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Jungalist81

Red Alert 3 review

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(Note: This topic has been moved from the news forum, as it bumped a thread from 2008. It is still worthy of discussion ~Zee)

 

Preface: I apologize for the necroing but I just replayed the RA3 campaign and Id like to say a few things. Ive been playing games since the early 90s. I dislike the culture of this decade of gamers or people in general; we are now heavily influence by the voice of critics

 

It is never a good idea to compare pc games in the 90s and games played right now; they are two distinct gaming cultures. Back then we had two things that enhanced and defined our video games back then: special effects and pace.

 

Special effects - Take Command and conquer 1 for example, think back when you had your windows 95 computer with only 72MB of RAM. It was slow as hell to startup and opening each folder took a couple of seconds. Very frustrating lol... but when you pop in the command and conquer cd into the CD-rom and hit play, you were immersed in a virtual world war... a quicktime movie shows you flipping through channels "Wow! its like I am watching TV on my Packard Bell Computer!" Then a real-life actor briefs you on a mission where you must take on a beach. Game loads and you see the battlefield. "Wow the graphics are improved from ms-dos 8-bit to 32-bit. Wow, even the pictures on the right are real photos of people and wow they are talking to me on stereo sound!!!" It was a nuclear explosion of entertainment; it was a real life simulation of a futuristic battlefield. It was a popular rts game and the 1st rts game to many people. It was new, it was fresh and it used state of the art graphics. Another random example is Donkey Kong Country for the super nintendo. If you can recall, the box cover stated "3D GRAPHICS!" which was basically rendered animation of DK and the scrolling environment.

 

Pace - With respect to games nowadays, 90s games were much slower and had an elegant pace for the player to play through. Take Command and Conquer 1 for example, when you built your base, it would literally take a few minutes to just set it up. The Speed of computers were obviously slow and even toggling the speed on the menu still didnt do anything (at least on my grandfather computer it didnt). It would take a minute for a soldier to walk a distance of 6 barracks (thats was when APCs were really useful). Another great example is Journeyman project 1 (my fav game of all time). This point-n-click adventure game had top of the line rendered environment as well as great cinema movies. People playing through that game was preoccupied by its special effects. Gamers would immerse themselves inside the world walking around on the same paths many times. Gamers would write notes down (the instruction manual encouraged it). Play the same games now and it would probably take people about 2 hours to beat the journeyman game lol. I played cnc1 again and I was breezing through the game pumping out vehicles, running over enemies, going past base defenses and then killing fact and racks lol (granted I know the mechanics very well so its a no brainer)

 

A fast and crowded gaming community - Game companies must keep up with the demand and the demand is overthetop special effects and fast action that comes and goes. For the past couple years I have been observing popular video games. This is the trend I have been seeing:

1.A game would be announced:

2. Depending how much money the company has on advertising, it will be seen advertised on many game sites, game stores and game magazines.

3. Video game community will voiced their prediction reviews and fight to the virtual death on score "no it should get 95.2% not 95.3%! Your a noob because blah blah blah.

4. Inadvertantely gamers will know so much about the game without it coming out (just like how star wars nerds like me knew Samuel L jacksons jedi name was Mace Windu when it wasnt even mentioned on the 1st movie).

5. That popular game would come out, 90% will buy it because of the hype, 10% will buy it just to say they played it and rage about it on youtube and on sites about how stupid the game is (funny since that 10%

 

Back then games were valuable novelties, not like a rock concert that comes with much anticipation and is short lived. Games werent raped by semantics and esoteric reasons that make it a good or bad game. Games are for entertainment, not religious relics that must be judged.

 

News Flash: Its just a game.

 

Appreciation is Key - Accomplishing those goals back then in the 90s were extremely hard and tedious. We must appeciate and give our thanks to the artists and developers of games back then; they didnt have a lot of developing tools like we have today. The other day, the movie: Dragonheart was playing on TV. Its a 1995 movie that had a CGI dragon (voiced by Sean Connery). Check it out, the CGI is as well done and even better than movies seen today. Perhaps its depends on the rendering tools and back then artist had little or no programming shortcuts and enchancers; they had to make it by hand (no more ranting on this, that can be another topic)

 

 

Appreciate Red Alert 3 - Every game is inevitably bad if you try to compare it to other games; you will always find a reason why other games are better. In my opinion, what makes a great game is if it fulfills its purpose: Is it entertaining?

 

Defining Entertainment (what nots):

1. It is not entertaining to compare one game to another.

2. It is not entertaining to try to comparea sequel game to its predecessors.

3. It is not entertaining to give a game a numerical number that has no significant or solid meaning.

4. It is not entertaining to bad mouth a game (if its bad, why waste your time being upset about it and continue talking about it?)

 

Bottomline - Red Alert 3 was entertaining.

What im aware of but disregard:

1. Dont care that the depth of strategy will never go the distance like Starcraft 2 does. There will be no masters in this game as the game itself is quite simplified compared to that game.

2. There are tons of other great games and movies that came out in 2008 the bioshock, fallout was great, oblivion was amazing. I watched at least 10 movies that year, so I can see why it wasnt one of the top games. (I added movies for the financial aspect, people would rather spend 20 bucks for movie, candy, poporn, drink)

3. I dont care that a lot of other gamers wont play RTS and will stick with FPS games all the way.

4. I dont care about veteran CNC fanboys complaining that the new CNC games didnt have this or that (dont get me started on CNC4)

 

 

Everything big and small about Red Alert 3 was flawless on my opinion. If you remove the irrelevant variables of comparing other games and focus on the game and how entertaining it is, you fan boys will appeciate it more like me. This game did in fact took gameplay strategy to a whole new improved level. The graphics of the main menu and music maintain the integrity of the franchise (an over the top animation of kirov bombardments and all 3 faction symbols with a new hell march remix). The 1st mission where you see a guy get launched from the cannon vehicle made the game authentic. It was as ridiculous as seeing the Tesla Coil for the 1st time. Red Alert 3 was a great game. The developers maintained and polished the franchise even further.

Edited by Zee Hypnotist

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Welcome to the forums... this is slightly over the average word-count for a first-time poster... so I'm guessing you've been saving this one up for a while. :)

 

The short version is I enjoyed the game for it's entertainment value, I railed against the changes to game-play like the resource mining, but once I actually start playing the game I get past it.

 

(It makes me wonder what/how we reviewed RA3 originally. I forget - was this the infamous/last Saracen review for RA3? Zee which thread was this posted in?)

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Thank you for the pleasant welcome. I found this forum when researching about Red Alert. I stumbled upon that old post and here we are now :) Forgive me for impulse post; these threads get me fired up

About me: Like everyone else here I play video games. Ever since I can remember, I have participated in many game communities. I usually troll around trying to find some insights and share my love, interest, philosophy of the art of making games but most of the time its 13 year old kids making rants like these:

 

hrmm its video games afterall what can I expect. Maybe I should shift interests to politics... nah lol. So anyway, like mentioned above, I have been playing Command and conquer when it came out, I even played that online skirmish red alert 1 version (it was crappy but the idea of playing with someone online was fresh and unique). If I look back at my history of comments and posts from awhile ago, I was one of those people who would rant about how a game sucked and how it didnt have this and that and blah blah. Its an embarrassing reminder but its the reality of many people: people these days are a critic and get hypnotized by what everyone says online thanks to review gaming sites and review site of everything: yelp.com. I hope everyone can see past that and actually play a game rather than judge.

 

Right now I am playing Skyrim along with old pc games: riven, Syberia, Cyberia (no it didnt mispell), I am also playing CIvilization IV and RA3 again.

 

I used to play starcraft 2 and tried making custom maps but then the overal gaming community for that was terrible; too much complaining and bit*hing. Then I tried my luck on Minecraft. I played that for over a year and even created my own server. I even made a video of myself going to the Penny Arcade Expo 2011.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f--SJksCTU0

 

Not trying to advertise, my server has been disbanded for awhile now. The MC (minecraft) community was very good especially the mod community. Unlike the s 2 mod community, MC community focused on helping each other with their plugins and gave suggestions and worked together.

 

back on track...

 

In conclusion, I will continue to come here and give some positive feedback, thoughts and conceptual ideas. I still have to play through the Japan campaign then play the uprising for the 1st time.

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