on the power generators. When the third crystal is acquired, each is sent to their respective alchemators. However, when he brings the final crystal to Rend, his team is ambushed by a much larger force of rebels who capture the crystal. Burns receives information that Manson's AAN loyalists (including himself) have defied Braddock and are under siege from his New Regime troops. After breaking the siege, Cooke counterattacks with Manson's forces, destroying the NR base and even intercepting a rebel convoy carrying the crystal which they are willing to trade with Braddock for bio-metal. With the last crystal in his possession, Cooke lands on Rend for a final payback. Braddock personally defends the alchemator with a trio of Attila Combat Walkers, but he is ultimately defeated and the crystal is placed. The three alchemators are then activated, and their combined beam is shot through a wormhole into the Solar System. The beam impacts into the Dark Planet, gradually transforming it into a new Core Planet at Earth's doorstep. Development Pandemic Studios continued and expanded the concept of a RTS and FPS hybrid where the player drives the vehicle in the game, but using a mixture of the reticle and the space bar, selects units and buildings to build and orders units around the battle field. The F keys at the top of the keyboard were used to create groups of units for easy selection of the units presently on the battlefield when they were not in the range of the player to select via the spacebar. Battlezone II was not very popular, likely due to Pandemic Studio's attempts to blend two genres together; both styles of player had trouble adapting to an unfamiliar genre. Programmer Ken Miller said, "BZ2 was meant to do that [appeal to both genres] at first, but headed in the opposite direction. The problem is that mixed-genre games only attract players that like both genres (the intersection) as opposed to either genre (the union). It mainly comes down to learning curve. Action/shooter gamers can pick up just about any action/shooter game on the market and play it in short order, as almost all of them use the same control scheme and feature similar gameplay conventions. Similarly, strategy gamers can pick up just about any strategy game on the market and play it, although strategy games tend to differ from each other more than action games. Confronting