h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I asume it's better than the original Dune 2 - holy Zarquon, what a pile of [scatalogism deleted] that was. You couldn't even select groups of units for the same order.

I bought Half-Life on Friday for the unbelievably low price of £7.99. On my computer (Cyrix 166, 32MB RAM, SB16, 2MB video, 4x CD) it plays (at reduced res) at about five frames a second with unintelligible speech clips. But it works, and is just about tolerable.

Dune 2 was only lame on the control side because of when it was made - it was quite good for its time. We're just used to the delights Westwood introduced when they made Command and Conquer.

Emperor is significantly better than Dune 2, and much better than the Command and Conquer games too. The unit balance is better, the campaign is more interesting to play, and because losing a mission doesn't always mean that you lose the whole game like it does in C&C, WarCraft II, StarCraft and most other games of that type, you get some nice non-linear gameplay. It's possible to retreat if your attack goes wrong, and choose to attack another territory instead. Or, you can retreat if the computer attacks one of your territories, if you don't particularly feel like defending it. Of course, that's not usually a good idea, since the object is to conquer the planet...

And you also get the occasional sojurn to other planets - I've not played enough of the campaigns to see more than one mission on the Ordos homeworld, where the Teilaxu were wreaking havoc (they weren't once I'd been at them though!) But I do know that you also get to go to Caladan and Geidi Prime in the Atreidies and Harkonnen campaigns respectively. Obviously, you can't harvest spice there to get money - you get a regular cash infusion, so spending has to be carefully regulated.

On the whole, it's better. I read a very disappointing review which totally ignored the campaign-level features and complained that it's just rehashed C&C - which it is, but it's C&C done as it should have been done to start with. Certainly it should have been done that way after the second game, at least! Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 really were just rehashes - at least, TS was. I've not played RA2.

I don't suppose they'll ever make a game set on Chapterhouse, when Dune (or, rather, Arrakis) is a green, fertile planet.

I remember thinking, when I read the scenario notes for Dune 2, that it didn't seem to fit anywhere in the canon. The Fremen don't, strictly speaking, make an alliance with House Atreides, but just conquer the universe under Paul-Muad'dib, formerly Atreides. There's also no such emperor as Emperor Frederick (the real one, IIRC, was Shaddam IV).

What are the differences, in terms of gameplay (rather than scenario and units), between Red Alert and Tiberian Sun?

Between Red Alert and Tiberian Sun? Umm... very little. Most of the buildings are the same! There are a few extra things - night missions (which don't really do much for the action, apart from when the enemy installations have searchlights around them), hills, craters. That's about it really, apart from the usual map size increases and so forth.

Emperor changes things a bit though. The fundamental stuff is the same, but it's done just differently enough to make it interesting - and miles better, too.

As for the setting - Dune 2 just didn't fit anywhere. Emperor is supposed to be set a few centuries before the books, and, I believe, a few years after Dune 2, because Emperor Frederick has been assassinated by a Bene Gessirit (probably spelled wrong there!), who unfortunately hasn't made an appearance since the introductory movie. Hopefully she'll be in it again, although it wouldn't surprise me if it was only for her execution.

I installed a demo of TS some time ago. It crashed as soon as the mission started, but at least I managed to see, in the control setup section, that you could set 'waypoints'. I presume that means that you can tell your units exactly what route to take. That's an improvement at least over the Playstation version of RE, where they just take the shortest route. They try to take the shortest route even if it's past Tesla coils or even a cliff. Also, if you're sending huge masses of units (which often happens in an infantry storm) through a narrow gap, they often bump into the units in front, turn around, and take a different route. This is incredibly annoying.

About setting: AFAIR from the book, the Fremen were seen by all sides as harmless, except by the Harkonnen, who saw them as a threat to their monopoly on spice production, and attempted to genocide them. They certainly didn't make an alliance with Atreides - although they'd welcome any Bene Gesserit (again, spelling uncertain) due to the 'missionaria protectiva'. Sorry if I'm repeating myself...

I have a copy of 'House Atreides', the first 'prequel' written by Frank Herbert's son. It mentions another emperor, the one before Shaddam, but I don't remember his name. Watch this space.

Oh, the games really don't fit perfectly into the universe - since when did a game ever do that? Don't worry about the continuity - it's a lot better than the story of the Wheel of Time game.

Yes, I forgot to mention waypoints. I don't use them very much, that's why! Emperor has them too, and I assume RA2 has as well. They can be very useful, for instance you can use them to make units patrol around the perimeter of your base, or around the fields where your harvesters are collecting spice/minerals/Tiberium (depending on what game of course). Of course, in Emperor, having units running around the spice fields continuously is a good way to get them eaten by a sandworm!

I hope the carryalls are better at rescuing refineries (as they are called in the book - not 'harvesters') from the spice fields. In the book, that bloke (insert name here) in the ornithopter with Duke Leto says that the worm *always* comes.

You begged the question: what's the Wheel of Time?

Does the PC version of RA1 have waypoints? I'd be annoyed if they do, because the PS version doesn't.

No, RA1 doesn't have waypoints. They were introduced for TS.

Carryalls aren't that great at rescuing harvesters from worms, or from being attacked, which they're supposed to. They do sometimes try, but often they just move the harvester over a little way, and the worm comes over and eats it anyway. Thankfully, when a worm comes, it only eats one harvester before it goes, and Emperor is the kind of game where you have multiple harvesters all the time. Especially since each refinery, when fully upgraded, can support three harvester pads... and you get a harvester and carryall free with each.

Of course, when attacking enemy harvesters, it's actually more effective in the first instance to shoot down their carryalls, as carryalls aren't very heavily armoured, and it's most irritating if you're shooting at a harvester and a carryall comes along and takes it away.

There's a rather evil trick one can do though - if the enemy isn't defending their harvesters very well, build an advanced carryall (which is one you can direct to pick up specific units and take them where you want them to go) and pick up their harvester with it, then drop it just outside your base where all your defences are. It'll be debris only moments later...

Of course, if you're Ordos and you have some deviators (which you may be familiar with from Dune 2), drop their harvester next to them, wait for them to change its alleigance, offload it in your refinery and _then_ blow it up.

It's a bit extravagant, but it's very cool if you've got nothing else to do.

You have to build a special sort of carryall to be able to give it orders? Crikey. Well, at least you *can* order them. On a related subject, do you get a landing strip or pad or something for 'thopters?

I know about deviators, but my buggy copy of Dune 2 started your Ordos campaign with no construction yard . So I didn't get that far. However, they're really problematic as Atreides (when you're foghting against Ordos).

So what's this Wheel of Time thing? (You have two weeks to answer the question, BTW.)

Ugh, I meant 'fighting'.

The Wheel of Time: a fantasy series by Robert Jordan, currently standing at nine books and one of my great literary loves. There's a computer game, but it only vaguely fits into the world. Still pretty good though - although a tad primitive in some areas. However, it does have about the biggest mapping community of any Unreal Engine game, bar perhaps Unreal Tournament, and three very impressive mod projects including at least one Total Conversion that sends it third-person and everything. I'm supposed to be testing that one...

Back to Dune 2 - normal carryalls that come free with harvesters are automated so you don't have to worry about them. That's quite helpful really. You can't give them orders, but if you can I don't really think the game would play right. Advanced carryalls can be given orders, but they don't behave like normal ones w.r.t. harvesters, so they're best for airlifting big, slow units like Devestators or Minotauruses around, because those have a tendency to get eaten by sandworms!