The Beast entered the Homeworld galaxy on the _Naggarok,_ an intergalactic explorer vessel. _How many other galaxies have been completely devoured and converted core to rim?_ Also, as Commander Drich pointed out, the Beast bioform was seemingly _designed_ to fuck with/hurt/disable/humiliate 'unbound' species, species linked into their starships. The Bentusi are terrified because they're especially vulnerable to the Beast.
The Beast is a type of what is known as a 'grey goo scenario'. A theoretical apocalypse scenario where nanomachines or similar microscopic things gain the capability to self-replicate and adapt themselves while consuming all matter they come across to fuel that process.
Kinda, though more closer to rogue von Neumann probes. It wasnt really mentioned or even implied that it can infest planets and consume them in its entierty. For some reason, it just do ships.
Basically what the Beast does when it infects the ship is melt down the crew to fuse it to the ship as circuitry, and while its at it steal the knowledge of the crew, allowing it not just to learn intel, but also to instantly learn how to control a ship it has never seen before. The only thing that kept it trapped on the Naggarok is that the original crew sabotaged their own ship beyond what they themselves knew how to fix. Also, the beast actually improves the ships it infects (with the mutated lower deck beign an extreme exemple), so an infected ship will typically be more effective than its uninfected counterpart. And oh, once it infects a ship, the Beast can learn to make more of it so its not even limited to just what it manages to infect as far as numbers go. If it catches a fighter, it will be able to use normal ressources to make more of it, and same goes for the largest ships it catches like heavy cruisers... And oh, unlike other "space plagues" in sci-fi, the beast can infect other ships from a distance through the emitters their larger ships have. And ships get infected in seconds, the only ways to avoid full infection beinf either to self-destruct in the short time before control is lost, or to be a ship large enough to apply the Naar Directive, which is basically automatically sealing a section of the ship as soon as any infection is detected in it, and flooding all of that with core plasma, incinerating evrything in it trapped crew included and heavily damaging the ship in the process. And if not infecting you frol range, physical contact can do it (which is basically the whole purpose of Beast cruise missiles, basically big warheads meant to breach a ship's hull and deliver a beast payload right inside it) But what makes the beast even worse is that while its only concern is to infect everything, its smart about it. Its very first target as soon as it can do anything is going for the smartest, most advanced race around, and then it readily uses deception and even plays up galactic politics to facilitate its own goals. And oh the Naggarok got infecter by grazing a dimention made of nothing but beast matter during hyperspace. Meaning a new patient zero could always happen. Overall, ots one of the nastiest scifi infections in fiction, only beaten in my book by late stage flood (once it starts beign able to warp reality), because of how quickly it can spread, is unstoppable by any form of on-board crew (space marines could do nothing against that), and doesnt depend solely on infection to fill its ranks while on top using any ship it takes just as well if not better than its original crew, their biggest caveat bekng that its unknown how or even if the beast can infect a planet, which may limit it as a purely spaceborn plague.
It is worse when you don't see what is happening to the crew and let your imagination do the horror for you. Because yeah it is 100% in the same realm of body horror as the 3 you just mentioned.
There's one brilliant bit of multi-level gameplay and story integration that doesn't get mentioned here. All the older Homeworld ship types are available, and they're more powerful and effeceint than the ones you can build. HOWEVER, they are vulnerable to Beast takeover. The ships that YOU build convert these sorts of attacks to damage, because YOUR ships, which you design knowing they'll go up against the Beast, are basically designed to self-cauterize themselves. If they're hit by this sort of attack they burn out the effected ships and people instantly with plasma. I LOVE how much this makes sense from both a story and gaming perspective, and makes for an interesting strategic question.
4:15 The game in question is almost certainly called "impossible Creatures". Its cheap, even out of sale and runs of the Dawn of War engine, you'll feel right at home. The creature mixing is really the centerpoint of it all and I remember it was very enjoyable just creating these horrific abominations. Like a gigantic Rhino with Hornet abdomen/stinger, wings and legs.
You should know, before watching the Homeworld 3 video it’s a good idea to watch Mandy’s video on Genesis Rising, not only does the video itself reference Homeworld a lot because it’s also a space RTS game, but Mandy will reference Genesis Rising a good amount in the Homeworld 3 video.
15:29 The closest example I can think of is actually The Flood as seen in Halo Wars 2 where one of the Flood Pure Forms is specialized in taking over vehicles but even that probably doesn't go as deep as The Beast's way of turning the former pilots into a meat moss that directly interfaces with the machine... But The Flood can genuinely Mind F you and AI into doing its bidding, seriously organic beings are just as susceptible to The Logic Plague as AIs are...
Three of the people who worked on Cataclysm in Barking Dog Studios went on to found Kerberos Production (get it? :P) who later released Sword of the Stars, a great indie space 4X with turn-based strategy and RTS 3-D battles. It was full of cool ideas, like all the races having unique FTL drive mechancis. I loved it. Then they released Sword of the Stars 2, the game that taught me to never pre-order or get pre-release hyped. This post could be novel-length about that, but I don't know if you're interested.
The problem was that they had a Master of Orion 3 situation where the Devs had all sorts of good ideas but the Publishers discovered that they've been behind schedule and tried to push the game out the door ASAP, oh, and said Publisher (Paradox) actually withheld funding because it wasn't making a RoI. The build that we're left with is surprisingly decent... but sadly not good enough to keep people around. Oh, and to put salt into the wound, Paradox has complete rights to the MARS 2 engine, meaning that Kerberos has to make a whole new engine for any further games in the franchise or remakes... and in-house game engines are *_NOT_* cheap in any sense of the word. Hell, retrofitting engines is expensive as hell (for example, Unity, which has been having problems lately because of the recent 'you pay a fee for each *_GAME INSTALL_* as long as the game is around' fiasco, causing a mass exodus from Unity).
5:36 It's fully Canon, actually... It's just that until recently it's been in a state of flux because of Gearbox... Also IIRC Relic, much like Bungie when Ensemble were making Halo Wars, was SUPER salty about another studio working on their IP.
Underdog stories in games are rarely done nowadays, but this game nailed it. Along with the haunting nonconsensual body horror in deep space, I think only Dead Space surpassed it since. And as for this series... Well its like Dawn of War, there is only the first and the second one.
11:53 He's seeing what The Beast is doing to everyone and everything, he's willing to condemn himself to a horrible fate just to ensure the Kuun-Lan can survive
The fun thing about the Homeworld series is that for all but two games (HW3 and Deserts of Kharak), the man who voices the Bentusi is also the narrator, and his name was Campbell Lane (sadly, he died back in the 20-teens). He got around and was a good chunk of the '90s and 2000s kid's memories. He also showed up in the 2003 remake of Battlestar Galactica as the First Hybrid (which makes things even *_FUNNIER_* because Homeworld was supposed to be a game for the *_ORIGINAL_* Battlestar Galactica series before the licensing fell through) and was the narrator of Gundam Wing.
More like bio engineering you're nerve system as biocomputers also you sloshy dissolved flesh and bones are used to reinforce the infected ship. But that is just my imagination.
44:15 This is honestly my main criticism with the Homeworld series, this big universe, with this many cultures and you play only as the same people, but I don't think is even "the Kushan/Hiigaran", because every other game but this one (Cataclysm/Emergence) has you playing as a non-S'jet. Every other homeworld game is S'jet, and is annoying
17:55 Cataclysm is by far my favorite Homeworld game and I haven't even gotten to play it. I WANT to play it, I WANT to experience this horrifying storyline, and I WANT to see it in HD! 18:49 This is another use of a sample of "Behold the Darkness" by Medwyn Goodall which came out in 1999 and is in basically everything, the track Enmity from Empire Earth uses a sample of it, MonsterQuest uses it, various paranormal shows us it, it's basically everywhere. 31:38 Actually they probably would work, see given how they work (not getting into the stuff with Neural Physics anyway but that's effectively The Force or something) they can theoretically be used to target ONLY Beast Cells (this is a things stated in Lore, the Halo Array can be fine-tuned to specific targets, not just ALL life but that's the best way to hit the Reset Button on the galaxy) depending on how much of the Beast is organic and how much is inorganic you could probably use a localized firing on a Halo to kill them off... However there's also the chance of some of it remaining if it is in someway shielded from the blast like High Charity was at the end of Halo 3... That ended up quite the mess come Halo Wars 2's DLC, that whole thing takes place in the span of a DAY and by the end of it we're fighting a Proto-Gravemind on the very CUSP of becoming a full on Gravemind, the Flood can snowball FAST and anyone who thinks 40k has a chance of stopping the Flood from overtaking a single Hive World is lying to themselves because those planets have enough biomass packed together to make most of the outbreaks we deal with in the games look SMALL! Seriously, The Flood and The Beast don't mess around with how fast they spread and The Beast can actually just shoot a particle beam to infect or CHAIN INFECT things in one shot. But enough of that, I digress from my main point. A Halo Array could, in theory anyway, prove quite effective against the Beast and arguably more so than they were against the Flood. The reason why the Forerunners actually killed all life is to give enough empty space that any surviving Flood forms can die out over time in addition to giving the galaxy a clean slate... By the end the Forerunners felt great shame at what they allowed and had done so most also chose to die fighting or die in the pulse from the Array's activation than to live with the shame of what they had done.
"Whenever you begin a mission, you hear something like this:" "... The Imperium of man is under siege." Thank you Displate. Your timing is impeccable. XD
15:25 the only other parasite of sorts that absorbs technological and biological matter to use it in conjunction is the Flood and that is mostly in the books since in the games no outbreak last enought to see it at large, the most visible examples are the few infected ships you find in 2 and 3 and in the Halo Wars 2 (RTS) in the Flood campaing where the Flood fuses the biomass of the drivers in vehicles to the machinery itself (pretty sure its actually inspired by The Beast art style)
Yo some RTS react/plsy recommendations: Grey Goo - relatively new in the RTS scale, its super unique and fun Age of mythology retold - one of the best rts of all time, lots of mythological creatures and god powers. Age of empires 2 remastered - another one of the goats Rise of Nations/Legends - age hopping nation building rts instead of just building a base you build a nation, they have cool border mechanics. One is historical themed the other steampunk fantastical. Sins of a Solar Empire 1/2 - They dont have campaigns but they are a ton of fun, very unique as 4x scale mostly true RTS rather than turn based/ civ-likes. They also have a ton of super cool mods and i am definitely biased for working on the halo one.
13:11 *Looks at my fleets in UA:D* Well it's not like I have any room to talk given my Battlecruiser heavy doctrine. God I love making Battlecruisers...
The beast reminds me a little of the obliterator virus from 40k (not the sentient part, the biomechanical part) Edit: also, if you want another sci-fi game with a rule of cool to it: Brigador is a fantastic little game which Mandy also has a review for
There was an mod attempt to bring Cataclysm into the remaster, but it never got finished. It has the beast ships and mechanics for skirmish mode, but no campaign missions sadly.
This is the only game out of everything I own, that I bought and played just for the voice acting. Never played the mainline games because I feel like the story in Cataclysm is just so much better than anything was put out.
If our glorious lad here finds the exchange between the Hiigarans and the Bentusi compelling, he really should watch Babylon 5. The verbal duels between the ancient and mighty races and us upstart youngsters makes for some fantastic science fiction!
If we’re still rocking the “space game vibe” with Mandalore, might I recommend his review of Sins of a Solar Empire. One of my favorite RTS games that recently got a sequel after…well…over a decade! Might be a fun watch if you’ve got time.
You say underdog but is wrong, Homeworld Cataclysm is about a PARIAH who everybody hates saving the universe. Mandy kinda skims over but the disrespect you suffer is inmense across the game: -Your main ship the Kuun-Lan was made in 48 hours, yes hours. Other bigger Kiith wanted the Somtaaw as literal modern day slaves, they refused and the other Kiith ban them from the mothership facility to build ships as result. They Somtaaw had to BEG to be allowed to create something and they gave them two bloody days, this is why everything is so space truck in design. -the first missions you help a battle group against pirates, after you protect and save the drive of say ship you say "ok now lets join forces and assist us with the pirates". The ship just warps out and tells you "eehh miners can deal with whatever" -the leaders of the Kiith Somtaaw upon the discovery of the beacon want to keep it secret for political gain even when in the first game the moment we found the Stone Starmap all Kiith drop they own differences and join in the project for the Homeworld (at least on the surface) -the second victims of the Beast are the Turanic Pirates who chase you at the star of the game, the Kiith Somtaaw capitain immediately tries to tell them not to touch the ship (even when the Turanic are terrible people) and this fall on deaf ears -the Caal-Shto mission is a two part missions, you escort them into a nebula and find Taiidani Imperial battlestations, you get them out and they say to you "ok, now hide little miners and let a warrior Kiith take this one mkay?" before warping out. The only people who help you out of the blue is your sister ship the Faal-Corum mining ship who you save from the Beast and the Hiigaran Kiiths say "oh this is the only help we can send you, but worry not we are keeping a watch" which translates " we want the Taiidan Republic to suffer the blunt of the attack while we sit and watch" even when the Republic help us to win the Homeworld. So yeah the Taiidan Imperials were completely right: the Hiigarans in just a few years really turned into the old Hiigaran Empire and they were correct in the burning of Kharak but then Homeworld 2 made the Hiigarans just the Federation from Star Trek so we never got to explore how the Hiigarans turn back into the empire and other cool interesting plotpoints. Still Homeworld 1 and Cataclysm are one of my favorite stories in all videogames.
Personally, I believe 1, Deserts of Kharak, and Cataclysm to be canon, while 2 and 3 are not, because they suck and fail at having lot of the great vibes the other games have
Cataclysm's voice-acting goes... so insanely hard. I don't know what they paid the guy doing the Captain's voice, but he earned every bit of it.
IMDB says that the voice actor for the caption of the kuun-lan is Scott Swanson, but I'm not 100% sure that's right.
The Beast entered the Homeworld galaxy on the _Naggarok,_ an intergalactic explorer vessel.
_How many other galaxies have been completely devoured and converted core to rim?_
Also, as Commander Drich pointed out, the Beast bioform was seemingly _designed_ to fuck with/hurt/disable/humiliate 'unbound' species, species linked into their starships. The Bentusi are terrified because they're especially vulnerable to the Beast.
Another scholar of the Planetary Annihilation SI story boom I see.
41:16 Even the BEAST recognises that was badass in this scene "So the Miners are now Warriors? You have come far, Kiith Somtaaw"
The Beast is a type of what is known as a 'grey goo scenario'. A theoretical apocalypse scenario where nanomachines or similar microscopic things gain the capability to self-replicate and adapt themselves while consuming all matter they come across to fuel that process.
See also The Borg
Iain M. Banks called them Homogenizing Swarms
Kinda, though more closer to rogue von Neumann probes. It wasnt really mentioned or even implied that it can infest planets and consume them in its entierty. For some reason, it just do ships.
Your speculation on Homeworld 3 will serve you well when you watch Mandalore's video on it...
Prepare to watch a grown man reach his breaking point...
It’s so bad, like worse than I could have even expected
Basically what the Beast does when it infects the ship is melt down the crew to fuse it to the ship as circuitry, and while its at it steal the knowledge of the crew, allowing it not just to learn intel, but also to instantly learn how to control a ship it has never seen before. The only thing that kept it trapped on the Naggarok is that the original crew sabotaged their own ship beyond what they themselves knew how to fix. Also, the beast actually improves the ships it infects (with the mutated lower deck beign an extreme exemple), so an infected ship will typically be more effective than its uninfected counterpart. And oh, once it infects a ship, the Beast can learn to make more of it so its not even limited to just what it manages to infect as far as numbers go. If it catches a fighter, it will be able to use normal ressources to make more of it, and same goes for the largest ships it catches like heavy cruisers...
And oh, unlike other "space plagues" in sci-fi, the beast can infect other ships from a distance through the emitters their larger ships have. And ships get infected in seconds, the only ways to avoid full infection beinf either to self-destruct in the short time before control is lost, or to be a ship large enough to apply the Naar Directive, which is basically automatically sealing a section of the ship as soon as any infection is detected in it, and flooding all of that with core plasma, incinerating evrything in it trapped crew included and heavily damaging the ship in the process. And if not infecting you frol range, physical contact can do it (which is basically the whole purpose of Beast cruise missiles, basically big warheads meant to breach a ship's hull and deliver a beast payload right inside it)
But what makes the beast even worse is that while its only concern is to infect everything, its smart about it. Its very first target as soon as it can do anything is going for the smartest, most advanced race around, and then it readily uses deception and even plays up galactic politics to facilitate its own goals. And oh the Naggarok got infecter by grazing a dimention made of nothing but beast matter during hyperspace. Meaning a new patient zero could always happen.
Overall, ots one of the nastiest scifi infections in fiction, only beaten in my book by late stage flood (once it starts beign able to warp reality), because of how quickly it can spread, is unstoppable by any form of on-board crew (space marines could do nothing against that), and doesnt depend solely on infection to fill its ranks while on top using any ship it takes just as well if not better than its original crew, their biggest caveat bekng that its unknown how or even if the beast can infect a planet, which may limit it as a purely spaceborn plague.
So....the 'Beast' is like a combination of the Flood, the Borg and John Carpenter's "The Thing"? Damn that's downright horrifying!
It is worse when you don't see what is happening to the crew and let your imagination do the horror for you.
Because yeah it is 100% in the same realm of body horror as the 3 you just mentioned.
There's one brilliant bit of multi-level gameplay and story integration that doesn't get mentioned here. All the older Homeworld ship types are available, and they're more powerful and effeceint than the ones you can build. HOWEVER, they are vulnerable to Beast takeover. The ships that YOU build convert these sorts of attacks to damage, because YOUR ships, which you design knowing they'll go up against the Beast, are basically designed to self-cauterize themselves. If they're hit by this sort of attack they burn out the effected ships and people instantly with plasma. I LOVE how much this makes sense from both a story and gaming perspective, and makes for an interesting strategic question.
4:15 The game in question is almost certainly called "impossible Creatures". Its cheap, even out of sale and runs of the Dawn of War engine, you'll feel right at home. The creature mixing is really the centerpoint of it all and I remember it was very enjoyable just creating these horrific abominations. Like a gigantic Rhino with Hornet abdomen/stinger, wings and legs.
From what I recall, Lobster front halves are OP.
I still need to try that
You should know, before watching the Homeworld 3 video it’s a good idea to watch Mandy’s video on Genesis Rising, not only does the video itself reference Homeworld a lot because it’s also a space RTS game, but Mandy will reference Genesis Rising a good amount in the Homeworld 3 video.
He should also watch Genesis Rising because it's Genesis Rising.
15:29 The closest example I can think of is actually The Flood as seen in Halo Wars 2 where one of the Flood Pure Forms is specialized in taking over vehicles but even that probably doesn't go as deep as The Beast's way of turning the former pilots into a meat moss that directly interfaces with the machine...
But The Flood can genuinely Mind F you and AI into doing its bidding, seriously organic beings are just as susceptible to The Logic Plague as AIs are...
Three of the people who worked on Cataclysm in Barking Dog Studios went on to found Kerberos Production (get it? :P) who later released Sword of the Stars, a great indie space 4X with turn-based strategy and RTS 3-D battles. It was full of cool ideas, like all the races having unique FTL drive mechancis. I loved it. Then they released Sword of the Stars 2, the game that taught me to never pre-order or get pre-release hyped. This post could be novel-length about that, but I don't know if you're interested.
The problem was that they had a Master of Orion 3 situation where the Devs had all sorts of good ideas but the Publishers discovered that they've been behind schedule and tried to push the game out the door ASAP, oh, and said Publisher (Paradox) actually withheld funding because it wasn't making a RoI. The build that we're left with is surprisingly decent... but sadly not good enough to keep people around.
Oh, and to put salt into the wound, Paradox has complete rights to the MARS 2 engine, meaning that Kerberos has to make a whole new engine for any further games in the franchise or remakes... and in-house game engines are *_NOT_* cheap in any sense of the word. Hell, retrofitting engines is expensive as hell (for example, Unity, which has been having problems lately because of the recent 'you pay a fee for each *_GAME INSTALL_* as long as the game is around' fiasco, causing a mass exodus from Unity).
@@TheTrueAdept Yeah while Sword of the Stars is a mechanically deep game, it's severely unpolished.
@@AAhmou, it needs a lot of work, but it is a damn good game despite the unpolished nature.
5:36 It's fully Canon, actually... It's just that until recently it's been in a state of flux because of Gearbox... Also IIRC Relic, much like Bungie when Ensemble were making Halo Wars, was SUPER salty about another studio working on their IP.
Underdog stories in games are rarely done nowadays, but this game nailed it.
Along with the haunting nonconsensual body horror in deep space, I think only Dead Space surpassed it since.
And as for this series...
Well its like Dawn of War, there is only the first and the second one.
11:53 He's seeing what The Beast is doing to everyone and everything, he's willing to condemn himself to a horrible fate just to ensure the Kuun-Lan can survive
The first time getting that cutscene was CHILLING. Awesome, and great on storytelling, but the 'holy shit' factor was high.
The fun thing about the Homeworld series is that for all but two games (HW3 and Deserts of Kharak), the man who voices the Bentusi is also the narrator, and his name was Campbell Lane (sadly, he died back in the 20-teens). He got around and was a good chunk of the '90s and 2000s kid's memories.
He also showed up in the 2003 remake of Battlestar Galactica as the First Hybrid (which makes things even *_FUNNIER_* because Homeworld was supposed to be a game for the *_ORIGINAL_* Battlestar Galactica series before the licensing fell through) and was the narrator of Gundam Wing.
Picture The Beast like this:
It's John Carpenter's The Thing but it also absorbs mechanical to improve upon itself.
More like bio engineering you're nerve system as biocomputers also you sloshy dissolved flesh and bones are used to reinforce the infected ship.
But that is just my imagination.
44:15 This is honestly my main criticism with the Homeworld series, this big universe, with this many cultures and you play only as the same people, but I don't think is even "the Kushan/Hiigaran", because every other game but this one (Cataclysm/Emergence) has you playing as a non-S'jet. Every other homeworld game is S'jet, and is annoying
17:55 Cataclysm is by far my favorite Homeworld game and I haven't even gotten to play it. I WANT to play it, I WANT to experience this horrifying storyline, and I WANT to see it in HD!
18:49 This is another use of a sample of "Behold the Darkness" by Medwyn Goodall which came out in 1999 and is in basically everything, the track Enmity from Empire Earth uses a sample of it, MonsterQuest uses it, various paranormal shows us it, it's basically everywhere.
31:38 Actually they probably would work, see given how they work (not getting into the stuff with Neural Physics anyway but that's effectively The Force or something) they can theoretically be used to target ONLY Beast Cells (this is a things stated in Lore, the Halo Array can be fine-tuned to specific targets, not just ALL life but that's the best way to hit the Reset Button on the galaxy) depending on how much of the Beast is organic and how much is inorganic you could probably use a localized firing on a Halo to kill them off...
However there's also the chance of some of it remaining if it is in someway shielded from the blast like High Charity was at the end of Halo 3... That ended up quite the mess come Halo Wars 2's DLC, that whole thing takes place in the span of a DAY and by the end of it we're fighting a Proto-Gravemind on the very CUSP of becoming a full on Gravemind, the Flood can snowball FAST and anyone who thinks 40k has a chance of stopping the Flood from overtaking a single Hive World is lying to themselves because those planets have enough biomass packed together to make most of the outbreaks we deal with in the games look SMALL! Seriously, The Flood and The Beast don't mess around with how fast they spread and The Beast can actually just shoot a particle beam to infect or CHAIN INFECT things in one shot.
But enough of that, I digress from my main point. A Halo Array could, in theory anyway, prove quite effective against the Beast and arguably more so than they were against the Flood. The reason why the Forerunners actually killed all life is to give enough empty space that any surviving Flood forms can die out over time in addition to giving the galaxy a clean slate... By the end the Forerunners felt great shame at what they allowed and had done so most also chose to die fighting or die in the pulse from the Array's activation than to live with the shame of what they had done.
The best way to visualize what The Beast does is what is going on under an abandoned building in a mission in Trepang2
18:55
That's Empire Earth, another great strategy game series. Mandy did a review on it as well.
17:02 if you're curious, that game is Duskers, and Mandy has covered it in another video
6:50 And the Gaalsien are mentioned here too, but I don't think Kiith Ferriil are ever mentioned again.
Unfortunately, you were very correct about Homeworld 3. I think Relic's third entries will just always be cursed
"Whenever you begin a mission, you hear something like this:"
"... The Imperium of man is under siege."
Thank you Displate. Your timing is impeccable. XD
I didnt catch that bit mandalore said about karen towards the end the first time but
MANDALORE NOOOOOOO
My favourite of the Homeworld games, it goes so damn hard.
Getting bullied by the anime club is one of the dark timelines. -_-
15:25 the only other parasite of sorts that absorbs technological and biological matter to use it in conjunction is the Flood and that is mostly in the books since in the games no outbreak last enought to see it at large, the most visible examples are the few infected ships you find in 2 and 3 and in the Halo Wars 2 (RTS) in the Flood campaing where the Flood fuses the biomass of the drivers in vehicles to the machinery itself (pretty sure its actually inspired by The Beast art style)
Yo some RTS react/plsy recommendations:
Grey Goo - relatively new in the RTS scale, its super unique and fun
Age of mythology retold - one of the best rts of all time, lots of mythological creatures and god powers.
Age of empires 2 remastered - another one of the goats
Rise of Nations/Legends - age hopping nation building rts instead of just building a base you build a nation, they have cool border mechanics. One is historical themed the other steampunk fantastical.
Sins of a Solar Empire 1/2 - They dont have campaigns but they are a ton of fun, very unique as 4x scale mostly true RTS rather than turn based/ civ-likes. They also have a ton of super cool mods and i am definitely biased for working on the halo one.
Grey Goo. Now that's a name I haven't heard in many years.
Forget the chosen one, give regular Joes who rise to the occasion.
13:11 *Looks at my fleets in UA:D* Well it's not like I have any room to talk given my Battlecruiser heavy doctrine. God I love making Battlecruisers...
The beast reminds me a little of the obliterator virus from 40k (not the sentient part, the biomechanical part) Edit: also, if you want another sci-fi game with a rule of cool to it: Brigador is a fantastic little game which Mandy also has a review for
There was an mod attempt to bring Cataclysm into the remaster, but it never got finished. It has the beast ships and mechanics for skirmish mode, but no campaign missions sadly.
15:25 the flood also possesses machines in exactly the same way. it just isn't mentioned much in-game.
25:12 for a moment I thought he was going to skip past the spoilers when he paused it 😂
cataclysm is so good...........buckle up, homeworld 3 is bad......like, really bad. oh and it also endet support......less than 2 years after launch
The Relic animal morphing RTS is called "Impossible Creatures"
42:28 Holy shit that's metal as fuck. Good for them!
This is the only game out of everything I own, that I bought and played just for the voice acting. Never played the mainline games because I feel like the story in Cataclysm is just so much better than anything was put out.
If our glorious lad here finds the exchange between the Hiigarans and the Bentusi compelling, he really should watch Babylon 5. The verbal duels between the ancient and mighty races and us upstart youngsters makes for some fantastic science fiction!
If we’re still rocking the “space game vibe” with Mandalore, might I recommend his review of Sins of a Solar Empire. One of my favorite RTS games that recently got a sequel after…well…over a decade! Might be a fun watch if you’ve got time.
I pray the Source Code of Cataclysm gets found...
Next is Desert of Kharrak.
The narrator for Homeworld also did the narration for Gundam Wing so his voice is a major part of my childhood.
CUT US LOOSE!
Next is going to be Deserts of Kharak
I can't play the video for some reason, it just says "this can't be played in the background" even though I'm trying to watch it normally.
No idea what's going on there. Seems like everyone else can watch it normally. Probably something going wrong on RUclips's side.
You say underdog but is wrong, Homeworld Cataclysm is about a PARIAH who everybody hates saving the universe. Mandy kinda skims over but the disrespect you suffer is inmense across the game:
-Your main ship the Kuun-Lan was made in 48 hours, yes hours. Other bigger Kiith wanted the Somtaaw as literal modern day slaves, they refused and the other Kiith ban them from the mothership facility to build ships as result. They Somtaaw had to BEG to be allowed to create something and they gave them two bloody days, this is why everything is so space truck in design.
-the first missions you help a battle group against pirates, after you protect and save the drive of say ship you say "ok now lets join forces and assist us with the pirates". The ship just warps out and tells you "eehh miners can deal with whatever"
-the leaders of the Kiith Somtaaw upon the discovery of the beacon want to keep it secret for political gain even when in the first game the moment we found the Stone Starmap all Kiith drop they own differences and join in the project for the Homeworld (at least on the surface)
-the second victims of the Beast are the Turanic Pirates who chase you at the star of the game, the Kiith Somtaaw capitain immediately tries to tell them not to touch the ship (even when the Turanic are terrible people) and this fall on deaf ears
-the Caal-Shto mission is a two part missions, you escort them into a nebula and find Taiidani Imperial battlestations, you get them out and they say to you "ok, now hide little miners and let a warrior Kiith take this one mkay?" before warping out.
The only people who help you out of the blue is your sister ship the Faal-Corum mining ship who you save from the Beast and the Hiigaran Kiiths say "oh this is the only help we can send you, but worry not we are keeping a watch" which translates " we want the Taiidan Republic to suffer the blunt of the attack while we sit and watch" even when the Republic help us to win the Homeworld. So yeah the Taiidan Imperials were completely right: the Hiigarans in just a few years really turned into the old Hiigaran Empire and they were correct in the burning of Kharak but then Homeworld 2 made the Hiigarans just the Federation from Star Trek so we never got to explore how the Hiigarans turn back into the empire and other cool interesting plotpoints. Still Homeworld 1 and Cataclysm are one of my favorite stories in all videogames.
Nice
React to his homeworld deserts of kharak review
If want to learn more about the kiith watch maclore's video on it
Personally, I believe 1, Deserts of Kharak, and Cataclysm to be canon, while 2 and 3 are not, because they suck and fail at having lot of the great vibes the other games have
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