Remastered, not revived
Sometimes nostalgia is better left in rear-view mirror
There was a brief moment as Command & Conquer booted up that triggered a flood of memories. The game flashed screens, scrolling through graphics settings that begin with “VGA” and an array of now-obsolete sound cards, and I could remember exactly where I was when I first played the two titles included in the remastered collection: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and Command & Conquer: Red Alert. I recalled the CD-ROM tray that popped out from the chassis of my Dell 486.
First introduced in the mid1990s, Command & Conquer breathed new life into the real-time strategy genre. Since then, the genre has only become flashier and more intricate. The remastered versions of Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert feel a bit spare today. Players still command different infantry types and mobilize vehicles ranging from Humvees to helicopters. They build fortresses that serve to further the mission at hand, whether it be a task in the campaign or dominating a human or AI adversary. The graphics are sharper, the controls and interface slightly tweaked, but at the core the remaster is just two games treading the same ground they broke years ago.
Back then, the game was good, if not revolutionary. The pointand-click interface made it simple. Click the building you want to build, click where you want to build it, and presto: Construction begins. Click the unit you wish to create, click where you want it to go, click who or what you want it to shoot, and voila: It carries out your commands. All of that is still present in the remaster, which is fine.
But fine isn’t good, and I was left wondering why the remaster was made at all. The bundle includes the game’s first two titles along with three expansion packs (one for Tiberian Dawn and two for Red Alert), and it incorporated several missions from the console version of the game (Playstation and Nintendo 64) previously unavailable on PC. But beyond that ... what’s new?
Some games that were revolutionary when first released have since been ported to more modern platforms to render their worlds in stunning new ways. The remastered Command & Conquer just files down the rough edges of a previously pixelated game. The new images are sharper, but that’s it.
As the Command & Conquer Remastered intro plays out, the “upscaled” cutscene graphics, which incorporate both animations and full-motion video, still seem outdated, their content silly. A few missions into the campaign, a pilot lets the player know they’ve crossed the border into “Bell-air-is,” an egregious mispronunciation of “Belarus.”
If you’ve ever been curious about the limits of “upscaling ” — improving a lower-resolution for high-resolution hardware — the remastered Command & Conquer provides a clear answer. In several such scenes, it’s as though the pixels have been smoothed over with a layer of Vaseline.