Video Gamers Podcast - Video Games Quick Take - Command and Conquer

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

From video games hosts Josh, Paul, and Ryan we're bringing you even more video games content each week.  Video Games Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hello and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast where we break down all things gaming. We cover things on this show like first impressions on new releases, deep dives, gaming news, and tournaments like figuring out the best gaming dad of all time. And on Saturdays, we have these Quick Take episodes. These are a little bit older. They were recorded by us back in the day under our old name, the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. And the Quick Take episodes were initially only available to Patreon and Apple supporters, although there was a little bit of demand that people were requesting to hear them as they got a little bit older.

So we started releasing these to the public for everybody to enjoy. These episodes are pretty short. They are generally about 10 to 12 minutes long, and they are recorded by just one of us at a time. Usually, it's us wanting to talk about something that just didn't really fit the format of the main show, so it always gave us an opportunity to maybe record just a few minutes about something that we've always wanted to talk about. Just keep in mind that as you listen to this episode, if you hear any announcements or upcoming dates, plans, anything like that, just take that with a grain of salt because you're listening to this quite a bit delayed.

All right. I think that covers everything here. We hope that you'll enjoy this episode. Let's do it. Hey, everybody. It is Paul here, and I am back with another Quick Take episode. Thank you so much to all of you out there for helping support our show, whether it's on Patreon or on Apple. We really do appreciate it and we are so excited to keep doing the podcast and we could not do it without you guys helping fund the show. So thank you so much. Let's go ahead and talk today about one of my

favorite game series of all time, Command & Conquer. Now, Command & Conquer, I remember being the very first game that I played when we upgraded our home PC. We had a 386 processor. For a lot of you guys out there, you probably don't even know what that means. This is pre-Pentium days. These were incredibly slow machines. They really sucked. And we ended up upgrading to a 486 PC, and that allowed us to run Command & Conquer on the computer. So I had it for DOS, and Command & Conquer, along with Descent, were the first two games that I remember playing online.

Now, this was back in dial-up days, and so we had AOL at the time, and you could dial up one of your friends, and then of course you could only play 1v1 because you could not connect more than two people through the phone line. And so I remember playing a lot with my good friend Kyle, who had been my friend since kindergarten all the way through high school. And I would always pick GDI. So if you're not familiar with Command & Conquer, it is an RTS series that is set more or less in the real world. It's kind of like an alternative future where people discover this stuff called Tiberium, and it's very valuable. And basically, you've got the Brotherhood of Nod, who are more or less the bad guys, and then you have the GDI, who are the good guys.

Now, depending on which side you played, you got access to different buildings and different units. There was some overlap where they would have some of the same stuff, but it did make each team feel very different. And so a lot of times I would pick GDI. And I remember one of my favorite strategies was to build just a giant fleet of helicopters, however many I could afford. I would just fill my screen with helicopter pads. And those were kind of fun because ground units could not shoot at them. And so I remember I would just, you know, try to build 20 helicopters and use those to try to destroy Kyle's base. One of my other favorite units in the game was a stealth

tank. And so in this alternative future, they've got this technology that lets you make a tank go invisible as long as it's not moving or firing. So unbeknownst to my friend, I would always build a couple stealth tanks and park them around his base so that way I could kind of see what was going on and I could kind of know when he would start to mobilize and what kind of units he was building. And the multiplayer aspect of Command & Conquer was absolutely fantastic. We would play day in and day out. I remember, you know, I would sometimes have to disconnect if my parents would need the phone. And so I'd have to call my friend back later and say, sorry, my mom needed the phone. Do you want to dial back up and do you want to play another match?

And so as fun as the multiplayer was, the single player content was just as good, if not better. The Command & Conquer series would record real video with real actors. And then of course, it would get compressed down into these terrible looking videos that were very low resolution, but it had real life audio and real video. And so they would actually shoot some scenes almost like a movie. And so you'd really get sucked into these storylines. And then it also gave you some choice about where to attack. And so basically they would tell you whether you were GDI or not, you would get completely different actors and different storylines. But if you took over a certain territory, they would show you, okay, well, now we can either go here or here or here.

Here's the difference. Here's the benefit of capturing these areas. And here's what you're going to start with. And here's your mission. And so it kind of gave you a little bit of choice of what to do next. But what I really want to talk about is one of my all-time favorite units in any kind of game. What a great character. The original Command & Conquer Commando was the strongest unit in the game. It was like an old sergeant with a cigar is kind of like what you would imagine. He's got a really deep, gruff voice, and he was equipped with a sniper rifle. And so he could basically one-shot any ground unit. And then also he had C4. And so if you would click on an enemy, as long as you were in range,

he would immediately kill it. Or if you told him to go blow up a building, this kind of became a little bit of a meme, but he would have some of the best voice lines ever. And so if you would click to destroy a building, he would yell something like, I got a present for you. And then he would run over and immediately destroy that building. So if you ever were playing a match either online or in the single player, if you could get a commando into their back lines, you could just start destroying buildings left and right. And they introduced you to the commando pretty early in the single player campaign. They would drop you off as a single commando, and then you are basically surrounded by enemies, buildings, vehicles, and you would die very quickly because you're just one unit, and especially vehicles. The commando, that's the only thing they were

weak against. You really couldn't destroy vehicles well. So if an enemy vehicle saw you and got into a firefight, you're probably going to lose. But as you would play the mission over and over, you would learn where all the enemies were hiding. You would be able to click on and kill them before they would aggro to you, and then eventually you would kind of learn the best ways to try to sneak into this enemy base and then beat the mission. Well, I had to take a look on YouTube and see if I could find any of the footage of the Command & Conquer commando, and sure enough, I did find some. There's not a ton of content about this on YouTube, so I'm just going to play a short clip here, but you're going

to be able to hear some of these great voice lines. He yells things like, that was left-handed, I got a present for you. I think he says something like, that was easy. There's some really great voice lines in here. I'll go go ahead i'll play a couple of those right now keep them coming no problem real tough guy no that was left-handed i'm on a present for you real tough guy i'm on it no problem no problem you got i've got a present for you you got it you got it you got it that was left-handed all right so on top of having the great voice lines command and conquer also had some of my all-time favorite music and i remember when i bought command and conquer it was some kind of like deluxe box and it also came with a double c of all of the Command & Conquer music. And I remember,

I mean, it was kind of nerdy at the time. I mean, people are more into video game soundtracks these days. Back then, games weren't really known for ever having good music, because we're talking the early to mid-90s. But I would put on the Command & Conquer soundtrack. I loved it. I thought it was fantastic. It has some of my all-time favorite music from games. I know that a lot of people in our Discord have asked us to do things like a tournament of best video game music. I know that Josh doesn't go out of his way to listen to video game music, and I don't go out of my way to listen to it so much anymore. So I don't know that there's really enough that we would know these days in order to share. But I definitely want to share a little bit of the music from Command & Conquer. I feel like

it kind of just like immediately hits you with high energy. So I'm just going to play a little bit of a sample because obviously we don't maintain rights to Command & Conquer or anything like that. So just a little snippet. That way you guys know kind of what I'm talking about. And that's just how we'll end the show. So thank you so much for listening. I know a lot of you out there love RTS games. I hope that you've had a chance to play some of the Command & Conquers. There are so many of them out there. I probably ended up playing Red Alert more than I did the OG Command & Conquer,

but Command & Conquer 1, I really just wanted to talk about. It's just very old at this point. Some of you have probably played it. A lot of you have probably never seen it before, but let's go ahead and end this episode by just hearing a little bit of the music, and I hope that you guys enjoy it, and we will see you next time. Happy gaming, everybody. There is a very unstable situation on the ground.