Command &amp; Conquer!

Westwood Studios Discovers A New World Of Real-Time Warfare, Just Beyond The
"Dunes".

by Chris Lombardi

IMAGINE STORMIN' NORMAN SCHWARTZKOPF AT DESERT STORM HQ. He's got
state-of-the-art satellite technology that gives him a dynamic overview of the
battlefield; he can see every squad of men, every tank, every aircraft, both
enemy and friendly. He's got state-of-the-art communications that give him
instant contact with every unit. He's in total command of the situation.

What Norm <*>doesn't<*> have is the traditional military command hierarchy. His
lieutenant generals have been given early retirements, his captains have fallen
to the legislator's pen, and his sergeants have been stripped of their chevrons
and foldedback into the ranks. All by his lonesome, Norm must orchestrate the
entire Allied attack, scheduling bombing runs, F-16 CAP patrols, special forces
insertions, and the main thrust of the ground war. Can you see the poor General
huffing, puffing and dancing around the command console, barking orders to his
units? Saddam might have had a chance.

The Real-Time Zone

What the General has demonstrated is the challenge offered by "real time"
strategy games. These games are very similar to your typical war and strategy
game except that they don't afford the luxury of time to plot your moves. You
give a command to a unit and it responds. Bang! There's no time to calculate
attack factors, no counting movement points, no such thing as a well-considered
strategem. You make your decision now, or the enemy will be climbing down your
throat. If you make the wrong decision, well, you quickly assess and adjust.
It's the ultimate in "gaming on your feet."

The most popular of these real-time tests has been DUNE 2, a game set on the
desert planet of Frank Herbert's popular science fiction novels. Designed by
<*>Westwood Studios<*> and distributed by <*>Virgin Games<*> in 1992, DUNE 2
put the player inthe commander's shoes of either the Atriedes, Harkonnen or
Ordos, the "houses" battling for control of Dune's precious resource, Spice.
You commanded tanks, rocket launchers, and squads of men in attacks against the
enemy; you ordered harvesters to gather Spice; and you built a military base,
structure by structure--all while the game clock was ticking.

When it came time for a sequel to DUNE 2, Westwood had do some serious thinking
about the next game's setting. They might have gotten the Dune license to
create a DUNE 3, but they decided against it. They felt that they had mined the
Dune universe of all its spice, and they wanted room for more interesting
scenarios, vehicles and structures, without the constraints of an established
fictional world. So they put the Dune universe behind them and dreamt up their
own.

What they've come up with is COMMAND &amp; CONQUER, a "near-future" story that
lumps together a hodgepodge of sci-fi concepts with today's newspaper
headlines. It involves a fallen meteor, a mad scientist, an ancient,
quasi-religious organization, some creative Internet hacking, impending
ecological doom--and it all goes something like this....

Meteor, Mine

The place is Earth, the time is sometime in the next few weeks. The planet has
scheduled a rendezvous with a small but intriguing meteor with a magnetic
personality. The meteor is made of Tiberium, a mysterious alien element that
has the odd ability to draw precious elements out of the soil and gather them
into nice, neat globules of ore. So, wherever the meteor fragments land, one
finds conveniently-packaged chunks of gold, silver, platinum, uranium, etc.
Call it strip-mining made easy.

Recognizing Tiberium as a wonderful new source of wealth and power, the powers
of the world make plans to capture and control this resource at any cost. Out
of the woodwork leaps the Brotherhood of Nod, an ancient, clandestine
fraternity that has been waiting for centuries for the right time to seize the
world's reigns. Now, they decide, is the time.

In the other corner is the G.D.I., or the Global Defense Initiative, a
world-wide coalition of nations not unlike the U.N. This group has a serious
problem with the Brotherhood's plan, and so sets out to slap its greedy,
grasping hands.

In the middle of all this is Mobius, a mad scientist type who doesn't like how
either side is handling the matter. He has studied the meteor's effects and
gained some insight into its origin and implications for the earth's
eco-system. Without any military brawn to back up his brains, he can't take
part in the war, but can only manipulate the two warring powers by
disseminating bits of info to each side.

The story swims in the backwaters of credibility at times, but it gets the
Westwood designers where they want to go. It gets them away from the DUNE 2
universe, but it doesn't go so far that they have to abandon all the things
they liked about it. Of course, the new setting opens up new plot
possibilities, but DUNE 2 players may have also noticed that the fiction
retains the harvesting element of that game, since Tiberium is functionally
identical to DUNE 2's Spice. Furthermore, the near future setting allows the
designers to draw from the current stock of modern armaments for their units,
but is just futuristic enough that they can inject cool new speculative
weaponry into the fray.

Westwood is focusing very heavily on the cinematic wrappings of the game,
investing an enormous amount of time and money into 3-D animation and digital
video. For a strategy game, it's an unprecedented effort. They've hired an
actor/director to direct the video shoots and star as the leader of the
Brotherhood of Nod, and their 3-D "rendering farm" of 25 Pentiums has kept
their offices nice and toasty through the winter months.

As the game opens, you'll get your first taste of this graphic razzmatazz.
Stunning 3-D graphics and digital video will spool off the CD-ROM to introduce
the complex story. Your character is "channel surfing" the TV waves, getting
news of the meteor's effects and of the world's response to it. Then you get a
dual video feed, one feed being propaganda for the Brotherhood of Nod, the
other for the G.D.I. Here, you must choose the side you'll lead.

That choice made, you're into the heart of the game. Like DUNE 2, COMMAND &amp;
CONQUER is an episodic affair with 30-40 possible scenarios for each side of
the war. Also like its predecessor, the core of the game is built around
harvesting the rare mineral to finance the construction of a war machine,
and build up a force capable of knocking out the opponent's base. But there's
some variety thrown in to keep players on their toes. There are plenty of
harvest-build-destroy scenarios, but there are also strike-and-capture
objectives where you're in and out--no building required. Then there are escort
scenarios where you'll have to lead key civilian vehicles through war zones.

Unlike DUNE 2, the scenarios don't progress in lockstep linearity. Like a WING
COMMANDER game, there is a "critical path" through the scenarios that leads to
success, but there are also scenario branches. Losing a scenario doesn't
necessarily mean it's time to start over--you might be able to fight your way
back onto the winning path. There are also alternate "win" branches; you might
be able to win a scenario and continue the story by destroying an enemy
research facility, but you could also take the harder route of <*>capturing<*>
the facility. The capture route may take you on a new branch of scenarios
<*>and<*> enable you to build a new weapon of war.

And of weapons there are plenty. Westwood has 15 different vehicles on the
drafting board, each with an upgrade enhancement, including M-1 Abrams tanks,
flame throwing tanks, huge Mammoth tanks, HumVees, Apache attack chopers,
single-man attack chopers, battle cycles, amphibious landing craft, A-10
"Warthogs" and more. That's not to mention your foot soldiers who can tote
flame-throwers, rocket launchers and grenades. Throw in special weapons that
are unique to each side of the war, and you've got enough rockets-red-glare and
bombs-bursting-in-air for a month of July 4ths.

A Time To Build, A Time To Destroy

But the joy of DUNE 2, and now of C&amp;C, is just as much in building things
as in destroying them. Like DUNE 2, many C&amp;C scenarios will require that
you build a military base from scratch, placing the oddly-shaped buildings with
the care of SIMCITY zones. In one preliminary scenario I played, I had to land
an amphibious force on a hostile beach and set up camp. With the help of
coastal bombardment from a ship, I was able to land some grunts, take out an
enemya perimeter. Then the reinforcements rolled in, bringing with them a
mobile construction vehicle. With but a mouse click, the construction vehicle
rolled to a nice clearing and plopped itself down--instant HQ. From there I
added a harvesting facility, which comes with a harvester to gather up the
precious Tiberium, then a training facility for more grunts, and a vehicle
factory to build basic armored cars.

And so it goes in C&amp;C. As you harvest more Tiberium, you can afford more
structures, which, in turn, will crank out more weapons. Of course, all the
while the enemy is sending units to harass your base. If the enemy is too
pesky, you'll want to throw up some fortifications around your base, building
walls around sensitive areas and guard towers where the enemy foot-fodder is
coming in droves. In the later scenarios, ground-to-air missile defenses are a
must to stop the napalm-spewing A-10s or the mean-spirited Nod bombers whose
payload drops slowly, but ever so surely, on your panicked, scattering troops.

All of this action is delivered with crisp graphics and detailed animation.
Perhaps bored silly by the endless yellow dunes of Dune, Westwood's artists
have composed some lovely VGA terrain with varied features for you to pock-mark
and raze. There are coastal areas for beach invasions, temperate areas with
lush forests, darkened terrain for night strikes, and, yes, even some desert
zones (you can take the boy out of the sand...). They've also spiced up the
unit movement with multiple "death animations." Squads of foot soldiers will
drop to their knees in a firefight, and if they get shelled too hard, they'll
lie prone and try to belly crawl out of harm's way.

Happily, the improvements over DUNE 2 don't all lie in the realm of flash. The
interface is getting a few needed adjustments, including new group movement
logic that allows you to command several units at once. Then there are small
but significant tweaks, like the fact that the health of a unit and your
overall energy supply will be visible at all times.

The artificial opponent is also getting an overhaul. The DUNE 2 opponent was
famous for having easily exploited weaknesses, and while I'm sure C&amp;C will
have its own Achilles heels, it will certainly offer a less predictable foe.
The C&amp;C design team has completely rebuilt the opponent intelligence using
"genetic algorithms," allowing the AI to generate multiple approaches to a
strategic situation. If it tries one possibility and fails, it will try
another. The AI will also have three different "personalities" depending on the
objective of the scenario.

But the best news about the computer opponent is that it won't be the only
opponent. Yes, Westwood has heard the cry of gamers demanding multiplayer
options. COMMAND &amp; CONQUER will support two-player modem and four-player
network games, and will include a few extra terrain maps just for that purpose.

<P>The big question for C&amp;C is how well the cinematics and the gameplay
will come together into a tightly-wrapped package. I've seen some of the
animation--it's superb. I saw a little of the digital video--it seems competent
enough. But as yet, the cinematics are in the chaos of the editing room.
However, I <*>have<*> seen the important part--the gameplay--and it looks like
DUNE 2 with a face-lift, more scenario variety, and more firepower--which is to
say that it looks fabulous. Fans of frantic real-time play--Stormin' Normans in
their own minds--will really have their hands full with this one. Just be sure
you properly stretch that mouse-hand to avoid the risk of injury.

Again, as a package with all its cinematic ribbons and bows, who knows? At its
worst, COMMAND &amp; CONQUER will be DUNE 2 with the volume cranked up and
cinematic cut scenes that can be ignored. At its best, it could be the strategy
game equivalent of WING COMMANDER 3.
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