Red Alert 3?

With the current announcement of Red Alert 3, I was pretty excited for the game to once again be revived. After the release of the magazine cover of April's issue of PC Gamer, EA today released a bunch of screen shots which can be seen over at Actiontrip.com
It was also revealed that the second in command for the development of Tiberium Wars is going to be responsible for making Red Alert 3. The screen shots reveal that the game will once again use the same engine as Tiberium Wars and honestly there hasn't been much of a graphical uplift either.

The thing that made the original Red Alert so much fun was with the .ini file editing. Unless of course EA decides to bring in some similar form of easy mod support, the game might be flamed by fans since its such a highly respected franchise. Secondly, I really didn't like the cut scenes in Tiberium as compared to the older Command and Conquer games...I mean common, the original C&C had such awesome moments like the video where an eagle (GDI) grabs onto a scorpion (NOD) from a cliff, the flame tank video etc. I could go on with a lot of great action videos that the original game had, yet the new Tiberium Wars was mostly filled up with more "blah blah blah" conversation videos which were really dry and lame and do not even come close to the plot twists of the original. Even Tiberian Sun had a lot of awesome cutscene videos and the plot twists (although cheesy) were pretty interesting.

I also really missed some of the iconic characters from the original C&C, like the Commando. Well of course, there was a commando in Tiberium Wars, but he was no way in hell as cool as the old one who smoked a cigar and had some of the coolest voice overs in video game history! Oh, and not to forget how toned down the violence in the new C&C games is as compared to the old ones, I remember guard towers with mounted machine guns literally ripping apart soldiers! That was downright brutal and actually made those defensive units scary! Ah, well, I should say something about Red Alert and Red Alert 2 as well, they both have a similar story, although I would still rate the original Red Alert higher than the sequel, but still the sequel was really good in many aspects as well! (especially the high quality videos, interesting plot and nice selection of actors, oh and the awesome voice overs!) Talking about voice overs, who can ever get sick of the great one liners (which I mimic pretty accurately to this day) like, "Kirov reporting!", "Bombardiers to their stations!", "Rubber boots in motion!", "For mother Russia!", "Happy Birthday!" (ah Crazy Ivan!)...well, all I am saying is that its so easy to crush all the extremely high expectations of the hardcore fans of the C&C franchise by trying to please a broad audience and overlooking the things that made the original games so great! EA has a huge responsibility ahead of it, of course Tiberium Wars sold a whole lot but still, that in no way makes it greater than the original games.

The unit balancing was just perfect in the first 2 RA games and some missions required a whole lot of thinking before they could be finished successfully! Same was the case for the original C&C. I especially loved its expansion, The Covert Operations with some memorable missions like Bad Neighborhood and CNC: Under Siege! It was a joy to play that game on my old 486 back in 1995! The new Tiberium Wars had a considerably toned down difficulty level and the strategic depth was just not there! I no longer had missions in which I had to defend my MCV with Orcas and take it to a place where I could safely deploy it while enemy Flame Tanks harassed me or I didn't have to use my Stealth Tank to free my captured MCV from a heavily defended GDI base or even use my commando and take him around in a Chinook while avoiding hostiles and capturing a damaged NOD base. Those games were simple yet had great ideas, I don't know where the new games went wrong, but they did, its just not that interesting anymore and it really makes me sad! Still, I will hope for the best for this upcoming game...I surely hope Red Alert 3 would be a more promising outcome as compared to Tiberium Wars!