Anyone else love the Command and Conquer series?

The Game Room
#1

Hi SD,

Just sharing love for Command and Conguer, Red Alert and Tiberian Sun, games which were pretty awesome back in the day. There was nothing quite like beating a difficult mission and getting rewarded with a movie clip.

The acting was, to my mind, pretty decent. There were some big names involved in the series (James Earl Jones, Michael Biehn, etc.) I always used to get chills watching (spoiler alert!) Kane murder Seth in cold blood halfway through the first Nod campaign. And Cabal was awesome, in the Tiberian Sun series. The voice acting for him was pretty fantastic.

I liked the storylines as well, and it was a pretty slick interface. I also enjoyed using the overpowered characters like Tanya to single-handedly destroy a base.

Anyone have fun memories of these games?

Dave

#2

I’ve only played Tiberian Sun. I wanted to like it but it never quite got there. I thought the acting was a huge mountain of cheese, barely watchable. And there was a quirk with the pathfinding that annoyed me. I’d tell a unit to go from A to B and if there happened to be a lava pit in between he’d merrily walk into it and die. It seemed to want a level of micromanagement that I didn’t find fun.

#3

It never quite hit me.

I think most people I knew in the mid-90s were firmly in Warcraft camp or the C&C camp when it came to their RTS flavor. C&C-style games had lots more units, lots more chaos on the screen. Warcraft had a fewer number of more detailed sprites.

I was a Warcraft kid, probably for no good reason other than that I played it first. But there ya go. I do remember acknowledging that C&C felt technically superior in some ways: especially in regards to unit stacking. But it always felt so serious and grim. Warcraft was vibrant and had some underlying silliness to it.

C&C did a lot of stuff first and better, though. The acting may have been cheesy, but it was FMV in a time when FMV wasn’t really a thing yet. I wonder how much of the disc was allocated for those videos.

#4

I played them all quite a bit when they came out and enjoyed them a lot. However, none of them changed my world in the way Warcraft 2 did or Starcraft did years later. I haven’t played any game as much as I’ve played Starcraft, nothing is even close.

#5

I loved C&C, C&C 2, and C&C:Red Alert. I don’t remember Tiberian Sun as well. The feeling of awesomeness you got the first time you unlocked the Mammoth Tank was just great. Is there anything similar to the old RTS games like this today?

#6

I played the heck out of Red Alert back when I was in college, because that’s what was installed on all the computers in the computer lab, and one of the professors would let a group of us in after hours for LAN battles. I was the only one of the lot who ever used any primary strategy beyond “mash the heck out of the tank button”. I have particularly fond memories of the time when my cruisers devastated the professor’s base, and he decided to retaliate with helicopters based on the thin strip of land that was out of their range… only to discover that a third of my cruisers were actually destroyers.

#7

Command and Conquer: Generals is probably still my favourite RTS. I can certainly think of ways a new RTS could be better than it was, but it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.

One thing I enjoyed about that game was comp stomps where I would raid a few enemy bases for bulldozers, and then build mixed forces along a certain theme - like a deathstar of Emperor Overlords, Bunker Overlords and Nuclear Overlords that just drives through multiple enemy bases to victory, or squadrons of all the different humvee variants.

#8

I loved C&C and Red Alert; Tiberian Sun was okay and I thought Renegade was a lot of fun. I also liked Red Alert 2 and thought Generals was okay. C&C3 and 4 were terrible, IMO.

FWIW, I also liked all the WarCraft and StarCraft games back in the '90s and early '00s.

I liked Age of Empires 2 and 3 even more tho.

#9

Incidentally, if you liked the Command and Conquer series, you’ll probably also like Dark Reign. It was pretty transparently inspired by C&C, but they refined and improved a lot of the gameplay elements. For instance, you can give queued orders to your units, and can set default behaviors for roughly how they’ll behave when not given orders (like, if an enemy stumbles into your units, do you want them to chase it as far as they can, chase it just far enough to make sure that it’s running, or stay put, and at what level of damage (if any) do you want them to automatically return to a repair station).

#10

I loved Command & Conquer before they ruined it with C&C4. Does Dark Reign have unit caps? That alone ruins most other RTS games for me.

#11

If it did, I never ran into them, and I routinely had things like the entire screen completely paved with artillery (artillery in Dark Reign had much longer range than in most RTS games).