Yes. I have been playing in (God forgive me) ZERO Annihilation West and surprisingly enough it has grown into a really nice game, possibly the finest of the new privately run zones thus far. Not that the ranks of those have been many. Shine World and The Dark Zone come to mind. (Pure Hell does NOT.) What ZAW has going for it is a twenty flag war-style game in a good map. I recognize that I've railed on this type of map in the past--it is a patchwork of old bases, largely from T2-17's map with references to the old VIE War and Chaos maps. I'm as great a snob as the next guy, and the prospect of wacky settings and no greening becoming the standard for War Zone is the kind of thing that could keep me awake at night even later than Subspace already does. I know I'm a bit behind here, but the zone was not always this good. It's only recently that the flag game becan to work, and that's where the zone's strength lies.
Still. As much as I favor the tradition of negs, greening, public freqs versus privates, etc....you go into Annihilation West, and...people are actually playing the game! My god, every single frequency was actually making a concerted effort to get flags and take them back to a base! Teammates attach when I call them. I fly out of an enemy base with a flag, lo and behold someone answers when I ask who is defending. Those who aren't playing the flag game aren't out looking for negs to kill or flaggers to interrupt. They are playing King of the Hill, fighting over the mass of greens lumped at the center, or carrying flags and doing Rabbit Chase. This is low stress and zero frustration. Stress and frustration are good things, but if greening and negs are such a big deal, there's no harm in offering lighter fare. If oldschool subspace is good and important, people will play it. I know I'll tire of this sooner or later and go back, just like I did before.
Having said that much, I will say this. I haven't had this much fun playing War Zone flags in a long time. Games last hours. Tonight I think the flag game lasted nearly three hours once. This was not a standoff between two superfreqs but a series of invasions between several flag holding teams. For most of the game, four teams had flags.
Two more points worth noting. Unrelated entirely.
One. I love brick wars. It's so rare in this game that you find yourself bricking up entrances, pushing back fronts, fighting across walls. The last really good brick war I played was back in July, when Sheep Cloning Facility was opened to the public and INXS II's Rebels vs. Alliance scenario with its massive once-entrance bases were fought over by super powered ships. This was my first experience with wacky settings so maybe there is some sentimental value there, but I think more likely it's the rarity of this sort of conflict, the dynamic created when teammates have to constantly be replenishing the bricks at the door while fighting off enemy efforts to cross bricks into the doorway, all the while watching your back for warp-ins or that cloaker who somehow slipped in.Two. One thing this zone has which the VIE servers were always missing, and which none of the private servers seem to have recognized the potential for up until now, is a constant updating of the news.txt and map. VIE hasn't done this at least since I started playing, and maybe this will stop on ZAW, but sooner or later I am hoping things will evolve to a point where the game is constantly changed for variety's sake and maybe maps are rotated or simply changed more often and so forth. I am looking very much forward to this.
And in the other corner...Neg Wars!
This is an incredibly cool zone, totally the opposite of what you might think based on the title. That is, it's the opposite of Annihilation West. Maybe it's not an accepted term but I've always used "neg war" to describe instant gratification games like j12 and t20 and the map details they are situated around, i.e. Dueling Zone a1 was a great neg war. Well this zone has a different but maybe more correct use of the term. You can't green past yellow and you get very few powerups here. It's the polar opposite of Pure Hell and exactly the kind of innovative, careful tweaking this game could use after a month of wacky settings. No dirty tricks; you just hammer away at your opponent and, as the news.txt says, may the best man win. This might stink of elitism and not make for much more than an independently run Dueling Zone but for the fact that it sports a sweet and totally new Chaos style map, complete with a nice tweaked tileset. It's a little map, utilizing the middle stripe of the screen (that is, stretching from about G1 to about N20). This is run off of a cable hookup at a university and so it goes down at night. Look for it during the day.I was busy all day long and then when I got home I became addicted to Annihilation West and so I never got around to finishing the Pocket Guide to Space Law, not that anyone cares about that anyhow. :P Speaking of which, the time has come for me to try and find out what you think of this site. Forgiving, if you please, that I've neglected it some, is it an ok page, could it use a lot of work in some places, a little in others? Would you like to see more of one thing or less of another? If you read it at all, I'd like to hear from you. If you check for updates regularly--or if you *would* check for updates regularly assuming that I *did* update regularly--please let me know how I am doing. I can use all the help and inpuit I can get, both good and bad. And as I've said previously, contributions are always welcome.
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