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Command And Conquer: Red Alert 3 Game Review–What Might Have Been

Today’s word is “Alternate history”, folks, and it’s a kind of science fiction that deals strictly in the things that might have been.  It goes back a long time, way back past World War II, and mostly encompasses books about Nazis or sometimes, the Confederate States of America.

But today, I’ve got a new and interesting example to bring to bear, and it comes to us in the form of real time strategy title Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3.

The plot is clear and tortuous at the same time–we’re picking up where Red Alert 2 left off, basically.   It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of the late fifties, and the Soviet Union is about to buckle and wind up a temporarily neutered third-rate power, conquered by the Allied forces.  But since they see it coming, the Soviet Union is about to unleash its newest secret project, a time machine.  Made from what looks like large amounts of brick and scrap iron, the time machine manages to transport three Soviet officials, a scientist, General Krukov and the always popular Colonel Cherdenko, back to Brussels in 1927, where Albert Einstein was delivering a speech before a convocation of scientists.  General Krukov then kills Einstein, thus ensuring that the numerous scientific advances the brilliant man gave to the Allies instead never existed.

And things look good for Mother Russia when the threesome returns to their present timeline–the altering of the space-time continuum has produced interesting fruit.  Cherdenko is no longer a colonel, but rather the Premier of the Soviet Union.  And business is good in the Soviet Union–they’re about to completely conquer Western Europe.  But as Cherdenko is settling behind the big desk and about to start gloating, a sudden communique comes in–the Empire of the Rising Sun has just invaded eastern Russia, even seizing the Russian Pacific Fleet’s headquarters at Vladivostok and pushing as far as Leningrad.  General Krukov orders an immediate nuclear strike, only to be met with confusion.  What IS a “nuclear weapon”, anyway?

The “Empire of the Rising Sun”, of course, is just one of many changes that took place within the confines of Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3.  Students of alternate history will LOVE to see the sheer array of them–from a Japan that never got nuked by the United States that became the Empire of the Rising Sun and followed its own technological path (it’s LADEN with robots, by the way), to the rest of the world developing bizarre technologies for use in a continual war.

This is where you come in.  You can play as the Russians, the Empire of the Rising Sun, or the Allies, and you’re out to conquer the world for each.  You’ll have a dizzying array of options at your command, and most of the game will be spent playing the same campaigns over and over until you learn all the enemy’s tricks and surprises, then counter them all.  The sheer depth of this game is amazing, and will likely keep you playing for hours as you advance in each faction’s campaign.  The additon of naval warfare is a development that’s been widely heralded, but on the down side, the game treats it like a kid with a new toy, badly overusing it, even to the point of neglecting the other kinds of combat.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 is, overall, a deep and satisfying game experience that will prove to be even a match for Microsoft juggernaut Halo Wars.

Turning Point: Fall of Liberty Game Review–A Great Story Was Never So Hard To Get At

I am something of an alternate history buff.  For those of you that aren’t already familiar with this subgenre of science fiction, let me provide some background.  Alternate history is essentially a “what if” game of history.  Basically, alternate history would ideally take one event in history—the United States’ civil war, World War Two, the Great Depression, or something similar—and change one critical portion of it.  Perhaps Germany wins World War Two, for example. Think how shockingly different the world would be if that had happened.  Or if the Confederate States of America had actually emerged from the United States’ civil war as a full-fledged nation—how different would the world be if the United States were only about half its current size?

That’s exactly the kind of question that Turning Point: Fall of Liberty will ask and attempt to answer.  Specifically, what if Winston Churchill had died, unexpectedly, in 1931?  Double bonus irony points–Churchill was an alternate history author himself, having written an essay for Sir John Squire’s “If It Had Happened Otherwise”.

The extrapolation from that point says that, without Churchill, no one was willing to stand up to Adolf Hitler’s steadily expansionist war machine, and as Hitler goes on his epic-scale land-grab, Great Britain surrenders in 1940.  This gives the Nazis the perfect staging ground for an assault on the United States, and so, they launch.

Stop and think about that for a minute—in 1940.  America didn’t actually get involved in World War Two until nearly 1942.  Before then, there had been lend-lease activities in which the United States supplied other countries with arms and munitions, and that didn’t even start until 1941.  That means that America’s industrial might is probably still trying to shake off the Great Depression, without the impetus of nearly seven hundred billion dollars (at 2007 prices) of goods being produced for use worldwide.  That means, chances are, we’re armed in World War One style while the Germans are coming over in fresh off the line gunboat zeppelins with the entire industrial might of Europe.

Oh, and the Japanese are also taking potshots at California.
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