Sometimes you get the chance to build up a base and amass a huge force in the traditional manner, but at other stages in each campaign, you’ll have to protect certain units, defend your ground for a set period of time, or even take a handful of powerful units on a mission of stealth and destruction. The missions are fairly varied, although admittedly, they’re the kind of variations you’ll have seen before if you’ve played one of the previous games in the series. Once you’ve chosen your side, you can watch a few silly cut-scenes before getting right into the action. Leaving behind the pseudo-contemporary setting of Red Alert and returning to the futuristic global war between the Global Defence Initiative (America) and the Brotherhood of Nod (er, America) established in the first game, you can either elect to make the world safe for democracy or establish some kind of mad terror state, depending on your preferences. You set up a base, collect resources, train troops and build tanks and then go and try and kick the crap out of the other side until a robotic female voice tells you it’s ‘Mission Accomplished’. While gaming trends come and go, games bearing the Command and Conquer name remain largely the same. “It’s exactly the bloody same”, they groaned, amid claims of one-dimensional ‘build and rush’ gameplay – clearly, that’s back ‘in’ for 2007. Graphics aside, by all accounts it’s the same game it always was, yet it seems to have gone down a treat with the gaming press – which is interesting, considering the howls of protest that greeted Tiberian Sun on release. Old it (and I) may be, but it remains incredibly popular, and even the most die-hard retro-bore will be aware of the fact that there’s a new one (C&C 3 – Tiberium Wars) out at the moment. The name of the game is still stockpiling a bunch of units until you’re confident you can crush the enemy. And if that wasn’t bad enough in itself, it then gives birth to lots of other horrible little thoughts – such as, for example, that there are lots of kids out there playing games now who WEREN’T EVEN BORN when C&C first came out. At other times, you’re reminded of your age by suddenly realising something horrible – like the fact that the first Command and Conquer game was released in 1995, which (at the time of writing) is TWELVE years ago. You can expect a few days of paralysing fear and crippling depression every time a birthday comes along, for example – which is at least quite predictable. Occasionally, this relatively blissful state is interrupted. So while you may think that ‘Emo’ is the stuffed animal that spent a considerable amount of time in the 1980s with Rod Hull’s hand shoved up its arse, and that though you may be able to get into a pair of skinny jeans if you laid off the booze and did some exercise once in a while, you can’t understand why you’d want to, as long as you can still recognise most of the songs on the radio and know that a Wii is not just what you’ll need if you sink a couple of pints and then get on the Underground, it’s not really time to worry yet. Deep down, we all know this, but for most of the time we’re happy to drift through the days, weeks and months of our humdrum existence in a near-permanent state of denial.
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