Command & Conquer: The First Decade(Review)

Heres a an excerpt of a review of Command & Conquer: The First Decade:

How's this for nostalgia: installation begins with you having to type in a decade's worth of serial keys. That's right, they couldn't be bothered to come up with a one-key-fits all, no you have to manually type in one hundred and fifty digits before you can even install.

Ah, but with installation motoring there's time enough to make a cup of tea, tidy my desk, and explain to Kieron what 'RTFM' means. Then, as planned, I begin lurching onwards into the recent past.

Command & Conquer Generals is a 3D RTS as slick as a glob of engine grease, and about as intellectually attractive. This is no Total War, in fact it's barely anything above what we'd demand from an RTS in 2006. Button pushing, repetitious but disgustingly compulsive. Hell, the explosions are ace and you've gotta build 'em all. You just have to; and you know how to. This is the rich top layer of sediment in our site of gaming archaeology. Recent but decomposing matter. Fertile stuff, but ultimately dead.

There's an interesting story attached to my own recollections of this game, since the early press versions weren't quite the same as the version that landed on the shelves, (or so the journo hive-mind reminds me). The difference was that the retail version didn't have the level where you drive around exterminating mobs of innocent people with jets of poisonous sludge. Was this entertainment gone wrong? Had Generals really gone further than all the other destruction and massacre and terrorist campaigns of the previous C&C games? After all, the tradition of Soviet vengeance and counter-culture death-mongers in these games had set a fair precedent for silly violence against the weak.

A pantomime of 'terrorism' plays out in front of my eyes. The pixel memories of protagonist factions GDI and NOD, dancing around each other for the first time. And then it comes to me: the entire world is living a dream of Command & Conquer. The all-encompassing terrorist threat is right here, seed-like in the comic ramblings of anti-Freedom mega-threat, Kaine. Perhaps he's really behind it all - stepping out of fiction to fool us all into thinking we need global death squads to keep the unfree in line.

I control a tiny commando. I am my own Pentagon. Cartoon point 'n' click carnage.

Ten years at the helm. No wonder our minds have changed.

And now, for just forty quid, you can know the whole of the past under one DVD, with no driver issues or boot discs and all that jazz.

Awesome.

I lean back in my chair and, in a moment of grim lucidity I realise: all of these games are already in a cardboard box in the shed. That means something. I just can't decide what.

Ah, I know:

6/10

Full review here --> http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=63229