Chrome Hounds



Chrome Hounds is a squad-based Massively multiplayer Mecha Game for the Xbox 360, developed by From Software. The game is set in an Alternate History version of 2006, on the south shore of the Black Sea - as 3 countries battle it out for control of a region known as Neromius. Of course, how the war turns out is up to the players, and thus, the story of the war is reset every so often, so that new players can join in.

The game's single player is more of a tutorial on the role-types (which do come into play in the multiplayer) and is about how the "Neromius War" got started. That said, the single-player part of the game is severely lacking in comparison to the excellent multiplayer mode.

Regarding the minimal story the game has: The cold war combined with solar flares caused America to become extremely isolationist, and several wars broke out as a result, leading to the independence of 3 nations within Neromius: Tarakia, which does have America's backing, Morskoj, a nation that broke away from the USSR, and a stereotypical middle-eastern nation- Sal Kar (backed by South-east Asia). (Oh, there's some other groups, too: Rafzakael, a sort of "Mercenaries R Us" business the player works for, and a mysterious organization on level of the Knights Templar, called Cerberus. But they don't matter that much, ) Also- these wars lead to the development of a new type of tank: the Advanced Combat Vehicle or ACV, which could interchange weaponry parts based on a standard hexagonal frame. This in turn lead to the development of the titular weapon, the Hound, an advanced ACV that could interchange all of its parts. With this, mercenaries took to the field in the Hounds, and soon began a series of events that lead to war...

Oh, this game may be a prequel to Armored Core.


 * Alternate History- The game is set in 2006, with the USSR still in existence, but fractured along ethnic lines, the US out of touch with mostly everyone, and most importantly: Humongous Mecha being deployed in warzones.
 * Artistic License Physics- The most obvious liberty that the game designers took was omitting the effect of height on a Hound's center of balance. Because of this, even basic designs tend to be absurdly top heavy. Competitive players arrange their guns in tall and narrow stacks to make them harder to hit. Recoil from hits also seems to be absent no matter how large a caliber the shots are. A Hound that gets destroyed by a single absurd volley simply explodes in an upright position.
 * Awesome but Impractical- The Morskoj Unidentified Weapon, the MSK-X0, which is GIANT HOWITZER that fires shells that are larger than people, while still incredibly tough, never seems to be able to fire at hounds (with the main gun, anyways), because the cannon can't rotate.
 * Awesome Yet Practical- The Double-Double, or Double D's (as it's sometimes called) is a type of Heavy Gunner that carries around a pair of twin-barreled Battleship Cannons, and use them as its weapons. And it works.)
 * Battleship Raid- When one of the nations is suffering online, but manages to retake a foothold, they'll deploy an "Unidentified Weapon", and the other nation's players will be able to commence one of these type missions against it.
 * Boom! Headshot!- Snipers.
 * Breakable Weapons- Every part. And when it's broken shooting it makes the damage that would be done, done to the cockpit instead.
 * Competitive Balance- The Role-Types: Soldiers, Scouts, Snipers, Defenders, Heavy Gunners, and Commanders.
 * Downer Ending-
 * Elite Tweak
 * Enemy Mine- Given Squads and players alike can switch sides every now and then, the country you were fighting for could be your enemy in your next deployment.
 * Featureless Protagonist- The Player Character is one.
 * For Want of a Nail- Solar Flares disrupting global communication lead to Humongous Mecha.
 * Kill It with Fire: Some howitzers are equipped with incendiaries, good for causing lots of damage to those Stick Mechs.
 * Humongous Mecha- ACVs and Hounds. Even bigger: Ghalib, Sal Kar's Unidentified Weapon.
 * Macross Missile Massacre- The unguided Rocketlaunchers, which fire in an arc to saturate an area with HE rockets. They fire six at a time with a slight dispersion and high rate of fire...mounting 4 of these spams rockets everywhere. They are probably THE strongest close combat weapon, as the damage output is very high and the enemies Cockpit goes massively off target.
 * A Mech by Any Other Name- Hounds.
 * Military Mashup Machine- The Hounds themselves, and a true example of the Land Battleship type: Tarakia's Unidentified weapon: the M-99 Super Patriot.
 * Mission Control- The entire point of the Commander Role-Type is to be this to the rest of his/her squad.
 * More Dakka- Machine guns and more Machine guns.
 * You can actually mount 4 normal Machine guns and supplement them with Gatling guns that weight next to nothing and fire in a 120 Round burst, even when you switch weapons. So you could potentionally fire up to 8 Machine guns at the same target, at the same time.
 * My Country, Right or Wrong- Alexei on the Scout Campaign-- he knows countless Sal Kari will suffer and die because he blew up their water treatment plant, but he did so to protect Morskoj.
 * Oh Crap- Any new squad's reaction to "Unidentified Weapon Appears" and watching the intro of said Unidentified Weapon.
 * Real Robot Genre- Gives Patlabour a good run for its money on how real.
 * the mecha even have frikkin fuel gauges. though they don't really have that great an effect on gameplay unless you take a really long time play command-centre games, though...
 * Schematized Prop Like its cousin, Armored Core, EVERY part.
 * Screwed by the Network- Sega has announced that they will be shutting down the Chrome Hounds server on January 6, 2010.
 * Urban Legend of Zelda- There are lots of theories and rumors of if Sega will reactivate the servers and when.
 * Yanks With Tanks- The M-99 is supposedly American. Guess what it is? (If you guess GIANT Tank, you're right on the money.)