C&C: RED ALERT 2

Celebrating Westwood's lively romp around the world.

- John Strike

When the hell are you going to get the internet?” bellowed my friend Mike as he handed me a wad of folded up sheets of A4 paper on the school playing field. Knowing I loved Command & Conquer, and that I basically lived in a cave on the Cumbrian coast in 2000, he'd very kindly printed off sheets and sheets of web pages covering Westwood's new announcement: Red Alert 2.

Tiberian Sun defined my summer in 1999, sharing its time with Half-Life, Medal of Honor and others behind my barricaded bedroom door, GCSE exams looming. But now only a few months later, the excitement of Mike's Red Alert 2 print-offs had me on tenterhooks. The same way I pored over PC Gamer's pages of Tiberian Sun coverage, now I stared for hours at Mike's black and white inkjet goodness trying to decipher the madness. Were those really huge flying balloons with smiley faces on page 3 of 7? And robotic tank-eating spiders on page 1 of 4? And why were dolphins blasting farts at tugboats on page 5 of 12? Harvesters with machine guns, soldiers taking over skyscrapers and deadly weather control devices all sounded outlandish.

BEIGE ALERT

Released in October 2000, just over a year after Tiberian Sun, my feelings about Red Alert 2 today are probably the opposite of my first impressions at release.

Command & Conquer has always been underpinned by its full motion video sequences. They tell a story through each game between missions which would otherwise lack their own way of presenting a narrative. FMVs in early games felt budget (who remembers the awful green screens?), often tense (who remembers when Cain shoots Seth in the back of the head mid-briefing?), but always serious and self-important in tone. This was amplified by the time