Sledgehammer, on 13 January 2019 - 02:41 AM, said:
There is that feeling that the world is going to dark times and despite some cheesiness the game has pretty believable serious tone to which soundtrack also suits perfectly. Tiberian Dawn I'd place almost on par with TS perhaps, but those games are quite different and in some cases they offer different things. Gotta say I really love the plot of Tiberium universe including first RA which was a prequel to TD and before it became its own universe. It's simple and yet there is so much happenings in it and so many references, to me the game is more than just some RTS. RA2 was great, but gameplay surely took priority over everything else.
Heh, I completely agree with all that
I still like
TD more than
TS for whatever reason. I do appreciate the atmosphere in
TS, and the movies are great, but somehow it didn't feel as engaging as the first game for me.
FS felt more coherent in that respect, but it's also shorter and entirely linear. Cool stuff with Nod stealing an EVA unit for their communication subplot, the missions with limited forces felt more well thought out generally. There's one in
TS where you need to recover the Tacitus as Nod with a small force, that one I didn't like because it felt incomplete. You can find orange Nod which are hostile, and basically try capturing their buildings or whatever but this never seemed to be useful for the mission even though the briefing mentions these Vega's forces. I always felt that maybe you were supposed to "rescue" these units like in Blizzard games (i.e. take control of them) and use them against the GDI, but this was not properly implemented.
Sledgehammer, on 13 January 2019 - 02:41 AM, said:
Anyway, a honorable mention to Dune 2, Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Dune. Emperor is the most underrated Dune and an RTS game despite being the last Westwood game. I loved how they handled campaign there, you had a big map and could go almost anywhere while your territory could be captured too.
Emperor was an interesting experiment for sure, but after a while (I replayed the entire game several times for different Houses) those random missions would become basically just skirmish maps with scripted secondary objectives. When I was replaying on hard difficulty, the AI would at some point amass huge armies that were too much for my video card to handle back then, with the framerate dropping to an unplayable crawl. So to avoid this I would start a mission, rush the initial troops to seek out the enemy construction yard and take it out while unfurling the base just in case the starting forces were not enough (and you have reinforcements in most missions too!). This turned out to be the most efficient strategy altogether, but would never work on a regular hand-crafted map in any previous Westwood RTS of course.
Zaxx, on 13 January 2019 - 12:53 AM, said:
That image was cool but this? THIS IS AMAZING
Thanks for sharing, I love this! Many of the rearrangements sound quite different, nice.
Having some nostalgia here, currently at the
Renegade section. I picked this game because it was part of the franchise, and man what a disappointment it turned out to be. The first few levels kind of keep your hopes up that this is the same
C&C universe experienced from the first person perspective, but the design flaws quickly make the game pretty frustrating. I totally hated how it virtually punishes you for exploration and sidetracking by introducing a very strict time factor for achieving high score for each mission (akin to the RTS titles in the series), even though each level has quite a lot of stuff to explore. And you can't just reload the level because loading a saved game automatically disallows getting the highest score possible (basically saving = cheating). To replay a level, you either save at the end of the previous one and load that game, or replay from the menu, meaning pistol start and no health/armour bonuses that you collect along the campaign (they are very handy on highest difficulty).
The story and level design creativity also seems to have run out at some point before the campaign was completed, seeing as how the game has you getting into a place in one level and then out of it through the same scenery in a subsequent level
twice (that's out of a total of 14 levels), and has the characters run away from a nuke twice (well, maybe it's just me picking here already...). You have escort missions too, of the most frustrating kind (no control over NPC, which gets in the way, runs straight into enemy fire etc. etc.). Also the visual design went away from the more realistic tone of the first
C&C game towards something closer to
Tiberian Sun or whatever, with Nod troops wearing bright red-and-black suits and Darth Vaderesque gas masks with glowy red eyes instead of urban camo seen in the first game, the vehicle design is similarly flashy and bright, and everything generally kind of steps away from the more gritty visuals that are characteristic of
C&C the RTS.
BUT, all that said, I played
Renegade through several times (including pistol-start only runs to get a good score), and even though it would get frustrating more often than I'd be comfortable with, I should say I enjoyed it overall. There are some good levels with a nice change of and pace scenery (mostly in the first half of the game), and I think that I've generally grown on
Renegade despite its shortcomings. Lots of nostalgia. It'd still be fun to see a more faithful experience of the
C&C world from the first person view though.
Back to the concert, the dedication to John Bain is very touching.