Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "command-and-conquer"

I was about seven or eight years old when I got the demo disc for Command & Conquer. Up until that point I'd only ever played games like Commander Keen and Super Mario Bros. and such, which were fun but not particularly noteworthy. I had no idea what to expect from the opening demo and that guy (my first FMV experience) talking to me... until the music kicked in, accentuated by the explosions, the cannons, the gunfire, and the screams of the dying, and promptly blew my mind.

I played that game as much as I was allowed for the next couple days, until the disc was taken away. I never figured out how to set up the construction yard and make buildings and new units, and instead charged with my mammoth tanks and others in a suicide mission against the NOD walls and the laser obelisk, over and over again, like banging my head to a wall. In retrospect it's probably a good thing that I never got over that: I later learned that the next demo mission involved a commando, and that guy probably would've blown my mind all over again in some unhealthy way, with his badass one-liners and awesome insta-kill sniper rifle.

Christmas 1999 I got Tiberian Sun, and I still remember it as one of my most beloved presents. Even today I think that game has the overall best soundtrack in the series - sure, it doesn't have any Hell March in it, but neither does it have a single C&C Thang - and a pretty great visual style that's influenced my scifi writing a fair bit.

In any game of the series, I always loved engineers. I preferred capturing all enemy buildings rather than destroying them, because it felt wasteful. But there's a thing there: what's up with the way reverse-engineering works in these games?

Okay, I've acquired the NOD stealth tank designs, can I use these in the next mission? No? Why the hell not? Why do I need to do this again every time? Shouldn't once be enough, and now everyone in GDI everywhere should be able to design these things? This makes no sense!

I didn't get to play Warcraft II or Starcraft until years after Tiberian Sun, but as soon as I did they resonated with me. They didn't have this reverse-engineering nonsense. Warcraft's armies were equal: obviously the orcs had long since stolen the sword designs from humans, for instance. And yeah, they still had dragons, but the Alliance has a bunch of gryphon riders that can shoot lightning, so it evens out.

(I used to experiment with their stats in level editors, giving humans better penetration and armor due to sharper weapons and better steel, while orcs got higher damage and hit points because they were stronger and tougher themselves. It never really went anywhere.)

And in Starcraft, of course, the three different factions are entirely different - but also of entirely different races. I can't imagine humans figuring out how to use Zerg tech. So that's also pretty great.

That's why I like them better than Command & Conquer. They're so realistic.