![]() ![]() To build you need cash cash is tiberium, and can only be realised with a harvester and a refinery. The buildings you get depend on which side you're on, though in network play these rules seem to be relaxed a bit. Once deployed you can build new building types, and from them you can make new units. Usually you start with a mobile construction yard, which becomes the focus of your base. Sometimes you get a base to work with to build new units, sometimes you get fixed units, sometimes you get reinforcements, and on the odd mission you have just one man (but boy, what a man the commando is!). The forces at your disposal will vary with time and the nature of the mission. The game controls let you program the tracks, so if you like track 10 (I think that's the one that reminds me of the Terminator music) then you can simply cycle endlessly through that track. In addition to all the battle sounds, there's a rather unconventional "techno" style set of background music, which cycles through about a dozen tracks as you play. The sound effects are as good as you could probably want. Yet most impressively of all the NOD nuclear missile will destroy or cripple many buildings and vapourize just about any infantry in the same screen as the impact point. The NOD obelisk of light frazzles all those who approach. Rockets fizz from launchers and bazookas. Grenadiers lob grenades which blast hapless victims up into the air in a bloodied mess. Tanks have turrets which rotate smoothly as they move and fire. Idle infantry will do pressups and fiddle around. The animations have clearly had a lot of thought, and a good deal of humour, injected into them. Having seen the Warcraft 2 alpha demo, the graphics in C&C do look very chunky, but once you get used to it you begin to appreciate the finer touches in the animations. That said, one of the beefs of C&C is that after those spellbinding sequences the game uses only standard 320x200 VGA, and not SVGA. Even the install sequence is to be marvelled at. Between each mission is a superbly rendered cut sequence, featuring digitised actors and computer graphics the like of which I've not seen before on a game of this ilk. GlitzĬ&C is very professionally put together. The value of TV as a propoganda medium for both sides becomes clear quite early in the game, with NOD hell bent on turning world and UN opinion against the GDI. The intro sequence heightens your game expectations - short movie clips from different cable TV channels put you into the mood of the world the game is set in. It looks quite similar to the Dune II manual, but then I guess it would! Glossy and well presented, very much like the game as a whole. The manual is as complete as you could probably want. And as C&C comes on 2 CDs, you can play a 2-player game on 2 PCs with just one purchase of the game - nice one Westwood! While C&C is still a challenging and enjoyable game playing through the missions, the immense satisfaction of hearing the guy sat opposite squealing as you nuke his construction centre is second to none. This makes network play, with up to 4 players, a rather awesome experience, and probably the most fun part of C&C, if you have the hardware available. However, if you choose network play you are able to have every weapon buildable, right up to satellite beams (GDI) and nukes (NOD). For each side, winning overall means winning about 15 scenarios, but the scenarios you get vary to an extent on how well you do in each mission, and the difficulty of the mission can depend on the success of a previous mission. This means you can't play with the advanced stuff too early, and you get new units to learn the pros and cons of as the game develops. These two forces compete for control of the world, and the invaluable tiberium (which for Dune II fans equates rather similarly to spice).Įach side has as arsenal of weaponary at its desposal, most of which only becomes available as the scenarios progress. For another the protagonists this time are the Global Defence Initiative (the good guys) and the Brotherhood of NOD (the bad guys). For one, it's set a small time into the future rather than in the Dune world. While C&C might to some people be Dune III, it's rather more than that. If you've played Dune II you'll be very familiar with the control system used in C&C. C&C was hyped a lot, and its release date slipped a few times, but in my view it's been worth the wait. Whether C&C will have staying power is a debatable question, but its initial impact is rather explosive. Very few games have that initial appeal, but also very few games stay at or near the top 10 for very long. C&C has been out now for a couple of weeks and has already nipped up to number 2 in the unofficial Internet Top 100 game chart. Recommending Command and Conquer is a bit like recommending you go and see the latest big blockbuster movie at the cinema. ![]()
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