Command & Conquer The First Decade

"If you are ready for the most buggy and frustrating version of Command and Conquer…."

This game is for you. Oh boy this review is going to let me vent and fill the masses in about the reasons to stay away. I bought this game about two months ago. Thought it was a good deal, it has 12 games in one… who wouldn't think that right?

Well I plopped the thing into my system and typed in the massive seven line activation code and after 5 attempts the thing installed. A word to the wise, write them down and stick them somewhere safe, unlike other E.A. titles there is no tool on the disk to tell you what your P.I.D. is if you lose it. After waiting an hour to install on a 2.66 Duel Core processor with 1022 MB of ram I finally get to play it.

I started with Command and Conquer one, from the beginning a logical place to start. Beat it in about 2 days and didn't have much trouble, very few glitches except some of the music wouldn't work, but I turn that off anyway. Time to move onto Red Alert, and at this point I should have ran away like a little girl.

To my first horrific discovery the movies would not work. Don't worry there is a patch for that. Search the net for 20 minutes, find the stupid thing, look at the small size of it, and think “this will never work”. Install it and start from scratch. Yay I have movies. For that most part that will be all most people who play Red Alert will have trouble with. The other hurdle you will have to pass is the fact that it came over on Noah's Arc and a lot of the thing we are used to in newer RTS' are not there, but for the most part you will pass that quickly and enjoy the rest of the game.

Now we move on to Tiberian Sun. Here is where my frustration mounts and the warning begins. You will play Tiberian Sun and for the most part, have no troubles with it then it hits you. “Tiberian Sun has encountered an internal error and cannot continue further. For more information visit the forums at www.westwood.com” you computer will now continue to self-destruct and you will be left with nothing but a smoking creator. Well after I installed patch 1.02, removed the game, ripped it out of the registry, turned off my second processor, ran with onboard video and sound and the damn thing will still pop-up, I gave up. Tiberian sun is pretty much unplayable with the Nod, you will get this message as soon as battle field control is given to you in the first mission. So much for that idea.

Now I tried Red Alert 2. You can play the training missions fine, but after I click new game and go to Allied or Soviets, the black screen of death meets me and does not go away. God job I have them on cd somewhere so I can just play them from that.

After I fiddle with my computer for a while, I finally get Generals and it expansion pack working. For the most part they run ok, some slowdowns but fine other wise. The game still looks as impressive as it did before with some support for newer model video cards and resolutions. The slow downs are very infrequent and can be surpassed by saving your game and reloading it. Other than that the game is great.

For most people running a PC that is in the middle of the pack by today's standards will not have much trouble, or none at all. But for people with the newest hardware and such, be prepared for many headaches and tantrums. I have tried this game on my fathers new system with the same results, his machine is slightly under mine. Personally if you can set your machine up for duel boot do it, and save yourself the headache and play on windows 98.

Now if you want to play the older versions on the disk on-line, you are going to have a lot of trouble. Pretty much everything up to Tiberian Sun is unplayable on lan or online without some modding and tweaking. There are some user created guides to fix this, and they are pretty easy to come by on a google search. Some of them just require you changing a file, some of them a patch, others to run away and rock back in forth in a corner. Don't think this is one of those games you plop into your system and have fun with. Oh no, unless you know your way around the registry, have ample time for tweaking and patching and are not easily angered stay away from this title.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/06/06