I don’t even remember if I enjoyed playing them! I have no fond memories of wrecking shit, or multiplayer matches with friends, I certainly couldn’t even tell you the plotline anymore (there’s crystals, Tiberium, and the Brotherhood of Nod is run by Kane, because every bad dude in the ‘80s and ‘90s was named Kane, Caine, Cain, or Kain). Here’s the thing though-I have absolutely no recollection of what Command & Conquer even plays like. I was a good Sierra girl until this happened. I’d been a devotee to Westwood Studios since the first Kyrandia game, I loved the first Dune (the sequel is fine), but it was Command & Conquer that detonated my sense of identity as a “gamer.” For weeks, I abandoned school work and responsibilities to cram as much of it into my body as possible.

But in 1995, there was a game I couldn’t put down.

So, yeah, obviously when it came to strategy war games, “Real Time” was not something that was ever going to get along with me. And I’ve never been good at processing large volumes of information quickly. Let’s just say that twitch responses have never been my strong suit. You’ve seen the articles about the reaction time drop-off rate in people after their late teens, the impossible Actions Per Minute that professional Starcraft players are able to achieve.

In fact, I hadn’t played anything even vaguely resembling an RTS in decades. I needed to talk coherently about it, and the best way I know how to do that is shove as much as I possibly can of it as quickly as possible into my system-half-measures are for the weak.Īnd I realized something, I had never played a Total War before. This week, I’ve been cramming a lifetime’s worth of A Total War Saga: Troy into my brain. Let’s take a trip back to Command & Conquer. Remember Westwood Studios? Let’s take a trip back to the ‘90s, where journalists like Christiane Amanpour didn’t use the phrase “Forever War” even though they were soundly in the midst of covering it.

Starcraft vs command and conquer