Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Red Alert 3.

I have always been a fan of the Command and Conquer series on the PC. However I lost focus of the game after the Tiberian Sun series came out. In fact I thought Red Alert was dead and buried. If you ever played the game in the distant past, am sure you know where am coming from. In fact I haven't touched a PC game in a long while since then. If you remember that game by any chance - or happened to run across it. It was a war strategy game - where you could use all kinds of distinct vehicles, infantry and just tear shit up!! You had units like Seals, Chrono Legionnaires, Spies and even war dogs!! What made the game fun was not only the scope of the kind of stuff you could do - but some of the funnier shit too. The Spies had the voice of James Bond (think Sean Connery) and a psychic guy called Yuri. The voice for Yuri was provided by the guy that played the vampire boss whose teeth get pulled out in the first Blade. Yeah - its a nostalgic game and that was a while ago!! So I am quite surprised to see the game come up in its new guise. Make no mistake - its a totally new game - but follows the old story line pretty much. If you have a good PC at hand and are into strategy - look this one up.

Bellows' the review from IGN.com :

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 Review
EA goes to war, tongue firmly in cheek.
by Jason Ocampo.

October 28, 2008 - You may think you know about the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but you don't. In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3's alternate history, it's the Allies launching a surprise attack on Hawaii, a longtime stronghold of the Empire of the Rising Sun, and that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Red Alert 3 puts tongue firmly in cheek and dreams up a bizarre world where armored bears parachute from the sky, transformable Japanese mecha wreak havoc, and Mount Rushmore is actually a secret military facility where Honest Abe's head shoots deadly laser beams out of his eyes.

Red Alert has always been the more "colorful" of the Command & Conquer franchises. Its premise of time travel messing up the space-time continuum allows it to come up with some silly scenarios that are conveyed by scenery-chewing performances by actors in live-action video sequences. So with the Soviet Union facing defeat at the hands of the Allies, a trio of Russia's finest (played by Peter Stormare, Andrew Divoff, and Tim Curry) travel back in time to whack Einstein.

This is a tip of the hat to the original Red Alert, where Einstein travelled back in time to whack Hitler. Job done, the Soviets return home only to discover that, like Eckels stomping on a butterfly in A Sound of Thunder, messing with time has unforeseen repercussions. Take that, Lady Liberty! What results is three campaigns that let you play from the perspective of the Allies, the Soviet Union, and the new Empire of the Rising Sun, basically a Japan that's led by Sulu from Star Trek and armed to the teeth with almost every notable Japanese clich? turned into a unit. There's the aforementioned transformable mecha as well as non-transformable samurai robots, high-tech ninjas, suit-clad engineers, and, yes, even a skirt-wearing schoolgirl armed with Akira-like psychic powers. Not to worry, because the Allies and Soviets can play silly too, with helicopters that shrink opponents to pint size, tuxedo-clad spies, armored zeppelins, and leggy female commandos.

The big new addition in Red Alert 3 is that the entire single-player game has been designed with co-op in mind. You can either play with another human being or with the computer, but basically you each control your own base and forces. If you're playing with a human, there's built-in voice-chat and an ability to drop markers on the map to get their attention. If playing with a computer, you can issue orders for them to seize a location, or strike a certain target. It's a good dynamic because it can make what are traditionally long slogs shorter; you effectively have double the forces that you would normally have in a traditional RTS. Quite often, I let my computer partner tackle half the map while I tackled the other.

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