Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

Before I get started, I feel I should let you all know that this week I was planning on reviewing Lair on the PS3. For some reason I only managed to play the first level and then it completely slipped my mind for what turned out to be over a week. Normally anything with dragons that makes me dive around my room with a joypad goes down a storm, or at least leaves some sort of lasting impression. So much for PS3 exclusives then?

Anyway, while C&C 3 has admittedly been out for quite a while, I always thought that the only people who bothered playing it were massive fans of the series. And by “massive fans of the series”, I don’t mean fanboys. What I mean of course is socially inept future serial killers. If you can find me any other kind of person who gets their jollies from pretending to be sitting in a big chair sending legions of soldiers to their death while simultaneously collecting various minerals in a manner that borders on obsessively compulsive.

Being one of these socially inept future serial killers, I don’t quite understand why I have such a poor relationship with RTS games. Watching little people stab, shoot and bugger other little people while stockpiling huge piles of shiny things from the comfort of my lovely chair should, in theory, be more fun for me than the average psychopath gets from shouting at people on buses.

I accept that I’ve taken a massive break from all RTS games, following an oddly obsessive bureaucratic phase during which I locked myself in my room playing Sim City 4, so I decided to don my “commander” costume (consisting entirely of my pants and a big bag of crisps), fired up C&C 3 and tried to rediscover why it was I’d abandoned all hope of RTS games. And more importantly, why I’ll be upset when Tom Clancy’s End War is released.

As I understand it, Command & Conquer has always been one of (if not the most) popular RTS franchise EVARRRR. Especially when you consider that Age of Empires is mostly played by students during college time and Supreme Commander is exclusively played by people who don’t lose sleep over how much RAM their computer has – but only because they’re worrying about a staggeringly long and complicated list of things the average human being doesn’t even know exists. Granted, a number of these could be imaginary; concocted to make the rest of us feel small and silly, but who can really understand what goes on in the head of someone who’ll defend to the death a machine they have to gut and upgrade every time a half decent new game comes out.

I digress, my point is that as far as RTS games go, Command & Conquer is probably the best. In all honesty, I very nearly approached this review with the intelligence of a psychopath who gets his jollies from shouting at people on buses. Should you be a normal human being, I should probably inform you that technically you are going to get bored rigid reading this, and in C&C 3 there are two basic factions locked in battle of some sort – there’s GDI, which is basically the United States with a few tins of Dulux, and there’s the brotherhood of NOD, who are basically religious communists – which is clearly more than meets the criteria for being on GDI’s bad list. It’s also worth taking note of the cutscenes in the C&C series, which are usually in place to make the story more dramatic, but really just exacerbate the situation by looking like out-takes from Babylon 5.

Anyway, my almost psychopathic mistake was to play through the GDI campaign until I reach what I like to call the RTF (Real-time Fuckery); which is that point in any RTS game when the difficulty curve you’ve been casually strolling along suddenly decides to spike up into a wall, impaling you through the arse leaving you crying and wondering why you bothered trying to play an RTS game again. I spent days trying to free myself from this anus spike; which in this particular instalment was to leave me in the middle of a heavily populated enemy area with but a handful of soldiers (most of which had fought their way to this place and had a very real risk of suffering a massive heart attack from breathing too quickly), very little resources and a miniscule but still very much blown up base – and then I was told to survive for five minutes until reinforcements arrived to let me build a real base, then ordered to rescue them and bring back to what was left of my base; and what was left was a smoking crater and half of NOD’s populous.

Speaking of spontaneous coronary issues, I forgot how hard you have to concentrate when playing an RTS. In fact, at one point I was concentrating so hard I didn’t even know I’d lost all of my paranoid-ninja-self-defence senses. Somehow I didn’t notice someone walk past a window directly adjacent to my face, and nor did it register when they opened the unlocked door directly behind me. As such I shat myself rotten, far worse than anything even Condemned 2 could have thrown at me, when said person said the terrifying word “hi”. It’s times like these that I really fall out with games.

When I decided this wasn’t actually possible, I set off to bitch and moan about being royally buggered time and time again, but then remembered that I could play through as the other side if I so choose. Now I’m sorry, but if you offer me a choice of being a noble, almost demigod gallant knight, or the choice of being a complete bastard whose only motivation in life is to give those self-righteous wankers whatfor; well, in that situation I’d have already killed your dog and stole all your food leaving behind only a tin of tomatoes in my wake.

I then proceeded to enjoy killing and tea-bagging GDI for a few hours, while trying worryingly hard avoiding getting, uh, you get the picture. The RTF moment in the NOD campaign was when I was told to command a literal one man army, then to take out a quite heavily protected GDI base. Granted, I did eventually get some reinforcements, but they consisted entirely of a couple of scout helicopters, and a disturbing group of lemmings who detonated whenever someone coughed on them. I spent a couple of days on this mission, suffering a number of RSI and stress-related injuries, before dubbing it pretty much impossible and giving up.

It was at this point I remembered why I should never be allowed near an RTS ever again. I remember a number of times when I’ve been playing The Settlers or Age of Empires, and I just sat there whimpering into my monitor and crying myself to sleep, having just watch some unstoppable force waltz onto my screen, murder all my people and pillage my whole society while occasionally stopping to insult my mother and choice of trousers. You’d be surprised at what happens to you when you watch hours of work and planning get wiped off the screen as if it were but a shit on the wall of a toilet bowl.

So here I am, wearing more than my pants and finishing off the last of my crisps trying to come to a conclusion on a game no one bothered playing over a year ago when it was released. I’m just so, so proud of me. In all fairness, the onslaught of console-friendly RTS games is set to begin soon and after a whole, painstaking 20 seconds of research, I realised there are a whole four RTS games over the current generation of consoles. One of them is on the Wii, so you can bet your arse that the strategy bit is gone, two of them are C&C 3 and the other looks like it’s been aimed at six year-olds. Considering that I’ll be damned if I’ll be flummoxed by a game aimed at people who can’t tie their own shoelaces, there’s technically only one RTS game on the current generation of consoles and that’s Command & Conquer 3.

If you need me to recommend an RTS game you can play with a joypad because, like me, you find keyboards bewildering and lacking in feel when it comes to gaming, then it’d have to be C&C 3 (either Tiberium Wars or Kane’s Wrath, seeing as I’d struggle to differentiate between the two). If on the other hand, one decent console RTS isn’t enough for you, I recommend you start travelling on buses more often and find people to shout at for no apparent reason.

Super Mario Galaxy

Let me begin with a little something called dedication. This week I'm up to my eyebrows in assignments for university, and GTA IV has finally been released just today. Rather than spending all my free time between doing work playing a game I've been waiting the painful side of 2 years for, I'm here to bring you your weekly review. Granted Mario Galaxy has been out a few months now, but I've never had chance to play it.

The first thing I'll say about Mario Galaxy, if you haven't played it, is that it messes with your mind. Seriously, while I was playing it my eyes kept pointing in different directions, while everyone else in the room had to go and enjoy some narcotics just to cope. Bright colours... little Italian plumber jumping several times his own height... changing gravity... it's all very weird. And of course, being a Mario game, all kinds of realism have been locked in a cupboard in the basement of an empty house on the top of a hill, while everyone else moved out. Then they called a napalm strike on the house just for good measure, so I can't judge it on the nerdy observation of gravity fields and orbit etc. etc. ...yet.

Oddly enough, this isn't all that different from the opening scene of Mario Galaxy... fire, explosions and the most useless element of the series is surgically removed with a lot more fire and explosions. What's more odd is the soundtrack. For some reason, Nintendo decided that twenty-odd years was a good time to introduce Mario to Final Fantasy's composer. I was expecting more of the same cutesy, synthesized crap from the past that sets the mood fine for once. But no, the bulk of the game is accompanied by an orchestra rivalling the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra.. only you know, not butchering all your favourite movie theme songs.

I'll get this out of the way right now, there is a multiplayer mode but by Jack Sparrow's braided hair, is it pointless. Basically, should you end up playing it in the same room as a stoner, you're given the option of giving them an extra Wii Remote so they can point at star bits and help you collect them. Seriously, that's it. Considering this is a stoner we're talking about, you might as well just give them the old VCR remote, take the batteries out and give it to them, because it's still going to be about as useful and involving, but you can save yourself £30.

There's clear evidence that it's another attempt at the recreating the success of Mario 64 - aside from the fact it's bleeding obvious - in that Mario can still pull off the triple jump... for no reason whatsoever. I mean yeah, if they took a move off him, we'd all feel a bit cheated while all the Nintendo fanboys met up for a good old suicide pact, but the only reason for it in the first place was so that you could fly while wearing the wing cap. And that hasn't made an appearance outside of Mario 64 (don't say a damned word about the DS version or I'll brain you for your short-sightedness).

Moving on...

While supposedly receiving the title "game of the year" by someone/thing not important enough to warrant a spot in my memory, it isn't without flaws. One of the things that made Mario 64 a huge success was the fact you had to work to get the stars - partly down to the weirdest shaped controller ever made - but in Mario Galaxy, I had the feeling the game just took pity on me and threw an obscene amount of stars in my lap without much provocation. After a day I'd racked up 45 stars, surprise, surprise, you're collecting stars again, and only felt like I'd earned about 10 of them at most. And the only reason for that was my wrist had cramped to the point where I thought it was strong enough to get run over by a few double decker buses. I'm not sure exactly how many, but apparently using double decker buses as references puts anything into perspective.

If I may bounce off on a tangent for a second, I'd like to talk about this whole double decker bus perspective thing. Everywhere I see a statistic, I always meet up with someone explaining it to me in double decker buses, because I'm British, I instinctively know every minor detail about double decker buses. I know vaguely how tall a double decker bus is, and how long it is too, but I can't say I've ever seen them piled on top of each other. I've seen them lined up behind each other a few times and that's the main reason I haven't caught a bus in over a year. So when you tell me someone's made a cinema screen the height of 60 double decker buses stacked on top of each other, all I'm going to think of it a pile of rust, scrap metal and fire because some dipshit tried piling 60 rather heavy metal boxes with wheels on top of each other. You've seen what happens when a double decker bus goes under - sorry, through - a low bridge... and saying something weighs as much as X double decker buses? Who's ever tried lifting a double decker bus? Yeah, they're quite heavy, but I'm pretty certain a Challenger Tank is a lot heavier.

Hmm? Oh right, Mario Galaxy. I'll be honest, I didn't finish it, but I did play the crap out of it for a day or so while I was waiting for GTA to come out because my boss wouldn't let me buy a copy before the release date despite being surrounded by 500+ copies of it. What I did establish, however, is that Bowser and Bowser Jr. have stormed the Mushroom Kingdom while everyone was happily giving each other piggybacks and used a perfectly reasonable amount of force to kidnap a petite girl in a pink dress whose only protection is a bunch of cowards with mushroom brains and a short Italian plumber who hasn't actually done any form of plumbing since 1993. Of course, the reasonable amount of force isn't some Tom Clancy-esque stealthy infiltration, minimising the ammo budget to a magazine each member; it's an armada of flying ships with cannons coming out of every orifice.

As you progress through the game you come across various "enemy bases", which are all called "plants" of varying descriptions, which strangely enough seem to look purpose built just to injure portly Italian plumbers. Ignoring the total lack of productivity on Bowser's part, he claims to be steaming ahead with some plan, and to be honest this is probably just a bluff because all the power stars he has been blamed for stealing all seem to be jammed up the arse of various twisted mutations creatures, rather than any kind of useful place like some sort of reactor. Having said that, Mario did choose to retrieve these and shove most of them up his own arse, so nevermind.

Jumping back onto a point I mentioned earlier but couldn't be arsed stretching out, I have to talk about the whole micro galaxy thing. Unless the science behind Family Guy is to be used as a guide, then everywhere in Mario Galaxy is total bollocks, frankly (I wanted to link Family Guy, but I couldn't find the video I was looking for... it was supposed to show the bit from "The Fat Guy Strangler" when Brain demonstrated how fat Peter by proving he generated a noticeable gravitation field). Normally I wouldn't bother mentioning the innate problems with Mario jumping on a floating platform only slightly bigger than himself, mostly because I'm crap at physics but still an absolute c*nt. But when you star using gravity as a USP in a game, I'm going to try taking the piss out of it. Maybe everything in Mario Galaxy is just incredibly dense, to the point were a toy robot has enough mass to create a gravitational pull as strong as Earth's. Either way, I figured out that on one level if I could land exactly between two platforms, I could leave Mario perpetually floating and confused while I left for a nap.

That's all that last paragraph was leading up to, and I make no apologies. I'd rather be playing GTA right now, thankyouverymuch. Come to think of it, that's just about all I can think of to say about Mario Galaxy that hasn't been said by everyone else in the world ever. So yeah, if you haven't done yet, buy it. It's as unique as Mario's going to get without straying into the world of animé porn - but I can guess without looking that deviantart has already tapped that twisted pool of inspiration - and it's also demanding enough on your brain while trying to cope with the weird changing gravity that it can keep you off drugs... but only if you're the one playing it.