Starcraft > Red Alert

[R. Daniel 01]

Red Alert is just a contest of who can press the tank button the most. It's not deep enough to hold my interest. Y'know, it's like tic-tac-toe. I've grown out of it.

You can't say, "well it was great at the time." Starcraft is nearly as old, and it's still played across the globe. In South Korea, it actually fills stadiums. The US following is still going strong. This isn't a case of people being dumb, because there are:

10 Things I Hate About Red Alert

1- In multiplayer, the sides have very similar unit selections. This didn't change with the half-assed Aftermath expansion, either.

2- lron curtain/chorosphere/nuke... all hype. Though fake buildings and gap generators were a clever idea.

3- Allies don't have any cool-factor to match up against the Soviets. Everybody wants the mammoths, the coils, the migs.

4- Most infantry types are worthless from the get-go. Helicopters rather worthless. Jeeps and APCs are worthless because nobody uses infantry in the first place. Mine-layers need too much micromanagement: worthless. This all means that you're limited to building just one type of unit for most ground battles: your heaviest tank. Meanwhile, your opponent has done the exact same thing.

5- A game with instant pop-up buildings, anywhere within 2 squares of preexisting buildings? That's silly AND annoying as hell. This is a strategy game, not whack-a-mole!

6- Without fog-of-war, all intelligence-gathering stops after about a minute.

7- There is no "terrain." Trees don't provide cover, high/low ground doesn't come into play. All the ground and all the water is uniform. The only ground with any special restriction is a square with ore on it, but you can clear that away with a single tank shot. Worst of all, maps come in only two tilesets: "temperate" and "snowy temperate."

8- The "Ctrl+F" (Formation) command was a great idea, but didn't work in execution. My units never held a pattern. "x" (scatter) didn't work well enough to keep massed infantry from dying under rockets/tank treads.

9- Building an army one unit at a time drives me nuts. It's like. Delivering. A speech. Very. Haltingly.

10- Hey, I love tanks. Love 'em to death. I know lots about them. But watching a flock of cartoon tanks shoot orange balls, that just isn't impressive.

[Galatea]

Hey buddy, don't pay out a game from so long ago and compare it to the likings of today, i bought the came when i came out and it was great! Soviets vs. Allies, it doesn't get any better than that!

1. It's didn't have to change in Aftermath becuase it wasn't that bad.
2. Don't pay out the chronosphere and nukes are always a tradition.
3. Allies were good, they had the fake buildings and the speed. It seems to me that you did not know how to use teir strong points well enough.
4. Helicopters were totally useful. I agree that the jeeps were a bit off but APCs are very good as usual to get people into like engineers to places fast. Minelayers were the fastest ground units in the game, if you layed mines on the shore lines, transport vessels cannot deploy troops there, also if you group units withthe minelayer all troops will gain the same speed as the minelayer!
5. It is silly but not annoying as hell, this sort of compensates for not having a fog of war i guess.
6. I would like t see you try and reveal a whole map in one minute.
7. i can agree with you there but it didn;t bother me as much as it did you, i actuall enjoyed making my own maps and such, the whole set up was pretty good at that time.
8.I'm aware that formation was not very good unless you used it on tanks. At least scatter made them scatter a bit the button does not mean 'run out of the way!' you know.
9. Keeps a bit of balance i guess, i wouldn't like to build 10 tanks at the same money, you gotta balance out your credit flow after all.
10. Better than icecream eh? At least you can see the shots in this game unlike other ones that you just see a tank shoot and then a hole in another tank a second later.

[Toji]

well, red alert came out 2 years before starcraft did. What do you expect?

by the way, i never did bother with any of the other superweapons besides the nuke - I always found the rest to be novelty value, though it was nice that they improved on the super weapons in RA2

[R. Daniel 01]

Ooh, seems like we're gonna have a good little discussion here.

well, red alert came out 2 years before starcraft did. What do you expect?

I wouldn't expect anything else. It's just that a certain "Majin Vegeta" was calling me out for my love for Starcraft over Red Alert, so I thought I'd put things in perspective.


I'd definitely give THIS Red Alert a try, though. It's a mod for Battlefield 1942. It has remixed music, 3d models for every single Red Alert unit (Aftermath included) and cool effects for things like the Chronosphere and Gap Generators. I wouldn't want to be that mammoth tank at the end of the trailer!