Command and Conquer

Title: Command and Conquer
Platform Played On: PC
Release Date: August 31, 1995
Date Played: Summer 1998
Time Played: 30 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 4/5


Opinion:
Mid 1990's saw a lot of breakthroughs in gaming. Games were starting to use midi cards and Sound Blasters instead of the PC speaker, developers were starting to utilize filtering and depth techniques to make the games look better, and a new genre was being born, the RTS. One of the first pioneers of this genre was Command and Conquer by Westwood studios.

Command and Conquer came on two discs, one for each faction. Depending on who you wanted to play as (GDI or NOD) you would put the appropriate CD-ROM disc in. Did I mention it was one of the first games to use CD-ROM? That was pretty insane back then. The technilogy seemed incredible, and the fact that virtually within the same physical space we now had about 450 times more storage was crazy!

Each faction had its own story, everything from the intro to the ending was tailored towards that faction. Each mission briefing was accompanied by a full motion video (FMV) clip with real actors portraying the characters in the game. This was super cool and really drew you into the action. Instead of associating with little 10 pixel sprites, you were associating your experience with real people. The jump from 1.44Mb floppies to 600Mb CD-ROMs allowed Westwood to have a lot of video in the game and not worry too much about space. It would have taken them nearly 700 floppies for each copy of the game instead of two CD-ROMs.

The FMVs made the game stand out for me, it felt like I was participating in a cool war movie, and overall production values made Command and Conquer stood head and shoulders above the competition at the time.

Overall Command and Conquer is a great game, it is now a classic, and surprisingly it didnt age too bad. The difficulty curve can be brutal, but that is to be expected from the games 20 years ago. I am definitely going to install DOS-Box sometime in the future and play through it again. It revolutionized the genre, and it's success gave birth to some of my favorite franchises (Red Alert and CnC Generals).