Command&Conquer: Red Alert 2

Red Alert 2

This game marked the beginning of a new era of C&c. in my personal opinion; Once EA games got it's greasy little paws on westwood (they bought them out) and on the franchise; they lost something that made C&c great. ever since RA2 i feel like each game except C&c 3 is lacking in some way. Now when I got this game I was eagerly awaiting it's release for like a year (cough.. StarCraft2..cough..Diablo3), as I said before Red Alert in contrast to other C&c's had a special place in my heart. I remember that I got a bootleg copy early (don't worry i had a real copy pre-ordered and EA got their cash) and I loved the game. Once I got a real version, I learned that there were B and C list Hollywood actors playing characters in cinematics for the campaign. Everything was really cool except that the game seemed a little too cartoony. Tiberian Sun had great graphics, better than RA2 in ways because the shapes were more proportionately realistic so everything was more believable, but in RA2 soldiers appeared to be more than a story tall when standing next to skyscrapers, and there alwase seemed to be a playground somewhere on the map. This attitude carried on in later versions of RA to a wild extreme where I have a hard time playing the game; I find myself getting bored and playing something else. The one positive side to RA2 is that the units were great, that is to say that EA put a great mix of units in the game, they included important Red Alert units such as the tesla trooper, the demolition truck, mammoth tanks, and naval units, with even cooler new ones. another cool thing about RA2 was that both factions had individual countries that you played as in skimish or online play. Every country had a special unit that gave it a particular edge, for example; USA had aircraft carrier, France had long range artilery defense tower, British had sniper (awesome one hit to infantry), Koreans had a fighter plane, Germans had an advanced tank killing tank, the soviet army had a similar setup. Another cool thing that happened in RA2 was most units gained a secondary skill or alternate attack, this depended on the nature of the unit but an example is allied infantry dug into a sandbag bunker and gained damage and range, AWESOME for turtles. The final excellent feature of RA2 that stuck with subsequent games was the large AOE (area of effect) super weapons. In RA2 super weapons could take out an entire base if you liked to make nice neat and organized bases (like me). basically if you group building at all you better be able to knock out enemy super weapons before they fire...EVERY TIME. So basically in RA2 a nuke was way more powerful than it had ever been before