The Stack

Only in the final battle do you get to use the Chronosphere. Honestly, I find it disappointing. I had been anticipating teleporting a battalion of tanks right into the enemy base, behind the defenses, to take out crucial infrastructure like power plants (always a good first step against the Soviets). I had done similar things a few levels back with helicopters, but helicopters are vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns, and tanks are not. But it turns out that the Chronosphere can only teleport one unit at a time, and a single tank in an enemy base doesn’t last long enough to destroy anything.

Okay, so perhaps I could send Tanya? Tanya is the sole “hero” unit on the Allied side: she can shoot foot soldiers at a greater distance than they can shoot back, and she can demolish buildings in a single stroke by planting explosives. Her only drawback is that there’s only one of her, and she tends not to defend herself unless explicitly instructed. Still, Tanya sent directly into the heart of the enemy base could take out multiple power plants before she died. But no: the Chronosphere can’t teleport people, only vehicles.

But what about a troop carrier, then? An APC with Tanya and a company of engineers would really do a job on the place. Each engineer that you send into a building damages it by 25% of its full hit points. If the resulting damage would destroy it, the engineer instead takes it over. It’s expensive to do this — the engineers used this way are consumed in the process — but it’s just about the quickest way to eliminate an enemy structure, and I imagine it’s really demoralizing in multiplayer mode. I’ve used this trick on a few occasions, and the only difficulty in pulling it off is getting your engineers safely to the structure in the first place. The Chronosphere seems like it would solve that, but teleporting an APC only sends the vehicle, not the passengers. It makes me wonder if the vehicles I sent have drivers.

Just about the best use I ever found for the Chronosphere was to teleport damaged units back to base, where they could be repaired. That saved me the cost of building a few replacements, but I don’t think building the Chronosphere resulted in net savings. Perhaps it has uses I never discovered. Oh well, at least the Iron Curtain seems to be similarly lame: its effects are short-lived enough that the tanks using it always seemed to run out shortly after reaching my base.

I won the level mainly with the tried-and-true massive pack of helicopters on offense, using tanks and defensive structures to deal with counterattacks. That, and harvesting as much Ore as I could, as quickly as I could, to support this strategy. I built up a far larger cash reserve than I had at any previous point in the game, but I still managed to waste it all rebuilding my defenses and repairing my damaged helicopters. By the end, my ore trucks were going clear across the map to the fields that the enemy had been harvesting before I destroyed all their ore trucks. It all ended up in a gradual but inexorable eating away of the enemy base, and the mission went on for a good half hour or so after victory was a foregone conclusion. Not that there was really ever much danger of losing that mission. This is a game that wants you to win. The levels get bigger as you go along, but they don’t really get harder. Still, even when the challenge is removed, there’s a simple pleasure in destroying everything.

That leaves the Soviet campaign. Having completed half the game, I’m tempted to leave it at that and go on to 1997. It’s been almost two weeks, after all, even if I haven’t been playing much during that time. But I do want to experience some of the Soviet gameplay while that of the Allies is fresh in my mind — and to that end, I’ve already started on the other half, which I’ll describe next post.

Twice now, I’ve encountered indoor levels: enemy complexes with patrolling guards, where your goal is not to slaughter everyone, but to reach a certain room or rooms. (In both cases that I’ve seen so far, it also involves keeping a brace of defenseless Engineers alive to reach those rooms, that they may ply their skills.) This is a familiar variation on the RTS, and would have been familiar to players at the time as well: I don’t remember if the original Command & Conquer had levels like this, but Warcraft certainly did.

The game engine doesn’t really know it’s indoors. Apart from a paint job on the terrain, everything looks and acts the way it usually does. You obviously don’t have tanks and airplanes in the corridors, but that’s because the level designer chose not to make them available, not because they won’t fit. One of the basic Soviet defenses is a kind of automated flame thrower on a pole: these are seen spewing destruction at the entrance to most Soviet bases, preventing you from simply storming the place with foot soldiers. They’re present in the indoors scenes too, where they somehow seem smaller, more like a Dungeons & Dragons trap than something to hold back an army. But in fact there’s no change in their range or destructive power — it’s just that the scale of the world around them has been altered.

The real way these levels differ from normal ones is that there’s no base-building. You arrive at the complex with a certain number of soldiers, and you have to keep enough of those soldiers alive to accomplish your mission. This extremely contrary to the way I normally play these games, which is heavily based around accepting losses as long as the enemy suffers losses too, and as long as I can recover from them faster. Here, there’s no recovery. Both of the indoor levels I’ve seen give you a medic, who provides slow but unlimited healing during quiet moments. But there’s no healing the dead. Putting this constraint on makes it feel a bit like a special exercise, like blindfold chess or fistfighting with one hand tied behind your back. It’s easy to become complacent about the abundance of resources in other levels — Ore is not inexhaustible, and indeed I routinely exhaust stretches of it through my profligacy. But the indoor levels teach me to be frugal with lives. If it were to teach me this successfully, it would probably make me a better player, raise my customarily abysmal Economy rating at the end of each map, and make the tougher levels a lot easier.

But I doubt that’ll happen. I’m almost at the end of the Allied campaign already; it’s basically just a sprint to the finish now. And if they expect me to carefully look after the well-being of my people when I switch to the other campaign, well, then they clearly need to read up a little on Joseph Stalin.

Both sides in Red Alert have their own distinct superweapons: the Soviets have the “Iron Curtain” effect described previously, while the Allies have the Chronosphere, a temporary teleportation device developed from the conspiracy-theory-famous Philadelphia Experiment. I still haven’t seen either of these things used in battle, but their development figures big in the plot, which is greatly concerned with protecting your own research and sabotaging the enemy’s. About two-thirds of the way through the Allied campaign, we learn of another project, Stalin’s ultimate secret weapon: his scientists have discovered how to unleash the power in the heart of the atom, creating an explosion of unparalleled destructive power. You, of course, have to prevent these doomsday weapons — these “atom bombs” — from ever being deployed.

It’s alternate history as moral wish-fulfillment fantasy for America. I suppose some people would argue otherwise — I mean, a world where the Reds got the bomb first? That’s your fantasy? But it is: it puts us in the role of unambiguous good guy. Nukes are, after all, bad-guy weapons, things whose chief practical use is to terrorize the world into submission like a James Bond villain. The first Command & Conquer recognized this by making tactical nukes the ultimate weapon for the fanatical terrorist side, the Brotherhood of Nod. The ultimate weapon for the good guys, the Global Defense Initiative, was an orbital laser: clean, precise, comfortably remote from retaliation, and best of all, fictional, and therefore never yet historically used to massacre civilians.

Come to think of it, the very premise of Red Alert is a moral simplification of World War II. Forget the real-world use of atomic weapons for the moment; that’s something people manage to justify in their minds. All it takes is an extreme us/them mentality, the sort that considers “uncompromising” to be a compliment. But that same mentality finds it extremely galling that, in order to fight the Nazis, we had to be on the same side as the Communists. Removing this factor, Red Alert allows us the luxury of complete purity, of both aims and means. Heck, even the lack of any involvement with Japan presumably means no Japanese-American internment. It all comes a lot closer to our national myth of WWII-as-last-good-war than the reality ever did. It really says something that the creators of this game felt it necessary to clarify and improve our good-guy status even in the context of the war we spent fighting Hitler. And it’s profoundly weird that they decided to do this by removing Hitler from the story.

Red Alert is essentially a two-player game, even when you’re playing the single-player campaigns. It’s just that in single-player mode, the opponent is computer-controlled, has a large material advantage over you, and is kind of stupid. If you destroy the enemy’s ore trucks, for example, there’s no guarantee that they’ll even try to build replacements, even though they’re pretty much doomed without a source of wealth.

The computer is more predictable than a human opponent, and if that isn’t enough to guarantee victory for the player, you can save the game mid-battle. (In fact, mid-battle is the only time you can save the game, which is something of a deficiency. I’d like to be able to save between missions. Sometimes you have a choice between two battlefields for the next mission, but you can’t save until you’ve chosen one.) In other words, although the single-player campaign is where the plot and the FMV is, the two-player game is where the challenge is. As usual for the RTS genre, the single-player game is essentially a tutorial for the real game.

Except… it’s kind of lacking as a tutorial. I remember playing the original Command & Conquer, the original Warcraft and Starcraft. Those really started off as tutorials, giving the player missions like “build a farm” and “defeat a small group of isolated grunts”. Red Alert is a second-generation RTS, and assumes familiarity with the first generation. If you don’t already know how combat and base-building work, this isn’t the game for you.

Moreover, the game itself doesn’t provide nearly as much information as I expect from a tutorial. No in-game unit or building descriptions here, and the crucial hotkeys (such as assigning and selecting groups of units, or telling them to guard an area) are only documented in the manual. The game gives you the ability to tell a group to maintain formation, so that every unit in the group moves only as fast as the slowest. This is an incredibly useful feature, and one that I wish more RTS games had imitated, but it’s buried where you’re likely to not notice it. This may mostly be a matter of changing expectations, though. Games today are pretty much expected to be playable from just picking up a controller, but they were allowed to be more dependent on their manual in the old days. I’m a little surprised that this mindset was still in force as late as 1996, though.

In fact, the manual actually contains a section titled “Tutorial”, which is a walkthrough of the first two missions. Unfortunately, I seem to be missing part of it: my copy of the manual, part of a 200-page perfect-bound thing covering four anthologized Command & Conquer games, has a 16-page duplicated section. Thank goodness for the internet.

Still, sometimes even the manual isn’t enough. In one of the early missions, I was instructed to do something to the enemy’s technology center. Okay, which of the various buildings in the enemy base is the technology center? The most information the game will give you about enemy buildings is the string “Enemy Building”, and the manual only contains pictures of the icons that you click on to build things, which don’t necessarily look much like the building itself. It took me two or three tries to get the right one.

But I have to emphasize that it functions as a tutorial. It’s just not the sort of tutorial that spoon-feeds you answers. It uses a harsher but no less effective pedagogic technique: that of throwing problems at you, and not letting you pass until you’ve found the answers. The levels largely seem to be strategic puzzles that yield easily to the right approach. Need to destroy a heavily-guarded naval yard? Build some ships of your own. Those ships have to pass through a strait guarded by submarines and tesla coils? Send some tanks to take out the power plants first, so you only have to fight the submarines. Each level introduces new stuff, on both your side and the enemy’s. The puzzle, then, is to find the weakness of the enemy’s new stuff — a weakness that can, in all likelihood, be exploited using your new stuff.

As I plow my way through the 1990s, I seem to be avoiding the whole “Full Motion Video” phenomenon. This ends now. I wouldn’t call Red Alert primarily a FMV game — the actual gameplay is firmly within the world of 2D sprite graphics — but it was released at a time when the marriage of Silicon Valley to Hollywood still seemed like the way of the future — if not to gamers, then at least to the people who controlled game development budgets. And so it shipped with two CD-ROMs full of low-quality video.

The video content is at least a bit more ambitious than a lot of the era’s shoehorned FMV. Where the original Command & Conquer basically just had talking heads that gave you over-emoted mission briefings, Red Alert actually has a few FMV action scenes — ones that even show signs of editing. It’s still strictly B-movie material, though, with thick accents substituting for characterization. And whenever the video ventures outdoors — usually to show military vehicles either being deployed or finishing their mission objectives — we’re suddenly in Unconvincing CGI Land. When you think about it, that’s a strange complaint. After all, the vehicle sprites during gameplay look even less real. Even putting aside the low pixel count, they basically look like toys — probably due to the flatness of the focus. But at least they’re consistent with the level of stylization throughout that part of the game. My problem with the CGI in the video sequences isn’t so much that it doesn’t look real as that it looks substantially less real than the live actors immediately preceding it in the same video clip.

Also, in a way, I find the in-game sprite stuff to simply be more effective storytelling than the FMV sequences. They keep including little set-pieces told with sprites and more or less without explicit narration. For example, one mission starts you out with just a single Spy unit and instructions to infiltrate a certain building. Spies are hard to detect, but not impossible: guard dogs, with their keen noses, are this game’s low-tech equivalent of anti-cloaking technology, and the player has to devote some effort to avoiding canine patrols. One you enter the building, a truck parked in front drives off, illuminating new areas of the map as it goes: clearly the spy has secreted himself inside. After it gets through a number of security checkpoints, the spy leaps out, leaving it to crash as you proceed to the next phase of the mission. That’s a little story right there, told with toy trucks and toy soldiers. It’s not in any way more sophisticated than the stories told through the video sequences, but it works better just because it’s told in a way that engages the player. Partly because it’s interactive, but also partly because it leaves so much more to the imagination.

Mind you, nearly every mission in Red Alert eventually degenerates into “kill everything”. It would be kind of cool to see a game with RTS-like rules and presentation that stays at a more narrative and less game-like level.

The original Command & Conquer, one of the foundations of the realtime strategy genre, made the unusual choice of near-future sci-fi for its setting. Wargame settings tend to be either strongly historical (as in the Total War series) or completely separate from reality (as in the original Warcraft), but C&C forged a path through the middle, giving us a world recognizable as our own, but greatly changed. Fictitious global alliances fought for control of real nations; mundane technology like tanks and airplanes mixed with fanciful stuff like death rays and automatic mining/harvesting machines. The player was effectively left with a choice of whether to regard it as a military story with sci-fi elements or a sci-fi story with military elements.

And then, intriguingly enough, they aimed for the same effect in the sequel, which is set in the near past.

How? Alternate history. Red Alert very explicitly sets this up in the opening FMV cutscene, in which a time traveler assassinates Hitler as a youth. As in countless Nazi apologists’ fantasies, the might of the Third Reich turns out to have been the only effective check on Soviet expansion — at least, until you come along. Thus, in a sense, the player is taking on Hitler’s role. But not in any strong sense: the anti-Soviet alliance shown in the cutscenes includes a strongly-accented German representative independent of the player. In fact, the entire alliance seems to consist of Germany, Greece, and whatever nation the player represents — presumably America, although I haven’t seen this stated explicitly. Perhaps there will be more details when I play the Soviet side. (Which I’ll definitely have to do before I can consider the game finished: in C&C, the two sides played noticeably differently, and I have every reason to believe that the same is true here.)

The milieu, then, is WWII-era warfare with modifications. The first Allied mission’s goal is to rescue Albert Einstein, who’s been kidnapped by the Soviets. (I predict that the first Soviet mission’s goal will be to kidnap him.) While in captivity, he was presumably forced to contribute to their secret weapon projects. You get a taste of those secret weapons from the very beginning: devastating defense towers based on the works of Tesla. And I’ve gotten just far enough into the game for the Allies to become alarmed by a newer development, code-named “iron curtain”: a device for making units completely impervious to harm, which should have interesting effects on gameplay. But most of the buildings and units are ordinary things like tanks and jeeps, factories and airstrips — even when they’re exactly equivalent to something science-fictional in the original C&C. That harvesting machine I mentioned, for example, is replaced by a guy in a truck. The stuff it’s harvesting, in the previous game a mysterious crystalline substance called “Tiberium” that was a vital ingredient in all your advanced technology, is now reduced to mere “ore”, which you sell for the cash you need to supply your army. It all makes it quite clear how skin-deep the themeing was in the first place.

It’s funny: any particular level of Icebreaker might take a couple of minutes to complete, or it might take more than an hour, and there’s no way to tell which aside from playing it. As I played the last couple of levels, I knew I was close to the end, but had no good notion of how close. Close enough to finish today, it turned out, although I had a moment or two of doubt.

Toward the end, nearly all of the levels are slime-heavy, often filling the entire area around with the stuff. When slime was first introduced, I didn’t really notice how useful it is to the level designer: it provides a way to keep the player confined to set paths, while not restricting the movement of the Seekers at all. (Even the smartest Seekers have trouble navigating walls sometimes.) Level 149 in particular really shows this off: it’s essentially a maze of paths in a lake of slime, with Seekers constantly hurtling at you from all directions.

Level 150 is just a level like any other, with no boss monster or recapitulation of the lessons learned up to that point. Which makes a certain amount of sense, given that the levels aren’t really ordered, that access isn’t gated. And afterwards, the game ends without ceremony. Or at least, it does if you still haven’t got the in-game videos to work. The disc holds an obvious victory scene, set in what can only be described as pyramid heaven, with a choir of winged angelic pyramids surrounding the luminous pyramid godhead. I only looked at this after exiting the game. In the game itself, what happened was that I finished level 150 and was immediately whisked to a randomly-generated level. I’ve looked at a few randomly-generated levels now, and while I can’t say they’re as well-crafted as the designed levels, they’re at least satisfactorily different from each other. As in the designed levels, each picks just a few elements from the full palette.

Because of that transition from victory into more game, just like the transition at the end of every level up to that point, part of me isn’t sure that I’ve just won. I get up, I look around. I’ve spent most of the day on this game. It should be some ridiculous hour before dawn, with me shaking off the gaming-trance like a sleeper awakening. That’s how it worked when I was younger, and this is definitely the sort of game where it would apply. Perhaps these days I never really leave that altered state at all.

The statutory two weeks are just about over for this game. When I posted yesterday, I was still shy of level 100, which is only 2/3 of the way through the game. I was thinking that I’d play up to the round number and call it quits for the time being, but my progress has suddenly accelerated — maybe I’m getting good at it or something — and it’s a holiday weekend, so I think I’ll make a try at powering through to 150. I’m up to 130 already.

I’ve encountered one more level with unusually difficult terrain: level 96, “Live and Let Slide”. The gimmick here is that the periphery consists of slime pits, and the outer edge of the playfield is all ice with blue pyramids on it. Thus, to break the blue pyramids, you have to venture out onto the ice and risk slipping into the slime. Well, that or wait for them to change color. I indulged in that a bit. Vanquishing this level took me fully 95 tries — yes, just one short of a pleasing coincidence, but I wasn’t about to let myself die one more time just for that. It’s also one of only three levels so far where I’ve needed to drop back from Hard difficulty to Medium.

Level 122, “The Valley of Death”, is another. The gimmick here is that the center of the playfield is walled in, surrounded by rock except in two corners. Inside, it’s wall-to-wall swamp, with zombie spawn points around the edges, so that you start off surrounded. The best way to clear this area is to kill zombies as seldom as you can get away with, because you can get them to trail you in a pack as long as they’re alive, but once they respawn, they’re likely to do it in front of you. This is really one of the basic tactics of the whole game, but compressed into a smaller space.

Like level 53, both of these levels were designed by Ken Megill. I’m starting to detect a pattern here, but have to be wary of confirmation bias. The game doesn’t tell you who designed a level unless you ask (by pressing the “Level info” button), which I seldom do. Checking out some other levels at random, it looks like Megill is responsible for an awful lot of them, possibly even the majority, and certainly not just the hard ones. But the very hardest ones are always his work.

The few levels designed by Andrew Looney himself are quite mild in comparison, and seem to be put together more to create pleasing visual patterns than for challenging play. I think my favorite of his is level 112, “Lemmings!”, which puts the player in a path girded by pits. Hordes of yellow Seekers charge from all directions, smashing through the green pyramids that surround the path and falling into the pits. Eventually you have to venture to the the end of the path, where it empties into the dangers outside, to deal with the few pyramids that have avoided destruction (mostly by changing color before the Seekers got to them), but you can spend a while shifting around within your safe haven and directing the destruction.

Looney also collaborated with Keith Baker on level 71, “Advanced Pits”, which is notable for its simplicity of conception: it simply fills the entire playfield with purple pyramids, the ones that turn into pits when shot. Why did it take two people to design this? Maybe the idea came out of a conversation. At any rate, this is one level that takes some planning to pull off successfully, because you need to preserve access to the parts you haven’t covered yet, and can easily destroy your escape route while trying to swat Seekers. I managed it by rushing to the edge at the beginning, then shooting as much as I could of three edges from the outside, creating a box that’s only exposed to attack from one direction.

That’s just a few of the things that the level designers have managed to do with the tools this game makes available. All in all, I think they did a really good job of exploring the possibilities. I wouldn’t have guessed from a description of the game elements that they would be capable of this much variety.

Grassland
You are in a pleasant grassy meadow. To the north, south, east, northeast, southeast, and southwest is a meadow; to the west and northwest is seething lava.
A red pyramid stands to the north.
A green pyramid stands to the south.
A blue pyramid stands to the east.

Since people have expressed interest in the IF adaptation of Icebreaker included on the CD, I suppose I should say a few words about it. In a way, it’s similar to the IF adaptation of Doom: when something is about to kill you, you simply type in a command beginning with the word “shoot” and that’s that, with no possibility of missing. Unless, that is, two seekers happen to come on you simultaneously from different directions, which can happen, but isn’t likely as long as you stay in the region where the pyramids and the natural obstacles are. This seems to be a 6×6 region, much smaller than in a normal Icebreaker level, and there are only 14 pyramids to destroy in it. It’s just as well that it doesn’t try to create a full Icebreaker level, if you ask me. The whole thing is basically a curiosity, and is just large enough to make its point.

The most interesting part is also the chief way it differs from the game it’s based on: the point of view. In the original game, you see a broad area around you — not the full playfield, but enough for you to make plans based on where everything is, and to see the Seekers coming. In the text version, all you can see is the square you’re on and the squares adjacent to it. Information about what’s going on elsewhere is conveyed through sound — which, actually, happens to some extent in the original game too: you can always tell when a Seeker offscreen has crushed a green pyramid from the distinctive “kssh”. But in the text game, “offscreen” means almost everywhere, so the noises play a larger role. Apart from that, the fact that you can see only one square around you means that it’s possible to forget where you are relative to other things — in other words, to get lost. Which means that, in grand adventure-game tradition, there’s motivation to draw a map.

The mechanics aren’t completely faithful to the original. You can’t edge between a pair of adjacent pyramids here; any attempt at movement sends you straight at the center of the square in the specified compass direction. You can shoot stuff by specifying a compass direction, but your shots seem to only have a range of one square: shooting at a red pyramid from two squares away does nothing. I have no idea if the pathing algorithm for the Seekers bears any resemblance to that in the original — it’s hard to tell, when you can’t see beyond one square — but I suspect not, because it has to happen on the level of grid-squares here, not on the pixel level. Still, you expect changes when going from one format to another. Icebreaker: The Text Adventure does a reasonably good job of aping the experience of the game it was based on, and that’s all we can really ask of it.

I’ve never really liked zombies in games. I’ve spoken of this before. They usually strike me as more annoying than scary. The zombie pyramids in Icebreaker are no exception to this, although for completely different reasons than in most games. My problem with the typical zombie is mainly aesthetic: they’re unpleasant to look at, in the same way as skin diseases, and the usual zombie moan is designed to grate on the ear. Of course, the degree of irritation varies from game to game. In general, it seems like the games that want their zombies to actually be scary try to achieve it by simply turning the irritation up, while games that treat them abstractly or humorously can stylize it away. And zombies don’t get much more stylized than the ones in Icebreaker.

No, the annoying thing about zombie pyramids is their effect on gameplay. Consider first the way that they can respawn underfoot. The chief effect this has is that when you’re standing still to blast something repeatedly — a stone pyramid, say — you might have to suddenly and unexpectedly abandon what you’re doing, move over a bit, and blast the freshly-spawned zombie before going back to what you’re doing. All other Seekers give you a little bit of tactical room to maneuver when they chase you, but zombies can effectively just say “stop what you’re doing for a few seconds right now or die”. Add to this the fact that zombies take three hits to kill, which tends to increase the amount of time that you spend standing still and blasting stuff, which tends to increase the probability of the above happening.

Also, there’s a strong bond between zombies and swamps. Swamp tiles seem to be the only places where zombies will spawn, so any level with zombies will have a lot of them. The other particular property of swamps is that they slow you down when you go through them. They don’t slow the zombies down, though, so you really want to stay on normal ground as much as possible, to preserve your speed advantage. But you don’t always have that choice; where there’s swamp, there will probably be large areas of swamp, with pyramids in the middle.

In short, zombie levels give you the three conjoined annoyances of slow movement, slow killing, and periodic but unpredictable interruption in your pursuit of goals. These all have the same effect on gameplay: slowing it down. And that’s what I find annoying.