Striving for something more

The real-time strategy genre has grown to gargantuan proportions since Westwood released their classic "Dune 2", way back in the days when a 486 with 8Mb of RAM and a 100Mb hard drive was considered state of the art. But although games like Starcraft, Red Alert and Total Annihilation have proved massively popular on the internet, until now there haven't really been any real-time strategy games focused entirely on online gaming. Enter Ethermoon and their new multiplayer-only game "Strifeshadow", which should stand out from the crowd for a number of reasons...

"What gives us the edge is that Strifeshadow was designed specifically and only for multiplayer gaming. In that environment, Strifeshadow has far greater strategic and tactical depth than any other RTS game ever made", lead designer Tom Cadwell claimed in a recent interview with 3D Gaming Daily. "We also worked very hard to create a feature set that goes beyond the game itself. Strifeshadow is very well suited to game observation and recording. To go one step further, recorded games can be annotated with automatic camera and playback controls and custom text, sounds, and graphics."

These features should also prove a boon for the growing sport of pro-gaming, which has until now been mostly confined to first person shooters outside of Korea, a country which is inexplicably almost universally hooked on Starcraft. As a result, Ethermoon are making sure that Strifeshadow will have everything that pro-gaming needs. "We expect tournament play to be very popular, and players will be able to easily register tournament games from within Strifeshadow and have the results automatically reported". Which is nice.