Back in 1995 Westwood has released the second member of the
famous Command & Conquer series. With Command & Conquer
being a full success the second part was just a logical consequence
and reading about the remaster makes me wanna relive that era!

I can still remember when I bought the original english version at a little Store called “PC Fun” in Munich. It was the only source that made the english version available to european customers.

I wanted to play the game cuncesored, unaltered, unmodified. As it was intended.

So ready in time for the christmas shopping in 1995, Westwood brought this one into the stores. The sales numbers were huge and confirmed again that Westwood dropped a good one here. It shouldn’t take long and Westwood brought out an expansion, called “Counterstrike” offering a whole new bunch of new missions and some more hours of headcrunching missions. Boy what a time! Even when playing in network mode it was a nice time playing 2vs2 or Heads upwith my bro. And when it was meeting time with my friends, we took our PCs and created a small LAN party where we fought against each other “Last Man Standing” and since we were all good players, well, such matches could take SEVERAL hours to complete!

Interesting is that none of us had disturbed with the rather clunky graphics at that time. Not more than 640×400 was possible and honestly the computers and their graphics cards weren’t as powerful as today. But it was the whole concept that made Command&Conquer so successful. Hearing that EA was to take over the entire Westwood Studios in 1998 after Virgin Interactive went into fiscal trouble didn’t make me feel too confident about the future of Command&Conquer in general. But before that takeover, Westwood released another expansion called “The Aftermath” and bringing some more futuristic elements into the game that altered the gameplay a little. With the Windows 95 support even the common VGA resolution could be used and with Windows’ DirectX the sound setup was a breeze compared to the DOS era where some annoying driver issues either could make your mouse support drop or your sound not to play back correctly or at all. There were so many traps set but we all mastered them.

So back to today when EA finally announced a complete remaster of this series without altering the original gameplay, EA might win back my trust. But I will closely inspe2ct the web for any news dropping on RA Remaster and how EA will perform this one! If they do good, EA should also consider remastering the initial CC and CC Tiberian Sun series which also made us play many many hours with friends (and online!) –  And that was at a time where we still used dial-in lines with modems! You still remember these creaky noises? Well, welcome to my youth back then!