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Real time strategy with real people?
 I have had a number of questions about the upcoming Red vs Blue paintball event outside of Dallas. Everything ranging from "I don't understand, is this videogame paintball" to "I don't understand, is this machinima paintball". Since the common thread was that no one understood, I thought I would take a moment to explain. Viper Scenarios, the group in charge of all this, holds regular theme-based paintball events. They have created a truly unique experience by taking videogame RTS rules and applying them to a real-life paintball games with hundreds of players. Since the upcoming incarnation will be a RedvsBlue-themed event, gus and I will be acting as generals of the Red and Blue armies respectively. Essentially, we will be playing a 24 hour continuous Real Time Strategy game but instead of pixelated orcs or virtual zerg, we'll each have 150+ living, breathing, shooting humans at our disposal. We will have missions to run, resources to gather and enemies to fight. We'll be able to use resources to purchase character classes like medics and engineers. We'll even be able to purchase vehicles for mechanized forms of assault. Coincidently, we attended a Starcraft themed event a while ago and the picture above shows the Terran team's tank that hounded us throughout the weekend (yes, it had been modified to fire paint). Clearly, these guys take this stuff very seriously. Night play is especially interesting. People bust out everything from flares to spotlights to Gen 3 Nightvision goggles. You haven't lived until you've travelled across 60 acres without being able to see five feet in front of your face. For a full list of the RTS rules, you can check here, although you may want to read the master Scenario rule set first. It covers the basics of Scenario paintball, of which the Viper RTS rules are a subset. Try to think of it as an expansion pack.
If you're an RTS fan in general (but shy away from real life events and paintball-induced welts), you may want to take a look at Halogen's website. It's a group of Bungie fans that's working to create a Halo RTS game using the Command & Conquer: Generals engine. From the screens they have posted, I am extremely impressed in the models they have made so far. It's the kind of awesome "for the love of it" independent fan project that I hope will be even one tenth as cool as it looks in mockups. As an RTS and Halo fan, I am giddy at the prospect. But, I temper my enthusiasm with the knowledge that I am historically batting .500 on gid-inducing fan projects, with one swing being the terminally in-development Ultima 5 Lazarus Project and the other glorious at-bat being the unbelievably wonderful Ur-Quan Masters Star Control 2 project. But I have faith that the Halogen team can pull it off.
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