Command & Conquer (MS-DOS)

Developer:

Westwood

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Release Date:

1995

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Systems:

PC, Mac, PSX, N64, Saturn

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This year on Super Adventures, I'm celebrating 10 years of the site by playing games that you'd find on a 'top 10' list, and that means I've ran out of excuses not to write something about Command & Conquer. The game was retroactively relabelled Tiberian Dawn, but I'm not calling it that. Partly because I always get it mixed up with the sequel Tiberian Sun, partly because I can never remember if it's 'Tiberian' or 'Tiberium'.

You might be wondering why I've been so reluctant to write about such a well-respected and beloved classic. Well that's because it's an RTS game and that means it's going to take effort. I have to play it for hours and then somehow summarise what I did and how it plays with just a handful of screenshots, all of them of little dudes standing in a grassy field firing at smoking buildings. This is why I write about so many platformers, they're easy! "Hey it starts with a forest level, huge shock. I guess I'll go jump on the spiders then? Oh no the bottomless pit killed me! And now I'm in a sewer, wow." RTS games almost never have sewer levels for me to whine about!

There's lots of different ways to play this game now, like a modern source port, or fan made patch for Command & Conquer Gold. But the best way is almost certainly Command & Conquer: Remastered, which improves the sound and visuals, and updates the interface without messing with the gameplay. Everyone showers it with praise and it seems like it's earned it. But I won't be playing that. Instead I'm going back to my original CDs, the very first DOS version, unpatched. Why? Because the DOS release is incredibly zoomed in compared to later versions and I want to give you a fighting chance to see the tiny little tanks and soldiers in my screenshots.

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I don't usually take a screenshot of a game's install program, but this is clearly something special. It's an install program so iconic that it shows up in the intro to the sequel Tiberian Sun and composer Frank Klepacki put it at the start of his Command & Conquer LIVE concert (YouTube). Plus it's part of the story, as your character in the game is installing the E.V.A. system that they'll use to communicate with HQ and command their troops.

It's a shame that the console ports can't give you the full install experience... but they do give you some of it. The N64 game even does a bit of a sound test, showing off its superior stereo sound.

I started the actual game up and it went right to the main menu, with a button at the bottom saying "REPLAY INTRODUCTION". Makes me feel like I just missed something. Could be worse though, N64 owners miss out on the videos altogether.

This came out in 1995, so live action video was fairly typical, but most games didn't start with a scene from a trashy soap like this does. Well, not deliberately... it's a struggle to produce really high quality footage when you don't even have the budget for sets.

The player character's done installing E.V.A. now and they're testing it out with a bit of channel surfing, flipping through whatever's on, while GDI and Nod emblems flicker in the static to hint that someone's trying to get through.

We get a bit of exposition here in the news clips, with various reporters talking about a quasi-terrorist group called the Brotherhood of Nod that's been blowing up buildings and harvesting a lot of something called 'Tiberium'. There's not nearly enough exposition to satisfy a player's curiosity though, so if you want to know what the hell's going on, you've got to play the game.

The other clips and adverts make it seem like the game's basically set the day after tomorrow, not in a distant sci-fi future, and Tiberium's new enough that people are still wondering if it's dangerous. Of course they're going to go and dig it up either way, because it's worth a fortune.

It seems like the intro's supposed to transition straight into this screen, which offers a choice of what transmission to answer, but it dropped me back to the main menu instead and I had to click "START NEW GAME" to get here.

Each side gets their own CD, because there's two full campaigns here, with unique missions and FMV videos. That's pretty much what you'd expect from an RTS though really. The Brotherhood of Nod campaign is apparently harder, so this is also the closest you get to a difficulty select. Unless you're playing the Remastered version, which adds 'Easy' and 'Hard' modes.

I tuned into the GDI channel and got into a video call with General Sheppard, who puts on a better performance than you might expect from a 90s video game cutscene. In fact he's great, though I've always struggled to make out exactly what he's saying here. It doesn't help that the video stutters a bit on older DOS machines and emulators with the cycles set too low.

What he says is "I know you need more deep background but we're up against it." So basically the game's still refusing to tell us what's going on, what Nod is, and why there's all this Tiberium everywhere.

All he can tell me is that I need to take a beach at X16-Y42 with the help of some gunboats. I have to take out the fortifications, eliminate all Nod troops, and establish a beachhead by building a base. Whatever that is.

"Beachhead, noun: a defended position on a beach taken from the enemy by landing forces, from which an attack can be launched."

Okay cool, that makes sense.

I got a short CGI video of troops riding a hovercraft and now here I am on a beach, with four soldiers, a cursor and a giant truck called an MCV (not to be confused with the Marvel Cinematic Universe). When I hover the mouse over the MCV the cursor changes to an 'open up' animation, but I'll leave it for now. My first goal is to get my men away from that turret over there on the left until the AI gunships sailing by have finished blowing it up.

Already two things are annoying me: I have to scroll the camera by moving the cursor to the edge of the screen (there no keyboard controls), and I can't zoom out.

On the plus side, I can select all my units by dragging a box around them and issue orders by left clicking on somewhere to walk to or something to shoot. And there are keyboard controls to assign number keys to selected unit groups and immediately focus the camera on them.

I forgot to mention how great this tune is. Here have a YouTube link to the Remastered version, because it's even better: Act on Instinct. There was no hint that the soundtrack was going to suddenly switch to rock music once the gameplay started but man I'm glad it did.

The music doesn't loop by default, which surprised me, but it makes sense. Missions can be so long in this that you could get through a whole album before they're over. There's also video options, but they don't adjust the graphics detail. Instead the game gives you sliders for the brightness, colour, contrast and tint. So that's weird.

But the best option here in the menu is the save option, so you don't have to replay 40 minutes of gameplay if you screw everything up near the end. Sucks if you screwed everything up near the start and didn't realise it though. It also sucks if you're playing the PlayStation or Saturn versions as all they have are passwords!

Right, time to open up the MCV.

New construction options!

Man that's beautiful. I especially like the way it builds a giant hole in the ground as part of the construction process. The game calls it a Mobile Construction Yard here, but everything else calls it an MCV and it sounds better than MCY so it'll always be a Mobile Construction Vehicle to me.

I love how clean my new sidebar interface is by the way, without a whole lot of cryptic and unnecessary buttons cluttering it up.

Alright, now that I've got a sidebar I can build a power plant and then even a barracks! A barracks means more dudes, because you go to war with the army that you have, then you build a bigger army when you get there. Trouble is that that it doesn't let you queue build orders, so I have to wait for a soldier to finish being built before clicking the button to make another one. Uh, trained, whatever.

Fortunately I think I'll be fine with the soldiers I already have on this first level. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if I could finish this mission off with just the pair of Humvees that just got delivered. But Sheppard wanted me to build a beachhead, so I'm sticking a barracks down.

Just to completely change the subject for a moment, Command and Conquer was released a few months before Warcraft II, so the top RTS it had to beat at the time of release was the original Warcraft.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (DOS)

Warcraft lets you command groups of units as well, though only up to four of them and you have to either click the 'move' icon in the sidebar or press 'M' to send them anywhere. Warcraft also has a bit of a process for making new buildings. First you need to make a peasant from your town hall. These guys construct and repair buildings, but they also harvest the resources necessary to build them.

There's two types of resource in Warcraft, lumber and gold, so you get a few peasants doing a bit of enthusiastic deforestation while their buddies are busy down the mine and soon you'll have enough materials stockpiled to make a new structure. Probably best to start with a farm, seeing as you need food to make new peasants. Oh, also you need to place some road for them to build these structures next to.

In Command & Conquer there's only one resource: money, and to build something you just click the button on the sidebar, wait a bit, then place the building down adjacent to one of your existing structures. No peasants, roads or farms, and you can have as many units as you want. So it's a bit more straightforward. Whether that's a good thing or not is subjective I guess. The Command & Conquer franchise itself started leaning a bit more towards Warcraft's approach in Command & Conquer: Generals.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE FIRST LEVEL

I think this guy might be the last enemy I need to kill! I just have to click on him with my units selected like this and they'll handle the rest. Or somehow find a way to wander off in the wrong direction instead (the pathfinding isn't perfect).

All I've been doing on this level is sending my swarm of troops around, scouting out the area, clearing up the black fog of war, and shooting all the Nod soldiers that were hiding underneath it. I don't have a map yet, annoyingly, but once a soldier has seen part of the level it's revealed to me forever, so I know where I've already been at least.

These graphics have a nice kind of painted look to them I reckon. It's not going for photo real but it's not quite pixel art or obviously 3D rendered either.

Mission accomplished! Only 60% efficiency (whatever that means), but at least I didn't get anyone I care about killed.

I can't believe the name entry box is one letter too short to let me put my name into the high score table though! Also the game has a high score table, what the hell? Meanwhile the Saturn version didn't give enough space for my name even when I took out the space, and the PlayStation and N64 versions don't even let you put a name in at all!
 

Hey, it turns out that the game takes place in Europe. Unless you're playing as Nod, in which case the operational theatre switches to Africa. The intro made it sound like we were fighting a terrorist organisation, but this makes it looks like Nod controls a decent percentage of Europe.

This map is just like the one in Dune II, Westwood's previous RTS. In fact a lot of the game is like Dune II, but I'll talk about that later. It says 'select territory to attack' but I've only got the one arrow so really it's Estonia or nothing right now.

MISSION 2

PlayStation version

On the second mission briefing General Sheppard was about to give me that deep background on Nod he promised, but he got as far as saying 'here's a picture of the leader' before being interrupted by an urgent crisis! Man, this game really doesn't want to explain anything.

Honestly, I think this is a great way to use live action video clips to tell a story. It's giving me just enough exposition and world building to get me interested and then letting me get right back to the gameplay part of the game. I assume we're actually going to get some answers eventually though, because it would kind of suck if this is just going to string me along to the end and then say 'maybe we'll explain it all in the sequel!'

This is a shot from the PlayStation version by the way, if the text saying 'PlayStation version' didn't give it away. The videos in the Sega Saturn version look more or less the same as the PC version, but the PlayStation videos have more detail, better colour and less blockiness. Plus the DOS version runs at 320x200 and relies on your monitor to stretch the image to 4:3, while the PlayStation videos are the right aspect ratio to begin with.

Personally I think they all look pretty good for chroma keyed FMV from 1995. I'm just glad there's no black lines interlacing the video (though apparently that was a feature of the Windows 95 version?)

Damn, did these assholes just blow up the base I built by the beach in mission one? Well the good news is that no one can blame me for this, seeing as this is how the mission started. I still have to deal with it though.

I saved the barracks at least, then a hovercraft arrived loaded with Engineers which I can use to instantly fix buildings, at the cost of the unit's existence. But they can also steal buildings and I've got a 'REPAIR' button on the sidebar, so why waste them if I don't have to? Fortunately the next hovercraft came loaded with an MCV, meaning that I can start rebuilding. Though all I can build is a power plant and Minigunners.

I built up some minigunner squads and then sent one on recon, where they ran into this thing.

This is an enemy harvester, in a field of Tiberium. This nasty poisonous green stuff will kill infantry units if they walk across it, and the harvester will kill them if it drives across them, so I need to be careful here.

Hey wait a minute, where's my bloody harvester? I'm having to get by with severely limited funds here!

Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis (DOS)

These Harvesters and their Refineries are straight out of Westwood's previous RTS, Dune II. In fact you've got the silos, the barracks, the power plant... it's all very similar. You can't just put buildings down though in Dune II, first you have to build concrete slabs. One for every tile the building will sit on. Individually. And you can't just put them anywhere, you have to build on the rocks. It's kind of awkward.

It's more awkward to command your troops as well, as you have to select each unit individually and then click 'move' or 'attack' before sending them somewhere. Why am I telling you all this? Because these are all problems they fixed for Command & Conquer. The game has its issues, but it's so much slicker than its predecessor. I mean all I could fit into Dune II's high score table was 'Ray H'!

To be fair to Dune II though, it did pretty much invent the genre. It's the Wolfenstein 3D of RTS games and Command & Conquer is the Doom. Or maybe Warcraft's the Doom and C&C is the Duke Nukem 3D, I dunno.

Saturn version

Here's the Saturn version, which looks fairly identical to me, except for the way that buildings fade into existence instead of having building animations. Kind of takes the fun out making them really. Plus the sidebar looks very different with its horizontally scrolling build options. By default it's set to only appear when you want to build something but you can lock it on screen like on the PC game if you want.

The Saturn version also has a handy button combo that starts building another one of the last thing you chose to build, which is great for building an army of minigunners. I've still got to get the camera back to base to click the units and then scroll back to click where I want them to go though. No rally points or waypoints in this I'm afraid.

Hang on, is that a Nod soldier trying to attack my base from the south? That sneaky little git, he and his buddies deliberately came around the long way to attack me from behind! It's lucky I haven't sent all my units north yet. Don't want them shooting my three helpless engineers hanging out just off-screen to the right.

Alright I've got my giant army together and I've raided the GDI base, and there's no one here! In fact they don't even have any buildings here to build new units, so they were harvesting all that Tiberium just to hoard it in their silos. Sure wish I had all that Tiberium for myself... and a Harvester... and a Refinery to park it in.

Oh hang on, I still have those three Engineers back at base! Those guys are ridiculous overpowered in this game, as all they have to do is step inside an enemy building and it's mine. I don't even have to damage it first.

So I'm going to use them to take the Construction Yard, the Refinery and one of the Silos. Actually, no, hang on, their Construction Yard can build a Hand of Nod and the Hand of Nod can build Engineers. That means the whole base is mine! Though power plants cost $200 less than Engineers so it'd actually be cheaper just to blow that structure up and make a new one.

N64 version

Alright, I've got a fresh new Engineer from the Hand of Nod and I'm ready to take the Refinery. The trick is to wait until the Harvester's parked to offload its Tiberium haul so you automatically capture it as well. Man, it's still bloody weird to me that the Nod version of the barracks is a giant fist holding a globe. Seems like a bit of a waste of resources.

Speaking of weird, look at these graphics! I was surprised how faithful the Saturn and PlayStation versions are to the DOS original, but the N64 version of the game is full real time 3D and you can tell. I can't say that it looks better, but it does look distinctive.

The missions seem the same in all the versions so far though. This is clearly the same base as in the last screenshot.

MEANWHILE, IN THE NOD CAMPAIGN...

Things aren't all that different in the Nod side of the game at the moment. A few more war crimes, some senseless slaughter of civilians, and a change of scenery, but I'm still learning the basics of building bases and using Engineers to take them from the enemy.

The main thing I'm showing off in this screenshot is how surprisingly identical the Nod sidebar is. All that's changed is the logo! And the logo's only there until you get the ability to build Communication Centers.

Oh, I just thought of something else I can mention here: you have to put new buildings right next to an existing one, which doesn't give you any gaps to move units between them. Fortunately they come with a 1 tile strip of empty tiles in front of them, so if you stagger your structures you can kind of squeeze a Harvester between them.

MISSION 3

General Sheppard got on video chat again to tell me that he knows he promised me deep background on Nod, but it's going to have to wait a bit longer because SAM sites need to be destroyed. I don't have any air units for these things to shoot down so they're actually entirely harmless, but those rocket troopers protecting them are definitely a threat.

Oh by the way, check out my new minimap in the top right! I got a Communication Center built so now I have a tactical overview of the level, it's awesome. Well, actually it's ugly, hard to read and doesn't even show the whole map. I dunno, maybe there's something I can do about that.

Destroying SAM sites takes a while because they're being repaired at the same time, so I'm leaving this squad here to keep the pressure on and protect the right entrance to my base from sneaky invaders. Meanwhile my main force is going to do some recon up north.

I found a base protected by turrets!

Fortunately I know their weakness: grenade violence. In fact grenades are everyone's weakness as these Grenadiers are a real threat to themselves and others. Friendly fire and splash damage are a fun combination, as long as you weren't planning on using that army for anything afterwards. There's no regenerating health or hospitals sadly, and this game doesn't seem to have Medics.

Anyway, I've got some momentum going now, so I'm going to go take my swarm and storm the base! As long as there are more of my guys than there are of theirs I will surely prevail! Well, unless they've got a tank parked in the fog and decide to just drive it over all my troops.

PlayStation version

Or that could happen.

The worst part of this isn't even all the money I spent on those grenadiers, it's all the clicking. I had to click, wait, click, wait, click, wait, so many times to train that many soldiers and now I've got to do it all over again.

This is the PlayStation version again by the way. If you put it side by side with the Saturn port you'd notice a few subtle differences (the money counter is a different colour, the power meter's different, the unit construction meter fills up differently...) but they basically look alike. In fact the biggest differences I've noticed between the games is that the Saturn version has CD music and lets you slow the game speed down a bit. Handy for when you're playing it with a controller... which you will be, because the Saturn port doesn't support a mouse.

Right, what's the best way to deal with an enemy Hand of Nod that constantly produces new troops? Oh right, I took out all of those SAM sites didn't I...

That means I've unlocked airstrikes! I have to wait a while before the button's available again, but Nod certainly doesn't appreciate the fire when it finally rains down upon them.

With the place cleared out a bit I sent in an Engineer, claimed their Hand of Nod, and then used that to build more Engineers. And that was basically it for them.

My reward for winning: a pre-rendered video of the A-10s bombing the base! Aww, I love those planes. Took me 45 bloody minutes to finish that one by the way.

Wait, what? A choice of three missions? The game features two entirely different campaigns and they have multiple different missions in each? That's a bit overkill, in a good way.

There's no level select though, so you have to keep all your saves if you want to try the other scenarios without a full replay.

MISSION 4

Oops, the level I picked started me off with just a few troops and a couple of APCs. It seems I choose poorly. No base means I don't even get a minimap!

I'm supposed to be looking for a stolen cargo or something, but it's hard to do recon when boldly journeying into the unknown is a good way to get your tiny squad of dudes wiped out. So far all I've found is a Hand of Nod pumping out dudes with rocket launchers and I feel like I need to destroy it to have any chance here. It's not working out great for me so far.

In fact I think I've screwed everything up. They've blown up one of my APCs and if I march my poor wounded troops across the Tiberium without the protection of a vehicle they're gonna die. Incidentally getting the troops inside the van is more awkward than it needs to be as I have to send them in one at a time. I click a soldier, click the truck, click a soldier, click the truck, five times per APC.

A RESTART LATER

 

Turns out that Nod have tanks now as well! Different units have different strengths and weaknesses, and tanks seem particularly good at obliterating my APCs. Fortunately they were less good at shooting all my dudes when they spilled out of the flaming wreckage. I decided I might as well make a run for the crate in the middle of the enemy base, and fortunately touching the stolen cargo was an instant win!
 

Now I get to watch a news interlude with reporter Greg Burdette. Hey, I remember that name from the news clips in the intro.

Burdette has a grim story to tell, as it turns out that GDI has been attacking civilian buildings! They've utterly destroyed this picturesque fantasy village, which is a really bad move tactically as that's how you get unstoppable RPG heroes going after your whole army.

It's okay though, as the village is a 3D rendered scene composited in around the actor.

No seriously, that fake background behind Burdette was actually a genuine fake background!

Nod are filming fake news to discredit GDI, and the Nod leader, Kane, has turned up to personally shoot the camera that I'm watching this through. Three actors in the same shot, that's pretty rare. Unlike the sequels, this is mostly a 'one person talks directly to the camera' kind of game. And none of them are famous actors going full ham or models in tight leather uniforms like you get in the sequels.

It makes sense that Kane would be here supervising, as he's played by Joseph Kucan, the game's cutscene director. You can see actual behind the scenes footage as a bonus feature in Command & Conquer Remastered, and it looks like they just pulled the camera back a bit to film this scene, putting their recording hardware in the shot. Either that or they did a good job of recreating their own set on their own set.

Well this a bit crap. GDI's lost its funding due to the civilian massacre and I've lost my security access. I needed that to wage war across Europe!

Also I love the game's flashy fake UIs, but I feel like this one's a misfire. I'm really not keen on pins floating over and drawing the text onto the screen. This cutscene's all bad news.

MISSION 6

My resources have become a bit limited since the loss of all my funding and GDI support, but a least I've got this dude and his bottomless bag of C-4. I'm going to need him as well, as a soldier phoned me up and told me I need to blow up some SAM sites. At least I think that's what he said, the signal was terrible.

If you absolutely have to do a solo mission, the Commando is the guy to send to do it, as he can snipe enemy soldiers in a single shot from his silenced sniper rifle and blow up entire buildings just as quickly. And he never shuts up. The trick is finding the sneaky little gits, as the enemy units have been deliberately hidden behind the trees. I keep having to scanning my cursor over them to see if it turns red.

The trouble with the Commando is that his health doesn't regenerate and there are so many ways to lose it. Even blowing up a building can cost you a little bit of health, either from the explosion or because a dude spawned in the debris and shot him, so you can do nothing wrong and still lose your only unit due to attrition. I've been save-scumming to make sure I lose the minimum amount of health from each SAM site as I've got lots to destroy before I'm done here.

Crap, there's a Nod buggy patrolling the level. Back to the chopper!

The Commando's great against troops and buildings, not so great against vehicles. Fortunately the game has given me a handy (unarmed) Chinook transport helicopter for him to run away to. The weird thing about air units in this though, is they can't uncover unrevealed terrain. You'd think they'd be awesome at it, but units can only reveal the map from the ground and I can only fly to places I've already seen.

After I finished blowing up all the SAM sites I got another briefing video from the soldier, telling me I didn't hear his message correctly. He wanted the entire base levelled. So now I have to come back with my army and do it right this time.

MISSION 8

Mission 8 has me starting off with a ruined base and damaged vehicles. The good news is that I've got a Repair Bay so I can fix them! The bad news is that I don't have a Construction Yard, so I can't make a Vehicle Factory, meaning I can't make more of them. Every tank that explodes is gone for good. It's got me a bit stressed out really. Especially as it always happens when I've got the camera focused elsewhere. Some rocket troops or a tank will sneak down out of the fog and BOOM, unit lost.

You know what would be cool? A mission that just lets me build a proper base.

At least I found a present when I was scouting. I saw a mysterious crate and when I drove up to it the thing had a huge 3D rendered dollar sign inside!

The extra money helped, but my vehicles got trashed and I'm really struggling to build units quick enough to replace the ones I'm losing to the waves of enemies coming from the north. Their flamethrower troops are nasty, able to wipe out my squads of infantry almost instantly.

Though I have to be honest, it's my patience more than anything that I'm struggling with here. Every replacement unit I build takes a click to build and then a click to move into place because I can't set a rally point for them to go to.

SOME TIME LATER

I gave up in the end and finally checked a walkthrough. It said I just have to get some rocket launcher troops up here on this cliff and then I can rain down misery upon their buildings. That airstrip is how Nod gets their vehicles, they order them from Amazon, so if I break that I cut off their supply of tanks. They'll just immediately put it back again, but at least this'll keep them distracted while I build another force to attack their base from the front gate. Slowly.

Click, wait, click, wait...

MISSION 10

Command & Conquer Gold (Nyerguds patch 1.06c revision 3)

Here's a look at what the game was like on Windows 95 (and Macs, apparently). It's got twice the resolution and the camera's zoomed out so I can see things! It really is a lot better like this. Plus they even made new pictures for the sidebar.

Also Mission 10's finally given me access to a new GDI superweapon: sandbags. Also Orca helicopters, which are great, but it's these $50 sandbags that are the game changer. I have to put them down next to another structure like any other building, but if I build a line of them I can put them anywhere I can see.

There's three reasons that sandbags are going to sway things wildly in my favour:

1. The enemy can't get through them. 
2. The enemy won't target them.
3. I can build structures next to them.

What this means right now is that I can block off all the routes to my base and build my forces up in complete safety.

But it also means I can continue the line all the way up to the enemy's front door. Their vehicles and turrets can still shoot me, but they can't get out, and neither can their Harvester. That means they'll eventually run out of money, while I get to take all the Tiberium on the level for myself.

I also used my sandbag line to build a Repair Bay nearby, because my poor Medium Tanks are taking a real hammering here, and sending them all the way back to my base to get healed up takes forever.

The developers of the Remastered version fixed a lot of the game's bugs, but they deliberately left this sandbag exploit in because it's how the game was. It's kind of an unfair game at times, and when they tried taking away the player's own unfair advantages it ruined the game balance and made it way harder.

To be honest, even with the odds overwhelmingly in my favour I'm still struggling here. I figured I could blast a hole in the wall, build a barracks next to my sandbags, and just send Engineers pouring into their base. But their troops are immediately annihilating everyone I train (I told you about those flamethrowers, man).

And when I finally did manage to turn a few buildings from red to yellow, a laser beam from off screen started blowing them all up!

Oh hey, Nod has an Obelisk of Light in their base! This thing can destroy a Medium Tank in two hits, and that's a lot quicker than it takes to build the things. I'm trying to shoot it, but there's tough walls in the way that need to be destroyed before I can hit it. Plus there's also a turret at the top of the base blasting away at me.

The thing probably can't hit my Orca helicopters... but the SAM site right next to it will blast them out of the air. Damn, these are pretty good defences actually, I feel like I should be taking notes for my own bases when I play as Nod.

I stumbled across the Obelisk's weakness though when I came up with a way to destroy the wall quickly. Turns out it can only hit one thing at a time, so once again a huge swarm of Grenadiers was the solution! Right, now that's done it's time to send in the Engineers and take this base as my own.


CONCLUSION

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I'm not a huge fan of RTS games, in fact I've never actually stuck with one long enough to finish it, but it seems to me that Command & Conquer might actually be pretty good! It's probably not as good as some of its sequels, as it's missing a few features that makes playing it more frustrating than it needs to be (like queuing build orders and setting rally points), but it's slick enough to be a big step up over the games that came before it. It's great to be able to just drag a box around all the units you want to command, assign them a group with a shortcut key, and then just click where you want them to go. It's also nice and straightforward without being too simple, so you spend less time figuring out how to play it and more time figuring out how to win.

It's kind of cheating though, having a soundtrack like that. You know that a composer's nailed it when they're still performing the music live 25 years later. Not that the visuals weren't great for the time as well; it's a really stylish game. The story works as well, adding context to the gameplay without droning on and on about things you've been given no reason to care about yet, and the actors are generally pretty decent! They haven't descended into full camp yet but there's an endearing cheapness to it. I've always thought that there's a place for live action footage in video games, and this is definitely the right place for it.

On the downside, the game's a bit too fond of putting you in missions without a base (or a map), and even when you've got the base it can be brutally difficult. Some missions took me over an hour to figure out. Plus the pathfinding can be a bit pants and friendly fire is a real issue. Never trust any unit that uses fire or explosives.

Here's how the console ports compare:

PlayStation:
The PlayStation game is very similar to the DOS original and it even gives you most of the shortcut commands to do things like set unit groups and jump between them on the map. It has better quality videos for the most part but looks much worse when it's showing something like the score screen or operational theatre map, and you don't get to see the building construction animations in-game! Plus it uses passwords instead of saves, it doesn't have multiplayer, it doesn't support a mouse, and you can't slow the game down so it's always at turbo speed. It does have some extra levels though!

Saturn:
The Saturn port is pretty much the same as the PlayStation version except it has CD quality music and you can thankfully change the game speed. It's apparently missing a few of the bonus missions that the PlayStation version has but it's generally superior.

N64:
The N64 version is missing the videos and the proper digital soundtrack, and it has real time 3D graphics that don't really look as good to me. On the plus side you do get a save slot, there's some unique real time 3D cutscenes, and it has some exclusive Special Ops missions. Still no multiplayer though.

Plus they're all zoomed right in like the DOS version and they all require you to memorise a set of button combinations if you want to do anything reasonably quickly.

EA made the first three Command & Conquer games freeware a while back, and there's three ways I know of to get the original game running on modern systems: there's the OpenRA source port, which messes a bit with the gameplay and UI, there's Nyerguds' installer, which will get the higher res Windows port running with a few fixes, and there's emulators like DOSBox and PCem for the DOS version.

Though if you don't mind paying a bit of money, it seems like Command & Conquer: Remastered is what you actually want these days. It's by all accounts a fantastic update, with new HD visuals, rerecorded E.V.A. voice and a remastered soundtrack. Plus you can just queue up a few units to be built instead of having to click, wait, click, wait.

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Thanks for reading all those words. I warned you at the start that writing about an RTS takes a bit of extra effort! But now it's your turn to write something in the comments, I'm done for now.

You could even take a guess at what the next game's going to be.