Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

Red Alert 3 is a game designed to be stupid.  Not just any kind of stupid:  aggressively stupid.

Back in the '90's Westwood made the original Command and Conquer, and soon after that the original Red Alert.  Full Motion Video was the current plague on gaming.  Cutscenes featured terrible acting from no-name actors and actresses in front of green screens goading you into greater feats of tank rushing and attack moving.

When EA took over in the early 2000's, they held a secret meeting where they discussed the past success of the C&C franchise and what they needed to improve on to make their games popular to the modern audience.  Obviously, the continuance of the dead art of FMV was paramount.  Pencil more terrible B-list actors into the budget!  Give me Tim Curry as a Russian premier!  The asian chick from Battlestar Galactica as your personal assistant!  Michael Ironside as some general!  James Earl Jones trying hard not to cry!

After fucking up the Tiberium francise for a good decade and offhandedly fucking up Red Alert 2 for good measure, the C&C drones came up with the amazingly racist and fun-to-play Generals and its even-better expansion Zero Hour.  Generals was lots of fun despite a bad campaign, terrible FMV and shittily-coded multiplayer that, even if played 50 years in the future on quantum computers, will still bog down like you were playing Crysis on a Pentium 2.

Red Alert 3 attempts to copy some of what made Generals fun and fails.  Gone are the options to play each of the 3 races in a different fashion like Zero Hour let you do.  Each of the 3 races, Soviet, Allied and Gay Empire of George Takei, plays very differently.  This is even to the point of having buildings constructed in different ways, somewhat like Starcraft.  However, this just means that only the Soviets build buildings in a rational way and the other two races have you micromanaging the shit out of everything just to build a base. 

If you try to play a skirmish against the computer, then God help you.  The enemy AI's all secretly work together to beat on the puny human.  You'll see AI-controlled units all the colors of the rainbow attacking your base at the same time at regular intervals.  When you start a match these AI's will take over your map screen and broadcast shitty FMV acting at you while you scramble around for a few seconds trying to fend off attacks.  The speed of the game is way too fast for everyone except Koreans on Ritalin to keep up.

If you make the mistake of watching the intro movie you will want to take your own life rather than watch fat Tim Curry make an ass of himself by trying to approximate a Russian accent.  Instead of playing this game, send a letter bomb to the EA offices showing your appreciation for all their hard work keeping this long-dead franchise twitching.