SUPREME COMMANDER

There is no high quite like the emasculated agony of graphics envy. It was 2007, I was 16 years old, and still fully bound to the limitations of the Xbox 360 and PS3 in the bedroom. The hand-me-down laptop whirring on the desk could barely handle Battlefield 1942, much less the relentless tempo of speedy processors dutifully obsoleting the seventh generation of home consoles. Still, I voraciously tore through the games press, reading up on the mouthwatering vistas that were enthusiastically unavailable on a Dualshock, essentially as a way to torture myself. The primary object of my obsession? Supreme Commander.

Gas Powered Games’ watershed RTS arrived with exactly one selling point; this thing was a beast, and you should be jealous if you couldn’t run it. And so, I binged the 360p E3 preview footage of on my sad, dinky laptop, which seemed to wheeze and gag at the mere sight of all of the quicksilver troops