I don't know about you, but Command and Conquer: Generals and the early 2000s was one of my most fond memories of real time strategy, and PC gaming growing up. I couldn't tell you how many hours that I put into the game, but what I can tell you is that the voice acting and sound effects of this title never really left my mind.
Set in the (then) future of 2013, it depicts the United States and China joining forces to fight the Global Liberation Army, who are depicted as a terrorist organisation utilising all sorts of unconventional arms such as chemical and biological weapons, as well as the ... sound I still hear in my head "AK-47s for everybody!"
Every faction plays differently. Using the resources of Power and Cash (Power is generated from reactors) - and cash is obtained through supply caches, or in the case of China, being able to hack the Internet's most naive users (is this strangely prophetic, with the dimminimus exemptions the world benefits (or benefited from until just shortly)? ) and GLA being able to salvage enemy units they destroy in battle.
You also get different play styles. The US has few, but strong units. The Chinese faction has swarms of units, and the GLA has a variety of specialised units to counter specific threats. It is fun, well balanced, and enhanced by special "General" bonuses, akin to "god powers" in Age of Mythology where you can call in special strikes, repairs, units, or other devasting effects.
There is no doubt that Command and Conquer: Generals is widely loved by those who played the game, but I must say, it has not aged in the best manner. While I was able to get it running on 2025 on modern hardware using Proton's compatibility layer in Linux, there are many things that are missing that I feel like the paper manuals of the era would have addressed - if not modifying config files by hand.
- There's no way to see a list of all the game's keyboard shortcuts, which is really important for strategy games.
- There's no native widescreen support, so you're left playing in a 4:3 window
- The interface takes up an enormous amount of the screen real-estate
- Mouse clicks appear to be inverted from every popular strategy game. Left click moves, right click deselects.
The single player campaigns, each consisting of just over a half dozen missions feels "light" for the period, when you compare it to the expansive campaigns of other RTS games of the period.
But did any of that matter with a fun skirmish mode and so many fond memories of destroying the enemy in a myriad of ways?
To me, not so much. I loved playing all of the factions, and each of them have their unique strengths and things to make you smile.
It is a game that leans to the "not very politically correct" side of the spectrum, with stereotypes (particularly in the Global Liberation Army) - and as a result, to those who are sensitive to cultural issues and unable to examine something as an artefact of their time ... may find offense here.
Yes, this is a game about war. Yes, it is a game about politics and global conflict. But it somehow has an inescapable charm, all linked back to the voice acting. To me, it is nothing more disturbing than a South Park episode.
The great news about this game is that you can still enjoy it, twenty years after its release, so you don't need to hear me wax nostalgic about how much fun I had it.
Even better, the art style has held up well for its age, and the game is still fun, in spite of its quality of life issues. Be prepared for it to not be a modern RTS game. Prepare for some level of pain and discomfort, and you'll do just fine.
I'm reasonably sure I played C&C but not this particular one.
I played a lot of rts around the same time
Love people getting offended by stereotypes in a work of fiction.
Also yay for games working. We tried having the kids computers on linux but ended up having to revert to Windows because of the massive security flaws pretending to be "ant-cheat" systems.
If the game has anti cheat, its not worth playing... but I don't play big multiplayer titles anymore because I have no social life...
You don't play big multiplayer titles anymore because you have no social life, how does that work? o_O
I don't think anti-cheat is as effective as the developers fervently want to believe. Maybe there's less cheaters than there otherwise would be but from the sounds of things (hearing my kids telling me about their encounters with actual cheaters that were shooting them through walls etc without the character having an ability that would allow them to do so and not just them being salty because they lost) it doesn't work.
I'm more or less of a similar opinion to you but mostly because I consider anything that requires kernel access to function that shouldn't need it is a security flaw.
Because the only social I wanna be on the computer is this place :D
When using bazzite, my distro of choice, everything is basically isolated from everything else. Anything that isn't a proper package (ie, taken from flathub) only has access to whatever you grant it.
It makes it really annoying when you want it to access nfs and other network shares because I am sure I have to give each container / file access to the local network if they want to see those files.
It hasn't broken my OS yet, but I think I broke my conda python environment when I was playing around with some AI image processing stuff to bring back some photos from the brink :D
Fair XD
I'm probably going to at least attempt Kinoite (or possibly Aurora) on a future laptop I'm trying really hard to save up for (I did have enough for it and then stuff happened -_-). I have a feeling it's going to do my head in given my previous experiences with Flatpaks and our more recent experience with spinning up a Silverblue kiosk for work (that's actually gone pretty well, there's just some interesting bugs that has us scratching our heads).
I really want to like containerisation but it does my head in because of problems like the one you described.
Wops XD Did you manage to fix it? And were you able to rescue the photos?
On my server, Unraid handles it well, with you able to define mountponts as accessible to the containers. It feels harder (and honestly, haven't looked) as to how to do that to the ... applications that aren't natively part of the bazzite thingo.
I may yet move to another distro, I did mint for a while, but that's just green ubuntu. I do like the fedora side of things as bazzite is quite optimised for gaming, with wayland etc; but I will probably one day end up on arch (EndeavourOS) - will just need to learn much more as it doesn't naively support discover app, and using the repositories is FINE, but being somewhat new to the OS, I like being able to have a curated list of stuff to choose from and try out before going down rabbit holes of the Arch User Repository.
Can just make a new one... lol Yes, the photos were rescued; they were just out of focus with a touch of motion blur, amazing what you can do with with SD and comfyui these days :D
Worst case scenario I just reinstall my distro
best case scenario I actually use snapshots or disk images
I feel like everyone goes through Ubuntu/Mint at some point :D I'm pretty sure Ubuntu was My First Distro(tm) way back in the early 2000s x_x
Think the hardest thing about Arch outside of the install ("they" don't seem to like people using archinstall but I think that's how most people install Arch, I have gotten J to do the partitioning because I can't always maths correctly, home goes on its own drive pretty much always, I'm starting to put srv on its own partition now after accidentally blowing away websites too many times and only just recently thought about putting things like tmp and local in their own partitions but it seems like a thing one would only do if pedantic) is that they really depise you using the software centres (at least they did back when I was using it) and just want you to pacman everything. I don't care as I command line my servers anyway (no gui) but I think it's unnecessarily hostile/unfriendly for normal users.
AUR is fine for the most part anyway as long as you don't install anything that clashes with a base package (my biggest paranoia) and you're only in there because there's stuff you want that isn't in the main repos or the one in the main repos won't do what you need.
Yay for rescuing the photos!
I used to play this video game back in the day. I hadn't seen it in years, but I even remembered another one that was also very difficult because of the incredible AI it had when you faced it. If I remember correctly, I think it was called Company, or something like that. The truth is that it was very difficult, since you had to collect ammunition and money, and it was practically impossible.
Company of Heroes?
I do remember playing Command and Conquer:Red Alert 3 on my PS3 with my father. Mirage tanks in the allies were my favorite, they were quite powerful. I played it a lot along with Warcraft 3. Thanks for the nostalgia 🤞🏻💪🏾🕊
Warcraft 3 was another game I remember quite fondly. I'd like to play the Remaster someday.
I don’t think I ever played Generals but definitely one of my favourite strategy games growing up was Command & Conquer: Red Alert.
The graphics on that definitely won’t have aged well but I bet the game play is still awesome.
There's a 4K remaster! It happens to be on sale at the moment too :)
I've played it a bit, and you can swap between old graphics and the remastered graphics. Its pretty good!
It's a cool throwback to Command & Conquer: Generals. It's interesting how some things haven't aged very well (like the lack of widescreen support!), but the strategy still shines. By the way, speaking of solid gaming resources, I recently came across https://newzealandbanks.co.nz/westpac/ which is a really useful guide for comparing banks, interest rates and banking services in New Zealand. Convenient if you'd like to make an in-game donation. Definitely worth bookmarking if you ever need reliable analysis.
Linux gaming just gets better and better :)