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Supreme Desktop Commander: Wildman's Mad Mod Tools

Will Wildman cross the financial finish line before Kickstarter strikes 12 and Gas Powered Games turns back into a pumpkin? Who knows? Crazier things have happened. But, more often than not, they haven't. That's kinda why they're, you know, crazy - not normal. But Wildman isn't the only thing doing laps in GPG's primordial ooze. As Chris Taylor told us, they've also got something called Project Mercury in the works. But what is it, exactly? Well, it's been dubbed "the infinite desktop" and placed in the same lineage as Supreme Commander. Now, though, we finally get to see how it all fits together. GPG's released a video of Project Mercury performing its most mercurial of tasks, and it actually looks really impressive. If I'm being honest, I think Mercury has me more excited than Wildman proper.

So yeah, that's quite a potentially exciting thing. I mean, the constant connectedness of it all sounds like a godsend for modders, and - as someone who's physically incapable of not having several thousand applications and tabs open at once - the ability to zoom out to space is just perfect. No organizational skills? No problem. Take that, MOM.

Also nice: it's modular, so you don't have to worry about entire programs or operations in the event of an error. Just individual aspects. Further, since it's on the cloud, that means it's cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux) and capable of instantly transferring progress across multiple machines. Admittedly, Taylor's developed a Molyneux-esque habit of promising us the moon (while using words like, bleh, "synergy," no less), but he's at least got a modicum of evidence to back up his claims.

Now if Taylor and co just follow through on their promise to open up Mercury to fans and other mod-friendly games alike, this could actually make quite an impact when it comes careening into the current game development galaxy. Or at least, that's the way I see it. I don't make these things, though. I just write about them. Modders and game developers, what's your take? Could Mercury be a game-changer, or have I just been blinded by the fact that I secretly want all my daily activities to be thinly veiled extensions of Supreme Commander?

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Nathan Grayson: Nathan wrote news for RPS between 2012-2014, and continues to be the only American that's been a full-time member of staff. He's also written for a wide variety of places, including IGN, PC Gamer, VG247 and Kotaku, and now runs his own independent journalism site Aftermath.
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