rileyuk.co.uk

for some reason i was overcome with the urge to revisit this game last week. couldn't find the floppy disks [remember those?] and had to download it from http://www.bestoldgames.net. i hadn't played the game in years and it was even longer since it had been released; 1990-something i think, being one of, if not the original rts game according to several internerd sources i found while trying to track it down.

once again, i am now supreme ruler of dune after a five hour slog through the final mission. with no money left and only two battered missile tanks bombarding the emperor's palace, when 'mission complete' appeared on the screen i was knackered...and overcome with the desire for more destruction, more carnage, more power! ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

though still thoroughly entertaining, the game really shows its age; the graphics are functional at best, the sound is awful , and the strategy is limited to pummelling your enemies from a far with missiles and, in the rare cases when they attempted to fight back, running back to massed ranks of tanks and watching the usually lone adversary get annilated in a matter of moments. comically simple warfare on my part because if the game had a single air-bomber option my defences lines would have been massacred in seconds.

anyway, with two weeks off and no children to keep me up all night , im looking for the next step in this line of gaming and am canvasing for suggestions. command and conquer sounds interesting, although i havent been a diehard gamer for years and dont know if this is just a passing distraction. either way im not interested in shelling out wads of cash for soft and hardware i may not have much time for beyond easter.

ps - i have in fact found a game called 'emperor: the battle for dune' which is the obvious successor to dune 2 and sounds quite impressive. there was also a game called dune 2000 but this wasn't really much of an improvement as far as the reviews of it sound, so i skipped it and bought 'emperor' instead for about 20 quid - maybe ill review it at some point. other ideas for games still welcome.

This was a proper trail-blazing game in its time. Not wishing to stereotype, but were you playing as the evil Harkonnens? It's just that I very much remember air units attacking my base whilst playing as the Atriedes. Annoying when you don't know what the damn anti-air upgrade path is.

I think Mike can give you a better run-down on the final installment: it has it's moments, but it's best viewed as Westwood's trial run for the 3D incarnations of the Command & Conquer series. It does have sandworms though, which are always frickin' cool.

having succeeded as the noble atreides and evil harkonnen in the past, i decided to join the green party and went for the insidious ordos; choosing cunning over outright aggression for once. not that this tactic served me all that well. while the enemy could call upon airboure attack craft, local mercenaries and sonically powered war-engines, or near impossible to stop tanks that took most of the local scenery with them when blowing up and devasting warheads that levelled half my base at several critical moments, i had to go behind my superiors backs to get hold of anything useful. glorified trikes, saboters that were useless until i had blasted my own way into the enemy strongholds, and chemical warfare that was only effective until the opposition discovered lemsip, meant i had to buy all my game winning missile tanks on the black market. this was as much a victory againt my own house as it was against the enemy!

I remember Dune 1 which was a sort of RPG turn based war board game. It was not too bad to be honest but all the travelling by Ornithopter was annoying.

Dune 2 I should really try and play as I love the Command and Conquer series (or at least I did before the EA powerhouse took it over!) and I have just found out that this was a Westwood Studio's game too!

Emporer: Battle for Dune was not too bad to be honest. It was the first forray into 3D battlefields from Westwood Studio and very fast paced. I don't remember playing it for very long because of the irritating fog of war, it was made up of 3D poloygons that shimmered and broke apart as you moved around. In certain instances I sort of remember being able to see underneath the F.O.W through cracks in adjoining polygons. . . weird.

If you would like to try the game I think I still have a copy at my parents house. Will double check next time I am there, unless johnriley1uk would like to have a look for me?!

its all become academic now as ive just found out someone has ripped off my credit card details; the second time in three years. credit to halifax [no pun intended] as their fraud department put the stoppers on it as soon as the second suspicious purchase was charged. all i have to do now is wait for the new cards to arrive and change al my on-line account details again, which means by the time this is resolved ill be back at work

Damn, that's not so good. Any idea where/how they got the details?

Part of me still wishes someone could make a Dune game that did the novels justice. That would be freakin' epic.

It would be good. Shame about the credit card details that makes life difficult and worryingly it is seeming to happen more frequently! Boo Hiss at being back at work.

Mike wrote:If you would like to try the game I think I still have a copy at my parents house. Will double check next time I am there, unless johnriley1uk would like to have a look for me?!

I take it that johnriley1uk forgot about this again. . . I will chase with another text to see if he can have a took!

It looks like the game has gone from parental home! Oh well. Dune 1 is there but it is so old I wonder if it would ever run on a modern computer.