The Gamers Arms

Yeah, £18 for both seems like a pretty good price considering there's clearly been a fair bit of work put into these. I'm certainly interested.

Full mod support and it’s going to be open source. An EA game....

Considering it's been 25 years since the original, it's quite remarkable how well he's aged.

Ok, so maybe Kane had the right idea. That man does not appear to have aged in 25 years.

And I for one would like to welcome our new Tiberian overlords...

Reviews are starting to trickle out...

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/2020/6/ ... windows-ea

I've got the game installing now. The original C&C was one of the first PC games I ever played (installed on my Dad's work laptop and played against my brother with a serial cable) and was a solid favourite of mine, so it was always going to be a likely buy for me.

Just finished downloading

I had chance to play the first couple of GDI missions before a scheduled multiplayer DCS game earlier. Firstly, the game going through a slightly altered Installation video (mimicking the game's original installer complete with EVA voicing, sound card selection and so on) was a nice touch. The FMVs for the most part look horrific, but without access to the original recordings or completely redoing them all with brand new casting for everyone but Kane (see above), they're as good as they were ever going to be. I personally really like the new sprite work, so I think the game itself looks fantastic. It sounds fantastic, with nicely remastered audio tracks and unit sounds.

And I think most importantly for a game that's over 25 years old, it plays better than the original too. They've given you more customisation of the controls, for example you can right click to issue orders now rather than left clicking, and you can double click units to select all of that type currently on screen. The sidebar is far higher resolution so you don't need to scroll up and down any longer, and you can zoom out the actual game view.

It's definitely one of the better remasters I've tried.

A few missions in now and I've started to remember just how far AI had come even with later titles in the 90s; it's hilariously shit with atrocious pathfinding and units that will just sit there being shot at when they could easily return fire.

There is one element that I don't recall being so deadly though. If you take a squad of infantry up against a NOD light tank, they will all be crushed to death. The Light Tank in particular puts enormous effort into running your troops down like dandelions facing a lawnmower. It's quite funny in a way, and made me fail the fairly difficult mission four right at the end.

It's an excellent remaster but it's definitely showing its age from a mechanics and AI perspective. The controls aren't very precise so I keep ordering reinforcements to the front lines only to find them back at base two minutes later because the reticule is so large that I accidentally selected another infantry unit at the front rather than issue a move order.

Warts and all, I do still love this game. Playing the campaign on hard mode and I think the difficulty stems mainly from the clunkiness than any real design. I keep making the mistake of sending my infantry over to an enemy harvester and having to watch them all slowly being squished because they're too slow to run away after they've engaged and the harvester is so heavily armoured the driver just YOLOs it straight through all my troops.

Pathfinding sure can be bad but overall its great! I dont even think the videos looks that bad all things considered though I wish there was a toggle for them to go to the originals (or is there? havent tried pressing space during videos -_-)

Oh yeah, if they'd fixed it it wouldn't have been the same game. The mission design in general is quite janky, but as it was one of the earliest modern RTS games it's not really surprising.

Mission Six for GDI is the first of the Commando ones, and it just doesn't work in a satisfying way - if your Commando comes up against a NOD vehicle, he's dead, as he has no way of destroying them and he's not quick enough to get away from them. You can't see the vehicles in advance to avoid them and the map is a maze of narrow corridors. Your only other unit in the mission is a Chinook which has no weapons and can't land on hidden terrain, and there are SAM sites dotted around the map which will nearly immediately shoot it down. It's an exercise in trial, error and luck.

But I still love it. There's just something about the charming little sprites and animations and voice samples and the excellent music.

I wonder if they fixed the sandbag issue in Dawn where the AI can’t just deal with them. If you just drew a line of sandbags across the map you were 100% safe in that quadrant. Sometimes I would just build a line of sandbags down to their base and block them in or trap their harvester.

Raid wrote: ↑

Sun Jun 07, 2020 3:19 pm

But I still love it. There's just something about the charming little sprites and animations and voice samples and the excellent music.

This is the huge thing for me. The music and sound effects bring back so many great memories. And they've done an amazing job on upscaling the models.

Coupled with all the added features and bits and bobs you can tell that they put a lot of love into this remaster. Quite the contrast to the Warcraft 3 one which was rushed out after having its team heavily cut.