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The Making of Shiny's Sacrifice
At the increasingly enjoyable PC blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Keiron Gillen has up a post on the making of Shiny's Sacrifice . A reprint of an article he wrote for the PC Format site, and with extra materials, it goes into the origins of the title with game designer Eric Flannum. From the article: "'One of the biggest things which stood in the way of Sacrifice appealing more was that there were so many different and new things in it we were asking a lot from the player as far as what they had to learn and accept ... From the visual style, from the lack of a disembodied camera ... RTS players especially had a lot of new concepts to wrap themselves around' Of course, these 'problems' were also some of the things which absolutely distinguished the game. 'It was definitely one of the strengths of Sacrifice - its wacky visual look,' Eric considers the issue, 'but at the same time ... well, there's something about 'an archer' which communicates on a very basic level what that unit does. People don't have to learn. But when you've got a little pyromaniac, there's an extra step of learning. They don't inherently know what he does.'" At the start of his post, Gillen mentions the retrospective piece on the game he wrote for his personal site back at the end of last year, which is also well worth reading. I have to admit, I'll take almost any excuse to talk about this game; it's a sorely underappreciated title.
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3797891/Sacrifice_-_Shiny_Entertainment_RTS_Full_
Go forth and enjoy it.
Sacrifice was one of the most impressive games ever created. Massive replay value, an interface that was basically gesture-driven, spectacular spell animations and an epic soundtrack. This game really IS that good and still holds its own. If you haven't played it, try to dig up a copy somewhere. You won't regret it.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Wow.. I can't believe an article about sacrifice got on /.'s FP. I never saw more than 15 people in the lobby at once, at a tournament... and I played that game for 2 years.
I must say, I totally agree that this game was awesome. What made it so incredible was how different it is from all other strategy games.
First, you're not juts a commander who mysteriously has a top-down view of everything as if from heaven. You were ACTUALLY ON THE BATTLEFIELD FIGHTING ALONGSIDE YOUR CREATURES. This sounds strange at first, but Shiny did an AMAZING job making this work.
The second thing that made it different was the creatures themselves. You had only 2 real resources in the game (Souls and Mana) that you really had to account for. The fact that you were limited on mana balanced the game and made sure you couldn't just rush the other guy with 5-soul creatures the instant the game began. You had to manage your creatures that were alongside you in battle and had to balance whether to summon more creatures, cast spells to help out your army of creatures, or just run away and hope for the best.
Which brings me to another point, spells. This is what really made the game fun. You just didn't go and let your units go out and fight the battle for you (although you could if your army was large enough), you actually joined into the fray yourself. I must say, throwing tornadoes at your enemies (or just opening a gigantic hold underneath them) is a LOT of fun. Along with blowing up random enemy souls. I really think this is what made this game amazing.
The last point that made this game so exciting was the sheer amount of variety that they had built into the game. This wasn't a typical startegy game that had one side pitted against the other. THERE ARE 5 DIFFERENT SIDES to the game, and each was incredibly different from the other. (Try playing Stratos (Weather god) and then playing with Charnel's aresenal (God of Suffering).
With that, I command all even remotely interested in playing a completely different version of a strategy game executed almost perfectly to go and find a way to play this game.
DK2 does work under SP2, just...badly/strangely.
The install will "fail" but if you install the patch, it'll run fine, you just won't be able to uninstall it cleanly.