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Natural Selection


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Anyone here play it?

 

It's a heavily team-based strategic Half-Life mod that's similar to StarCraft. Available from Natural-Selection.org, you can play as either Marines or aliens.

 

As an alien, you can evolve from your basic form (Skulk) into a builder (Gorge), a flyer (Lerk), a fighter (Fade), or a massive beast of an alien, the Onos. You start with one hive, and must expand to the other two hive locations. These 2 extra hives are important, as the availability of upgrades and advanced evolutionary forms is determined by the number hives you have. Also, the more hives you have, the faster you can respawn the dead. To win, however, you must eliminate the Marines and their ability to spawn. Along the way, the builders can build various other buildings providing upgrades, resource gatherers, healing of nearby units and structures, and autonomous turrets to keep the bad guys out.

 

Gameplay as a Marine is slightly different. The team has a commander, who views the action from a 3rd person RTS-type view, and is reponsible for spawning buildings, which a Marine must then weld together for it to become operational, giving orders (which come up as waypoints on the Marine's hud), and keeping troops in the field healthy and armed. The Marines must eliminate all alien hives, and do their best to protect the open hive sites.

 

The dead respawn at a rate of one every ten seconds per spawn point. As an alien, each functioning hive counts as a spawn point. As a Marine, the commander can build Infantry Portals, each one of which counts as a spawn point. This may seem unbalancing, as the Marines can have as many spawn points as they can afford, but the Inf. Portals are just about the easiest thing in a Marine base to destroy, and go down rather quickly if an alien finds his way into your base. An example of the spawn system in question, would be if 3 guys on a team died at about the same time, but only one spawn point was built, then after 10 seconds, one would spawn, then the second in another 10 seconds, and a third after a further 10. Now, figure it again for 2 spawn points. After 10 seconds, the first two respawn, and another 10 for the third. As a Marine, you always want to have two portals up. More are a waste of resources early on, and only having one will cripple you if it goes down.

 

The game is over when all the members of a team are dead, and have no spawn points from which to get back into the action.

 

However, I've seen games where the aliens lost all three hives, and the lone remaining player evolved to builder, and built a hive. 3 minutes as the only player, waiting for the hive to finish, then a full team again, and Marines wondering what the hell happened. we came back, got a second hive up in about 10 minutes, and ended up winning.

 

And don't be discouraged if you spend a lot of time dying at first... It happend to me, and if it doesn't happen to you, I'll be surprised, and declare you Complete Lord and Master of the Quik Stop.

 

All in all, a great, addictive game, and a sweet-ass alternative to CS.

 

http://www.natural-selection.org/

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Sure, it's not the best engine out there, but I haven't seen another one I really liked. UT was the only other I remotely liked... UT2003's just bothered me, and don't get me started on the myriad of Q3-based games.

 

I did fall in love with the Refractor 2 engine (BF1942), and I'd swear by it if it wasn't so damned resource-happy. You just can't make mods for an engine no one can run.

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Hey... Hold up a sec... I never said I like Half-Life.

 

I like the engine. And aside from having aliens, Natural Selection is NOTHING like Half-Life. Imagine playing StarCraft as a Marine, with someone else calling the shots, and you've got Natural Selection from the human perspective. The aliens, aside from visual similarities, aren't so much like the Zerg. There's no commanding "Overmind", but they do have a "hive sight", which places teammates, hive locations, structures under attack, and parasite-infected marines on the screen as circles. It's great, cause you can send in one Skulk to infect marines, and even if he dies, the marines still show up on your screen, so you can organize an all-sides assault.

 

The game is incredibly strategic.

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