What is it?
- A RTS in a science fiction
setting, 1997, Windows.
- What computer or emulator will it run on?
- Any Pentium running Windows 3.1 (with Win32s) or higher.
- Tags
- Isometric.
What is it?
Enemy Nations was developed by Windward Studios, whose other products were a firewall and some word processing software (meanwhile, their main products are a Java Report Engine and a .NET Report Engine). The publisher went out of business soon afterwards, so Windward Studios sold the game from their website.
In May 2001 they sold the last CD and declared the game freeware. The CD may be copied as long as it is given away and not included with anything else. Some time later the game was put up for download. In mid-2002, downloading a file of over 300MB was quite an adventure. I tried again and again for days, since the server allowed only five concurrent downloads. When I finally succeeded, the download took me seven hours; back then, a connection capable of downloading a Meg a minute was considered pretty fast.
Due to the many requests they recieved, Windwards started selling CDs again on 2003-11-24. That didn't affect the game's freeware status, but they removed the download from their website. Early in 2006, they put up a torrent download and stopped selling it again.
About a year later, that torrent was dead, nobody was seeding any more. So I decided to put it up myself. It was the largest file I had hosted so far, and for a while, I think, this was the only place where you could get it. Meanwhile, you can download it from the Windward Studios site again. You find the link at the bottom of the page.
Important: Once you have downloaded it, you must burn it to a CD, since the game requires the CD in the drive to play.
Originally, Enemy Nations supported both 16-bit and 32-bit Windows. When Windward Studios put the game up for free download, they noted that the 3.1 executables were not included in the free download.
Meanwhile I dug up an original CD, but there was no 16-bit executable there either. What I did find on the CD was Win32s and WinG, so I suppose this what is necessary to run it under Windows 3.1. Both can be found on many places on the web, including the Microsoft website.
Enemy Nations is probably the most advanced game to run under Windows 3.1. It should run at any resolution, at the very least at 1600×1200!
You will see smoke rising from chimneys, tanks creak into action, building parts scattered on the ground in an explosion, and many more details that show how much a game is a labor of love for the designers. The enemy AI is excellent, and you will be surprised at how well the computer player adapts to your strategies and plan attacks of its own. The game is a near-perfect blend of world conquest and real-time strategy games. There's a bit of everything here, but all of it is very well balanced and integrated, never overwhelming the player.
Even if Enemy Nations belongs to the growing category of real-time strategy games, it offers several features never seen before that will bring a wind of fresh air to the genre. At first glance, the game resembles Deadlock (Accolade) and This Means War! (MicroProse) put together, taking the best advantages of both games. Graphics are brilliant and look even better than those of Accolade's hit, and the real-time engine is flying compared to the speed in MicroProse's game. In addition, Enemy Nations includes multi-player support to let you play with friends across several connection possibilities including the Internet.
