A to Z Challenge: Yuri's Revenge (Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2)

 I've said before that I liked to use The Sims 3 & later 4 to design characters from stories I was working on or had worked on.  At some point in the mid-2010s, EA decreed that you had to have their Origin platform in order to play.

While Origin was usually annoying in that it was often slow and at least once some asshole in Russia hacked my account, sometimes they'd offer you freebies.  One of the freebies they offered was Command & Conquer:  Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack:  Yuri's Revenge.  Since there aren't really any Y games I ever played (I didn't really play Yar's Revenge for the 2600 or the Yoshi games for the Nintendo systems) I'm going to slot it in here.

Command & Conquer was a strategy game for the PC that was like a more full-featured version of Conflict or an early, military-focused version of Age of Empires.  After a couple of sequels, Westwood Studios made Red Alert, which was supposed to be a prequel to their original games.  

The game takes place in an alternate timeline.  After Adolf Hitler is erased by Einstein in 1924, the Nazis never come to power.  Instead, the Soviet Union expands to take over China and much of Europe.  The first Red Alert game is basically an alternate version of World War II.

The sequel continues this alternate history.  In 1972, the Soviets suddenly invade America Red Dawn style.  If you play the Allied side, you have to blunt the invasion and eventually capture the Soviet leader to make them stand down.  If you play the Soviets, you have to finish crushing the Allies to essentially take over the world.

Since it's an alternate timeline, you get things that didn't exist in our 1972.  There are robot tanks and "Tesla coils" that shoot lightning and are used to defend installations.  You get foot soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships and like Age of Empires, you have to build facilities to make these as well as walls, watchtowers, and anti-personnel/anti-aircraft defenses.  Unlike AOE, you also have to build power plants so you can run all your stuff.  Also like AOE, you have to gather resources like minerals and oil to fund and create your army.  Instead of "villagers" you get engineers or something like that.

Both sides also get like a secret agent type person.  The Allies get Tanya who is played by a real actor in the cut scenes.  I forget who the Soviets get, but it's some dude.  There is a mission or two where you have to help the secret agent get into and out of some enemy facility to destroy a power station or get secret files or whatever.  They can also help you destroy or sabotage stuff in battles.

The expansion Yuri's Revenge focuses on Yuri (big surprise) who's a Rasputin-like dude with psychic abilities.  He creates a machine to let him control the whole world with his psychic powers, but the Allies for their campaign are able to stop him from taking over San Francisco and from there use a time machine to go back and save the day.  As the Soviets you do something similar as both campaigns focus on destroying Yuri.  You can also play missions as Yuri's side, which has a lot of Soviet stuff but also psychic slaves and whatever.  Like the priests in AOE, Yuri and his minions can use their powers to convert units to his cause.

I keep mentioning Age of Empires because I played that game a lot and they came out in the same era and have a lot of similar features.  It's a good point of reference for me.  And it has a lot of the same problems.  In a lot of missions or just in single-player scenarios, the trouble can be building up your forces quickly enough to be able to destroy the enemy.  If the enemy starts hitting you when you're still trying to build up, you will likely get your butt kicked.  Also, the AI controlling your units is pretty dumb, so if you can't micro-manage everything on multiple fronts, things will probably go wrong.

So like AOE or other similar games it can be fun but also sometimes very frustrating.

While I got those two games for free from Origin, when they had a sale, I bought a bundle that had pretty much all the C&C games for only $10 or so.  I tried the first couple but the graphics and gameplay weren't that great; not really what I was used to.  C&C 3 was one I played all the way through.  In the world of that game there's this new mineral called Tiberium that has tremendous value.  You have the Allies and the ruthless terrorist organization the Brotherhood of Nod led by the mysterious Kane.  The gameplay was largely the same as Red Alert 2 but with a few different things and obviously different units as this took place years after the other games.

I tried to play C&C 4 that came in the bundle, but there were some rules changes that didn't make it as fun as the previous game.  I also played C&C Red Alert 3.  That game also had some rule changes and introduced an Asian enemy, the leader of which was played by Star Trek's George Takei in the cut scenes--and was less humiliating than his appearances in the two Oblivion movies on Rifftrax.  I also played C&C: Generals which was not part of the original or Red Alert series.  It was more like a real-world thing where you have the Allies, China, and Middle East terrorists.  You have different scenarios for each side.  The most fun thing with China was to raise money you could create "hackers" who literally sit around with laptops stealing money for you.  So you could "build" a whole swarm of them and they'd each be getting you up to$5 a second or so.  It doesn't seem like a lot but it starts to add up.  And it's often easier than mining or whatever else you had to do.

The other game I played all the way through was C&C Renegade which wasn't a strategy game at all but a first-person shooter game.  Or I guess you could use third-person too.  Unlike the original Wolfenstein or Doom games, you could actually drive vehicles around, though not usually inside buildings.  Like a lot of first-person shooter type games there was often that problem of trying to figure out where the hell to go, to the point that sometimes I had to watch a YouTube walkthrough to find out what I was missing.

When I was using the RetroGames site, I saw there were C&C games for like the PS1 and N64, but they were kind of annoying to play versus on the PC.  Keyboard commands or the mouse work a lot better for that kind of game than a joystick or gamepad.  At least I think so.

I haven't played any of these games for a few years because Origin was so annoying on my old PC and then I think they phased it out and I haven't really done much with whatever new thing EA has now.  C&CRA2 is still my favorite and Generals and C&C3 were decent, but the rest were kinda meh.