C&C simply demands that I stay on top of my war economy so I can crank out enough units to take out the other guy. There’s no modelling of cover, no worrying about unit fatigue, no worrying about running out of ammo or fuel, or anything else that strategy games have introduced since then. With C&C, I don’t have to wrestle with any unit’s secondary or tertiary abilities because there are none. C&C remains an enjoyable game because it’s designed to be a game that anyone can get into, not just the diehard RTS players.įor someone like me, who largely avoided RTS titles during my childhood because I sucked at them, this is an amazing opportunity to get back into the genre and revisit old memories while relearning the concepts and strategies that the better players in the 90s already knew. There were no standards for hotkeys, or controls, or presentation, or any of those things. Competitive RTS gaming was non-existent before C&C was released, and back then, the game’s developers had no checklist of RTS tropes that they needed to hit to grab the attention of the gaming public. There’s a certain purity and enthusiasm to be found in C&C that I’d be hard-pressed to find in any RTS that came out in the last ten years. C&C remains an enjoyable game because it’s designed to be a game that anyone can get into, not just the diehard RTS players. Three missions in and I was hooked like it was 1995. I fired up a GDI campaign (a new experience for me - I had always been a NOD-first player) and ran the game through its paces. It can’t be denied though that C&C is still tons of fun. It even had only two factions compared to Dune 2’s three! Command & Conquer, in comparison, looked like a generic modern military game with maps that had no sand worms lurking under the surface. Dune 2 had all that rich background and had detailed build screens for the structures and a unique gameplay element in carefully traversing open desert. I had played Westwood’s Dune 2 - the game widely accepted as the first modern real-time strategy game - and while C&C definitely had superior graphics and presentation, the world was kind of flat. They all sound like the same freaking soldier dude.Įven the setting didn’t do much to wow me when I first saw it in action long ago. I can’t delve too much into the intricacies of the system and how unbalanced it may be, but I can say that the unit variety isn’t that inspired, and different types of infantry don’t even get distinct voice clips.
Then again, I haven’t yet tried any other games in the set besides C&C 95 and Generals, and if the latter didn’t run, we really would have had a big problem.Ĭommand & Conquer is of course one of the great granddaddies of the real-time strategy genre - the game that epitomized the much-maligned concepts of SimBase (build up a huge base and never attack!) and the tank rush.
I picked up the C&C Ultimate Collection from the Amazon sale (which is still ongoing at the time of this writing), and after all the negative press about “lazy EA” and “lousy porting”, I find myself pleasantly surprised. After all, probably 80% of what I remember from the original C&C are the voice clips. Now that I’ve blocked off the time to sit down and write about Command & Conquer, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s difficult to avoid the temptation to just devolve the whole thing into a slew of unit quotes and game quotes.
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