Westwood cut its RTS teeth on Dune because the environment was very easy to simulate: sand, rocks, mountains. Here was the birth of the resource field, in the form of spice, harvested by, well, spice harvesters.

When it came time to transplant Dune 2's gameplay into the real world, Westwood used the idea of resource fields to create a unique sci-fi backstory.

The tale of Tiberium and how it is both used and misused by the two warring sides of the Tiberium universe, is what defines classic C&C. Tiberium is weird stuff. It does things to people, and it injures infantry on contact.

Playing C&C was always a fast and furious experience. It's not a game of careful expansion, hesitant probing, prudent spending. It's about making as much cash as possible, turning it all into tanks, and then stomping the opposition.

C&C is very much a game where the tank rush beats all. While some criticise this tactic or moan at its lack of strategic subtlety, it's difficult to argue that building thirty Mammoth tanks in a late-stage skirmish battle and then reducing the rest of the playfield to ash isn't extremely entertaining.

The franchise has had its highs and lows. Red Alert 2 is said by many to offer the greatest multiplayer experience of any game in the series, while Tiberian Sun allowed its admittedly entertaining superweapons to dominate skirmish play - the Hunter Seeker didn't even need to be triggered, it just automatically blew a chunk out of your base every five minutes!


Speed defines C&C. A C&C game is a fast game, with more explosions, more kills, more tech and more adrenalin than almost any other RTS.

C&C games also redefined the way RTS looks. The original C&C was extraordinarily detailed for its day, Red Alert 2 pushed sprites to the limit, and Generals was among the first RTSs to use advanced filtering effect such as bloom.

And now it looks like C&C 3 is set to up the ante once more. With the kind of graphical detail we couldn't even do in CUTSCENES ten years ago, it's going to look fantastic. But how will it play? Will EA preserve the essential pace of C&C? Will the interface remain as intuitive as in the games of yore? Will superweapons be tweaked to give you the big boom catharsis you crave, but not completely ruin the game?

C&C The First Decade is available now, so the best advice we can give you right now is to run out, grab a copy, and refresh your memory.

The only danger is: will the purity of Red Alert 2's skirmish mode, the cheekiness of Generals' GLA, or the old-school soundtrack and sandbag exploit of the original C&C keep you so entertained, you'll forget to run out and grab C&C 3?