Command & Conquer: The First Decade review

For long-time fans of the series, Command & Conquer: The First Decade is a bit of slap to the side of the ol' noggin that does little to drum up excitement for the next ten years. However, if C&C is new to you, TFD represents a solid value - providing you can run the games, that is.

TFD bundles every C&C game released to date on a single DVD, sans the forgettable Sole Survivor. That's nothing to cry about as Survivor was online-only and the real only clear stinker in the history of the series. You'll get Command & Conquer & its add-on C&C: The Covert Ops; Red Alert and its two expansions, Counterstrike and Aftermath; Tiberian Sun and its add-on, Firestorm; the action-oriented Renegade; Red Alert 2 and its expansion, Yuri's Revenge, and finally, the 3D Generals and its add-on, Zero Hour.

That's 12 C&C games, all supposedly tweaked to play nice with Win XP, for the princely sum of $40. But before we all get too giddy, here's the rub: the movies for the Soviet campaign in Red Alert don't play, the musical score for Covert Ops is not complete, and several games failed to launch off the new front-end interface. We encountered a few other minor bugs as well, most notably intermittent crashes. Pretty frustrating, to say the least, particularly after being forced to enter 12 CD keys and uninstall all older C&C games that might already be on your system. (It should also be noted that with the exception of the original C&C and Red Alert, most of the original releases worked just fine with Win XP.)