Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Re: REVIEW Command and Conquer: Generals and Zero Hour (revision 2)

[quote name="Revision Team Strike Force"]<b><font size="+2">Command and Conquer: Generals</font></b> <font size="+1">Just spam tanks. Spam tanks and you win.</font> <b>Intro:</b> This is 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 <b>JUKE!!!!!!!!</b> and suddenly guitars fucking shred as it's like SURPRISE, IT'S ACTUALLY ABOUT BLOWING UP ENDLESS WAVES OF SICK FUCKIN TERRORISTS as you start Operation: The Middle East is <b>Over</b>. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R76EFL_Lrjc">Here is the video on youtube</a>, which they basically made into the ad campaign, making it perhaps the best ad campaign in game history. <b>Actual game:</b> The intro is 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 minaret (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. 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 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 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 swee 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. <b>Flaws:</b> There are some inexcusable flaws in 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 units and watch them all get 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. <b>Units:</b> 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 diversify your unit portfolio. Example: tanks don't do much damage to infantry normally as 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 <b>NEW MISSION OBJECTIVE: KILL THE VILLAGERS</b> 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). <b>Overall:</b> Although there are problems with this game, it doesn't prevent the game from kicking all sorts of ass up and down. <b><font size="+2">Command and Conquer: Generals: Zero Hour: 9 AM</font></b> <b>Intro:</b> Of course they can't top the previous intro, so this is more about how YOU THOUGHT THE WAR WAS OVER BUT IT'S NOT and more blowing shit up while some incredibly fake news reporters stand in front of news screens clutching their microphones with both hands like they're afraid someone will take it away from them as they report every move the good guys are planning to make to fight the war on TERAAAAOW. They give you hope at the end of the intro by acting like one of the reporters gets vaporized during a broadcast. HAW HAW HAW. <b>Actual game:</b> I HAVEN'T FINISHED IT YET So far it's pretty awesome. You start as the US, and the second or third mission gives you the navy to take command of, so you can have waves of jet fighters fly over an area attacking anything they see forever, and at the same time have battleships fuckin blast the shit out of enemy buildings with artillary that you make visible with spy drones. They even give you ground units, and you don't even need to use them because you can have the entire navy coat the whole map with artillery while you sit back with a ginger ale and watch and perhaps beat off. It's normal expansion pack stuff, a couple extra units per faction, more single player maps. The USA is still the good guys of course, and the GLA units still all sound like Triumph the Insult Dog on a coke bender. One CRAZY plot twist in the expansion is it shows the GLA winning occasionally, like when they capture a crazy space beam from the US and sink one of their own aircraft carriers with it, afterwards showing a video of a reporter clearly from an al jizzeera propaganda type of news network talking about how because of this one aircraft carrier being blown up, the US might pull out of the entire continent of Europe, A DAY THE GLA HAS BEEN HOPING FOR FOR QUITE SOME TIME. ~____~ Also that may be from liberals MEWLING pablum about how amerikkkunt had it coming for trying to run the world and secretly building an evil global empire (the next day, Canada is annexed). One of the biggest positives of C&C Generals is the game doesn't even try to make you feel bad for treating your units like cannon fodder, especially on the GLA team with all the suicide bombing units and shock troops. Ever since blizzard put night elves into a game, having a supposed "good guy" race in an RTS became stupid, especially with the night elves campaign being nothing but a night elf bitch going OH WE SHOULD FREE THE ULTIMATE EVIL BETRAYER and night elf fag being like NO HE HAS BEEN IMPRISONED FOR A MILLION YEARS (BECAUSE WE ARE IMMORTAL AND HAVE PURPLE SKIN YOU SEE) then they free him and he becomes evil of course and almost fucks everything up, meanwhile the gay night elves act all superior and bitchy to the other races, and that's why Warcraft 3 is not for cool people (much like myself if I don't say so myself hm yes). Warcraft could've taken a page from Generals and had it so you can end every map by gathering all of your units (including your ultra annoying hero units) around the last enemy building and nuking it multiple times, and not even have the game punish you for it. The only game that does "walking your dudes in to an obvious trap while you kick your heels back and not give a shit" better would be Dawn of War (the best modern RTS these days if I don't say so myself hm yes).[/quote]