Well, not to worry, I could wait until the game came out to get it. Only… when it did come out I didn’t have much urge to buy it. I sat around watching the developer videos the night before it hit the market and got very discouraged. What’s the point of including a physics engine if the animations it produces are going to look exactly like the pre-baked building destructions of SH2? What’s the point of including dynamic lighting if the textures and shadows look worse than games I bought 6 years ago?

I understand small studios don’t have the big budgets, or huge developer teams to work on these things… and I understand that there was a bit of a time crunch to launch the game on the 10th Anniversary of the original Stronghold game… I guess I just got spoiled by Company of Heroes. Especially in a game like Stronghold where the main focus is to build a castle I want army units that are smart enough to dodge big things like a stone flying at their head, I don’t want to control every unit individually, squads just makes sense a commander doesn’t tell every person under his command exactly what to do does he? Give me a game that allows me to make my own squads by grouping people together and I’ll be ecstatic! Make them smart enough to put shooting units (arrows) in the back, and stronger units up front to block, and I’ll jump with joy! Make the battles as simple as possible for the players, the economy and castle building takes up enough time as is. Also what is the point of building a castle if it doesn’t defend anything? 4 shots from a catapult and whole sections of wall drop… seriously? Are they nuclear explosive rocks? You’ve got a physics engine, make a rock take out a rock sized section of the wall! Yeah, so it’ll take a long time to cut through a wall, but isn’t that the point of a castle?

I am probably asking too much… And I don’t know that I’ll ever see these features in a castle builder game… the market probably just isn’t big enough. Even the total war series had some very quirky, pretty bad battle sequences at times, and it wasn’t even a castle builder.

Actually come to speak of it all of the new stuff is BS.В  Alone you cannot play against a british player, or the new axis if you’ve got the old Company of Heroes game.В  Oh, and speaking of those guys, their “slow” effect, totally awesome since you can’t even retreat when they use it.В  Say sniper is being chased by them, they are getting close so you retreat, they use special slow effect, and he’s now crawling AFTER he’s been retreated prior to being slowed… how is this fair?В  He’s retreating in slow motion and can’t even shoot back or be unretreated.

Flak 88 firing with Tiger standing guard

Been playing Company of Heroe’s a lot lately!В  (Not as much as my Xfire profile says there’s some glitch because I have 4 gigs of RAM, and Vista it doesn’t say I’m out of game when I’m out.В  It’s as if the cache isn’t being cleared, and therefore because the game is still on the RAM it’s still registering me as “in game”).В  None-the-less I still have been playing a bit.В  That picture is of a Flak 88 that I built right next to this guys base, and Credal’s Tiger coming up beside it to help guard.

Bombing Run in CoH

This was after a perfectly placed bombing run as the enemies tried crossing the bridge.В  You can see some of the points fading away but a lot of stuff got blown to pieces on that bridge buying time for our troops to get up there and cross.

Volksgrenadiers up close

Just an up close shot of a squad of Volksgrenadiers owning some British guys to take their point.В  I love the detail of this shot, you can see bullets flying from a couple guys guns, flames, and the rubble is pretty realistic for a RTS, I mean, this is at the level of some older FPS games and it’s an RTS!!! I love that with my ATI HD 3850 I can keep things high resolution, and have a little bit of Anti-Aliasing, some Antistropic Filtering, and lots of other details and still get 30-35 frames per second!В  Definitely makes me happy.

Most of you have probably seen that Windows released Service Pack 1 for Vista not long ago, along with a release of SP3 for XP users.В  I decided that it was time to finally make the leap to Vista, it’s been in the plans for a long time, especially since I used it during the Beta and really loved it!В  I still waited for SP1 to come out just because back when I was using it in the Beta some companies such as Logitech still hadn’t gotten around to making any drivers for it… so I figured some maturity time was in order.

One thing that really does bother me a LOT about this purchase is that Microsoft is no longer including the copy of the 64bit Operating System with your purchase!В  They dropped the price by $10 and send only the 32bit Windows Vista Operating System with your purchase, then if you want the 64bit version of Windows Vista you’ve got to go online and order it for $10.В  To me this is backwards thinking on Windows part, I see the merit in it that the 32bit Vista works on any processor and the 64bit edition needs to be run on a 64bit processor… but honestly who doesn’t have a 64bit CPU now?В  And if you don’t why are you trying to install Vista in the first place?!?!

I still really like the operating system none-the-less and have run into very few problems so far… actually a lot of problems I was having (such as with the newer versions of Opera) have gone away… I’m with a lot of enthusiasts who say that if you’re having problems with Vista it’s because your computer is a piece of crap and you need to throw it off a building.В  Seriously Microsoft Windows Vista ran smoothly on my comp when I was doing the Beta and back then all I had was a 2.2ghz Dual Core AMD, 2 gigs of RAM, and an ATI x1600 video card… games were pretty darn slow, but really still playable, though some like Company of Heroes needed to be lowered in resolution and settings.В  Now with a 2.6ghz (OCed to 2.9) Dual Core AMD, 4 gigs of RAM, and an ATI HD 3850 I’ve had absolutely no major glitches with Vista to date… of course I’ve only been running it for a few days so I’ll get back to you on what I think of ReadyBoost, and whatever else pops up as it comes up.

Oh well, I still can’t deny the fact that I’ve got a good 600 or so hours in CoH, and at least 200 in Counter-Strike:Source.

Archmaille’s Xfire Profile

The Klipsch Custom-1′s have performed amazingly well for daily computer use and gaming.В  And by performance I don’t mean just sound, yes the sound is amazing!В  The comfort is just as amazing!В  Thanks to several ear gels to choose from you can get the perfect fit that doesn’t begin to hurt, or become an annoyance after hours of use.В  The eargels aren’t round either, since your ear canal is not round!В  What an amazing concept!!В  You mean a company actually made something that fits to our body rather thane expecting our body to become acustomed to it?!?!

I was glad that I started using the Klipsch Headphones on my computer at first since it has a tuner that I can change levels and adjust.В  The Klipsch Headphone line seems to be very picky to start things off and for the first couple hundred hours of use aren’t completely balanced.В  After that you can stop adjusting sound levels and just enjoy all the little details that you’ve been missing all along!

I used to have a pair of Turtle Beach 5.1 Surround Sound headphones, and wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to get used to anything other than complete emulsion of sound… I have to say that I never was used to it wearing those.В  Yeah, the 5.1 was awesome, but the sound quality of these Klipsch Custom-1′s is MUCH higher.В  I can hear every tiny detail, and still able to tell when someone is sneaking up behind me in Counter-Strike:Source.В  I will mention that for computer use I had to buy a six foot extension for the 3.5mm jack as the Custom-1′s only have a cord long enough to reach your pocket because they’re really for Ipod’s and Zune’s.В  Maybe one day when I get a Zune I can use this for it… which was half of the appeal of getting these over a pair of Sennheiser’s, can’t say that I was dissapointed.