Gamers last week were recently reminded about how much fun the Red Alert series was when EA charitably released Red Alert 2 and it’s expansion, Yuri’s Revenge, on Origin for free.
But if you weren’t able to play the game due to compatibility issues, or you’ve picked up the Cold War Bug all over again, then it’s worth noting that the original Red Alert is still getting love as well.
It’s not an official patch from EA or former Westwood developers. It’s not even a re-remake from a new developer, as was the case with the Age of Empires 2 HD release (or the expansion that was pushed out by Forgotten Empires afterwards).
The OpenRA project, however, is still pretty special. It’s been running for several years and it makes the original Red Alert, plus expansions, playable on modern systems without sacrificing any of their original glory.
Interestingly, the project has also remade the original Command & Conquer and Dune 2000, the game that served as the catalyst for the majority of strategy clones that flooded the market for much of the 1990’s.
But I digress. The OpenRA team pushed out a patch on the weekend, timely given what happened on Origin, and it adds a bunch of improvements including improved behaviour for airplanes, screenshot support, better AI, new maps, new single player missions and new difficulty settings for parts of the campaign. Dune 2000 and C&C received some love as well, according to the changelog on Github.
If you’re interesting in a bit of classic RTS action today — or this evening, if you’re at work like most people — then you can get the OpenRA installer for Windows, Mac and a range of Linux builds from the website.
The installer is just under 13mb, although you will need additional drivers/binaries depending on the OS. Mac users, for instance, need the Mono Framework which is another 200mb. And that’s not including downloads for the soundtrack and FMVs either (although you can use the files from your original CDs, if you have them lying around).
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5 responses to “The Original Red Alert Is Still Getting Updated”
Excellent news. Dune 2000 is one of my favourite games of all time and I can’t wait to get back into it.
Yeah. I’ve played OpenRA before but it was before Dune 2000 was added as an option. Once I get home I think I’ll give it a go, because while I played the original C&C’s I never got to give Dune 2000 a go.
Still have the original on CD, as well as Dune 2000, so might be worth reinstalling them.
Death March still among my favourite gaming music of all time!
Sooooooooo many hundreds of hours spent playing these awesome games and I don’t regret a single one. We once held an entire weekend LAN party where we had a giant match going of RA2, 4 seperate games of 4 players (remember the days when you’d have the entire underside of a house cleared out to fit PC’s everywhere???), then whittled it down to 4 champs from each. I lost, got to the last round though. Winner got a tiny novelty bottle of Jack lol (one of the airport ones lol). But was so damn fun.