Command & Conquer: Generals

Jhoh "Creexul" Cable and Jsoh "Joosh" Cable 9/3/2006 

Intro

Creex rouses the trolls!
This is probably the best intro in game history, where it has the closeups on the mowfs of Kofi Annan, Tony Blair, hitler(!!!!!!!!) and stuff about things in the modern world like maybe they're gonna fool you into thinking, hey, this is a game where you discuss problems to solve them ^_^ then goes for the JUKE!!!!!!!! and suddenly guitars fucking shred as it's like SURPRISE, IT'S ACTUALLY ABOUT BLOWING UP ENDLESS WAVES OF SICK FUCKIN TERRORISTS (and the occasional blowing up of dams) as they start Operation: The Middle East is Over.

Here is the video on youtube, which they basically reused completely for the ad campaign, making it perhaps the best ad campaign in game history.

Actual game:

The intro is pretty representative of the game, where a mission starts with a cutscene of a totally awesome airstrike or something where some units get fuckin smoked, and as the bodies are flying in mid air it goes into bullet time so the camera can spin around some sad fuck's exploding body, or a jet fires missiles at some mineret (THAT WAS THE 15TH HOLIEST SITE ON THE EARTH, RRRRRG AMERICA WILL PAY) and it falls over and smooshes some terrorists AND explodes. Then it's like "Wasn't that cool? Okay here's your base." Then you're looking at some buildings and the objectives are always "destroy the enemy base." Although there are some where you capture bases or something. But the end result is that there was an enemy base and you wiped it off the face of the earth down to the last man woman and CHIYAYAYAIAAYAOOOOOOOOWWWLLLLLLLLLDDUHHH YEAAYUH.

Mostly the game is some kind of republican wet dream where you go into Iraq and blow up all the plentiful WMDs before they can be used to blow up freedom, and the terrorists are actually an organized army that is identifiable and color coded with a nice bright green, instead of them being a bunch of psychos eating handfuls of sand and being impossible to organize into a real army because they can't stop trying to undercut each other in order to be the one guy who rules the local khat farm.

It seems the difficulty settings are totally mislabeled. They're normal, hard, and total bullshit or whatever the last one is called (it's something like that). So I play on normal, because I want to play a nice normal game, and it was really all too easy, except for the Chinese campaign which was more like a normal difficulty game until the end when it gets pretty hard with enemy SCUD storms raining on your base or tanks while you barely find shit for resources. Then you play as terrorists (GLA, but even the game calls them terrorists WHICH IS NOT RESPECTFUL OF THEIR FEELINGS AND POLITICAL POSITIONS) and the USA and they are both pretty much cakewalks. The upside to this is the game is letting me experience it how I wanted, which is a nice normal slaughtering of terrorists.

It's weird how you see in the intro that they blow up a dam, and it's like wow cool, and then they do it in a mission to totally crush some terror fuck camp, and it's cool. Then they milk it twice more in the game, I guess because it took a lot of work to make it. On the other hand, I don't even remember a part where a train fuckin smashes through a US blockade. I remember parking bomb trucks on train tracks to blow up trains as revenge for some of my units getting run over by trains, but that's basically it.

Another sweet thing in this game is that there are tons of normal civilian buildings in the game, and every one of them can be occupied by infantry units so it becomes a fortified fuckin place to blast enemy shit from. You can turn an entire neighborhood into an endless death trap. Especially because there's like no unit cap, period. You're only limited by your supplies. What they do is sometimes limit the shit out of supplies or put more supplies behind an enemy base, so you have to fight past some shit first to really crank your army up.

Flaws

There are some flaws with the game, especially considering how modern it is and how no other RTS makes these kinds of problems. First, when you have a group selected, it doesn't tell the types of units you have, or how many there are. It doesn't even tell you shit. COME ON MAN. Also, it sucks fuckin assdicks to have like 50 infantry unit and watch them all run over by a single enemy pickup truck. Fortunately this teaches you to just make tanks. Eventually you can learn that if you put all of your infantry in WITH the tanks you can raise your fire rate by a ton.

Another thing you'd have to get used to after playing other RTS games is that left click does everything. Moving your troops, attacking, wutevs. All right click does is deselect shit, and if you don't deselect some troops before trying to click on some other units, it might just make those troops walk to that unit instead, which sucks and you have to instead spend time correcting it instead of doing what you wanted to do in the first place. You can't see the status of the units in your groups either, unless you select them and go to them on the screen. There's no portraits or their health or anything. If I have a bunch of jets in group 4, and I want to launch them, there's no way to tell if they're even on the ground yet or still rearming or damaged or what, unless you actually go to them on the screen which you shouldn't have to do in RTS games anymore (psh).

Sometimes the AI seems really dumb, like enemy units won't try to retreat when maybe they should, or they don't move closer to one of their turrets or other stronger units. Sometimes they don't move when being attacked by jets. But I only played on easy. WUTEVS.

Also, there's not really an ending to the single player game. I think they just expect single player to be training for multiplayer.

Jsoh sez:

There seem to be a lot of things in this game that are missing, maybe because they're obviously ideas that Warcraft 3 came up with. So when you select a gang of units, you can't see a single one thats selected on the fucking HUD. I remember being able to switch the "move" function to right click in the "classic Starcraft" options...... which I can't fucking seem to find in the game anymore. Cars being able to run over people kinda sucks, and definitly sucks ass when the cars are going 1 mph.

Your standard infantry serve the purpose of capping enemy buildings for you to sell or produce different units, but their weapon range is so incredibly tiny that if they come across any of the other enemy units they will be killed before closing the distance between them. Additionally: wounded units of all types move more slowly depending on their health. A shitty damaged light armored troop carrier will be jamming up your massive column of tanks and arty behind it until it dies or you send it away.

The Chinese infantry and tanks get a "horde" bonus (waaaaaaaaagh?) when they cluster into groups of 5. Of course they always end up drifting far enough apart that they basically never get this bonus...... unless you construct about fifty trillion of them and build nothing else.

Having jet fighters is a really sweet idea and they work excellently against the computer who doesnt care that you are kicking its ass. Howeva, aside from the few training missions for multiplayer, air power is gay worthless crap which is either uncounterablly powerful, or pointlessly weak, depending on the existence of a single anti air building. If you are Chinese against a non-Chinese, don't even fucking bother with jets. Just spam more tanks more tanks more dots. Come on more dps, hit it like you mean it. OK STOP DOTS (puts down a giant stop sign that says "SOTP").

Just spam more tanks, more tanks, more dots. Here's an artist's conception.

Jhoh sez:

On the reference of infantry sucking, it's really fucked up how your infantry can cap buildings, but rocket infantry can't, so every time you got a giant group of tanks, infantry, APCs, whatever all scrambled into one big pile marching across te map wiping everything off the face of the earth (the way GAWD intended), you have to manually select all your infantry to get them to cap a building. One of the only things Warcraft 3 does better than this game is when you have units selected in a group, you can click a unit type's portrait, and it'll select all of them, so if you select some magic casting class it'll have all of them selected there for casting, instead of having to find them on the PLANET and select each one or double click them or something which shouldn't even be necessary.

Units

Maybe it's just me, but all the units in this game are AWESOME. From the crazy Chinese flamethrower tanks that can set up giant walls of flame, to the crazy fuckin terrorists being crazy fucking insane sick subhuman muddafucks, to the way the USA has superior units to everyone and manages to not violate Geneva Conventions because that would be wrong. ~_~

Also you have to really add a diverse bunch of units usually, because tanks don't do much damage to infantry normally, because they are more of an anti-building unit. If you have one tank against two rocket soldiers, those soldiers are going to win.

China is basically a good old fashioned Geneva-Convention-breaking army that wins by numbers, and also flamethrowers and landmines and nukes. It sure is fun to end a map by making the enemy turtle into the last 3 or 4 critical buildings they have, then building 10 nuke silos and carpet nuking their base into a big cloud of vaporized human fucks.

The terrorist campaign is probably the funniest one, because every mission starts with a cutscene of your forces being blown to shit, going into bullet time or just having normal pans as their bodies fly into the air and their blown up vehicles spray tires and chunks of metal all over their friends, and some sick fuckin terrorist whining about how THEY WON'T FIGHT US ON THE GROUND LIKE MEN or if they are fighting on the ground then it's something about how THEY CAN'T EVEN LOSE WITH HONOR because they blew up one of the toxic waste plants you must capture. Then you start a mission that revolves around how OUR CAUSE IS SO JUST THAT WE SHOULD TAKE SOME OF THE MONEY AND SUPPLIES THE UN IS DROPPING TO THESE NEEDY VILLAGERS AND USE IT TO HELP LIBERATE THE WORLD, then you start running for UN crates as they drop and some terror fuck is SHOCKED!!!!! to see villagers stealing OUR supplies, so NEW MISSION OBJECTIVE: KILL THE VILLAGERS and I guess it snowballs into razing their whole fucking village (might as well ctrl and click to blow up every building, car, tree, fence, and barrel and any other map doodad I can find while we're at it).

The USA campaign is basically superior American technology good guys teaching evil a lesson. 8( The first US mission that uses the huge dunting theme song is one where they have some computer controlled US forces trying to retreat through a canyon, being chased by terrorists, and you're given a handful of attack choppers which you park at the entrance and wait for the junky pickup trucks and salvaged piece of shit terrorist tanks are rained on by endless rockets and machine gun fire while you can just sit there and watch (or build MORE choppers for even more fucking shit up).

Overall:

Although there are problems with this game, it doesn't prevent the game from kicking all sorts of ass up and down.

Continue to the next page to read the C&C Generals: Zero Hour review!

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