#NETSTORM ISLANDS AT WAR

[retrocgads]

UK 1998

[digital-dryad]

storming her nimbus style

[anheliotrope]

Netstorm.

Imagine it's 1997

Warcraft II: Beyond The Dark Poral modestly expanded on the competent but rudimentary mechanics of the game a year ago. Its battle.net is still thriving.

You try out this seemingly cute game and are immediately thrust into the most cutthroat possible RTS experience where you vie for dominance over limited island space among the clouds.

The game gives you bridges shaped like random tetris blocks and you must rabidly place them around the map. Even if you fail to divine some proactive logic by which to place your bridges, you MUST go fast. Every bridge you don't place is territory lost.

On the terminus of every bridge you can connect more bridges or towers. Towers also go on land.

Towers are powered by generators, which provide power in a circular radius.

You think you've managed to push into enemy territory and your Rain towers are firing bullets that ricochet among all nearby enemy structures, which are pointed in the wrong direction to retaliate, as many towers have unique and restrictive firing patterns.

You feel good and give pause a bit.

The enemy quickly expands a long bridge parallel to yours, and at the middle where there is poor redundancy, builds a generator. It happens too fast for you to body block it with your own bridges.

The generator is immediately detonated, the ensuing explosion disconnecting towers from any support. Everything on the wrong side of the bridge plummets out of view.

This game ends only in one way. Somebody's priest is kidnapped by a transport unit and brought to the altar of the opposing faction and ritually sacrificed to a patron deity.

Besides transport units, and the priest, there are only towers and the constantly expanding maze of bridges. This landscape is not populated by anything that could be described as living.

In 1997, Titanic Entertainment invented hardcore competitive adversarial tower defense, before anyone was even cognizant of tower defense as a genre. I guess forget tower defense, embrace Tower Attack.

Completely unique multiplayer experience, never replicated. The game is so scarily good at demonstrating who is a better player.

Welcome to the kind of sweet hell only Netstorm can offer.

The game has inspired remakes: Stratus: Battle for the Sky and various projects I keep hearing about whose status is unclear to me.

The game is still playable a community at netstormhq dot net

Netstorm was one of the most inspirational games I've encountered from a design perspective. Something to violently remind you that games can be different and that there is so much explore.

[oldgamemags]

'Netstorm: Islands At War’.

[@Oldgamemags] [Patreon]

[garrett-highhill]

Netstorm - Islands at war 

Gaming for fun, sixth episode. And second for today! 

Hell, I’ve been a lot busy in this period! (and I will be in the next, but I’ll come back sooner than last time, don’t worry. Like tomorrow LOL)

This is from Activision, when it still made good games. 

Well, tecnically, it makes something good also now, but let’s go over it! 

Netstorm is a real time strategy game, in a strange place called Ninbus (yeah, it’s floating). 

It was quite new fot that time, becouse we have really few moving units, and all is about timing and strategy (well, I hope so, it’s a STRAGEGY GAME). 

Graphics is ok, when I was kid I hoped for some more than an isometric one like AoEII, but that’s it. The soundtrack is also ok, but what makes the difference is the gameplay! There are a lot of things to do, so you can never stop control everything! I like it, you need to focus to all you built. 

Now is considered abandonware, but I can tell you that is a good game! Fans also made a sequel! 

DISCLAIMER: Making a sequel out of something DOESN’T MEAN THAT IT’S GOOD STUFF (see for example COD Infinity Warfare, The Fox and the Hound 2, and Deus Ex 2, not considering another bunch of Disney sequels, bleah, let’s hope for The Incredibles 2). 

Well, it’s fun, give it a try! 

[retrocgads]

USA 1997

[retrocgads]

UK 1998

[digital-dryad]

does any1 remember netstorm: islands at war?

loved that game