Particularly, the combination of these the video sequences and well-balanced maps in RA would expose me to the first “video game vixen” that I fell in love with: Special Agent Tanya Adamsįlat, smooth, soft bellies? Tanya ain’t got time for that! How about abs so rock-solid, you can see them in low resolution! That’s the Tanya I grew up to love, not softcore B-movie actresses and Playboy models. If I am completely honest, I hated the non-building missions in my youth, but as I became older, I began to understand that these missions are a demonstration in good balance and design: give the player X units at the beginning, and create Y number of winnable and/or impossible fights to reduce X units to Z, whereas section A of the map will grant additional units and B and C are (sub)objectives. Additionally, RA taught me lessons in brilliant game design through its usage of scripts such as the patterns in which the AI would attack, but especially in missions where one begins with limited units and cannot build, but must survive until the end. Without them, I doubt I would have fallen in love with or the RTS genre in the way that I did. The FMV sequences that made C&C famous indoctrinated me to come to expect that a story-however cheesy-that would be conveyed through special FMV cutscenes after achieving certain goals like winning a mission or beating the game they provide a reason why I should care about one faction winning over another. I would much rather tech up to the Chronosphere, teleport a Cruiser into some water near my opponent, and rain hell on their base before it teleported back or use Longbow helicopters to blow up my opponent’s ore miners since their missiles were strangely ineffective against more mobile targets, even if they were tanks-or especially Soviet Mammoth tanks! Teching up with the Allies was doubly worth the effort because their tech building would reveal the entire map! For that reason, I did not care too much for playing on Westwood Online, because every game was all about the tank rush. My exposure to the Allies has stuck with me throughout the years, and even to this day, I prefer the “finesse” style play in most cases over brute strength. The unit diversity, tech trees, and (attempted) faction differentiation combined for experiences from which I never grew tired, no matter how many hours I pumped into the game. ![]() Maybe it was because he liked RA: Retaliation on the PSX while I felt it to be only slightly better than C&C: TD, but whatever the case was, and whatever the shortcomings of the PSX games were (like scratched rental discs from Movie Gallery and Blockbuster Video), all was remedied and forgiven by keyboard and mouse controls. ![]() I cannot say why my brother asked for the original Red Alert ( RA) Collection ( RA, Counterstrike, and Aftermath) on the PC for his birthday.
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