This may end up being slightly incoherent. This is partly due to the fact that I’m writing this at two in the morning on sod-all sleep, but mainly it’s because Tiberian Twilight makes me so angry that it’s kind of hard to think straight.

While I was playing through this I got quite a few PMs on Steam to the tune of “What the hell are you doing?” Tiberian Twilight certainly seems to have a reputation as a shitty game, and after completing the Nod campaign I can tell you that this reputation is richly deserved. I knew going in that it would be bad – although I did not quite understand just how bad – but I did it because I felt I owed it to the series to see it out to the end. Watching Joe Kucan ham things up as Kane is as integral a part of my childhood as grazed knees in the playground are for other, less psychotic children. And after the utter nadir that was C&C 3, surely the only way left for the series to go was up?

Okay, I’m going to give Tiberian Twilight just the tiniest glimmer of praise to begin with. C&C as a formula is something that’s not just stale, it’s downright putrefying at this point. If they were going to do a fourth game they needed to change things up a little bit, and it’s actually kind of interesting to me how similar the some of the broad design principles are between this Tiberian Twilight and Starcraft II, a game which succeeded in rejuvenating a formula that was certainly dated, if not quite as tired as C&C’s. To their credit, the developers of C&C 4 did recognise that something had to change. It’s just that where Starcraft II’s approach in everything bar the storytelling was one of refined excellence, Tiberian Twilight instead rushes in, seizes the wrong end of the “change” stick and proceeds to beat itself to death with it.

As a result, the few genuinely good ideas Tiberian Twilight has are mired within a horrible morass of poor animation, crappy visual design, and audio that is by turns bland and ear-meltingly bad. And even if all these things were not true, the core gameplay these good ideas have been bolted onto in the first place fucking sucks. It’s terrible. Tiberian Twilight may actually be, pound for pound, the single worst RTS I’ve ever played.  I’m casting my mind back over the years in an attempt to think of a competitor for the title, but while I have certainly played strategy games that were poorly designed or painfully bland I don’t think I’ve ever encountered one that sabotaged so many of its core concepts with such reckless abandon. Base building? That’s gone. Resource gathering? Screw you, there’s no economy in this game. Teching up? It’s almost comically one-dimensional and is almost completely out of your hands anyway.  C&C may have needed a shot in the arm, but instead the developers have cut and cut away at it like a gaggle of drunken surgeons until all that’s left is this mutilated, unrecognisable corpse.

Tiberian Twilight’s gameplay revolves around a thing called a “crawler”. You start every game looking at a grid that demarcates your deployment zone, into which you can call exactly one crawler. The crawler is a mobile construction vehicle which can be one of three types – attack, defence and support – and the type you pick will determine which units and abilities you get to play with during the mission.  This isn’t the worst idea in the world, although I seem to recall Kane’s Wrath doing something rather similar so it’s not exactly original, but things quickly nosedive from this relative highpoint when you scour the map for a decent location to set up a base only to quickly realise that there isn’t one. There are no resources in Tiberian Twilight; the only things limiting what you can build are time and an arbitrary supply cap, which means it doesn’t matter where you set up your crawler. That’s one of the key elements of the RTS just chucked out the window. I wouldn’t have a huge problem with this if they’d replaced it with something good but the thinking behind it seems to have been – well, base building and resource gathering slows down the game so we’ll just get rid of it, with no thought given to the massive impact this would have on every other aspect of the gameplay.

The crawler can pack up and move at will while still building queued units on the march. If this sounds like it might be kind of fun, trust me: it really isn’t. In practice you just walk it up as close to the enemy as you dare and start having it spew out units in their general direction. Hunting down CPU crawlers is a truly mind-numbing business because the computer has absolutely no problem abusing the crawler’s mobility to its fullest extent, keeping it mobile almost the entire time and just setting it down every so often to vomit out a fresh batch of troops. They haven’t just lobotomised the base-building element here; this is a complete removal of the brain of C&C, a game which was always more about supply lines and the economy than it was a collection of soft and hard counters. Those are in the game, by the way, but good luck trying to decipher the awful UI and visual design trying to figure out what is going on. In order to find out what a unit does you have to mouseover its icon in the build menu because there’s no chance of being able to tell just by looking at it. “Cannon; good against medium units,” says the tooltip. What’s a medium unit? Everything in this game is so overproportioned and cartoony that just about anything bigger than an infantryman could be a medium unit. Lasers are good against heavy units, apparently, but tanks apparently do not count as heavy units. Or at least not the tanks I was fighting. Other tanks, maybe, but this particular type of tank not so much. Nothing has a descriptive name, instead plumping for cryptic nomenclature like “Initiate” or “Redeemer” that don’t tell you a damn thing about what the unit actually does.

Now, Starcraft II did something similar but it was at least vaguely intuitive and you unlocked stuff gradually during the course of the campaign which gave you time to familiarise yourself with your units at a manageable rate. Here, nothing works the way you expect it to, and the game makes absolutely zero effort to teach you because they’ve removed tech progression from the game as well, instead plumping for a baffling XP system where you level up for winning missions and you unlock more units with each level. This has catastrophic effects on both the player’s ability to assimilate unit roles and the developer’s ability to design a balanced mission; I am reasonably sure I played missions where I was expected to have a unlocked certain unit that would have made things easy for me, except because I hadn’t ground out enough XP to level up I had to do things the hard way. At least that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why Tiberian Twilight is so utterly and incredibly difficult. The CPU has access to units and tech tiers that you don’t, as well as multiple crawlers, and it has no problem using them to grind you into the dust. Playing through Tiberian Twilight’s single-player campaign was an exercise in mad frustration until I dropped the difficulty down to Easy, and even then getting through a couple of the missions was like being trapped in a waking nightmare.

The singleplayer is complete garbage. Really, I don’t even have the words to express how bad it is. Tiberian Twilight is the steaming stream of effluent pouring forth from a fossilised industry that is almost completely devoid of good ideas or the talent to implement them effectively. Even the music is completely out of place when put in the context of the game’s lineage, sounding more like something out of Battlestar Galactica than the weird fusion of industrial and electronica that the first C&C deployed to such good effect. But hey, surely the FMV sequences provide some relief, though? That’s basically what C&C is all about, right? Corny FMV sequences?

Ahahaha. No. That would be assuming the people behind this travesty understood what made C&C’s cutscenes so fondly remembered when their frenzied hacking at the actual gameplay very much indicates that they don’t understand the series at all. I’m not going to write too much about the cutscenes except to say that not only have the they jettisoned their prior B-movie joie de vivre in favour of something far more po-faced and boring – they actually take themselves seriously, which is by far the worst thing a C&C cutscene could possibly do; did nobody learn from Tiberian Sun? —  but there’s now an association between the words “Joe Kucan” and “ham” that goes beyond the quality of his acting. Far be it for me to criticise somebody for having the temerity to age in the fifteen year gap separating the first Command and Conquer and this game; however, when you’re playing the immortal leader of a world-spanning cult it does become a bit of a problem.

Bleurgh. I really, really hate this game. Even if it wasn’t a personal insult to my childhood I’d hate Tiberian Twilight’s guts. There’s just so much I haven’t mentioned – the awful maps, the identikit captureable buildings that all look the same, the storyline that never ever explains what the fuck is going on, the inexplicable decision to have the player’s wife call them over and over and over, breaking into what I assume are encrypted military communications channels to simper and cry and tell the player she loves them – but which I don’t even want to think about any more. It’s a weird, unholy confluence of a tired license and terrible game design which showcases the absolute worst aspects of each while strangling any nascent good ideas in the crib. For god’s sake don’t buy it. Don’t play it. Stay as far away from it as you possibly can. If you don’t you’ll only encourage them to make C&C 5, and given the series’ current trend in quality it’d suck so hard it would, in fact, open up a gravitational singularity which would consume the Earth and everyone on it. Another C&C game or the continued existence of the human race. It’s your choice.

The post Thoughts: Tiberian Twilight. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Wait, Command and Conquer? The game that sold hundreds of thousands of copies back in the day? The game that kickstarted the RTS genre as an actual discrete thing and spawned a franchise that is still being flogged to this day, seventeen years later? That Command and Conquer? It’s hardly a forgotten classic, so why would I be talking about it here?

Well, I’m not actually going to talk about it here. Not the gameplay, anyway, which is reasonably solid and still holds up quite well today, but which has been dissected, catalogued, analysed and reassembled to create any number of bastardised clones which litter the gaming annals of the past two decades like Dr Moreau’s “experiments”. We know about the gameplay. We’re sick of talking about the gameplay.  What I want to talk about is Command and Conquer’s use of media, and in particular Command and Conquer’s use of sound.

C&C came out at a time when CD drives were just starting to become ubiquitous in the burgeoning IBM PC market, and the developers – Westwood studios – had decided to make full use of the massively expanded storage capabilities of the new format. For most other titles, this meant a game filled with reams and reams of poorly-acted full-motion video sequences (FMV) like the 7^th Guest, or else a painstakingly rendered slideshow of “puzzles” a la Myst. For Command and Conquer, it meant… well, it meant much the same thing. C&C has become famous for the FMV snippets that bookend each mission you do in the campaign, but they differed from the usual dross in a couple of important respects. First, the CGI sequences were, by the standards of the day, absolutely stunning. This sort of thing looked to me in 1995 like this looks to me now, and while the live-action sequences were as hammy as any other FMV game they were broken up by both the CGI and by Joe Kucan’s mesmerising performance as Kane. Kucan was actually the director of the live-action bits moonlighting in one of the main roles, but despite being only a fair-to-middling actor he’s got this definite charismatic magnetism to him that you can’t really fake. You really believe this guy could be the leader of a world-wide cult, and it’s all helped along by Kucan knowing exactly how much of the scenery he should be chewing at any one time¹ – not to mention one of the best videogame entrances ever.

While it was impressive for the time the FMV was, in hindsight, a mere sideshow to the really groundbreaking stuff C&C did. The conceit of the game is that you are actually a commander giving orders to the little men you see on the map through an interface called EVA. EVA reacts to everything you do in the game, responding with an emotionless computer-yet-not vocal cue whenever you start a building, build a unit, run out of money, or come under attack. RTS refinements like build queues and other queued orders had yet to come into being, so you were stuck building one unit at a time and one building at a time. This made EVA indispensible if you were trying to do things efficiently, allowing you to continue managing your base via the sidebar without having to keep an eye on it the whole time. I actually miss having those cues around when I play modern RTSes, which regrettably appear to have done away them.

The idea of EVA is so heavily integrated into the game it even finds its way into the game installer (this is legitimately amazing to a twelve year-old). It permeates everything you do from the moment you click the “Start New Game” button in the main menu, and it is backed up by some of the most outstanding music ever written for an RTS. In my experience most RTSes go for the subtle approach; their music is respectably minimalist without ever approaching being memorable. Example: I cannot remember off the top of my head any of the music from Starcraft, although I’d be able to pick it out of a police lineup after dozens of hours spent playing it. By contrast, I can remember nearly all of the music from C&C. It’s a collection of fantastic techno/rock designed to get the player fired up and into the game, and this is actually kind of necessary because by modern RTS standards – and even compared to Red Alert, its sequel – Command and Conquer is a very slow game. Any unit that isn’t basic infantry is built at the rate of one every couple of minutes; once built, they crawl across the map at a glacial pace, and when they encounter bad guys the shootout goes on for a while as one side or the other is gradually worn down. You need something to keep your mind occupied during the downtime, and Frank Klepacki’s soundtrack delivers in spades. From the fanatical chanting of Fight, Win, Prevail to the robotic beats of Mechanical Man to the incredible synth tones of the game’s signature theme, Act on Instinct, there’s not a single track here that doesn’t stick in the mind for years afterwards. It might actually be the most consistently good game soundtrack I know of; certainly it’s one of the few that functions on its own as a standalone entity.

And what happens when you throw all of these elements together? Well, you get this.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx1igDCbgq8

(Skip to 45 seconds for the good stuff.)

I posted a link to this on Sunday, but it bears repeating: even today the audio and video for this game is impressive. Back in 1995 it was groundbreaking; a game that was using the extra storage space of CDs to deliver a comprehensive multimedia experience where everything was designed to work together to produce an unforgettable experience for anyone who played it. Amazing.

Unfortunately, as with most good things, it didn’t last. Red Alert continued the trend of excellent music combined with high-budget CGI and low-budget acting, but after that too was a runaway success Westwood started to get delusions of grandeur and went all serious on us. The third C&C game, Tiberian Sun, was a startlingly drab, dull and depressing affair, where the gameplay, music and cutscenes were all completely devoid of the sense of vitality that was present throughout the first two titles. This wasn’t because it ditched the multimedia approach – it was just as media-heavy as its predecessors – but the tonal shift away from lively green and white battlefields to a post-apocalyptic brownland was one that foreshadowed the similar change in direction taken by FPSes and action games a few years later. Red Alert 2 was definite overcompensation for this, and then Westwood folded taking the soul of the franchise with them.

Ah well. We’ll always have the original games, especially since EA released them for free a couple of years back. Although getting them to work on modern operating systems could be a bit of a bugger.

1. Joe Kucan might not be that great an actor, but he’s perfect for what C&C is. He fits the role like a glove, and this was proven beyond a doubt when the sequels got in real actors who had been in actual films and television series; despite (or perhaps because of ) their acting pedigree they looked oddly ill-at-ease at being asked to give the equivalent of a pantomime performance for a computer game. Compared to them, Kucan looked like a natural.

The post In Praise Of: Command & Conquer. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Something of a companion piece to Warcraft II, since they were the first two games I played on the PC. Hearing video game music that sounded “real” blew my twelve year old mind. As did this.

The post Sunday Soundtracks. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.