Empire Earth 2 University

Way back yonder, a young, new staff member of HeavenGames read the story of many of his online coworkers visiting Stainless Steel Studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts for an event called Empire Earth University. The boy was fascinated by the amazing things they did and told himself that he would attend the future Empire Earth 2 University. Just last weekend, he did just that, visiting Vivendi Universal Games at Los Angeles...If you've yet to unveil my incredible ruse, that person is me.

Springfield Airport at 5 in the morning, I really coulda fallen asleep right there on the pavement

My journey to Los Angeles started with a flight from the Springfield/Branson Regional Airport in the homely Ozarks. I arrived at LAX and took a shuttle to the Radisson where I was staying and met TheGoodEvil, my HeavenGames comrade in arms at the event. We talked a while and everyone else made it to the hotel, so we went to the VUG offices and met Greg Aegius and Guy Welch, two VUG celebrities, as well as John Cataldo, a Mad Doc employee. We were herded into another room where they interrogated us under a bright light with questions on the RTS genre. It was actually a fairly interesting conversation, you'd be surprised just how fun it is to talk about video games for hours on end when you can't exactly talk about it with your offline buddies because they all think you're a bloody weirdo that needs to stop playing so many video games but you just love them so much and just want to talk abo-uh...yeah.

Dinner rolled around and we all hit the street, heading for the Islands restaurant at this Howard Hughes promenade right next to the offices. Unfortunately, we didn't see the exhumed remains of the aeronatical enthusiast, but we did have some succulent burgers and I learned a whole lot about E3 happenings from Guy and Allen Rausch, a chap from Gamespy I met at an Armies of Exigo event; I hope I'm adequately prepared for the incredible chaos this year. After dinner, we went back to the offices (where I found that Greg's a fellow history nerd, cool coons) and were shown all of the previous box and ad art for EE2; a notable box sketch had a huge face of man that looked exactly like the coach on Beavis and Butthead, nice...

See that mirror? It's actually a window on the other side for them to spy on us. Shhhh.

Us RTS folk were then shown the 20-minute video that's currently on the EE2 official site which gave us the preliminary info on the game. With that information, we were ready to play a game or two of it. Ian, the 1st Mad Doctor of Mad Doc, had just flown in from the Game Developers Conference at San Francisco, so he was up for smashing our faces into the pavement. And boy was he successful at that, the game I played with him (and 6 others) that night was quite the interesting game.

This game was the very first time I had gotten my hands on Empire Earth 2 and I hadn't read any detailed preview of it prior to the event...so I basically had no clue as to what to do. I pretty much ran my civilization like I would any normal RTS game, which was a big disaster. I built a strong economy and army and began spreading out to other territories; the fighting was uneventful and it ended up being me and Ian on the map. I believe I had a large enough army to hold off at least his first wave, but the fact that I was in age 11 with biplanes and riflemen while he was in age 15 with nuclear bombers and hercs (mechs) kind of meant he had quite the insane advantage over my army. Needless to say, I was obliterated. After the game, everyone headed home via the shuttle to prepare for the next day of Empire Earth 2 education.

There's Allen, me, and aRtificialiNsanity, front to back

The first thing we got to do when we got back to VUG Saturday morning was talk with Ian about our thoughts on the game. He seemed fairly interested in what we had to say, which is cool since if anyone could do something to make improvements to the game, he'd be it. We mosied on up to the second floor for an afternoon of gaming, the first couple ones just being practice ones to get us familiarized with the game before Ian and Jon would play some games with us on a handicap to even the odds. I was doing fairly well in the games, so Ian had me take the Expert handicap while he took the Gaming God handicap. The game that resulted was a 2 hour long stalemate largely due to the playing field-evening handicaps; it could have gone on for probably another two hours, but Allen was on a tight schedule and had to interview Ian on Gamespy which should be on the site in the next couple days...keep an eye out for it.

Next: Empire Earth 2 in the hands of a crazy man
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