Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection

Command & Conquer

I played it a fair bit in the 90s. Or maybe not. It’s very similar to its follow-up prequel Red Alert and shares a lot of assets for units and buildings. But i do think that i played it at least a little before 2020.

It’s interesting to see the evolution of the genre starting with Dune 2. Because everything before it can fuck right off and doesn’t even remotely belong to the genre. Literally anyone who has played more than one game in their life can see the difference between ☑ buildings ☑ resource gatherers and ☒ buildings ☒ resource gatherers. Even if the under the hood implementation of RTS was based on other genres, it doesn’t mean they are the same. MOBA was based on Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor, but MOBAs are more like a multiplayer Zelda than anything remotely akin to RTS. You don’t retroactively call Warcraft 2 a MOBA, so you can’t call anything before Dune 2 an RTS. Saying that everything is an RTS means nothing is an RTS.

Out of Wikipedia’s Disgusting List of Lies, between Dune 2 and Command & Conquer i would call an RTS only Warcraft. If it’s not even recognisable as an RTS it isn’t one. City builders, 4X, wargames, god-games, real-time tactics are not real-time strategies just as much as any turn-based game without harvesting and building is not a turn-based strategy.

To Blizzard’s dismay Command & Conquer is not a mere sequel to Dune 2, this is a technological improvement over Warcraft 2 that they will release three months later. It still keeps Dune 2 ruleset — no research, regrowing mining with a harvester. But despite having the same real-time-turns, the grid and terrible pathfinding problems as Warcraft 2 — everything is much more gradual, so it feels cooler. Five soldiers can occupy the same cell, most of the early units are much more responsive. Only artillery and big tanks suck as much as everything in Warcraft 2. While it had a couple of cut-scenes, this game is full of them and FMVs. Most of them are meaningless, but it’s still more fun than a plain-text briefing read by unprofessional actors in a poorly isolated closet. Though, the videos tease you with a lot of naval and air action, but you don’t have access to any such units. The unit limit is really big and it’s very impressive. The economy is still small, with a single tank costing a couple of harvester trips, but if you can get money the game won’t stop you from having a proper army. The infantry battles alone can be bigger than what Warcraft 2 will offer.
The GUI is slicker, it offers constant control over all production. Though, you lose precise information and stats, even the units’ names. And it can get cluttered. The order of the stuff in the production menu is not constant, but is generated on the fly so the placement of interface buttons is not constant. This game introduced the context sensitive mouse and the rubber frame controls. There is speed control, but where Warcraft 2 had hotkeys, here you have to open the menu every time. In the remaster too.

Most of the buildings have reserved walkways so it’s harder to jail units. Also most of them have a weird square cut-outs. Well you can’t jail your peasant since there are none. In Dune 2 the divide was continental in-between the oceans of sand. Here, to expand towards the new resource fields you have to build a line of sandbags, with an occasional silo, since sandbags don’t have eyes. Construction yard is way more important than a traditional town centre. After losing that you can build more. After losing your construction yard you are already losing. Theoretically you can capture a hostile one (including of the opposing faction) or have a second one. But it’s restricted to the utmost endgame and costs so much you can probably win already with those funds.

Dune 2‘s selection of units pretty much has universal solutions. Like, yes, it is more important to focus trikes on a rocket soldier before the quad. But a pack of tanks and then rockets can do everything. For the Sega Mega Drive 2 version i’m sure of that. Command & Conquer has no universal solutions, all stuff counters all stuff and there’s severe non-symmetry between the two factions (instead of three nearly identical ones). Your best hope is that you already have something to stop the attacker. Introduction of melee units made most fantasy or historical RTS heavily biased for giant archer blobs. But here your “melee” range basic soldiers can destroy an equal number of expensive rocketmen with barely a scratch. With proper micro they can disassemble an AI tank. Dune 2 produced lonely guys or squads who go forever alone after getting enough damage. Here, you can pack five guys, burgers and fries per cell. You can mix and match. But the weird thing is that the ranges seem to be (kinda) circular and off-centre on the vertical axis. So the units from lower parts of the cell can attack something of equal nominal range without getting hurt. Micromanagement of the sub-cell movement is indirect and bothersome but it is an advanced mechanic. Dune 2 is so slow you won’t notice it, but here there’s an extreme defence bias. The unit to move into the enemy’s range first gets shot at by everything before it can attack. And the units rarely attack on the move, and all these turrets don’t rotate when the unit is busy moving.

There’s absolutely no parallel production if you have two barracks — only one will work. Same with the construction yards and “spellcasting” buildings. But this time you can block all the exits. If a unit can’t leave the building it will be stuck, so instead of pushing the dudes out of the way all the overflow units will exit any other building of the same type. No more carriers for a blocked refinery either. But at least these harvesters don’t have dementia and will aggressively go for the resources they see. Full harvesters don’t go boom freeing some of the cargo. And there is no last free harvester. So the best strategy here is to attack the enemy harvester ASAP, leaving them dead in the water. It’s a battle for initiative — if you kill theirs with starting troops you are golden. The funny thing in Dune 2 was for the enemy to capture your building blocking the refinery, so carriers refuse to serve them and it is super extremely hard to destroy a building, probably more so than here vs hard AI. But now you can sell your own buildings. Like all those excessive silos. And it is always abused by the AI to get more soldiers out of them.

Interestingly there are no upgrades whatsoever. Dune 2 asked you to upgrade fully repaired buildings to produce better stuff.
And there’s no black minimap. It means you can scroll away from the starting position and be lost in a sea of black with no ability to return. I actually lost a multiplayer match to that and never found my way back until i’ve lost. You can’t even gauge where you are at without edge scrolling. But at least that has improved.
There’s only one layer of the fog of war, and there are global “spells” that can be cast anywhere. So you can’t hide and will be bombarded all the time, and the damage is often critical. There are also dropships and while they, choppas and planes don’t remove the fog of war, once scouted you can transport your infantry right up enemy’s base. With the game featuring the degradation of units and buildings, damaging the power sources can shut down the advanced towers even before you destroy them.

Westwood basically invented most of the mechanics owned by Dune 2, but ironically the ones from the book have made it to the unrelated successor. Instead of minors working in a mine, or something, this game implements the same harvesters. And for that the story introduced a new reason for there being surface-collectible resources. A meteorite have brought an alien live-form that consumes everything and excretes minerals to the surface. There is barely any lore and there is no coherent plot. Having cool cutscenes doesn’t replace having a story. It kinda sucks, they barely told anything about the world and why we are fighting.

I don’t know if these campaigns are fun on easy, but for the achievements i had to play on the hardest. The AI cheats mercilessly and has all stats boosted. Your first goal is to cut-off AI’s resources and still it often has a ton of free money and free electricity. Then steal the enemy’s construction yard with daring engineer raids, because AI instantly replaces any lost structure as if it didn’t cost anything and didn’t require time to prepare. Including the ones it has no access to. If you level its base to the ground destroying even all the walls, it will happily rebuild from scratch because rules don’t apply to it. And destroying big structures is as much of a problem as in the Dune 2 — the AI repairs stuff faster than you can damage it with several siege units.

By the NOD Mission 8B i realized that locking it out with sandbags is often the only available strategy for a normal person who doesn’t want to tolerate the insufferable unit AI and pathfinding for a week per every mission. Even with sandbagging — finishing off the AI base in the campaign is a gameplay in itself.

Warcraft 2 feels like it’s a generation behind tech-wise, but even without the FMV cutscenes and Frank Klepacki’s music — it’s much more fun to play. If you know what you are doing you are doing it. Really, a normal person can beat it, especially as orks, or breeze the human campaign and be stuck on the last map. Here, it’s all about dicerolling for every encounter and saving after every success. And you never even have access to all the units. Not even in the final mission.

The basics are all the same as in Warcraft 2 with bad pathfinding, real-time turns, dead unit AI. Enemy crushes your troops once it sees them, but it’s nearly impossible to do for you. Making your tank move means it won’t be shooting, but will be shot at. While the soldiers just instantly spread and abuse time-units to always be away from the harm. AI controls all its units perfectly, yours have dementia and spread around to do whatever. It’s the same low-resources game — refinery alone costs 2000 that’s like a quarter of available resources on half of the maps. Grenades are your worst enemy — they outrange gunners, ignore most of the damage from rockets or tanks, are cheap, and destroy anti-infantry guns in seconds. But when you have them it’s a casino+ — you always have chain explosions losing all of them, and they are always run over.

Choose the form of the Destructor.

The game retains the map screen with alternative routes from Dune 2. Sometimes there is no choice. Sometimes both choices are the same map, which means you will have to play it again for the achievement. And sometimes the tasks are the same, but one map is a breeze, the other is one of the hardest in the entire game, with no way to know beforehand. When you pick a region you are given some meaningless stats, but you can’t even back away and check the other stats. You are locked and now must proceed. Despite the different goals the missions are fairly repetitive. Even with an abundance of non-RTS missions of conquest or escort. Breaking open the enemy’s defences is almost like a puzzle. If you ignore its infinite resources and infinite streams of one tech-tier-higher vehicles.

The Brotherhood of Nod is kinda scrappy. The nukes are weak. Their army is light. They have close-range flamethrowers that can’t get near to the grenadiers. They have a selection of weird tanks that won’t scare anyone. Squishy light tanks, expensive invisible tanks that exist to be instantly destroyed, flame tanks that can’t get near to the rocketeers alive. They have anti-air guns that won’t save you from GDI spells, and AI doesn’t attack you with choppers in the campaign. You have to fight against the damn rocket towers with light tanks. They instantly see your stealth tanks and your crappy artillery is absolutely useless because it doesn’t outrange them. The only fun thing Nod offers is obelisk. A very dangerous defensive structure that requires a ton of energy. And can be instantly destroyed with any GDI spell. Starting from the mid-game you are constantly bombarded with GDI game-ending spells. You can lose your only harvester out of nowhere any second. Only rocket dudes can kill the bombers but dudes cost half a tank and die instantly. SAM sites are unsuccessful either and you need a ton of them.

There are many dumbass missions. Like capture a helipad and waste 85% of the mission’s run-time just shooting civilian buildings, refuelling, going back, rinse and repeat. That’s like almost an hour at normal speed doing the same stupid task.
8B already starts with a hard task, but then you see a river of infinite cars flowing across the resource fields. No matter how many thousands you will destroy you will not see the end of them. On top of everything else. And you aren’t even playing with Nod tech during it. The enemy is outright tier higher and with armageddon spells.
13A is a very annoying map, where you have to establish a new base and can’t re-use your accumulated tanks.

Joseph D. Kucan isn’t the best actor and he works with not the best lines. But somehow, probably due to the music, the game manages to sell you Kane’s cult of personality. There is no real story in the campaign, but the Nod propaganda is kinda interesting. They are still portrayed as outright bad guys, but your map is in africa and your propaganda is based on this region being abused and forgotten.
It’s as if all the bad guys has played this game because today’s africa is a favourite playground for big xi hard nephrite rod and low pukin thief big baldness. Even wagner’s paramilitary has some respect on the continent for keeping some order, even if for the bad guys, despite robbing it blind.
Just like europe abandoned ukraina after 2014 and continued to feed pukin in exchange for grandpa’s experimental internet gas, it still abandons everyone opposing the war and feeds the russian propaganda. Before and after the current war, the “civilised world” will still not care about africa. No one even talks about the war in ethiopia and it is still much bloodier than pukin’s current genocide.

It’s cool that Marauder Shields lets you pick the colour of the last cutscene. They’ve actually made four different sequences.

The GDI is much stronger. They have anti-infantry towers and universal towers, without the need of wasting money on separate SAMs. They have grenades even if yours always get chainsploded unlike the AIs. They have a big tank and a bigger tank. With a proper micro mammoth tank is pretty much universal, destroying the infantry with rockets, having solid range. And in the moment of respite it regenerates up to 50% of HP. In the campaigns only GDI has rocket artillery. It’s a bit faster moving and a bit more responsive than the Nod artillery. And GDI has access to two spells. There’s airstrike you get for destroying all the SAMs and the ion cannon. The Nod bot doesn’t even nuke you yet during the Nod campaign you were constantly harassed with mission-ending attacks from GDI bot. Nod stealth tanks exist only to get lost on the map so you have to hunt them, combing every square one by one. The GDI story is so primitive that it actually kinda works. Instead of random incohesive Nod cutscenes you just want to kill Nod.

While you play the Nod campaign — rocket ships could destroy a half of your big army. In GDI 9A your rocket ships do nothing and just die. Wow. That’s fair, i’m sure.
GDI 13A and 13B are just the same so for the achievement you need to repeat the same map.

Wow! They’ve remastered not only a DOS game, but the DOS gaming! DOS run at the internal resolution of 320×200. But that 1.6 aspect ratio was stretched by the CRT gun to the 1.33 output aspect ratio. All the old consoles run at insane internal resolutions and aspect ratios to be stretched to 1.33 too. The console developers of the time all targeted the 1.33, the only inconsistency was between scanlines hobo markets and pure picture markets, that never heard of any scanlines before the mid 00s. Some devs targeted dithering, and some did not.

But for the DOS the people had no idea what they were doing. Some of the team members targeted the internal aspect ratio, some the final aspect. The inconsistencies often were inside the same game. Some devs used the general public screens, some used professional early widescreens. So we ended up with Wolfenstein 3D having oval swastikas and loadings, but most of rest was for the final aspect ratio. UFO has the oval 3D-rendered geoscape and oval helmet visor, but the game is being obviously aspect corrected. At pixel perfect everything is extremely wide. In the original DOS CD Command & Conquer everything in the missions is made for aspect correction. The mouse pointers are made for widescreens. The cutscenes run with letterboxing and the Nod and GDI logos are stretched vertically there. But if you remove the correction for those the actors will be squished. Ha-ha we lived like that.

Some big young british youtubers actually think that 50hz markets run with black bars on the screen and big ones too. These degenerates literally lie to the new generations and misrepresent the history. We are on the same electric current as the UK, and we always used aspect correction. That’s the magic of CRT you can manipulate the picture with knobs in real time. And that’s how you can spot bad emulation being used.

So the original game was targeting aspect correction and you can see all the screenshots on the back of the original retail release being stretched to 1.33 But the artists of the remastered team traced the native sprites pixel-perfectly in 1.6 without aspect correction. All the sprites they drew from scratch are native to 1.77 Most of the AI-upscaled (didn’t age well, oof) cutscenes are made for the widescreens, but some of them are stretched. Also, in the additional materials the movies run in a separate player and should be viewed at 1.33 but in the interface all the previews are stretched to widescreen.

The only way to run this game at a mostly correct aspect ratio (interfaces can be sacrificed) is to pick a non-native internal resolution for your screen to stretch it at the right coefficient once you start a mission. And then return to native resolution before the mission ends to watch a cutscene. And still you can stumble upon one of the stretched cutscenes. They couldn’t even be consistent there. Truly, the DOS bullcrap experience, remastered to the modern day. Should’ve also added an obligatory setup menu to choose your audio device. Most of the modern players don’t know which exact chipset they are using, just like we didn’t back in the day.

This release includes the first Red Alert and all the DLCs too. The original full price was absolutely insane even for the sane times. But now it was on sale so i smuggled it, even with the new exchange rates this price was more like it.

The game starts up with a very long video sequence copying the game’s DOS installation process and then expands it with a sequence about the new AI upscale. And well, these cutscenes look like absolute crap. But i still probably will pick the upscaled version, outside of the cyber attack movie. The new one is an absolute mess you literally can’t understand what is happening. The AI didn’t. But if you watch the original it’s all clear. Also with newer better AI-upscalers they can have another pass today or some years later and patch the game with better-looking videos. If only.

While playing you can switch the renders on the fly. The original pixelart is cool. And i kinda like this high-res 2D look similar to Xenonauts. We don’t have many modern games looking like these.

They’ve added many achievements. Nothing too impressive, mostly progression and accumulation ones and some of difficulty-related. The guides on Steam claim that you don’t need to finish all the alt routes for the hard achievement. But it tracks all 81 missions. Good thing there’s this new great feature allowing you to play every mission in the game by picking it from the list instead of re-loading from before the choice. There’s an achievement for multiplayer matches. And no, hosting for bots doesn’t count. So what will happen when (pretty soon) the publisher shuts down the matchmaking server?

I planned to play the game the original way with LMB. But after suffering from this pathfinding and unit AI with it’s real-time turns on the hardest difficulty i just switched to the RMB scheme. Besides the Warcraft 2 controls there are other improvements like groups.

’97 Special Op

The killer feature is that they’ve ported the additional missions from PlayStation. These are several maps with pretty specific tactics in mind. And since they are made for gamepads they are slower paced and more fair on hard. They are pretty cool outside of the second Nod map on hard. It is an absolute dick. It is an absolute ass. I would like to see someone beating it on playstation.

’99 Special Ops

Playstation missions being ported here is nothing out of ordinary, but i just discovered that the N64 version was in 3D and its missions were ported too. Now that’s what i call “demastered”. They are tough, but doable since you have your sandbags.

I can’t say i would listen to many of these songs in my player. But having a game with such great background music as opposed to the modern brown note orchestral ambient (what are we in the 1600s?) is extremely good. Frank Klepacki‘s work with Westwood is legendary. The sound picture is very good too. While Silicon & Synapse was recording their programmers inside the office’s toilet stall for Warcraft 2, the quality of all the sounds and the soundbarks here is as good as modern productions. And that “acknowledged” of Westwood will haunt you in your dreams for life.

— / • / —

The remaster doesn’t fix what is broken, yet it fixed some AI quirks that should have remained broken. While this game is interesting from the historical perspective and very technically impressive coming after newer Warcraft 2, playing the campaigns on hard is not that fun. You might as well just play Red Alert 3. It offers all the same mechanics but in a proper package with good campaigns.

Between the remaster and the original i would probably pick the remaster out of sheer convenience, but a lot of it is very sloppy, like the aspect ratio.