Silos needed. I used to love Command & Conquer as a teenager. My Athlon 500 MHz sure did clock a few hours as did Andrew’s PC. While his PC wasn’t as fast as mine, it was my gateway to getting my own PC. Then came Red Alert 2 and the Yuri’s Revenge expansion. Such great gameplay.

While my PC of the time only had a PowerColor NVIDIA TNT2 M64 - it sure did kick Andrew’s onboard 2D graphics. I won’t say that my AMD Athlon FPU didn’t help… but his poor ~200 MHz Intel CPU stood no chance.

Regardless, it’s good to see these classics up and running through OpenRA, which recreates them with its own gameplay and balance changes. Even if I keep getting attacked by flamethrower men and nuked by the AI. I don’t remember the nukes being that powerful in Red Alert 2, but in OpenRA’s Red Alert a single nuke took out my Mobile Construction Vehicle (MCV). I couldn’t rebuild!

The ant missions! Wow! Takes me back to holding Shift and clicking the speaker on the original Red Alert title screen to unlock the Counterstrike ant campaign. Geez that’s a long time ago. Thanks to all who have helped develop OpenRA over the years. I only came across it in the Ubuntu App Store while installing 18.04 onto one of my HPE MicroServers - a great find!

You can find the project at OpenRA. At the time I was using the OpenRA content set on Archive.org and the Walkman100 OpenRA Install Guide. OpenRA also has its own installer for the original game assets, using downloads or original discs. Those two links record the route I was using at the time.

Battle control terminated! 🥰

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