Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis

Title: Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis
Platform Played On: Sega Genesis
Release Date: 1995
Date Played: 1996 - 1998
Time Played: 300+ hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 5/5





Opinion:
Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis was one of the most unique games of its time, it defined the RTS (real time strategy) genre, and inspired clones for years to come.

I first came across Dune 2 at the age of 11 while visiting a so called arcade, which really was nothing more than a dude with a bunch of consoles in a movie theater lobby charging 25 cents per 5 minutes of play. The dude himself would sit down and play Dune 2 to pass time when there were no customers. That is where my friend Alexei Gavrish whom I met in school (we were part of the same "A" class and would hang out almost every day) got introduced to Dune 2 for the first time. Video games was a passion both of us shared (well.. and blowing stuff up).

My first impression of Dune 2 was not a great one. All i saw was weird shapes, and compared to Doom 2 and Duke 3d's amazing graphics seemed nothing more than some sort of weird shape puzzle game. One day Alexei acquired a copy of Dune 2 of his own, and sat me down to show me, why Dune 2 was so great.

The Weird Squares That I Thought Were a Puzzle Like Tetris

My first question was something along the lines of "what the hell am I looking at?", random colored squares, some sort of shapes, and weird spinning circles. What came out of his mouth absolutely blew my mind. He said, "no, no you dont get it... look... these are buildings... you are looking at them from the sky! Like a map!"... my mind was blown. All of a sudden it made perfect sense, I could clearly see that what I thought to be square puzzle pieces are actually buildings. It never crossed my mind to think of it as looking from the sky at buildings, this whole time I was looking at it as a flat sideways plane, kind of like in Tetris. As mentioned earlier this was the pioneer, a founding father of RTS, and so I have never see anything like it before.

Alexei proceeded to explain to me how each building served a unique purpose, how you need to collect spice to sell it for money, and use money to build factories to produce an army, factories need electricity, so you have to build power stations. I was absolutely shocked with how much depth there was in this what I thought to be dumb looking puzzle game running on 7.67MHz processor and 64K RAM console. All of a sudden once I realized they were bird's eye view buildings the graphics became awesome. I was hooked immediately.

The 3 Houses of Dune
I liked Atreides and Harkonned over Ordos

Soon after this revelation me and Alexei headed to the "Chinese Hotel", a building on the edge of the city which smelled like the air was made of cigarettes and Chinese spices. You needed to be 16 or older to enter, so usually we would sneak in. Inside the Chinese residents would sell all sorts of goods right out of their doorways, from consoles and games to clothes, gadgets and food. It was there that I would buy all of my Genesis games for $5-$15 a piece. It was also there that I acquired my personal copy of Dune 2, and from then on Dune 2 was my video game of choice to kill a few hours.

Over the course of the next 3 years or so, I spent hundreds of hours with Dune 2, beating each of the 3 campaigns dozens of times, devising new strategies and becoming as close to an expert as I could ever get. It was in my opinion the best game ever released on the Genesis, and at the time possibly the best game in the world. At least my personal best. The amount of depth, strategy and replay value was astounding. Each house had its own story line, and special units. Each mission could be played hundreds of different ways. The ability to build and expand your base in whatever way you saw fit was something I have never seen in video games before, and gave an immense sense of freedom. It was an amazing experience.

Dune 2: The Battle for Arrakis was remade in 1998 as Dune 2000, the story is a bit different but the basic gameplay remains the same albeit with much, much better graphics. Although personally I love the old Genesis graphics.

Today Dune II is a great memory, but in no way holds up to some of the modern real time strategy games such as StartCraft 2, Red Alert 2, Homeworld, Company of Heroes, and World in Conflict to name a few; however Dune 2 still remains in the top 5 best RTS games of all time on most "best of" lists. It must be acknowledged that without Dune 2 the real time strategy games would take a completely different path, and perhaps would be completely different today. It is one of the dominant exhibits in the video game history, I still fire it up in an emulator once every couple years to remind myself of the great times I had with it. It is too bad that Westwood, the innovative developer behind Dune 2 had its doors closed in 2003 after being acquired by EA in 1998.

Dune 2 and Westwood will forever live in my heart as some of the best time I spent playing video games during my childhood.

Dune 2: Battle For Arrakis
(Sega Genesis 1995)
320x480 Native Resolution

Dune 2000 (1998 remake)
(PC 640x480 Native Resolution)
Click To Zoom