Total Annihilation

by Atari

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000059H0X
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches ; 0.5 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,922 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #40 in Video Games > PC Games > Action > Military & Espionage
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC | Edition: Jewel Case

Amazon.com Product Description

In Total Annihilation, you are a commander who can build an entire complex war. You can manipulate matter at an atomic level--but so can your enemy. Find a way to conquer the enemy and end the threat to universal existence. Battle with realistic firing cannons and nukes on diverse terrain, including canyons and molten riverbeds. Total Annihilation challenges you to set a new standard for combat strategy.

Product Description

Prepare yourself for the next generation of real-time strategy gaming. What began as a conflict over the transfer of consciousness from flesh to machines has escalated into a war. The battle grinds on the ground, lofts through the stratosphere, and even takes to water. Dozens on naval units -- submarines, battleships and destroyers -- give Total Annihilation a whole new edge

See all Product Description

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 3 years old and still the best!, March 21, 2001

By 

"[e-mail]" (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Total Annihilation (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)

You've probably heard of (or even played) other strategy games like Starcraft or Command & Conquer, and they were great fun, so why should you get this one? Because after playing Total Annihilation (TA for short), you'll never go back. (120 unique full-3D units battling among acid lakes and abandoned cities intrigue you? Read on.)

The story isn't really important here (basically, you fight as Arm or Core to rid the galaxy of the other guys in a 4000-year blood feud), but the giant robots, tanks, etc. allow for some spectacular explosions and heavy weaponry. A nuke's explosion annihilates everything on an 800x600 screen, unless your opponent has missile defenses, which are vulnerable to a strategic bomber strike, unless your opponent has flak cannons... and that's just the beginning!

TA's most important feature is its impeccable balance and rush defense. Instead of starting with a single construction unit, you have your persona, the Commander, the most powerful weapon on the battlefield. Your Commander can take down nearly anything the opponent sends at you for ten minutes by himself, meaning no early-game rushes will win you the game. And once you can defend yourself, you'll see that neither of the sides has the upper hand. There are no game-breaking units, because everything has a delicate speed/power/cost balance; during the course of a typical game you will use over two dozen unique units!

TA also stands out for its amazing realism. Warfare among the trees can start forest fires, which damage units around them and spread according to the same wind speed and direction which turns your turbines at varying speeds. Explosions produce shrapnel which arcs realistically and damages units hit by it. Every weapon has an area of effect, and shells often miss fast-moving enemy units and crash into hillsides or even your own troops! Aircraft act like real planes: bombers can take out several targets at once, but then have to swoop around for another pass, fighters do barrel rolls to avoid enemy fire, and seaplanes run along the surface until they have the speed to get airborne.

For seasoned strategy veterans, you'll be happy to know TA has over TEN DOZEN unique units. That's more units for each side than all the races in Starcraft have combined! Instead of researching new technology, just build a different factory to access a new slate of units! Your options include two levels each of vehicles, robots, aircraft and ships; free downloads on the company website give you everything from hovercraft to minelayers to resurrector units to underwater fusion plants.

The maps in TA are bigger than any of the competitions (up to 63 by 63 screen lengths), allowing for full-scale, 4-6-hour epic battles. Players routinely run into the 500 unit limit! To control all this, the interface is amazingly easy: just hold Shift to queue up unlimited orders for anything, from factories to infantry to construction units. Want your guy to repair this building, move to that area, build a radar tower, and then patrol the area? Would you believe five clicks? (Not just waypoints, but a starting target, repair order, and patrol route direct from the factory!)

In conclusion, there has never been a better time to pick up the "best game of all time" (PC Gamer magazine). For ten bucks, you can find more fresh gaming experience than you can in the forty bucks you'd pay for the latest two-dimensional Warcraft knockoff with 30 guys that all look the same. And when you're ready, you can check out the still-active fan following (over 300 players every day on the MSN Gaming Zone).

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No $10 can be better spent...., December 7, 2001

By 

Rolltide (Columbia, Tn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Total Annihilation (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)

Forget spending $40 on the next new game or more when for half that you can buy the best RTS game of all time for you and a buddy.

I have played most of the top RTS games, C&C seris, starcraft, warcraft, age of empires ect. and any fan of those games will love this game. First of all no game gives you the breath of weaponry, units and structures to wage war with. The concept is sci fi but the units don't seem that out of touch with what you will find in red alert or tiberian sun. There are two different teams you can play with the ARM or the CORE. The main difference is in how the units look rather than function though there are some subtle differences. You begin the game with one powerful unit called a commander. The commander can build any regular level factory or structure and can go anywhere over any terrain and even under water! You need two resources to function energy and metal and even here you have many options. If conditions are windy build several cheap windmills, if not solar units will do. You obtain metal by building a metal maker over any patch of silver on a map. Once the commander builds some factories construction units can be made and those units(vehicles,robots,air or naval) can build advanced factories from which you can make advanced construction units. Now you have a virtual cornacopia of choices for units and structures. If you see some steam coming out of the ground a construction unit can build a geothermal energy plant over it. The advanced contrution units can make nuclear energy factories and advanced metal makers as well as nuclear missles and anti-ballistic weapons.

As for the combat units you have almost an unlimited selection from fast scout like tanks and bots to a medium and heavy vehicles not unlike what you see in red alert. There are regular and advanced missle launchers with long range but less armor and almost everything in between. Small bots that move fast are good for scouting and special ops like work and if you have the metal and energy you can build ultra devastating energy vehicles. You can win either with more smaller units or fewer large units. Want to build a kick butt air force? Then you can choose from a variety of bombers and fighters as well as transports. You can also build a full fledged navy with destroyers, crusiers, missle launching ships and the motha of all vessals the battleship. You can even create energy(if there are tides) and metal in the water as well as defensive missles. Also construction ships can build on land off the shore.

What really sets this game apart from most is the awesome selection of defensive structures that can be built. The commander can build a basic single laser that while not very durable will give you some basic land and air defense. Because they are cheap you can build many of them in a cluster. Then there are the advanced anti-air missle launchers which also provide some land support and there is a double laser. Probably the best all around structure is the plasma cannon with double barreled fire power, exellent range and heavy armor. At the most advanced level you can build powerful energy weapons and the ultimate structure big bertha! Big bertha will destroy most units with one salvo and has awesome range that can reach halfway across some smaller maps. Then there is my favorite the pop up cannon. While roughly equal in effectiveness to the plasma cannon this unit stays below ground only to pop up when enemy units are spotted, really cool.

There are other strategic considerations as well. For example in this game unlike most others a unit doesn't disappear when destroyed. It will leave at a pile of metal at the spot. It's not hard to imagine a major battle leaving huge amounts of metal scattered about. This metal can be left there to help block out the enemy and lasers and cannons built strategically among it or you can use your commander and construction units to suck up the metal. A destroyed battleship or crusier will have enough metal build several tanks. Speaking of your commander he has great strategic value as well. See you can make things faster by using more than one construction unit. Tell any construction unit to guard a factory and the factory will build units faster or guard any structure during construction and it will build faster and the commander is most effective this way. The commander has an enormous amount of energy stored inside so he can help build things the fastest and that includes things he can't build himself. For example only an advanced construction unit can build a nuke launcher but you can use any construction unit to help and once started they can finish it without the advanced unit. Also because the commander has all that energy he can deliver awesome fire power with his D-gun but don't let him die because he'll cause an explosion similar to a nuke. If he is going to go make sure it is in the other guys camp.

Over all this is a great game, the ultimate RTS war game! You can play the missions which are fun but multiplayer is where this game is at. You can play an opponent directly modem to modem or you can find opponents at cavedog.com or mplayer.com. Even though the game is now 4 years old the graphics are not bad with similar 3D mapping to what you see in tiberian sun. The only negative is that when you are well into an epic battle the game will slow down. Since you can play with up to 500 units it makes it almost impossible to play a 2v2 game online. It even slows a little in just a 1v1 game. There is a helpful patch that can be downloaded at cave dog which will increase your units and maps. For rts vets this game can be learned quickly and will be very hard to put down. One of the all time classics!

..................socks

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't Get Old, December 26, 2003

By 

Yu-jin Chia "Yu-Jin Chia" (Cupertino, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Total Annihilation (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)

When Total Annihilation was released, it set the bar for real-time strategy. The brainchild of Chris Taylor (Dungeon Siege), its fully-3D game world was- and arguably remains- unsurpassed in the strategy genre, and the ambitious scope of the game remains incredible. To date, there are many elements in Total Annihilation that have never been successfully re-implemented.

The game resources are pretty simple- you've got metal and energy. Metal can be scavenged, mined, or generated with metal makers that essentially turn energy into metal. Power plants generate energy. You start with a special unit- the Commander- that can build all basic buildings and produces a small amount of resources. This unit will remain your most powerful for some time, due to the almighty D-Gun he packs around. In this way, TA beat Blizzard's Warcraft III to the 'hero' RTS concept by some 3 years.

Once you have resources, you can start building your army. Here is where TA is a really one-of-a-kind game. Your options are simply jaw-dropping in scope. Choose from scores of unit types, each with unique handling and weaponry. Fight on land, sea, or in the air or, if you don't like making units, just build from the awesome array of defenses available. Long before titles such as Shogun: Total War promised hundreds of 3-D units on the battlefield, TA already had it! You can engage in truly epic battles alone or with friends. Before starting, however, it's recommended you take a bathroom break and keep food and drink at hand. Most other RTS games are a paper-rock-scissors setup with one specific unit owning another, and being owned by something else in turn. This means victory is often decided by what you chose to build. To some extent this is true in Total Annihilation as well, but you have so many capable units to pick from (and can deploy so many) that it's pretty hard to lose as a result of a poor or unlucky choice. This also means that battles tend to be long, fast-paced, and utterly vicious. If you want to risk your builders, there's going to be metal hulks to salvage out there. Count on it.

Since it takes so long to win and the Commander makes a rush suicidal, you generally gain the upper hand by deploying some sort of terrifying superweapon. These range from fixed long-range plasma cannons like the Big Bertha to nuke silos and immense mechs like the Krogoth. Once you have one or more of these, you can quickly gain the upper hand. That is, of course, if they don't have one as well. The longest multiplayer games I have ever played were Total Annihilation. The next longest- on large C&C Tiberian Sun maps- got so boring I nearly fell asleep. Despite this, I've never had that problem with TA.

Multiplayer is the best part of TA, but there is a long campaign for each of the two sides as well. These two factions, CORE and ARM, aren't just mirror images of each other. Their units all look very different and some have no equivalent on the other side. Overall, however, the armies are amazingly well balanced.

The computer is pretty good at base building and not so good at defending, but AI overall is quite decent. If you don't rush in and blow up all the AI's power plants, it can put up quite a good fight later in the game. There's a skirmish-type mode available, as well as multiplayer. A LAN or high speed connection is recommendable for this, since it tends to bog down later in the game.

The graphics are still good, even in comparison to many new releases like C&C Generals. Literally everything is 3-D, and effects are well done- extremely so for the time this game was released. Dead units will leave burned-out junk on the battlefield that persists until someone comes to reclaim it. Projectiles streak all over the battlefield whenever a firefight breaks out, and when you fire nukes it really looks and behaves like a nuke should. When TA came out, many computers couldn't take the load in the latter stages of a long game due to the massive amount of units, structures, and debris. This gives you some idea of how revolutionary the technical aspect of the game is.

The Total Annihilation soundtrack merits some extra note. Created by well-known game composer Jeremy Soule, it is some of his best work and remains some of the best music I've heard anywhere- not just in games but in movies and assorted classical compositions. The music really sets the mood, and changes dynamically depending on whether your army is in action. Even if you despise strategy games of all sorts, I'd recommend you fork over the $10 for Total Annihilation just to get the soundtrack. It really is that good!

Simply put, Total Annihilation was and remains a revolutionary real-time strategy game. If you appreciate the genre, you should own a copy. Period.

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