Resurrection: Command & Conquer

‘Resurrection‘ is Resolution Magazine’s weekly trip into the past. This week, one of the founding fathers of the strategy genre…

What do you expect from a real-time strategy game? Many of the answers the average gamer would give in response to this question would be among the features pioneered by or at least popularized by Dune II. The game’s players were not to know way back in 1992, but Dune II was to be the calm before the storm – in 1995 Command & Conquer was released, transplanting improved versions of the older games mechanics from a licensed interplanetary setting to a more contemporary Earthly one inspired by the Gulf War and the topical rise of so-called “non-state actors”.

C&C’s release set up a relationship we are quite familiar with. The game now retrospectively subtitled Tiberian Dawn was to Dune II what Doom was to Wolfenstein 3D, what The Beatles were to The Quarrymen. It represented a quantum leap in expectations which ensured that things would never be the same again; it set Westwood Studios onto becoming one of the greatest American developers in the games industry’s history and made them millions upon millions of dollars.

Watching one of my cousins briefly play an early mission from the game some years after its release was one of my earliest formative gaming moments. Immediately, I wanted to play it at home, to escape the increasing repetition of playing the shareware version of Monster Bash. I’ve often found myself playing classic games and wondering how on Earth it must have felt to play through experiences which, at the time of their release, must have been revelatory. Playing a game like C&C today is to grasp fruitlessly at that feeling, like trying to touch a ghost. You can see it, but you can’t feel it.

That’s not to say that playing today is a hollow experience. Not only is playing C&C in 2010 still a gripping education in RTS history, but it’s also timely, given that Westwood’s 2003 purchasers EA have reminded us that C&C and its alternate history sequel Red Alert have for some years been available for free download, recently joined for the first time by 1999’s Tiberian Sun to promote the release of Command & Conquer 4.

A BIT LIKE STAR WARS
Revisiting, one of the thing that strikes you is the game’s plot. Albeit to a lesser extent, C&C is a bit like Star Wars – not only did it spawn a lengthy series but it invented several genre clichés. The idea of two disparate sides fighting over a mysterious alien resource is familiar to use now, but it was much more distinctive and new in games in 1995. Tasked with securing mystery mineral tiberium and eliminating the other faction from a continental map, the player commands forces of either the UN-sanctioned Global Defence Initiative or the sinister cult-army the Brotherhood of Nod. The game’s focus is squarely on the campaigns, the GDI one involving the player being instructed to eradicate the Nod presence in a besieged and tiberium-infested Europe, and the Nod campaign chronicling your efforts to turn Africa’s disaffected states against the GDI. Because of this territorial division between the campaigns, they’re largely not mutually exclusive, and until the endgame you can easily imagine that they’re taking place simultaneously.

It’s a little surprising now how much non-linearity the game’s campaigns actually contain, considering how old C&C is. Not only can you approach the campaigns in whichever order you choose, but you’re given choices after each mission as to which direction to attack the next warzone from. It’s based completely on luck, but choose well and you might get a substantially easier mission than if you choose poorly. At first confusing, these options soon form an alluring game of chance when you begin to realise just how challenging some of the game’s missions can be.

It’s a far cry from many of today’s strategy games. The units of both sides are generally extremely fragile, and there are very few strategies you can employ that can actually secure success in missions. Many missions, especially during the Nod campaign, task you with using a very small number of units extremely economically, perhaps to help you reach or capture a base to use, or even complete the mission as a whole without any additional help. Lose too many units in these missions and whilst you won’t automatically fail, your chances of victory are scuppered and you’ll have to retreat to an earlier save. It’s a familiar mechanic now, employed as a an occasional dash of variety in today’s conventional RTS games, but it happens almost alarmingly frequently in C&C, in increasingly brutal and unforgiving examples.

[Continues...]

Pages: 1 2