Docahkiin

Someone decided to hand in their 2000s RTS collection to a thrift store, and I scooped up the more interesting things.

Three of them were some interesting titles I hadn't heard of before. World at war is actually a paradox style map game that's apparently well regarded. Weirdly it was published by redant, a budget rerelease company that every once in a while published a full release of a game for whatever reason.

These two games were cool, cause they had unused digital codes. The DAW soulstorm code gave me all of the DAW expansions and the anniversary edition for free on steam, which is neat.

The sins of the a solar empire had its stardock code unused. Stardock was an ancient online realtor thats still surprisingly going. The game itself isn't on steam but getting a digital copy for, again, free is pretty neat.

Getting these two for 6 bucks a pop was really cool. AoE 2 coming with all of the microsoft warranty bullshit is fun, I do enjoy crap like that filling up big boxes.

Another cool find. A very mediocre collectors edition, the 'poster' has a nice render of middle earth on it but it, but the text covering it kinda ruins that. The bonus disc has the soundtrack and a digital art collection on it, which barely passes my standards for a collectors edition bonus disc.

All in all, 4/10 collectors edition. I enjoy the doublewide dvd box quite a bit, it matches well with my blizzard game warchests. But theres just not a lot in there.

IF-22 by Magic Labs from 1997

I adore old flight sims, especially big military ones where the entire simulation is a single plane or helicopter.

This one is centered on the titular F-22 (an overhyped but still very good plane, acording to my plane nerd friend), and you get to fly around and blow up stuff in your choice between Bosnian conflict (a fictional conflict between bosnia and serbia in 2004 fueled by ethnic serbians allegedly being targeted for state abuse and serbia deciding to responding with state funded car bombs. What the fuck) or the Russo-Ukraine war (the manual has a 3 page alt history of a fictional invasion of ukraine by russia in 2003 with the help of an eastern ukrainan alliance of states loyal to russia beacause ukraines getting too much western support. What the fuck) depending on which disk you insert.

The game comes with an 176 page spiral bound manual that is designed to look like an actual US Military manual, a really cool inclusion that I wish game publishers today had the balls to add to their games. Seriously, big slabs of documentation are always neat and should come with everything.

Besides that, the game comes with a keyboard refrence guide, and its original warranty paper. You used to be able to throw away publishers attempts to find out where you live.

Oh yeah, you might've noticed the free map fake sticker on the box. You might think that it'd be like, a small poster you can easily refrence while playing, right?

It was difficult to fit it in one picture with the cropping tools. Blåhaj for scale. They give you a 1:1,000,000 scale map. This thing is absurdly big why did they think this was a good idea. Like how are you easily supposed to use this.

Dispite everquest 2 likely not working when installed from this copy, I have a fondness for MMO physical editions.

I actually had no idea chessmaster was still being developed past the turn of the century. The 10th edition came out in 2004, this specific rerelease in 2006 (note, ubisoft was still using the horrendus 'that's hot!' Branding up until, at least to my knowledge, around 2014. Assassins creed unity had a rerelease physically with the branding)

Fuso truck empire is some of the goofiest shit I've ever found. Mitsubishi handed this out at truck shows as a promotional item sometime during the 2000s.

It seems to be a tycoon game in the vein of TTD. I am sure that it is a quality game with zero flaws.

The battlefield 2 copy is just neat. It has the special forces expansion tied in, and on one dvd-rom disc, instead of the three my original copy is split up on.

It still has the ad for the two 'booster packs' you could get for the game. There is a physical copy of the game that comes with those, but I'm yet to find it.

Next, like my 8th copy of skyrim, one of the loose steelcases from a fallout 4 collectors edition, and one of the better mid 2000s rtses ported to console with a god awful cover

At least this copy of skyrim is substantial.

The premium edition comes with an actual full length paperback, a bonus disc with trailers, a walkthrough, developer commentaries, and... 5 music tracks. Instead of the entire ost. It also comes with some concept art postcards, and is supposed to come with a shirt. The previous owner was kind enough to put the plastic packaging for it back in the box, but not the shirt

Honestly, a very mediocre collectors edition.

The fallout 4 steelbook continues the strange bethesda habit of putting like 4 songs on a music cd.

5 songs. For some reason. Idk.

Supreme commander is apparantly quite a good rts. I have no clue how well the port went, but for some reason they decided to give it a dollar store bayverse transformer cover.

Its quite silly.