I was joking but you know how media is.

Something from left field pops up in a forum over night, something you never heard or thought much about and then the following rest of the year your spammed with it over and over again.

Like this recent infatuation with Charlie Sheen - he's been around forever - where did this come from all of a sudden?

Speaking of which, IMO the ultimate RTS would be one that features giant cockroaches with twin rocket launchers strapped to their thorax. That would be the f*ing meanest game around. Imagine that!

I've watched some videos on YouTube for Hostile Waters and this is pretty much what I've been looking for - a game where you can take control of your units in third person and manually.

Speaking of which, I've always wondered if Battle Engine Aquila was any good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Engine_Aquila

Most RTSs allow you to combine your troops but I read somewhere that one of the factions can put two of it's soldiers together to make a third different soldier. Not sure if it was GCII or something else (been reading a lot of reviews lately).

What totally flipped me out is that you can send your troops to take cover in buildings and fire from blasted out windows.

I also liked that the troops felt very easy to manage and sort out. I did notice that it is easy to leave behind a trooper if you didn't switch him out of a stationary setting when you moved your troops. Easily rectified if you studied your mini map and saw the little stray green dot but there is quite a bit of micro management to remember when repositioning and moving.

I also noticed that the directional command isn't very responsive. In this instance of your vehicles with rocket turrets, they have tougher side armor so when positioning them you want to turn their side to the enemy but right clicking and dragging made them simply move again more times than it actually worked to reface them.

Small complaint though because, if you're like me, you usually just swarm the enemy with a large army and don't worry too much about who is facing what way.

No, the first part is better.

The first GC? I figured both were pretty much the same game but I went for programmed AI and solo play skirmishes more so than scripted enemy interaction and human 'intelligence' dependency online.

GC1 has AI, it just doesn't have skirmish. I like it more than GC2 as well, it's way more tactical IMO - for instance, you can't get any reinforcements, you only have what you take from base. You can't save mid-mission. You can strategise until your head explodes... Actually, you HAVE to do that.

So the difficulty is a bit more old-school.

One thing that I quickly noticed was that the enemy in GCII lacked the AI to be stupid - you couldn't take a grunt in and trick the AI into chasing after it to line them up in range with your awaiting assault squad.

But I don't think that was "They were so smart they didn't fall for the trick." but morse so "They were only programmed deep enough to hold ground despite whatever situation.