COMMAND AND CONQUER - RED ALERT
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Red Alert for the PC was an excellent game. It had excellent graphics, sound,
music, and was just plain fun. A Playstation port was inevitable, and here's
the breakdown of what we got and how we got it:

GRAPHICS 3/5
------------
I was disappointed when first trying out Red Alert. I looked at the grainy,
low-res sprites on the screen and thought "What the hell is this?!?".  The
graphics are more zoomed in on the Playstation version than on the PC, and
therefor more blocky. This I can not handle. After seeing graphics treasures
such as Resident Evil and Tekken 2, I will not accept grainy visuals. My
gaming dollar deserves better.

But if I stopped there, I'd be overlooking the FMV cut scenes. You sure are
exposed to a lot of it, so you'd expect it to be good. Well, it is, and then
it isn't. The production quality is decent, everything seems to look okay. The
acting is okay for some of the actors (I stress the word OKAY, as there is no
Oscar material here) but the actor that plays Stalin just sucks. He has the
worst fake accent ever, and looks retarted.

SOUND 3/5
---------
Not very impressive. They are fairly uninspired, and lack the flair that made
the sound effects in Warcraft 2 so entertaining. Commanding around a soldier
who keeps going "Yessir", "Yessir" gets lame after a while. Another thing that
pissed me off was the bad quality of the sound effects. It's not so much the
effect itself that sucks, it's the fact that the quality of the recording
sounds just plain bad. For example: I destroy one of the enemies buildings and
it makes my speakers crackle. That's just sad. I bought a brand new stereo
system just so I can have bad quality sound effects? I think not.

The music is fairly good, a techno-rock mix type of thing. Not as good as the
first C&C, but still decent.

GAMEPLAY 3/5
------------
TOO HARD. The game is way too difficult. By the fourth (or was it fifth?)
mission I was already stuck and getting my ass kicked no matter how many
different strategies I tried. I'm not trying to make out that the AI is THAT
good, in fact it sucks, it seems that what they did is instead of programming
in good AI routines, they just made it impossibly hard with no way around it.
That's not fun.

The control is difficult. They did the best job they could transferring a mouse
based game to a controller, but that doesn't change the fact that it simply
doesn't work. Oh, for you who bought a mouse for your Playstation, this game
uses it, although I never got to try it because I am not going to pay Sony
20 bucks to play a few games with a mouse.

I would quit my complaining there but there is one more thing I feel must be
covered. There is still no memory card support. Even after paying $25 for a
memory card, companies are still forcing you to get out the old pen and paper
and write down passwords. Maybe Westwood was going for that retro style to go
along with their game, or maybe not.

OVERALL 3/5
-----------
Try it. Rent it. If you like it's your cup of tea, buy it. This is by no means
garbage, it's just unpolished. A few more months in the development office
would have done this game a world of good, but Westwood must have had a dead-
line to meet.


                                                    lighted@hotmail.com