This is the Diablo that launched a thousand clones, made a fortune for Blizzard, got nearly universal rave reviews. It is by far the spookiest and most atmospheric of the Diablo series. That, for me, makes it the best one. Some here are saying the controls aren't so great, but those complaints are exaggerated. Movement was very good . But most of all, you have procedurally-generated dungeons that give plenty of variety and replayability, beautiful graphics and amazing and sometimes terrifying monsters (the rhino-types always made me jump! and the yellow thingies that fade in and out of reality to attack you were tough and frightening enemies too). The spells are great fun to use and fantastic to watch. The voice work is outstanding and sometimes genuinely scary. There are other Diablos that have come along, and other great clones, but none have replaced the true horror-style spooky pure fun of the original Diablo.
I got this when it first came out and was amazed. The box was full of extras in the player's "kit" that provided background, each well-written and colorful. GOG's version has none of them, but I hope we get some over time. They were some of the very best I've seen. But the gameplay's the thing. And wow did it rock! You've got one of the coolest looking avatars of all time, and wow can he move! Hardly any games let you drop to your knees to fire, and rolling around to move about and dodge was unique. Some hated its unfamiliarity, but none of Crusader's commands or movements are tough after just a little practice. And they add some welcome diversity. Speaking of diversity, you are one heck of a killer. Essentially a special forces soldier, you have access to ridiculously fun weaponry with which you can snipe, shotgun, blow up, burn, and shock both the innocent and guilty alike. In fact, you must make the decision whether to spare civilians or let them flip the alarm and call down hell upon you. Innocent bystander or deserving of being set on fire to run screaming hilariously -- I mean horribly -- to his death? The game's background and story were well-developed enough to make you wonder. Additionally, you can both fight some pretty scary and efficient robots and turn the tables right back on them, remote controlling guard stations and mechs, which is such tremendous fun you'll truly hate to see them evenntually die. The soundtrack really helped bring out how evocative the gameworld was. I still remember, decades later, the plaintive guitar music as the Crusader comes back one day to devastation on the home front. Wonderfully moody. The action music is full of energy without getting annoying; many remember it all these years later. And the impact of grenades and shots were fantastic. The graphics for their day were superb, and still have a lot of punch and character. Explosions were the best of their day, with beautiful flame effects. The environment was a joy to look at and sneak through, and its destructibility was fantastic, making the gameworld feel alive. Blow open a wall and a nearby chair will spin about ... while behind its ragged hole may be a secret cache of ammo! Be on the lookout ... and there are guides/spoilers on the net. There are full motion video bits that advance the story along, and some like them better than others. I liked a lot of them, and the actresses were very attractive, so no complaints there. Overall, I just want to say how beautiful, extraordinary, and alive these graphics were for their day, how great the sound effects and music were, how generous and wonderfully developed the background materials were, and how exciting the gameplay. Everything was amazingly top-notch. This and X-COM: UFO Defense were the two games I joined GOG hoping most to find or come around one day. I know I'm among the many people thrilled to find Crusader legally playable in a GOG-tuned edition. Finding Crusader again is an absolutely huge treat for those in the know, and it's sure to garner many more fans now. It remains one of my favorite games of all time and on many levels. Well worth your hard-earned (paltry few) dollars!
This game was a lot of fun, but it wasn't as good as Total Annihilation. At the time, online play was very laggy, too. It was by and large more than both the computers and the bandwidth of the day could handle. Which is to say, it was very good looking. The lead developer of TAK was the lead artist on the original TA. After TA creator and Cavedog, TA's developer, founder Chris Taylor, left the company, the artist moved up to the equivalent of Chris's spot as project lead, and maybe even put too much emphasis on the art. Users with less than great video cards, CPU's, and connections found online(and sometimes even offline) play aggravating due to slowdowns that made everything stutter and jump from place to place on the screen. But with today's computers, everything should look fine without clogging up your machine. Seeing a flock of dirigibles coming your way and dropping bombs everywhere was wonderful to look at back then, and today wouldn't slow your gameplay to 3 frames per second. I broke the first big story about TAK's playable state, with a post titled, "So I played TAK today..." that got tens of thousands of views very quickly and was spread around the net overnight. It was about my short experience looking over the game at the Los Angeles E3 convention. Kind of fun being a super-mini almost-celebrity in a tiny pond, for a while. TAK seemed very fresh, with plenty of the gritty challenge and bloodthirsty aggression TA fans had become so fond of, and everyone was really excited about it. With the only two resources pared down to only one, it looked if anything even more action-oriented. I would still recommend people try TA instead of TAK, or at least first. TAK is less flexible, less challenging, and less replayable. It is easier to find "just the right solution" in TAK, even easier than figuring out how great flash tanks were in TA, which were actually more fun and intriguing to find counters for and to try to stave off. TAK is also much prettier. And it has a fantasy rather than sci-fi look/world, which some may prefer. Also, if I recall correctly, both TA and TAK had unusually good single player games, generally played all the way through even by the most die-hard online players of the day, who generally learned just enough to take battles online and ignored single player campaigns or played them through in off hours when they couldn't get a match going. I did recently replay the TA single player game and found it very good. Recommended, but with reservations. Maybe something around 3.5 stars, but I'll rate it at 4 here since 3 seems less fair than a 4.
TA is a tremendously fun game that still looks great and and plays very well. It was also the biggest innovator in RTS's and well ahead of its time for many years. For one thing, it was 3D when games were still using sprites, including Starcraft. Vehicles ran over obstacles and you could see their undersides when they had to negotiate an odd bit of turf. Jet fighters did not just change their heading in a way that looked like a jerky version of an umbrella spining from above, but turned over in flight to make sharp turns. These units looked like units, not cartoon pictures of units. Projectiles shot further depending on the height of the placement of guns, and trajectories were calculated in a 3D world. Projectiles varied the time they took to hit, rather than hitting instantly because, unlike the code in games of its time, the code did not tell them that a shot fired is a shot that hits and hits immediately. Best of all -- and this was what made Starcraft the biggest retreat to the past after a game like TA had come along -- was that the realistic physics model meant that there are are no hard counters. There is no table that tells you that certain projectiles or units can't hit you because the game simply decides to disallow it. If the trajectory and speed work, you get hit! So you can't hover over someone and expect not to be hit by any bullets or missiles just because they don't have the one hard counter the designers have allowed you to use. You still have a chance of getting hit, as long as the physics work out. It is possible to counter any unit with (enough of) any other one. This makes fights more than a race to the uberunit or hard counter. So you can fight in a way that makes sense rather than follows some lame rule book or wins with one and only one unit. And that lets you pursue very unconventional strategies, and make very unlikely comebacks. One of the best things about TA is that coming from behind to win is extremely possible and indeed happens all the time. That makes TA a game to continue to play to the bitter but still at least faintly hopeful end, with some real gut-busting tenacity, instead of quitting out from when your enemy gets his superunit before you get the only unit that will counter it. One of the things you will not read talked about now, but was also huge when TA came out, is the incredibly usefulness and fluidity of the user interface. All others were VERY cumbersome and limited in comparison. TA's was lean in all the right ways, but you could still do quite complex things very rapidly. TA let you queue up factories to build units in orders as complex as you liked, and to cancel or partially cancel them with equal finesse. It let you manage units in small or large groups, and even assign single units to more than one group without losing the previous group assignment. You could set precise paths for all your units, whether on patrol or as part of the process of their being made in the factory, . You could set their responses on those patrols, from repairing and building to fighting and chasing, fighting without chasing, etc. There were key assignments for every kind of the many different sorts of vehicles, so moving and fighting orders of (and generally still unmatched) complexity were possible. FInally, interesting things were done by the mod community, from units to great maps to my favorite, the recorder. The recorder was a plug-in that let you record games and play them back later for fun and study. It made a fantastic way to study your own weaknesses and learn from others' strategies. There are still hundreds if not thousands of games out there to watch that reveal all sorts of strategic ideas and map-specific strategies, or are just like an incredible action movie with all the boring parts taken out. I can't mention everything good about the game in this already long review, but I must mention the sound and soundtrack. I still remembered clearly some of the jarring thuds and crushing recoil sounds of the game's guns. Absolutely incredible and it made battles very exciting! And composer Jeremy Soule's soundtrack was fantastic. Never omnipresent or overbearing, the full orchestral sound was rousing and beautiful; it seemed, frankly, far too good for a video game! Finally, check these out for great help with the game: Forums: http://tauniverse.com/forum/ Maps: http://www.ratpacker.com/Maps/Maps.html Commands: http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/showthread.php?t=38037&highlight=metal+heck Great 3rd party site: http://www.tauniverse.com/ wiki campaign strat guide: http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Total_Annihilation wind and tides chart (for energy): http://it-is-law.com/dump/TA/TA%20Map%20Wind%20&%20Tides.htm Game replayer: http://www.clan-sy.com/frame.html Recorded games: http://tadrs.tauniverse.com/
