Command & Conquer has fallen on hard times recently. After the shuttering of original series creators Westwood Studios, EA took the helm, and despite a strong start with their first two offerings; Generals and Command & Conquer 3, things began to unravel with the release of the toe-curlingly camp Red Alert 3 and then hit rock bottom in a final, misguided attempt to reinvent the series classic formula with Command & Conquer 4. After a few years of dormancy, the Command & Conquer brand is now being resurrected as an upcoming free to play venture using EA's Frostbite II engine, and while its certainly something I'll check out (I've been successful in applying for the closed beta), I don't think EA will ever be able to emulate the successes of the series heyday.
So with EA's recapturing of the Command & Conquer mojo unlikely, where can a grizzled series veteran possibly go for old-school RTS thrills? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you OpenRA, a freeware program that allows the first Command & Conquer, Red Alert and Dune 2000, the result of an unlikely union between the series and Frank Herbert's legendary sci-fi tale of same name, to be played competitively online for gratis. Considerable work has gone into the software; each game's graphics can now be rendered at colossal resolutions and modern RTS stapes such as build queues and waypoint systems have been shoehorned in, albeit with mixesd results. Once the OpenRA client is downloaded, support for each individual game can be installed via download from the internet, and each title works as a mod of sorts for the main client. The interface for joining online games is very basic, with the complicated matchmaking algorithms of today's RTS big hitters eschewed in favour of the old-school approach of manually choosing which to join from a list of available games.
Reverse engineering copywrited material in this way often carries with it the very real risk of legal problems, but given that EA themselves have in the past released free ISO disc images of these classic games into the wild, I don't think there's much risk of the developers incurring the wrath of EA's legal team in this case. If you fancy a free afternoon of fiddling about with tanks on a digital battlefield, check out the OpenRA website.
Reverse engineering copywrited material in this way often carries with it the very real risk of legal problems, but given that EA themselves have in the past released free ISO disc images of these classic games into the wild, I don't think there's much risk of the developers incurring the wrath of EA's legal team in this case. If you fancy a free afternoon of fiddling about with tanks on a digital battlefield, check out the OpenRA website.
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