shooter: Duke Nukem 3D, the third game in a previously unremarkable (2D) series. Again like Doom, the game became popular and influential as much because of controversy over its content (violence and misogyny in this case) as its actual groundbreaking gameplay. Duke Nukem was released for PC and ported to the NEC Futura and Sega Radical/Jupiter, with the former port being fairly faithful and the Sega version being criticised for inferior graphics and somewhat broken controls. Nintendo wisely saved its own port for its upcoming 64-bit console "Project Reality", announced earlier in the year: the Ultra Famicom, or Ultra Nintendo Entertainment System.[3]
Duke Nukem 3D
While the Japanese core companies of both Sega and Nintendo had practically forgotten cartridge media by this point, new SNES and Mega Drive games were still being produced by their American subsidiaries (and European in the case of Sega) as well as third-party companies. Sega of Europe enjoyed another success with two more adaptations of Sonic the Comic stories: Sonic: Rise of the Cybernik and Shinobi vs. the Four Elements, the latter being their first non-Sonic release, while Sega of America released Sonic's Adventures on an oversized cartridge, reflecting the fact that the game interspersed traditional platforming action with RPG elements and a meatier storyline even more so than its British rivals. Nintendo of America, responding to this, published Mario vs. Donkey Kong,[4] which received general acclaim from critics but was sometimes considered too much like an inferior port of Super Mario CD to the vanilla SNES. In any case, the companies' leadership were still eager to abandon cartridges and remained nonplussed at the enduring popularity of their 16-bit consoles. In one well-publicised case (particularly within the industry), a Sega of Europe executive faxed a letter written in to STC by one young fan who praised their recent tie-in Mega Drive releases, but was disappointed that there wasn't a Master System port.[5]
None of this really altered company policy much - production of the Mega Drive and SNES both ceased this year, except through subsidiary companies, but it was decided that production of the integrated PlayStation and Jupiter would continue, allowing cartridge media to continue in use. Both Nintendo and Sega underwent something of a reassessment of their core values in response to stories like the above: previously, based on their reading of the Great Videogame Crash of 1983 and how it had destroyed Atari's fortunes, they had assumed that producing videogames was like chasing rainbows, you always had to stay one step ahead of the easily distracted kids and keep waving new flashy things in front of them. The enduring popularity of the older consoles[6] forced them to consider that, while there was still a lot of truth in that for the mainstream audience, their devoted fanbases might disagree. This has been compared to the end of the Silver Age in comic book history, with the end of recycling stories every three years due to the realisation that their audience was not solely composed of kids who'd lost interest by a few years later. Continuity references had always been present in the great franchises such as Mario, but had more usually been for the benefit of the developers as in-jokes than for the player. This cultural shift took a while to become established. For the moment, however, neither Nintendo nor Sega would contemplate new handheld consoles, as for the moment media would have to be cartridge-based (technology not yet being feasible to use disc-based media in handhelds) and both feared the association with what they saw as a storage media of the past.[7] Nintendo's Game Boy remained particularly competitive due to its low price, however, and was revitalised this year by the release of Microbeasts (later retroactively subtitled Microbeasts: Earth), a revolutionary RPG involving collecting the titular beasts and having them do combat.
Ironically it would be Atari, the company to begin the CD craze, that would ignore these fears and release their first commercially successful handheld, the 16-bit, cartridge-based Puma, this year. The Puma was released just one month before Atari's new Microsoft-backed CD console, the Leopard, in August. The Leopard was the first 64-bit console on the market and corrected many of the problems with the Cougar such as its lack of any rewritable memory which had made saving games impossible (at least until an awkward expansion pack peripheral had been developed). The Leopard had memory card slots, like the Japanese 32-bit CD consoles, but at Microsoft's insistence also had a small hard disk to reduce loading times. This drove up the price slightly, but the Leopard still sold well for a variety of reasons. Firstly, its marketing was well handled, and secondly Microsoft's Windows 4.0-fuelled wealth served to produce and buy up several exclusive franchises.Terminal Reality, which was closely tied to Microsoft, released Fury3 X as a launch title with the Leopard. This was essentially a graphically enhanced version of the successful Windows 4.0 shooter Fury3, with additional missions added also. The Leopard's controller, designed around two analogue sticks (movement and camera), was ideally suited for such games and continued the tradition started by the Cougar. The sequel, Hellbender, was released later in the year for both Windows and the Leopard, but the console version was generally considered to be superior.
Fury3 (Windows version)
Microsoft itself produced Hover Racing, derived from Hover!, a short game that had been packaged with Windows 4.0 and had been intended to show off its graphics capabilities.[8] Finally, in one of its greatest coups, Microsoft was able to secure an exclusive console release (though the game still came out on PC) for Tomb Raider through its purchase of a controlling share in the British developer Core Design. The hybrid puzzle/action game proved a killer app for the Leopard, with Mexican-American protagonist Luis Cruz becoming virtually the face of the Leopard.[9]
Meanwhile in Japan, Nintendo had become dissatisfied with its awkward relationship with Sony and was eager to disengage to prevent the possibility of Sony holding it hostage over hardware in the UNES. A new agreement was signed by which Sony would sign over the rights to its contributions to the hardware in exchange for various concessions towards games it would produce for the system. Quite large concessions, but all the same Sony seemed to give in rather easily. Suspiciously easily...
Sega prepared a launch lineup for its new console, which it had decided to call the Saturn in all regions, using the project name as with the Jupiter. The emphasis would be on 3D platformers, with Sonic X-Treme at the head.[10] Rareware was called upon once more to show off the console's 64-bit hardware. The Ecco franchise was returned solely to Novotrade, but Rareware kept Flicky and produced Flicky: The Quest For The Golden Eggs. Around this time, Sega also reviewed its troubled Sonic 3D project. The game had been overtaken by the brief 3D sequences in Sonic Rad and it was decided that its slow gameplay style was unsuited to a flagship Sonic game. Instead it was reworked, with the decision being given to give some love to one of Sega's more neglected franchises, and was eventually released for both Saturn and Jupiter as Alex Kidd in Flickies' World (the game focusing on retrieving Flickies).[11] Because of this crossover, the Alex Kidd franchise was also given to Rareware and they began to develop a fully 3D Saturn game based on it. This was the first game to use Sega's innovation of releasing double-sided CDs, with the Jupiter version encoded on one side and the Saturn version on the other (coloured blue as a gimmick, like all other Saturn discs). This helped get around the problem that backward compatibility proved impossible to integrate (as Nintendo and Atari also found) due to the difficulty of emulating the older 32-bit systems, what with their construction having come in fits and starts meaning they were overly complex.
This year also saw Rareware's magnum opus released on the Jupiter, although by that point Saturn hype meant it was almost eclipsed. Dreamlight was a resurrection of the adventure games of old, starring the boy Edison and his friends in conflict with the pirate villain Captain Blackeye.[12] The game stretched the Jupiter hardware to the limit and was soon ported to the Saturn after its release, with Rareware immediately beginning work on a sequel.
Both the Saturn and UNES had a Christmas release in all regions. The UNES' main release lineup consisted of Ultra Mario Bros., a 3D shakeup of the Mario formula[13] along with Sony's fellow 3D platformer Crash Bandicoot and the enormously successful action RPG Diablo from S&S. The Saturn had Sonic X-Treme, Flicky: Golden Eggs and Westwood's Command and Conquer: Red Alert, an influential prequel to C&C whose original storyline introduced Alternate History to the masses.[14] Nintendo asked S&S to step up development on its own strategy game ideas to stay competitive.
NEC, on the other hand, continued along with its 32-bit Futura, the last and most capable of all the 32-bit consoles, going for the economy and portability market rather than trying for a 64-bit console. It also released the TurboExpress II, a more compact version of its earlier portable, which seized a sizeable portion of the Japanese market due to Nintendo and Sega's failure to compete although it generally lost to Atari's Puma in America. Little did the company know of the approach that would be made to them before long...
[1] This game is somewhat different to OTL's Phantasmagoria II, and rather better.
[2] They are ported to both the 32-bit and 64-bit consoles, though the graphics are basically the same in this case.
[3] The N64 was initially called the Ultra Famicom in Japan and the Ultra N64 in America in OTL, with this later being changed. In TTL the WarpStryke 128 fiasco, even more than the Jaguar in OTL, has discredited the idea of selling a console based on its 'bittage' so Nintendo doesn't do this. It also helps that Nintendo is going up against other 64-bit consoles and wants to create more of a continuity with the NES and SNES.
[4] No relation to the later OTL game by that title.
[5] Based on a true story (as witnessed by yours truly many years ago). Although in that case of course it wasn't about a game produced by Sega of Europe themselves of course. In any case, at the time the Master System still seemed to evoke more enthusiasm than the Saturn...
[6] This was mainly true of the SNES in OTL well after the N64 was released. In TTL Sega doesn't cut support for its pre-Saturn consoles out of one of its transoceanic spats so the same is true of the Mega Drive.
[7] In OTL at this point Sega had released the Nomad and Nintendo would release the Game Boy Advance a few years later, both 16-bit cartridge-based handhelds.
[8] As with Windows 95 in OTL.
[9] Based on earlier plans for the game, which had been in on-again off-again development since 1993; the decision to make the protagonist female didn't come for quite a while.
[10] Sonic X-Treme in OTL was cancelled, resulting in the somewhat absurd situation of the Saturn never having a proper Sonic game.
[11] Thus Sega dodges the major bullet of the execrable Sonic 3D Flickies' Island/Blast.
[12] This is based on the original concept for what became Banjo-Kazooie, originally planned for the SNES in OTL.
[13] Somewhat like Super Mario 64, except actually a bit more conventional, and with more voice acting and textures due to the CD media. Oh, and playable Luigi.
[14] TTL's version of Red Alert has better graphics than OTL's and is less obviously at roots a mod of C&C.
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This is huge. Are Nintendo, Sega and NEC preparing anything to fight this? Now I'm really interested who will the first to get internet connection on its console.
By the way, it's Blizzard now? Wasn't supposed to be Silicon & Synapse?
Thande
Donor
That is an interesting question, but the wrong one to ask: the real question is who will get an internet connection and make it work.
Depending on how you define 'internet', consoles with internet connectivity existed in OTL either from the early 80s or the early 90s - it just wasn't very good.
Fixed. I blame my subconscious autocorrect facility...TimeStorm said:By the way, it's Blizzard now? Wasn't supposed to be Silicon & Synapse?
Sachyriel
Banned
We've all been drooling over imaginary hardware we forgot about the interwebz!
Also, whomever gets the first handheld with wireless will PWN.Indeed, that's the right question. As far as I remember, Saturn was the first that had a network addon, if I'm not wrong, and Dreamcast was the first with online gameplaying. But with the early introduction of a harddrive on a console, it's easier for developing a network connection on them.
Thande
Donor
Well, the Mega Drive and SNES had online gameplay, albeit only in America and via a third-party peripheral. The Dreamcast was more the first one designed from the start for online gameplay.
Interesting. From the hints given, I anticipate a Sony/NEC alliance to take on Nintendo, Sega and Microsoft/Atari.
What the results of that are going to look like, goodness only knows...
What the results of that are going to look like, goodness only knows...
Microbeasts? Sounds like something extremely mundane and American. I don't know... maybe Pokemon is one of those roses that would smell just as sweet when you call it by any other name.
Hm... I wonder if a Heroes of Might & Magic (or an analogue) might have come to be in this timeline... on one side, the butterflies doesn't seem to have to have removed that many *basic* ideas at this point- we still get a Red Alert with a seemingly similar plot to OTL, etc- but on the other hand NWC wouldn't have 3DO backing, which at this point would still be a positive...
and I just realized that HOMM came out in 1995, not 1996 (that was HOMM2- fast development in those days)... er, yes, to summarise: do we still get a HOMM or something like HOMM?
Heh, maybe NWC could pull off becoming a major publisher in TTL. They did publish a fair number of other developer's games before being bought...
EDIT: Oh, and yay Red Alert! As it happens, I was playing it just yesterday...
and I just realized that HOMM came out in 1995, not 1996 (that was HOMM2- fast development in those days)... er, yes, to summarise: do we still get a HOMM or something like HOMM?
Heh, maybe NWC could pull off becoming a major publisher in TTL. They did publish a fair number of other developer's games before being bought...
EDIT: Oh, and yay Red Alert! As it happens, I was playing it just yesterday...
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