Command & Conquer: Red Alert

The Good
This is one of the first RTS games to get very popular online. TEN and MPlayer (and a few others) were the place to play it online. Why is that big deal? Well, the older online RTS games were actually very good sandbox games! The player had many different options in the game that led to very interesting games. Modern RTS games emulate this, but are in fact very scripted.

CnC:RA also had one of the very first working gaming ladders where players could compete to gain rank. This is common place now, but this was a huge thing back then. In addition, there was a not a "professional gaming staff" running the ladder, it was all amateurs who were honestly trying to have an open ended tournament (unlike many ladders today).

The Bad
The single player game was an awful rail game. If you didn't build exactly the right units and move them onto exactly the right map location, the developers would force you to lose the game.

The cutscenes were "high tech" for the day, and since many other genres were really pushing them, RTS games picked them up as well. It didn't matter if they were extremely short and boring, you simply had to have them, because everyone else did!

And the multiplayer had one major drawback; tank rushes! Because of how the maps were setup, and the units were balanced, if you didn't build 100% tanks from the very beginning you were going to lose horribly in about 5 minutes. Very few of the maps were setup so you could turtle (and thus tech up), so every game was a low tech tank rush. This was a knee-jerk reaction to players complaining about other players building up walls of defenses in CnC1.

The Bottom Line
A smoother version of CnC that was still terrible in single player, but quite good for it's day in multiplayer. But it had one major black eye; it's map design and balancing led to most games degrading into tank rushes.