Command and Conquer 10th Anniversary Edition Review

Many gaming companies are releasing their Intellectual property onto a single DVD to give fans and new players a chance to experience the older games. It also gives budget minded gamers a cheaper way of getting more games to play without spending a lot of money. (Fallout 3, for example, is still about $40 for the game. You can buy Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 on a single disc for $20.)

Electronic Arts released its first Command and Conquer game in the late 1990s. There were over ten games to follow and as long as the series remains successful, Westwood and Electronic Arts will continue to make more. It is not surprising that they would decide to re-release their old games on a DVD, if for no other reason than to keep people from downloading them from torrent sites on the Internet.

Many of the games included in this compilation have been reviewed on this sites or others. The primary advantage to the collection is the nice front end feature that lets you remove or install specific games if you do not have enough hard drive space for them all. (The entire collection takes up about 10 Gigabytes of hard drive space.) The feature that lets you remove and add games on the DVD as needed. It also lets you not install the games that you did not like.

Because the graphics in the games in this compilation of games spans a period of more than ten years, it is not really fair to judge them in a review of the entire compilation. The graphics for each game are the same graphics included with the original versions.

The compilation starts with the original Command and Conquer release, Tiberium Wars. It also includes Red Alert. These games ran on older Pentium-based computers. The graphics were not quite as good a those found in Starcraft and have much in common with the sixteen bit console systems. However, the core Command and Conquer features started here. Single buildings, power plants, naval yards and other units unique to each side. A bulleted list of the titles on the DVD and the expansions are found below.

• Command and Conquer Tiberium Wars & The Cover Operations
• Command and Conquer Red Alert & The Aftermath
• Command and Conquer Renegade
• Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 & Yuri's Revenge
• Command and Conquer Generals & Zero Hour

While Red Alert 2 and Renegade came out at about the same time, they are different styles of games. While the graphics or the Red Alert sequel seem cartoonish, Renegade's first person shooter graphics strive for more detail and a slightly higher level of realism, although this should not be mistaken for the game being a gory clone of Doom or Quake III: Arena. Generals improves the graphics quality a bit, and is by far the most system intensive game in the compilation.

Generals also changes the way units are built. Vehicles and troops are now trained within a building and multiple buildings can train troops faster in generals. Previous Command and Conquer titles did not allow a player to receive any benefit from having multiples of a building type.

The game comes with bonus materials, but these seem to be of little interest. Most gamers do not care to see the programmers tell how the game was made or need to see a making of video. Fortunately, Electronic Arts had the good sense to put these on a separate CD and not put them on the actual CD. A gamer never has to watch them.

Perhaps the worst part, at least from the perspective of someone who liked the glitches is that many of them have been fixed in the Command and Conquer 10th Anniversary Edition. Nor did they take the time to revamp some of the more confusing missions, particularly in Red Alert and the first game. The cosmonaut mission in Yuri’s Revenge makes no sense and could have been replaced with something that fit into the game better.

Command and Conquer Generals seemed to run slowly, but this might have been the fault of the video card installed in the author's computer rather than a flaw in the game itself.