Burning Command & Conquer Gold Edition

[Leo_A]

A few years ago, EA released this as a free download. Decided to revisit it today, but can't figure out how to burn it to a CD-r. I decompressed it and was left with a bunch of different files, where as it's supposed to be a ISO image. Trying to burn it with ImgBurn.

Any advice would be appreciated.

7807

Also, three of these folders include WinRar archives after I ran WinRar on the download itself. Should I leave those be, or decompress them as well?

[Tanooki]

Is that still floating around or was it a get it while it was good situation? I had found the 10 year package with all sorts of junk and it hated windows 7 64bit so I'm sure it'll hate win8.1 even more and I'd love to find a version that would work.


Hey I just found this, you maybe interested: http://digiex.net/downloads/download-center-2-0/games/2929-command-conquer-gold-patched-installer-windows-7-8-released-free-ea.html

Command & Conquer Gold - Patched Installer for Windows 7, 8 - Released for Free By EA
The Gold Edition (basically, hi-res Windows port) of Command & Conquer 1 was released as freeware by Electronic Arts, to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the Command & Conquer franchise.

This installer gives you the full game, with all game music, playable without CDs, and upgraded with the fan-made 1.06c patch. The new features added by this patch give you:

Tons of bug fixes in the game engine, graphics and missions
the ability to play the game in any higher resolution you want
Improved multiplayer support using the CnCNet system
The Covert Operations expansion pack
All of the exclusive missions made for the console versions of C&C
About a dozen remixed music tracks which were disabled in the original game
All 3 original languages in which the game was released on PC (English, German and French), plus the Japanese language (voice sets only) from the console versions of the game

The added videos pack completes the game, giving you more than 60 minutes of live-action video briefings and 3D-rendered battle cutscenes


This installer also solves the fact that the CD installer of C&C95 is a 16-bit program, which doesn't run on 64-bit Windows systems.

Download: Complete No-CD game installation pack (v1.06c revision 2, no videos, all music included): 96.5 MB
Download: Videos Addon (original English videos): 467.6 MB


Edit #2: http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cncstuff/0_files.html#ra303 (Seems you can also use this link for a similar patch to get Red Alert win95 too.)

[Leo_A]

I've grabbed the downloads from elsewhere. I don't think EA still has them up at this time.

http://www.cncnz.com/features/freeware-classic-command-conquer-games/

I'll check out your link, thanks. :)

[Tanooki]

Thanks for the link I'll try it. That version I linked, I guess it is a lie and hates Win8.1 (maybe it just likes 8??) It bombed so hard I couldn't even close it, waited like 1-2min for it to time out and force a crash of it by win8 as I couldn't even do it from task mgr.

I'll try and pure one from EA off your link and see if it bombs too. I'm starting to get pissed at win8.1 a bit as it's cockblocking me on some of my favorite early 90s games (Wing Commander Kilrathi Saga being the big one, XWing and Tie FIghter collector's editions but with the Gog.com releases I dodged that bullet.) My Williams Pinball Classics (4 tables, not related to Pinball Arcade) fails. C&C95 here is dumping out. GRR!


Edit: Well a victory -- that original install custom job I found worked. It appears that the default EA did was to set a WIn98/ME compatibility mode and in turn it caused all the modern patches to have a pissy fit and cause a major memory error. Uncheck the box, game runs like the old days, yet nicer since it's full screen very high res so I can see a lot more of the area as it's opened up. This one goes definitely on my thumb drive. It also seems to include the additional unique stages the PS1 and N64 versions has for fun play along with others. I thought it had the addon CD package but I don't seem to see it. I never liked it much anyway so I don't care but that is odd.

[Leo_A]

It worked for me at least (I'm over 2/3's of the way through the GDI missions right now).

Thanks :)

[Tanooki]

Wooo good job. I re-calibrated the install and messed with it, and it was a compatibility pissing match causing the issue. I only cleared up through stage 3 of the GDI as it was late. I'll have my fun with it, probably going to get my ass handed to me on those 2 annoying commando stages (hate them, love the rest of the game.)

I also snapped up Tiberian Sun too so I'll have to see how that one installs and one if not both will end up on my 32GB stick drive I keep stuff on in my desk.

[Leo_A]

Finished the GDI campaign. End of the last level said something like 4:35 minutes. Not sure if that's how long the entire campaign took, or just the last level. Was quite a final battle so it wouldn't surprise me if that was just the last level (Off hand, I'd say I built about 25 expensive mammoth tanks during it for an example of how long and how many resources were expended).

Moved on to NOD but not having nearly the fun. The difficulty seems much higher just 4 or 5 levels in (Perhaps why I recall not ever finishing this originally), plus I prefer the look of the European levels over that of Africa. And the equipment is more interesting in my eyes with the GDI army, although the NOD death tower is a lot neater than GDI's Advanced Defense Tower.

I wish the RTS genre hadn't evolved much past this. Command & Conquer struck just about the perfect balance. Red Alert is still a fine game and made some welcome additions (I remember enjoying laying mine fields, for an example of something I wish was present here), but the over-complicating was quite evident just in that first sequel. That's an issue that I think led in part to the downfall of this genre from a mainstream one to a niche as the years wore on.

They started developing with a core fanbase in mind instead of the average Joe. Just like some fighting game developers made the mistake of doing, leaving accessibility behind and all but locking themselves in with an existing customer base.

Wish EA hadn't killed them off though. Westwood was the master of this genre and it has never been the same since.

[Tanooki]

Dude you are so preaching to the choir ...all of it.

I finished NOD once back in the 90s, did not like it, but I paid for it, but I've taken down the GDI side a good dozen times pre-2000~. I'm so out of practice it's like new. I wish things had stayed more like this too, it's why I gave up not the direct side of this genre not long after. Red Alert over complicated and cheapened things with those asinine underground levels and then the soviet ability to freeze your hardware while they blow it up at whim (total bullshit) yet if you played their side (which I hated) it was far far easier so there was no good balance. GDI and NOD did have balance, even if the evil side wasn't as fun. From there blizzard stepped in it and went to Starcraft over Warcraft and put in 3 armies, rapid building on the enemy side over what you can do making things drawn out and painful while having lots of complicated unit factors to think about. I stopped on Blizzard there. I gave Westwood a last try with Tiberian Sun, and I did maybe 1/2 that game I think and it got wonky too like they wanted to steal the starcraft style and I quit on them too.

Ever so often I'd go back and fire up C&C1, Dune 2, and Warcraft 1 and 2 with addon packages. I then around 2001 discovered Age of Empires 2 as people at midway would play it on lunch at their stations and network fought. I found it has the slower pace of the older RTS we like, yet had the tech tree on Civilization and I loved it. I didn't much care for the campaign, but doing random tiny to small sized maps(as they got HUGE) kept me playing a long time. I quit on RTS after that as I never found one with the fair and balanced challenge that lacked the overly complicated stupidity or cheap moments the 2 kings of the RTS for PC stepped into.

EA sucks...the Evil Alliance, wrecked Westwood and you're right, downhill ever since.


By the way Tiberian Sun will not work despite that installer EA put out. They halfassed it doing like an hours worth of reading last night. They sloppily copied the directory off the 10th anniv CD package, removed the real installer, threw a .reg file on there, and you basically have to copy crap all over the place, manually enter a registry entry, and then on a win8 machine find a 'trusted' (hah) site with random DLLs to get the missing files. I ended up just erasing the mess as it's not worth it. If someone ever makes a good installer for it I'll give it another go.


*** I had something here about Red Alert but I think I solved it.
It appears that the download on one particular site is just a front end tool to get the original ISOs or (on their side) web based copies of them to install to a PC. The installer gives both off and online play with all the customizing the C&C Gold package does. The one glaring problem is the installer will fail on its own with ISOs. They need to be via 7Zip extracted into directories (which you can pick to be read in the installer) and even then it will bitch about failing on downloading some unncessary file during download. I told it to cancel off that and it still installed the entire set of Allied and Soviet install discs to the computer. Or at least I'm hoping it did, it runs fine, and the install rolls in around 1 GB directory size on the computer so that seems probably right given install CDs have extra fluff.

I played the first stage real fast going all commando with Tonya (forgot about her and that evil laugh, it's funny) and got out Einstein but the she got blown up by an off shore shelling after the fact :( I'll redo it.

[Leo_A]

Ever play Army Men RTS? That stuck to the basics and is one I'm almost as fond of as this one.

Another reason I love this game so much is the color palette. For some reason, dark and gritty soon became the norm in later years. But here, everything is bright and colorful.

This campaign is tough though. On a mission right now where I have to find a nearly destroyed Nod base with a small squad of infantry, which triggers a Chinook to appear after discovery that I then have to use to ferry two engineers and infantry to an "abandoned" GDI base that is still actively harvesting tiberium.

Finally figured that all out and safely captured the GDI base and defeated the infantry in the vicinity, but they just keep sending more troops, Humvees, and tanks every couple of minutes. I'll have to try something different I guess, since my guard towers were useless against the enemy armor and I'm not having time to build anything substantial like a airstrip to deploy my own armor.

Wish I had kept track of my mission selections with the GDI campaign, since I wouldn't mind replaying it by going a different route. Going to be a bit of a pain now with figuring out what I haven't yet played if I do that.

[Tanooki]

I think I remember that stage being a pain in the ass back in the day but I used to know how to finish it. I hope whenever I can get to it again it comes back to me as it sucks when they just keep pumping more junk and you have no heals and no backup.

[Tanooki]

Sad to report neither game is functioning properly now that I'm really digging into it. Red Alert isn't triggering events like captures and stuff so stages are left impossible to complete when you need to blow this up or grab that structure. C&C is randomly crashing with no real reason why but it just does like every stage or two, maybe it's after X minutes, not sure.

I've erased both. One dies too much to enjoy it (my favorite) and the other is malfunctioning into being a progression stopping bug so I've erased them. It's good you can play, but I guess you can't always go back.

I know there's that 'freec&c and freera' thing out there, but they are not the same game, they're built to honor them and have their own stages and some tweaked mechanics so I have no interest. What a bitch. >:[ The only thing it appears I could mess with is that Dune2 openGL setup someone made that'll run that old title using it's library files but even that (ran it on win7) isn't quite right but at least it's good enough. I guess I should go track that down since it's free too.


EDIT: I went and grabbed that Dune 2 game I spoke of. The game was freely released some years ago by EA like C&C but earlier so oddly it's scarce to find in that format. Your best bet annoyingly is abandonia.com or another abandonware site. Then you get this: http://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/ (Dune Legacy) and you're set. The game has some minor tweaks so it behaves like C&C so you can select more than one unit at a time (old game didn't) and all you need to do is just extract the DUNE zip into a folder, run the Legacy installer, tell it where that folder is and it'll set it up for you and you're good to go.

[Leo_A]

I think I remember that stage being a pain in the ass back in the day but I used to know how to finish it. I hope whenever I can get to it again it comes back to me as it sucks when they just keep pumping more junk and you have no heals and no backup.

I solved it by building extensive sandbag fortifications to block entrances and eventually seal all the tiberium sources, a trick I remember from back in the day. The AI isn't programmed to attack walls.

[Tanooki]

That sounds familiar. I recall sandbagging off entire areas between ridges. But again, it's gone, the game won't run for me without randomly crashing. I've instead moved onto Dune 2.

If someone decides they love C&C as much as Dune 2 and makes a cozy win 64bit friendly frontend like Dune Legacy where it just uses the ISO/CD contents and its own file system/loader executable I'm back in the game I guess.

[Leo_A]

That's too bad. I guess being out of date is working to my benefit, whatever version of Windows I happen to be using right now [Edit: It's Windows Vista].

Found an odd bug last night. Several enemy soldiers were stuck in a tiberium field frozen in place but twitching. Ran over part of the group and it seemed to reactivate them.

Only other bug I had, and one I think I remember experiencing nearly 20 years ago, was my repair depot ceasing to function. Had to build another one and destroy it by forcing my own troops to fire upon it (I couldn't even sell it).

Otherwise, my only issues are due to the original code, such as my harvesters sometimes just deciding to park, suddenly going off course without any warning into an enemy encampment on the same route it had taken correctly dozens of trips before, etc.

Edit: Onto the final mission of the Nod campaign.

[Edmond Dantes]

You guys could always try Virtual Machines. I've found that any Windows 95/98 game that doesn't need 3D acceleration worked just fine in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, which was the easiest to set up and use. This was how I had to play C&C Gold outside of having an actual Win98 machine (unlike you guys, I have to play from actual discs--I bought it back when it was released in a pack called Worldwide Warfare, back when we all thought Red Alert would be the last C&C game).

I always preferred the Warcraft series myself (still haven't played part 3) but I keep wanting to finish one one of these games. That's right, the Count of Monte Cristo has never beaten a Command and Conquer game -__-

[Leo_A]

Wrapped up the Nod campaign tonight. Strange ending...

The first path (Of three options for the final campaign) I took wore me down after a couple of hours leaving victory clearly out of my grasp, so I restarted tonight by selecting a different path and while I wasted some resources due to not knowing the map (I built 8 or so tanks, a repair bay, a Obelisk, and lots of sandbag walls and such that basically went unused on what ended up an island), it ended up being surprisingly easy.

Tanooki, do you remember the Nod temple? Building one seemed to start a nuclear bomb for me. But after using it, it never regenerated like the GDI laser blast from space does? I even destroyed the temple and constructed a new one, but it never reappeared.

[Tanooki]

I do and that doesn't seem right. I would have thought more than one bomb was possible given the GDI space cannon could be shot again.

[Leo_A]

And annoyingly, my one nuke to a game limitation apparently doesn't apply to the AI. Just was bombed for the second time in the same game, during the 2nd GDI special mission.

Time to make them pay.

[Tanooki]

Now that BS I do remember and it's infuriating. It's not the first game to pull that crap, try out Dune 2 and play as someone other than the Harkonen. Those evil pricks have a hard on for using tactical nukes.

[Leo_A]

Stupid game...

So I was warned about A-10 Thunderbolt II's in this one. Rather than build SAM sites, I just automatically conquered the level. But no victory, so I just kept going and going, building silos as I filled them with tiberium and building as many troops and tanks as I could. I just couldn't figure it out (Plus after a time, I wanted to see how far I could go before it stopped allowing me to build... there's no building limit that I found, but I ran into vehicle and troop limits; The dense red areas on the radar are parking lots for my tanks).

A portion of that can be seen below.

7847

All I had to do was build a single missile site to win the dumb thing, as I found out when I replayed it just now and still couldn't win even though I destroyed every enemy and enemy installation. Wonder what Westwood was thinking.

[Niku-Sama]

oi whatta mess

[Tanooki]

Wonder what Westwood was thinking.

That you need to build a SAM site? :D Funny picture though.

After finding that other odd multi-game patch I put C&C Renegades and Generals on here. Both of them seem pretty good, at least early into it. Renegades is screwy being the late C&C1 shifted into a first person shooter. Some of the mechanics are a wee bit annoying, and I think the stages are made a bit overly long but it's not bad if you have the time. Generals though, not sure what to think of it so far but it's nice being able to queue up multiple unit builds at one time. Only took this as far as finishing the 3 Gorges Dam stage for China and saved it as the next opened. I'll probably come back around to all these things when the mood suits me.

[Leo_A]

I've pretty much sucked all the fun I'm going to get out of this one, for now. Gone through both campaigns twice and played all the bonus missions that interested me (I only went through one of the dinosaur campaigns, and I avoided the commando oriented junk, which I share your dislike of).

Anyways, I've realized there's a terrible, yet somewhat humorous, bug in this game. In some of the later missions, you can be operating on separate landmasses that are completely divided by water, with no way to move between them except infantry by Chinook helicopters. The problem is that building tiberium refineries in each land mass frequently results in the tiberium tractors getting confused.

Out of the blue, they'll suddenly think that they're assigned to the other, unreachable, refinery. And try as you might, you can't get them to move to the refinery that they can actually reach to unload at. So when this happens, you're forced to destroy one of your refineries and have to mine tiberium on only one land mass (And then alternate building and destroying refineries as you consume tiberium while it grows back in the other location).

Edit: And one last thought on Command & Conquer. The GDI laser cannon paired with a NOD troop camp with several dozen infantry and engineers standing around outside, is great fun. I killed over 30 of them in one shot once. Any infantry standing shoulder to shoulder with those you've directly targeted, even if they're well outside of the 1 square or so blast zone, is vaporized at the same time.

Much more fun (And useful) than NOD's nuclear capability.

[calthaer]

A really good companion game to the original Command & Conquer, in my view, is "Command & Conquer: Renegade". In many ways, it was one of the better FPSes I've ever played, that let you drive / pilot all the vehicles of the original C&C and to play the commando. Multiplayer was really, really awesome, at least until a lot of cheats started to be developed for it. It was so much fun to play that game on a server with 20 other people - everyone using resources to buy their own upgrades and try to take down the enemy base.

Even though I'm certain the multiplayer part of it is dead today, the single-player campaign is worth it, especially if you wanted to take a new perspective (a 3d one, hehe) on the original C&C.

[Leo_A]

I enjoyed the fps, but never got around to finishing it.

I did a special mission yesterday that I had missed. Was a GDI mission and the attack helicopters are equipped with the NOD laser cannon from their Obelisk of Light.

That was a fun one and good way to call it a day with this game.

[Tanooki]

I think I brought it up that I fired that game up for a bit from the disc I have. It's not bad, unique for sure seeing the game played in such a respect when it always had been a RTS and placing it within the confines of the original game too. There are some questionably confusing moments in places but it's not bad. I do wish the stages were a bit shorter as it tends to drag.

[Leo_A]

How come the Red Alert installer here is only a dozen MB's?

http://redalert1.com/

Must be missing something here.

Edit: I'm all set.

[Tanooki]

I don't remember why, but when I was looking around at those installers, many of places where hiding the files you're entitled to on their webserver so you can't have them yourself. You get the web installer for a few MB then it pulls the rest of the data which is kind of sleazy since they're not EA and have no ownership rights to the files to hide them. There's this one website that hides all the released C&C games through button clicks on a website so you can't snap them up as it direct installs. It's partly a good reason why I gave up because I couldn't set stuff up so when I found I did have that old disc I was thrilled.

[Leo_A]

That's what I eventually did, but from another source than I linked (Which I assume was the same sort of deal). Wasn't entirely comfortable with it, but it worked fine.

Revisiting Red Alert definitely is about as far as I'll go with this genre (I have both of these on cd from back in the day, as well as the first collection release that had Red Alert 2, Renegade, and Tiberium Sun). Red Alert though is already too complicated and hectic for its own good.

I enjoy the more leisurely and controlled pace of the original. Still plenty difficult for me at times, but Red Alert almost feels like work at times.

Wish my wall trick worked here, but as I recall, the AI is smart enough to blast its way through walls in this game.

[Tanooki]

You and I are alike. I can't finish Red Alert as there's no enjoyment in it about 1/2 into it. They start pulling out these really bs situations or screwy nearly magical techs that just suck the life out of it, not to mention the 'stop a nuke with 3 guys' underground stage against a small army with tanks, flame towers, etc.

I wish Tiberium Sun would work, that one for some reason still hates the hacks when I attempted it. I've put them all to the side, doing more with the New3DS at the moment anyway and on PC I'd rather now that I've got them back blow time on the Wing Commander series and dabble with FF13-2 as well. Whenever it arrives I also have PS4-FF Type0 collectors box arriving so I'll be doing that and reading that cool manga in the box.

[Leo_A]

Confirming my memories, I never did finish the Allied campaign in Red Alert.

I'm now on an in-door level, something I've never seen (It's the second half of mission 10, out of 14 total). Must've never got past the first half of this mission back in the 90's, since I did remember the opening cutscene. Looks like it's what you're talking about, since stopping the launch of nuclear missiles is my task.

Jinxed myself, since I was just thinking to myself earlier that I'm surprised that they never tried such nonsense.

[Tanooki]

Enjoy wanting to slit the throat of the designer who cooked up that shitty level. The Allied Campaign is noted as being not as well built as the Soviet side which is a crying shame. I guess Westwood were commie sympathizers. :P

[Leo_A]

Do you ever get to enjoy the Allied cruisers in this game?

I had to evacuate a scientist a mission or so earlier, and was granted a pair of these as reinforcements. But by that point, there wasn't any enemy left except submarines, with it simply a matter of ferrying the scientist back to my home island for a Chinook to evacuate him.

The guns have quite a range and appear to be pretty powerful, judging by some manual shots I made to test them out. Would be good fun to bombard an enemy base with these (The gunboats and destroyers though, seem only useful for being submarine fodder or AA defense, since their guns and missiles are pretty weak against any enemy ground units close enough to shore to hit).

Reminds me of Battlefield 1942 and their battleships. Used to team up with a friend on Teamspeak, who would hide in bushes near enemy control points, and direct my fire while I was safely far off-shore. Never saw anyone else use it correctly.

[Leo_A]

Another indoor level, fun...


Do you ever get to enjoy the Allied cruisers in this game? .

Waited too long on level 12 to build a shipyard, since I could build them in what I just finished. Would've came in handy a little bit earlier.

I think the Apaches are this game's sandbag walls. They seem to be the great equalizer, since the antiaircraft capabilities of the Soviets are pretty weak. With a swarm of 7 or 8 of them, I'm able to destroy a couple of SAM sites on a single attack run without taking a loss. Then, just repair and perhaps take out 2 more missile sites and the enemy base is wide open for aerial attack. After, take out the construction yards followed by the refineries, then it's just mopping up.

Even the mammoth tanks are pitifully weak against them (How'd they end up an enemy unit?), although they still occasionally fire an underpowered rocket that doesn't do much of anything. And there doesn't even seem to be any enemy rocket infantry to worry about (They're all riflemen or equipped with flame throwers, and pose no threat).

Much different from the original C&C where the helicopters were only useful for the most part against enemy units in the field, with it suicide to fly them into any bases.

[Tanooki]

I kind of vaguely remember both those things now. I don't remember making any use of boats more than the minimum to get a fighting force somewhere, but the aircraft for the allies are the greatest asset that as you put it really does equalize the game. Up until that point it's just ridiculously slimy how much the soviets can just wreck your ass, on the ground (traditional history I guess of the mass of soviet hoards into the meat grinder to victory on foot and in tanks) as they were never heavily known or feared for their aircraft until the Mig jet period years after (normal history) WW2. I just know I'm almost certain I never finished the Allie campaign and had no interest in being a commie so I didn't play that side much like I really never did the Nod other than once to say I did on C&C. I know I was exposed to the apache and they were fun stress relievers.

[Leo_A]

I don't think the German soldiers that had to deal with IL-2 Sturmoviks, P-40's, and P-39's would agree with you, although veteran German fighter pilots usually didn't have much to fear from the Soviet fighters and routinely racked up kills in the many hundreds, something unknown before or since.

But as attrition lowered their numbers (Dying, being captured, or being too wounded to fly again were the only way out of the cockpit), anyone without hundreds of kills that had probably been flying fighters for Germany since the Spanish Civil War, was at risk against Soviet fighters like the Yak-9.

Either way, obviously this game is centered on pure fiction.

Back to Red Alert, the last level is sort of odd with how it starts. If you're not careful, you'll be blown up within about 2 seconds of it starting. Got that cleared and have a base going, but the Soviet jets and tanks made me turn it off a few minutes in.

Not looking like it's going to be an easy fight.

[Tanooki]

Not easy nor particularly fun either. The true cheapness hits on that one, a foreshadowing of how all future Westwood (and Blizzard) RTS games date wise were going. Unimaginably quick pain, cheap tactics, and all around ugly abuse making it a complete chore to try and finish a level sucking much of the fun out of it.

[Leo_A]

Got the upper hand tonight, and then it was pretty easy pickings.

Not sure I've ever played the Soviet campaign, but I'll move on to that one next.

Edit: I remembered some cutscenes because of the chick that is Stalin's buddy, so I did play this a bit back in the 90's. Didn't take long to get to the first in-door level in the Soviet campaign last night after playing through the Allied campaign (Which wouldn't be so terrible, if they weren't timed), so I suspect this side will be easy to complete.

Not too crazy about the selection of weapons in this game, especially for the Soviet side. There's a bit more variety than the original, but most aren't useful enough to worry about.

I basically only build medium tanks for both sides, Apaches for the Allied side (The Soviet aerial options are weak), AA guns for the Allied side (Haven't been able to build SAM sites so far in the Soviet campaign, nor mammoth tanks), 4 or 5 Allied jeeps to get the stray soldier here and there harassing my harvesters, and a few pillboxes to get enemy pilots that survive being shot down over my base. And naval units only when necessary.

Many of the options like the minelayer or stationary gun emplacements (Which cost about what a tank does, yet aren't mobile, need electricity, and don't seem any more powerful than a tank gun), just aren't useful enough to bother with.

[Leo_A]

Level 12 of 14, already.

Either the Soviet campaign is really easy, or I'm getting much better.

[Tanooki]

Both but it's also known the Soviet campaign was easier, or at least better balanced. If you start out playing as the good guys, it's very unbalanced and a bitch, just a lot harder, so it makes the enemy soviet side seem gentle and cupcake compared. At least I recall those discussions a long time ago, like I said, I never really touched it.

[Leo_A]

Slowly working through the last level. Was a fairly enjoyable campaign, although sneak attacks that caught me by surprise have led to more than one reversion on this final mission (Those Allied naval cruisers, escorted by a couple of destroyers, are the pain that I thought they could be when I briefly tried them out during the Allied campaign, except I'm at the receiving end of their guns.).

Edit: And one thing I really hate that we haven't talked about, is how the naval units in this game can appear from off-screen. Not enough to destroy their naval bases, since units can still appear if they're scripted to routinely make an attack run. There's a tiny bit of this in the original C&C, where I remember several enemy units in one mission that appear from no where, off-screen, but the Allied naval ships do it frequently in Red Alert.

Not sure I have it in me to play through all the extra missions (Which to the best of my knowledge, are all designed to be even more difficult than the base game, which just sounds like a turn-off to me, as you no doubt can sympathize with). And I definitely won't be going back and replaying these two campaigns anytime soon to try the alternate paths. The exact opposite of what I did with the original Command & Conquer. Didn't want to finish with that one, but I literally just ran out of stuff to do.

Super Mario 3D World has called and I played through world 1 today, so I think the classic PC gaming is going to end for a while after I finish this last level.

[Leo_A]

Turned the enemy cruisers against their creators, making short work of the final level after capturing a nearby construction yard.

Ended up useful after all (And fun, blowing away the enemy without any threat of retaliation :)).