> Give Us All Sequels All The Time

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Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
Westwood Studios/ Electronic Arts

Revisit your glory days of top notch Real Time Strategy Gaming.

Pretty soon it's going to be all sequels----that's the way it seems sometimes: Find a formula, stay within the original bounds, make improvements and tweaks, and lose the bits that don't seem to fly. It doesn't work with human breeding, but it does seem to work with games, and on the whole it appears to have done wonders for this E3.

Sequel Main Attraction
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2

Well dip me in vodka and roll me in baklava crumbs---I know neither if "baklava" is an actual thing (it sounds right) nor if, in fact, it can be said in any manner to have "crumbs"---but it appears that all those letter-bombs to Westwood Studios actually did some good: The first thing you need to know about Red Alert 2 is not the plotline, as you might think---although that's pretty awesome, too---but rather that it's a true example of game-makers listening to the requests, demands---and, yes, even thinly-veiled death-threats---of their clamoring public. Republic. Whatever.

RA2 combines the relative straightforwardness of the hit Red Alert, while including the best tweaks of the C&C interface from Tiberian Sun (unit queuing, path projection), as well as some slick additions such as production "tabs," which sort combat units and installations by type, reducing the need for excessive scroll-down in the heat of battle. RA2 isn't bothering with that deformable-terrain, LOS stuff, but you're not likely to miss it because RA2 also brings the left hand of game-balance vengeance back to the RTS genre. The story since the last incarnation of Red Alert: The Allied removal of HItler via time-travel resulted in, among other things, the unprecedented rise of the Soviet Empire, and their subsequent loss of WWII (version 2.0) only made them redder and madder in the long run. In RA2 the long-awaited Soviet invasion of America comes (break out your VHS tapes of Red Dawn and your hex-board copies of Invasion: America, you closet jutting-chin flag-wavers!) with real-time battles in recognizable American locales such as Washington DC, Texas and New York City. Picture all the gameplay simplicity of RA with the best interface perks of TS. Also, picture (in actual gameplay) the White House wrecked and smoking, the Washington Monument shot full of holes, or the Statue of Liberty with her head blown clean off. And nukes. Big, nasty nukes.

In apparent backlash to Red Alert, Westwood is serious about those nukes, which were one of the most irritating features of the previous RA title: They sucked. They were flat-out lame. When a nuke come riding in, you said to yourself, "Hmm, I'd better make sure my infantry aren't too clumped together, and after this attack fails miserably, I'll rally the survivors and cram those SRBMs right up the enemy's ass" (or words to this effect). Don't even think about it here---mass-destruction weapons (such as soviet nukes or the bizarre GDI weather-control machine) are so vicious and ghastly that they A) kill darn near everything on the impact screen, B) can leave the impacted area lethally irradiated for the rest of the game, and C) require an all-new gameplay scheme. When one player is minutes away from prepping a weapon of mass destruction, the other player is notified before the fact...and the origin of the threat has its fog-of-war shroud removed. Now the defender knows the source of his near-future woes, and the attacker knows he knows, and the defender knows he knows he knows. Paranoid. Ugly. Neato.

What else? Consider the Allied Mirage Tank, which can use cloaking techniques to assume the form of a tree, boulder or other battlefield overlookable until the time comes to attack. Imagine the dismay of the Soviet player, tank-rushing through a forest that, in mid-rush, turns out not to be a "forest" at all. Soviet Tesla troopers, annoying enough in their previous incarnations, can now lend their man-portable units to aid battlefield Tesla Coils in times of low energy, such as shortly after a power plant has been aced; and we're still not sure what's up with the Allied Chronotroopers, who seem able to zap friendly structures completely out of the space-time continuum, so as to provide temporary protection (!). We'd blame this last one on alcohol and/or general E3 befrazzlement, but we saw it well before E3.

-Chris Hudak

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