dnovraD: I sure do like when the visual design of something is equal to radio static noise.
Also, I do hold a
slight grudge against TDs as being one of the killers of RTS as a genre.
Ey, GOG. Why is the language randomly flipped in one of the screenshots?
I don't blame TD games from killing RTS games, even if they indeed feel a bit like simplified RTS games.
To me the reasons really were that newer RTS games didn't seem to have much more new to offer, and bigger RTS games all tried to become the next "online Starcraft", ie. concentrate on the competitive online game instead of meaningful single-player experience.
I would say I love single-player RTS games with proper campaigns (like Starcraft, Age of Empires 1-3, Total Annihilation etc.) but see competitive online or single-player skirmish RTS pointless and uninteresting. Every now and then I try some older RTS classics I personally haven't played before, but am usually a bit underwhelmed and understand why they never became as popular as Warcraft 1-3, Starcraft, Age of Empires 1-3 etc.
I don't even know sometimes what makes one single-player RTS great and another meh. It seems the same ingredients are there, but they just don't click or something is missing, just can't put my finger on it. For instance Dark Reign, I just got bored playing it even though I originally thought it must a great single-player RTS games all the way up there with C&C games or Warcraft or such (because at least I recognized its name for years before playing it). I can't even tell for sure what it is that makes me bored in the game, maybe it is just too generic or bland map design and unit design or something.
Starcraft (the first one) is the holy grail of single player RTS games to me, and I always try to ones that would click with me the same way like SC did from the very first time I played it. Age of Empires 1-2 were there too, for a bit different reasons than Starcraft. Total Annihilation was good too but felt a bit generic and bland compared to Starcraft's richness, but there were some things (like the user interface) that were even better in TA.
And so on and so forth... Not a big fan of tower defense games, but I absolutely loved Plants vs Zombies though, it had a very good design and a perfect difficulty curve.
Oh and as I keep saying, playing an engineer in Team Fortress 2 is the best tower defense game ever! Especially since saying that out loud during the game will annoy the heck out of enemy players when they can't get past my sentry gun. I bet they feel like they are those zombies in PvZ who can't get past my guns either. :)
