Dungeon Keeper

Many games today, as interesting and exciting as they are, tend to recycle old concepts and ideas. Dungeon Keeper first came out back in 1997, developed by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions. Its sequel, Dungeon Keeper 2, came out in 1999. The two games at the core are very similar, so I will discuss both in this article. Molyneux is famous for creating innovative and unique games that have unusual concepts and themes, most notably the ‘god-sim’ type games. Dungeon Keeper is no different and is hugely innovative game that has yet to have any real challengers to its own subgenre of real time strategy in the nearly 12 years since its release.

Dungeon Keeper is real time strategy game with a difference. You play as a Dungeon Keeper, an evil being whose sole purpose is to destroy the land of goodly hero’s in the world above. The games imagery, sound effects and atmosphere do much for the creepy overall feel. Despite the evil and dark setting, there is large amount of humour that works very well, with the second game in particular being one of the funniest I have played in all my years of being a nerd.

You play as a malignant incorporeal entity residing underground within a large construct called your Dungeon Heart. This is the epicentre of your domain, where you yourself reside within the gameworld. The standard strategy elements are here, resource gathering, base building, gathering up your army then sending it off to battle while you revel in the carnage. But there the similarities end. The whole game is located underground. You expand and build up your dungeon by tunnelling into the surrounding rock. As you go, you hollow out cavities which you then use to build rooms. The layout of your dungeon is only hampered by certain environmental obstacles, like water, natural caverns, lava lakes or impenetrable rock, the latter usually only there to mark the border of the game map. This give the player a huge amount of freedom in building their subterranean fortress, with every dungeon you build having a unique layout.

Each level is differnet, allowing the player literally limitless ways to build and design your dungeon

Now, as a Dungeon Keeper, you have a certain handicap. Being incorporeal you are unable to physically manipulate the world yourself. But the game has an excellent solution to your problem. When you start the game, you notice small creatures running around your dungeon heart. These are your Imps. These are your hands and tools within the world. With a simple click, they will run off to the designated area and begin excavating the tunnels and rooms you have designated with boundless enthusiasm. They never tire, grow hungry or complain, even when you slap them to make them work faster. When you have assigned them no tasks they will traverse you dungeon repairing walls, clear away corpses and generally maintain your fortress of evil. Truly model employees. However, they are small feeble things that cannot fight or cause much trouble on their own.

So in order to perpetrate some evil deeds, acts of violence and cause general disruption, you need some more powerful creatures. In order to recruit them, you must tunnel towards a portal. There are usually several scattered around a map, and once you’ve tunnelled to and claimed a portal, the gates of hell are now open, spewing forth a tide of horror that you can quickly get on the payroll. There is a large variety of foul monsters you can attract to your dungeon, from huge overgrown flies and other insects, demon spawn, dragons, trolls to leather bound S&M dominatrix with a taste for murder and foreplay. The number of different evil creatures is really expansive resulting in a large and hugely varied army as you advance through the levels. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, skills and abilities, that you will usually need to exploit as the game progresses.

Creatures are attracted to your dungeon depending on the combination of rooms you have constructed. There are many different rooms available that all perform different functions. Your creatures need to be sustained and nurtured, so rooms such as lairs to provide housing, and hatcheries to provide food are essential from the beginning. Other rooms are then required to attract specific monsters and allow certain tasks to be completed. The slovenly bile demon requires a vast hatchery, while a fully stocked library will attract the attention of warlocks. Workshops construct traps and doors, libraries research new spells while torture chambers allow you to extract information from prisoners. The different combinations of rooms you have doesn’t guarantee you’ll always get the creatures you want, so your army in each level will be different on every play through.


The games is played from a top down isometric view and move fast and smoothly. One of the most interesting and fun aspects is the ability to possess your creatures and control them like you would in a first person shooter. This is a cool feature, its lots of fun wandering around your dungeon from your creatures perspective. You can attack and cast spells as well as perform functions around your dungeon should you choose. Each creature type also has unique and interesting ways of viewing the world, but this never has any negative impact on the game play and adds greatly to the depth.

All of your rooms cost money, as does your army, with periodic paydays being announced where all of your minions stop what their doing and march off towards your treasury demanding their well earned coin. Money is provided by mining out gold seams, which you imps then dutifully carry back to your treasury. Most levels provide you with only a limited amount of gold, so it usually not wise to sit in your fortress for too long, as certain other tasks such as training creatures, building and a few others all cost money, putting a constant drain on your funds. In some levels, gem seams can be found. These can never be mined out and provide an infinite source of money, however they take longer to mine and are often located in hard to reach spots.

Your primary foes in the game the goodly heroes from the sunlit world above as well as rival dungeon keepers. Heroes are found as you tunnel through the level, or as they come tunnelling into your dungeon. Knights, fairies, wizards, barbarians and even samurai all seek your down fall. When entering combat, your creatures will charge towards their selected target firing spells and screaming. As they fight, a ‘health flower’ will appear above their head, with each petal disappearing as they take damage. You can pick up creatures and drop them into combat, or similarly pick them up out of combat if they are unlikely to survive the encounter. Each creature has its own variety of spells, some of which are quite humorous with bile demons farting a cloud of poisonous gas that harms both friend and foe.

As mentioned earlier, the two games are very similar.

DK 2 in its 3D glory. Note the early lighting effects

Graphically, the original Dungeon Keeper uses a mix of 2D sprites for the creatures and certain objects, while the landscape is 3D. The game looked good when it came out and doesn’t look too bad today, but the graphics haven’t aged well. In Dungeon Keeper 2 however, there is a huge graphical leap, with the game looking great even today. The whole game has being moved to 3D, with all creatures and objects looking detailed and interesting. In the first instalment your Dungeon Heart is represented as a large glowing jewel, while in the second, it is an pulsating organic mass embedded in the earth. The game also uses early dynamic lighting effects well as well as rendered water and lava. The interface is slick and presented well, while the whole game moves fast and smoothly. The intro cinematic is also great as well as the numerous cut scenes played between most levels.

It is very clear from the second game that the developers learned a great deal from the first. The sequel is highly refined, most of the issues from the first game are remedied and there is much more attention focused on story telling and atmosphere. Several rooms have been removed and new ones added, such as the combat pit or casino. Gameplay has been left mostly untouched mainly because it worked so well. There have been some adjustment with the addition of an added resource known as mana, used for spells and to sustain your imps.

DK2 is one of the funniest games I have ever played. Your mentor/narrator, voiced by Richard Ridings, has a decidingly evil voice. He constantly informs the player of their tasks, gives helpful advice and the occasional humorous messages, like warning the player of an invasion of micro-piglets, or that your creatures demand cable. The game also uses your computers calendar to tell the date and time, telling the player to go to bed if its late or else relaying holiday specific messages, e.g. ‘Trick or Treat Keeper’. One of the most memorable moments is when a creature wins the jackpot in the casino. Over the evil ominous soundtrack can be heard the 1976 disco classic ‘Disco Inferno’, and all the creatures in the casino begin to dance to the music, with each species of creature possessing its own dance style. While these are small touches, they add a huge amount of fun to the game.

A helpful reminder of your need for central heating

There are some problems though. These mainly focus on the AI, which tends to be rather poor, especially when it comes to other dungeon keepers. They tend to just sit behind their walls and do nothing until you attack, or sometime allow you to take over much of their dungeon with minimal resistance. There isn’t much consistency in the difficulty of the later levels, mainly in the first game, which can be disappointingly easy. Some early levels can be very difficult, while some of the last missions are a breeze. An example would be where an AI keeper occasionally kills itself by digging right into the centre of a heroes fortress for no apparent reason and getting killed. You only find this out when you abruptly win the level having not even begun your attack. I had some stability issues with the second game, but nothing too serious.

So in conclusion, these are some of the best, most original and innovative games ever made. DK was a milestone in gaming with dark and interesting gameplay. DK2 lifted the bar considerably with its great graphics, atmosphere and hilarious writing. I still find myself playing this game on a regular basis despite its age, still feeling as fresh and fun as it did when I first played it at the tender age of 14. It is a tremendous shame we never got to see DK3 which was cancelled way back in 2000. Bullfrog was assimilated by the ever expanding Borg collective *cough* sorry, EA, in 2004. Due to a lack of any creativity in EA these days, they have announced they will be robbing the grave of Bullfrog to revisit some of their games. So maybe we might see another Dungeon Keeper in a few years. Whether this can live up to the originals only time will tell.

Only a fool would disturb the grave of such a terrifing beast

StarGuard Review

Starguard Review

Starguard is a basic flash based side scrolling platform game where you play a venusian spaceman, part of a large force of soldiers invading a wizards castle. The game is unrelated to the old miniature war game or the 1955 novel.

The story is told through a series of short paragraphs that appear on the wall behind the player. It is a simple affair where the people of Venus created the wizard to herald in a time of peace and prosperity. The wizard then rebelled, slaughtering billions with his monsters and taking over the planet, residing in a mighty fortress. So you play one of the lucky guys invading the castle, the last attempt by the people of Venus to kill the wizard.

The graphics and interface are very basic, making the game fun and easy to play. He game looks very much like an old game from the Atari 2600, and has similar sound effects. The game take the form of a castle that the player has to navigate, avoiding obstacles and shooting enemies. There are 9 levels where the player moves either left or right, while descending down into the castle. The levels steadily increase in difficulty with quicker moving obstacles as well as more numerous and tougher foes. There is a reliance on pattern recognition puzzles later in the game, with some becoming very tough indeed.

Many of the levels employ sections where large beams or projectile launchers are placed in a pattern or row on a wall, firing in a specific sequence. This means the player has to time their jumps and movements so they land by the gun that is not firing, then move along following the gap in the projectiles. This can be fun, but got a bit annoying during the final levels as I felt it was a bit overdone.

The games combat is frenetic and fun. The players weapon fires as quickly as you can tap the keyboard, so you can often fill the screen with a barrage of projectiles. The fast pace of much of the combat and jumping puzzles is very satisfying to complete, but really frustrating to fail. The enemies death animations are well done despite the primitive graphics.

Some enemies are easy to kill, usually dispatched with one or two hits, but there are several others that take a serious amount of punishment to kill, only to resurrect in a different even stronger form once you’ve walked past their remains. As the player moves through the level, checkpoints are uncovered allowing the player to respawn when you die.

While the graphics are obviously very basic, there is a certain charm to them. The simple colour scheme is consistent as is the gameplay. While the game will not win any awards for story telling or gripping atmosphere, there are lots of other little green pixelated men fighting and dying along side you, so at least there is the sense that you are part of a larger attack. The game is addictive and doesn’t let you go easily, meaning you will probably complete it on your first sitting. While the difficulty I played it on is by no means impossible, it can get quite hard later in the game, and the last boss is very difficult. However, there is enough of a challenge to make the game playable and not too easy at the same time. So overall, an addictive game that looks good, sounds good and will have me coming back next time Iv got half an hour to kill.

Assassin's Creed

I have finally gotten Assassin's Creed. Iv heard much but know little. I am eagerly awaiting installation so i can finally see what all the fuss is about. Watch this space for a review in a few weeks.

Chindogu

For our Design Practice class, we had to come up with a Chindogu, which is basically an ingenious everyday invention that is completely useless.

The convenience and comfort of a personal arm rest

Spore

A few years back, I heard a description of an upcoming game that allowed you to create and guide life in an unprecedented way and scope. You had complete control of your lifeform, from its humble beginnings as microbial life oozing through primordial goo, all the way up to a galactic civilisation. Now this is obviously caught my eye, so, once I was able, I dutifully went and bought Spore, for a bargain price thanks to some very friendly and infinitely dodgy game dealers in Bangkok.

Spore was developed by Maxis, who we all know are behind the various Sims games as well as the SimCity games. Love them or hate them, the Sim franchises are one of the most successful lines of computer software (not games) ever. While I despise the Sims, I did actually rather enjoy the various SimCity packages. So when I heard of a game that could mock the scope of the already very complicated and huge SimCity , I was very eager to get sucked into the vastness of it all.

Once I began the game, I knew I would be in for an interesting experience. The game starts with a galactic view, and you get to choose a planet on which to send your….spore shall we say. You get to decide on your lifeforms diet, be it carnivorous, herbivore or both. You are then treated to a nice little sequence where a meteor packed with microbial life impacts on a wet but sterile world. After the impact, all the meteoric fragments rain down into the sea, from which your cell emerges and begins life. You then must begin feeding in order to collect enough DNA to evolve. The primordial pool is a busy place, and you can eat on whatever or who ever passes by, its up to you.

I must say I really liked this part of the game. I have a particular soft spot for space opera, and I do firmly believe in the theory of Panspermia. So this was right down my alley. As you swim about eating on your chosen diet, you gather enough DNA until you can grow to the next stage. This is really cool, as you change size, the whole scale of everything around you changes too. When you first emerge from the meteor, you nibble on passing single cell plants and animals, but as you grow, they become too small to be worth the effort and you move onto bigger prey. There are many things that will eat you too, they are usually much bigger and faster so you really have to try to avoid them. As you swim about, you can see huge creatures moving around in the background, These are too big to even notice you, so the game really gives you a cool and well thought out view of the microscopic world.

As I mentioned above, as you gather more DNA, you get to grow and evolve. When this happens, you can call for a mate, and you go to the creature creation screen. Here you get to spend your DNA on upgrading your critter so it can be more effective at its chosen lifestyle. Extra wiggly bits to move faster, spines and poison emitters for defence, the list goes on. So once your happy with your creation, you can hatch from your egg and begin life with your new features. This is a cool little concept and I feel it works well. You can always go back and look at all the stages of evolution you have chosen, so you get a view of how your cell has evolved and improved since its first tentative wiggles out of the meteor.

After a while, you gain enough DNA for your creature to evolve a primitive brain. Once this happens, your critter can then take its first steps on land, and thus the Creature Stage of the game begins. You evolve legs and begin to explore this vast new world you find yourself on. As before, your choice of diet remains, so you move off into the surrounding jungle to see what you can find. You will inevitably come across some other creatures and you can either eat them or befriend them, both giving you different amounts of DNA depending on their size or stage of evolution. Again this is used to change and grow you creature as it steadily evolves towards sentience.

Unfortunately, the game begins to struggle a bit here. While it is fun to evolve you creature, running around eating fruit from trees isn’t quite as exciting as you would think. This stage is boring and repetitive. As I said there is some fun to be had, but it seems as if the designers ran out of ideas. All of the creatures are ground based. There is some limited flying but that’s it. You cant climb, swim, burrow or use most of the interesting things on the landscape. The fighting is crap, with a maximum of only 4 attacks that don’t really look that good. Some of the offensive weapons are useless and I found myself sticking to the same really powerful attack while ignoring the others. The befriending is even worse. There is nothing cool about watching you hulking armoured monster doing a gay dance to try befriend a randomly generated creature that looks like an orange baby with 4 legs, called a BeebleBee.. Bah!

The creature editor is fun I must say. There is a lot of potential for a near infinite array of critters. There is also endless possibility for abuse and making some strange and completely nonsensical ones like below. However this is not enough to save Spore as, like in the cell stage, you eventually get enough DNA to become sentient, and so begins the tribal stage. Once you reach this point, you can no longer edit your creature, so the game effectively locks out one of its most fun elements.

The Tribal Stage, like the creature stage, feels unfinished. The scale moves up again, now you are on a whole continent with other villages of recently intelligent creatures scattered about. There is nothing like what you can do in any other building simulator. The rules are somewhat confusing, your village is tiny and you only have a couple of different things you can do. Again it is a choice between good and bad, or force and diplomacy. It’s a bit annoying in one aspect as the physical strengths of your creatures are removed and all of the enemy tribes have the same health as you. So the before mentioned Beeblebees can now take down my brutes with a club or spear, whereas in the creature stage I could have taken out their whole nest with one critter.

Your village can be upgraded, as can your costume, but even when it is fully upgraded, your tribe can only have 12 members, 8 huts and one livestock creature. The costume aspect is pointless as has no impact on your creatures behaviour or strengths. You cant even add all of the buildings you unlock at once, as of the 10 or so buildings, there is only 8 permanent unmoveable spots in village you can build on. It seems the sentience has done little to improve the game. So once you’ve defeated or befriended the other tribes, the game moves to the City Stage…yay.

Again, it is cumbersome and irritating. The city stage brings the scale up to a planetary perspective. You have your home city and you have to either conquer or subsume the other cities on the world. There are a few different ways you can do this. By military conquest, religious conversion or economic means. You also have access to a navy and air force. Money is gathered by controlling Spice geysers (Maxis you have no shame) which gathers at a rate dependant on how many geysers you poses. Now I know your thinking this sounds a lot better, but believe me its not. The military conquest is too easy, but still manages to frustrate. Your units do nothing to defend themselves and will sit still while firing, making it impossible to avoid enemy fire, not that moving around makes any difference anyway. All of the weapon effects are identical regardless of what you have equipped. Their armour is weak, you can do nothing to upgrade them and all of your offensive units are the same design. It is similar with the religious conquest method. Its boring and easy. Economic victory is also fairly lacklustre, you simply set up a trade route and just wait until you have enough clout to buy an enemy city.

The one small decent part of city stage is the vehicle/building editor. This is cool I must say, you can design your buildings and vehicles in the same way as you could your creature. It would have been nice if the preset objects for building were a little mare varied, but there is enough there to come up with plenty of interesting ideas.

So once you take over the world, can you only guess whats next?? That’s right, the Space Stage. This is actually one of the better stages. You can colonise planets, make peace or war with other interstellar civilisations and even terraform worlds. You can fly to different solar systems and scan planets (I will not evoke the name of ME2 in this review), even abduct local lifeforms for study. This is a bit of fun, but I found some of the missions difficult to understand and complete, and honestly, after all the shit Iv had to go through to get to this stage, I wasnt that interested.

The graphics were hit and miss and could have been better, especially compared to other games out the same year, but were colourful and interesting. The cell stage looked great. Sound wise, there were some nice ambient sound effects, music nice, especially in the opening intro and in the primeval soup. Animal sounds were cool and realistic, but again a bit repetitive with the same sounds being recycled for most of the creatures. The usual Maxis gibberish found in their Sims series makes a return once your creatures have evolved to sentience.

Overall Spore was an awful disappointment. The cell stage was excellent, some really good visuals and very clever ideas regarding evolution and the concept of scale. Creature maker is lot of fun, as was vehicle/building designing, if a little restrictive. There are no major differences in the types of creatures available, i.e. insects, fish, reptiles etc, this would have been really cool if it had been included.

Creature stage was interesting but repetitive and ignored many survival strategies, swimming, climbing, which would have added much to the game. The fight/friend system was very basic and felt unfinished. The game should have been longer while making better use of the creature editor, it was too easy and quick to advance to the other stages. Once the tribal stage happens the game goes downhill. City building is crap, as is combat. The Space Stage was a bit better, but still felt lacking. So while Spore has some excellent ideas, it ultimately falls far short of the mark and squandered an excellent chance to be one of the greatest games (if it could be called a game) ever.

Metro 2033

Its not often that a game comes out based on an overused and clichéd setting that leaves the player feeling rewarded and refreshed. Metro 2033 is another game based on the tired setting of post nuclear annihilation. The list of post apocalyptic games is extensive, Fallout, Gears of War, Hellgate, Resistance: Fall of Man, Stalker and pretty much ever zombie game ever made. Metro 2033 tells the tale of Artyom, a young man who grew up in a surviving human enclave known as Exhibition Station, in the ruins of the Moscow Metro. This has become one of the last habitable places in the city after nuclear holocaust devastated much of the surface of the world. Artyom is on a mission after Hunter, an elite Ranger, comes to warn the station of a new threat to humanities tenuous hold on existence. The story is loosely based on a best selling russian novel, by one Dmitry Glukhovsky. There are frequent visual references to the book in the game, although the story is slightly altered.

And so the game begins. The first thing that struck me were the graphics. I am one of the lucky gamers who owns a bad ass PC, so I was able to enjoy Metro 2033 on maximum settings. It was beautiful. The effects and lighting, facial animations and more subtle effects are top notch and add a huge amount of depth to the game. There is a serious level of detail, from the way the levels and especially the human settlements are constructed. There is lots of opportunities to explore the various stations that you come across, and this should not be missed. Each station is a self contained town, heavily fortified agains the horrors of the metro and outside world. The designers really went all out in their attempts the portray the dark and dirty existence that humanity finds itself in, and it really pays off as the stations put much of the towns from Fallout 3 to shame, albeit in a more linear and less interactive way.

The great presentation leads to a very believable and scary atmosphere. This is certainly one of those games that needs to be played in the dark as much of the finer detail can be hard to see. The sound effects are also very good, with spooky bangs and clanks ringing out through the crumbling tumbles. Weapons sound realistic as well as all of your equipment. When there are beasties about, they also lend their menacing voices to the atmosphere making it hard to know when precisely they will pounce.

The gameplay is standard FPS format. Artyom is equipped with an array of weapons, usual stuff, lamp, map and various other items to help you along. The items requiring power can be charged up with a charging device that is carried around throughout the game, so should your light look as if its losing its brightness, it probably is, so time to charge it up. While it can be a bit annoying to have to do this, it does add a level of realism to the game that doesn't take away from the gameplay. The game map is a physical thing that Artyom must take out of his pocket to view, with objectives written on it and Artyom using a lighter to illuminate it should he find himself in a dark spot. This again adds a level of realism to the game, as when the map is pulled out, it is done in real time, so you must be careful when and where you check it.

The game is also challenging, but not impossibly so. I played through on hard mode and found this to be perfect. Ammo is often hard to come by, so there were many situations where I was moving alone through the darkened tunnels, with just a single clip in my AK, and nothing else but a knife. The sense of desperation is very tangible. Ammo is found on bodies, scattered in realistic map locations or can be picked up in the stations. The game uses a form of ammo as currency. Bullets manufactured before the holocaust are highly valued and can be used to exchange for inferior post holocaust manufactured weapons and ammo. The player can choose to load their pre-fall bullets if they wish, significantly increasing their firepower. However these rounds are hard to come by, so they player needs to be careful about how they are used.

The games enemies suit their environment perfectly, ranging from small dog sized mutants, to huge brutes that are fast and tough, usually moving in packs. It can often take a whole clip of well placed shots to bring the bigger foes down, meaning your already precious ammo reserves usually don't last much more than a few encounters with the metro's resident nasties. Thankfully the game usually provides you with enough to get through, you just have to be careful not to waste it.

Artyom is the standard silent protagonist, not uttering a word during the game. However, and thankfully, we are treated to a short monologue between each level as Artyom tells his story. Though these are short, they do give him a voice and the player can connect a little better to their character.

The levels are based in two locations. The metro, where most of the game will take place and on the surface. The player must make several forays up to the surface during the game. The frozen ruins of Moscow are eerie and silent, inhabited by some of the more fearsome mutants that plague the city. Due to the surface being poisoned since the fall, a gas mask must be worn or the player will choke to death. The gas masks require filters that must be regularly replaced. These can be bought in the stations or scavenged from the remains of less fortunate people found all over the surface and tunnels alike. The masks can also suffer damage from attacks, so the player must be extra quick and careful to protect it.

Throughout the game, the player is usually accompanied by a few NPCs. This is usually welcome as the prospects of traversing alone through the spooky metro is not a very appealing one. The voice acting is good and the scripted sequences are realistic and enjoyable to watch. The story of the game also moves along nicely, with the player never losing sight as to what they are doing. The game also has two different outcomes, depending on certain decisions made through the game, like whether to use stealth or brawn, or helping or ignoring certain NPCs. While there is no different content and the difference is only in the ending sequence, there is a surprising outcome for one of them so its definitely worth playing the game again differently to see this.

So overall, I found Metro 2033 a very enjoyable experience. The story is interesting and is well paced, the atmosphere and graphics are some of the best iv seen despite the overused post apocalyptic setting. Metro 2033 is a very memorable game that I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a compelling and genuinely scary experience.

The slow death of Command & Conquer

Command and Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, was a game I purchased after an unsuccessful attempt to get Mass Effect 2. The game was out of stock the day I went to buy it, so rather than leave empty handed, I decided to pick up something else, and there was C&C4 sitting there in the new releases so I said fuck it, I’ll get it. Why I did this I still don’t know as I hated their last effort, Red Alert 3, and its predecessor RA2.

Now I am a big fan of the C&C games, well the older ones anyway, so I hoped that with this one, heralded as the closing chapter in the C&C storyline, would be a fitting farewell to great series. My first C&C game was the Red Alert port onto the Playstation. This was epic, with me spending a good chunk of my early teens sitting in front of the TV, kicking Allied ass with my army of Mammoth Tanks. I also got the all of the expansion packs, Tiberian Sun and its expansions, the Generals series and the terrible Red Alert 2 & 3. C&C 3 I thought was pretty good, keeping to the well known formula with a lovely overhaul of the graphics and interface.

Then came along C&C4. Where to begin I don’t even know. I hated this game. Hated, hated, hated it. Within 10 minutes of me playing it, my excited anticipation had turned into a grim realisation of what was in store, and that I should have held out for Mass Effect 2. The graphics are fine, not too much different to C&C3, but there the similarities ended. The designers made some rather drastic changes to the well known series. Rather than improving on the formula, some dickhead in EA decided to rewrite one of the most successful game series of all time. Why they did this on the very last game in the series I cannot fathom. The game begins with the live action cuts scene, with Kane and NOD being all evil and mysterious and GDI being all noble and honourable... boring. The game is played with the player controlling one of 3 different types of MCVs, (Mobile Construction Unit for all you noobs) that are all used for one aspect of play, i.e. Defensive, Support or Offensive, each MCV can build different units according to their role. Defensive build turrets and infantry, offence builds all the different tanks, and the support has air units and artillery etc. The MCVs can also move around the map and can be redeployed anywhere. Meaning you can advance along, bringing your base behind you to reinforce your army. If you lose your MCV, you can redeploy it in one of your deployment zones where it will arrive in a suitable dramatic and ludicrous manner, GDI dropping from orbit, and NOD burrowing from under the ground like Shedder in TMNT.

This style of play seemed to me to be designed for quick multiplayer skirmishes, rather than the long strategic story driven missions in the previous games. There is a story in there somewhere, but the cut scenes are so bad I just skipped all of them, but more on that later.

Another design decision that I struggle to understand, is their decision to remove the whole base building/harvesting aspect from the game. For me, a long time lover of strategy games, with my affair beginning way back with the classic Dune 2, this is absolute and utter heresy. In Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, the base building was left more or less intact, with the new ability to build on water as well as land. However the developers changed the resource gathering system by making the player build their refineries directly onto an ore mine, therefore greatly altering the gameplay by eliminating ore fields. This was a bit similar to games like Supreme Commander. This was fine for SC, where the scope was huge, but not in a C&C game where the armies and maps are much smaller. 

I hated this, and for me heralded the beginning of the slow and inevitable death of the C&C franchise. Unfortunately, my prediction was true, with C&C4 getting rid of the whole base building aspect altogether, with the designers going for a more multiplayer oriented game of a small tactical force with limited rebuilding capability. Funds were allocated to your MCV, and you could build a certain amount of units until you reached the unit cap. That was it. You could only replace lost units so long as the cap wasn’t exceeded. Each unit being worth a certain amount. So gone are the days of building a big army, sending it off to war, and having a second army being built while the first was out getting slaughtered. This was a strange decision to make, alienating a huge portion of their fan base. Now I know the game was praised for its multiplayer mode, but as iv previously mentioned in my blog, I’m a single player man, and for EA to leave me out of what should have been a great game is disappointing to say the least.

Uh oh, better build some defensive structures ASAP.. Oh wait.....

The base building was a huge part of the older games and with the removal of this feature, I feel this effort cannot even be called C&C as it now so fundamentally different from the other games in the franchise.

The other notable feature of the Command & Conquer series are the live action cut scenes. When I first saw them, way back during Red Alert on my PS1, they were cool. The crudely rendered backgrounds with the actor super imposed over were great, the acting was cheesy but completely appropriate to the game at the time. Who could forget the rants of Stalin, or the subtle subterfuge between his commanders, they were great fun and added a lot to the atmosphere of the game.

So WTF happened?!?!?!?

Oh Tricia Helfer, you were so much sexier as a Cylon

The effects have improved, the cast has many notable names, with some EA execs obviously recently having lunch with someone working on Battlestar Galactica. George Takei also needs to have a serious discussion with his agent. However, despite all of EAs lovely money, they are mind numbingly cringy. The acting is laughable, the writing as if it was done by George Bush and the whole look was just so cheesy. If i knew the game came with block of cheddar this size I would have ran out of Game all the way home. It was honestly like trying to sit through an episode of the X Factor. I know its only a small part of the package and doesn’t directly impact the gameplay, but even when your playing and you skip the intros, you cant escape the awfulness, with one notable moment where an enemy commander taunts you with the horrendous jibe, ‘Your units are weak, just like you….’.Whoooooooooohh, oh how I shat my pants after hearing that. I more likely turned off the game and went outside for some exercise, so disgusted was I by this idiotic writing. The fact that some moron in EA sat there and wrote that and with no one picked up on how stupid and childish it sounded. Its as if they thought they could get away with it because it was a game and gamers wouldn’t notice.. Oh how it makes my blood boil.

It might seem like I’m being over critical of this part, but really, when a game with such a long drawn out story, that has literally spanned over 15 games, you would think they would have tried to make the final chapter decent and watchable, rather than as a test bed for a new style of gameplay. The gameplay is so radically changed that it doesn’t feel like a C&C game. Westwood Studios must be turning in their grave. I have to confess, that I never completed this game, so bad did I find it, so I never even found out what happened to Kane, NOD, GDI or even Tanya (in RA3 only), who was played by Jenny McCarthy (the casting speaks for itself). However I honestly didn’t care, and will be forever wary in the future of anything that comes out of the carcass of Westwood Studios, so horribly butchered by EA in their quest to dominate the world.

I will grieve for C&C, but nothing will make me appreciate the horrible death rattle that is Tiberium Twilight.

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