Command & Conquer

The Good
The videos were pretty well done, I guess, even if they were horribly cheesy. Also, the plot actually seems a lot better now than it did in 1995. Replace the fictional terrorist Kane with the all-too-real Osama bin Laden, and the whole thing starts sounding chillingly familiar.

The game doesn't format your hard drive when you install it, although it does take up valuable disk space that would be much better spent on just about anything else. C&C also makes most other games (even of the astoundingly overrated RTS genre) look good.

Finally, I suspect this game satisfies some primal urge, deep within the darkest part of our souls, to buy crap games and then lie to other people about how cool they are.

The Bad
Let me count the ways! Is there any way this game could have sold as many units as it did had it not been for the technological explosion of the mid-1990s? NO! Too many people obviously bought this as their very first computer game. Otherwise, it would not have been hailed as brilliant, nor would it have passed muster as a strategy title. This game was simply another Myst, only it somehow managed to get respect from magazine reviewers and hard-core gamers. Before you flame me, allow me to try to explain where I'm coming from here…

Sid Meier's Civilization is an example of a great strategy game. I'm not just referring to the fact that it's incredibly deep, a work of art; I'm referring to the fact that you need to put some thought into it, even at the lower difficulty levels, if you want to be a successful Civ player. Now, my very first exposure to C&C revealed why it could never, ever be in the same class as Civ. A computerless guy in my college dorm asked if he could install C&C on my new PC and play it; naturally, I said "sure," wanting to be nice to the fellow but also harboring an ulterior motive: I wanted a sneak peek at this game that had such a buzz around it. Well, he installed it, and what ensued was positively horrifying. Yes, it was cheesy, with the videos and all, but at least it was kind of slick. (I suppose it's like the difference between low-budget and high-budget porno flicks -- although I certainly haven't watched enough porn to say for sure.) But then the game started. My friend proceeded to use the mouse, clicking on things on the screen more or less at random. "I dunno what I'm doin' here," he said, and he was obviously telling the truth. And bizarrely, unforgettable, maddeningly…he was doing REALLY WELL! Yes, that's right, no thought, no previous gaming experience, nothing required but a Pentium with a CDROM drive, and you too can be a master strategist!

I picked up C&C when it hit bargain bins a couple years later in the hope that I was mistaken in my hunch that it was a bad game. I played it and disliked it. A few years later, I got it back out and reinstalled it, thinking that my greater maturity, and the perspective of the post-StarCraft and Age of Empires II-era, would enable me to see what seemingly everyone else saw in this game. Nope. I'm pretty sure that if I reinstalled it and played it today, it would still suck.

It was a big mistake for us to label C&C a "real-time strategy" (RTS) game in the first place. First, it doesn’t really seem to be in real time, but accelerated time. In some ways, C&C's roots are in the video arcades. That opening beach-landing sequence wants to be reminiscent of D-Day, but it really reminds me instead of 8-bit era action games like Commando and Guerrilla War. The difference being that I loved those two games, because they didn't pretend to be anything but shoot'em-ups. Not so with C&C. Second, this game doesn't involve strategy in the traditional PC wargame sense; if anything, it's more of a puzzle game (an incredibly annoying one, at that). It's much more like Lemmings (minus the charm) than Civilization, so "strategy" was just the wrong word to use. In fact, C&C was the perfect game for the 1990s—the decade of declining standards. Strategy was still for wargamers and chess players in the 1980s. Thanks to C&C, even a drug-dealing juvenile delinquent who made straight D's since junior high could consider himself a master of strategic thinking.

And don’t get me started on how buggy and broken the game feels. You’ll grow old waiting for your units to actually start responding to your orders. Sorry if I seem bitter. Did I mention that I really hate this game?

Just for the record, I don't hate all RTS games. Warcraft and Warcraft II are undeniably charming and addictive, if not particularly substantive. I could make other exceptions. C&C just stands out as a tremendously disappointing game that influenced way too many of the shoddy titles that followed it.

The Bottom Line
An arcade-puzzle game that came along at just the right time, unfortunately. Future historians will no doubt look back on C&C and ask of our gaming generation: "What were they thinking?"

The Good
Flawless yet flawing. The game is fast paced, full of action and fun. The music is excellent and stimulating, the graphics and interface make the game easy to understand and control, and the two different sides create a lot of strategic possibilities. In the campaign game, the cutscenes are interesting and done in high level (espacially for that time) and on the multiplayer game there are a lot of options to exploit and try.

The Bad
The two sides are very unbalanced, with the GDI having the distinct advantage in combat. The computer is downright lousy, and defeating him (and the two campaigns) is a breeze- luckily, there's a powerful multiplayer option.

The Bottom Line
Although the game has many flaws, which were fixed at later strategy games, it's fun. The interface is simple, the units are unique, and the entire game experiance is unforgettable.

The Good
The first game of the Command & Conquer series delivers a truly engaging story through the cutscenes that take the form of a briefing by your commander transmitted to your battle terminal. With convincing acting, interesting characters and the way the missions relate to them they manage to create the feeling of actually taking part in the world of GDI, NOD and Tiberium. Origin's old slogan was "We create worlds." and really is what modern games are or at least should be about. Tiberian Dawn manages to be a world of it's own and to completely capture the player inside. A truly remarkable feat seldom achieved even by great games.

And what a world it is. The combination of present day war machines such as the US army battle tank M1A1 Abrams and futuristic weaponry like the ion cannon works well with the real-life units adding to the feel of this being "real" and futuristic elements ensuring that it doesn't merely seem like a war simulator.

The story involves the enigmatic religious group Brotherhood of NOD with perhaps the best fictional villain ever to be concieved, Kane (Joseph D. Kucan), as it's leader seeking control of Tiberium, a mysterious substance of extraterrestrial origin rich in minerals. As you march towards world domination under Kane's command or try to defend the world order from him you'll find yourself really wanting to achieve that goal and to see the future with Kane's eyes, or see him lying at your feet.

Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn has a perfect soundtrack that doesn't seem to have even a single mediocre track and the style varying somewhat so everyone should be able to find something to like here. Frank Klepacki has created an unique sound for the Command & Conquer series and for Tiberian Dawn in particular. The first game of the series certainly doesn't pale in comparison to the later titles, it may even be the strongest on the audio side.

The gameplay is very enjoyable and already has pretty much everything that a modern RTS does. When Tiberian Dawn was new this wasn't a problem as it hadn't already been redone to death. Today the value of the gameplay may have decreased somewhat but it still is a game genuinely fun to play even with all the typical flaws of the genre.

The Bad
The AI is rather weak and the gameplay has all the flaws that even most present RTS games continue to. The story seems very promising but fails to deliver all that much on the background of the conflict. All in all, there's very little to complain about in Tiberian Dawn.

The Bottom Line
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn is in many ways the definitive title of the real-time strategy genre. While it wasn't the first successful appearance of this game type, it refined the concepts Westwood themselves had first introduced with Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty which holds the honor of being the the first RTS game.

Dune 2 may be the first game that can be considered to be an RTS but Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn is the game that created both the term itself and the whole genre of games. The real-time strategy titles of today still carry it's distinctive mark and one could say that the genre hasn't developed much during all this time.

That alone makes Tiberian Dawn a title worth noticing in the history of video games but even as a late entrance to the RTS genre it would shine out from the best.