I was a fan of the Dune games on the Commodore Amiga, and later on of Command & Conquer on the PC even though I preferred Blizzard’s Warcraft series over the Westwood game. Most games in the Command & Conquer universe afterwards failed to impress me though.
Imagine my excitement when I heard that Aditya Ravi Shankar has started to port the classic Command & Conquer game to HTML5 and JavaScript.
The developer has released an impressive looking preview version that is allowing you to play the beginning of the campaign.
You start with two light tanks and a base unit that can build your base on the map. From there you start building up your base, adding power plants, a refinery to harvest and weapons factories to produce troops to fight the enemy.
The developer has made the decision to use the game’s original control mechanism. This means that you control and move units with the left mouse button. You can draw a rectangle across multiple units to control them together. The Ctrl-[0-9] keys allow you to create control groups which you can then activate with another tap on the selected key.
The current game version 0.3d runs best in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, according to the developer. My personal experience was different though. The Firefox version lagged significantly, the Chrome version a little bit less. It did however refresh the border of the game window several times per second which made the game unplayable in the browser. The Opera version was the one that ran smoothly and without issues. I also tried running the game in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 but never came past the loading screen on that machine.
The developer, who is currently looking for volunteers to push the project forward, aims to take the project as far as possible. According to information posted on the site, he plans to integrate multiplayer later on.
There is one issue though that could torpedo the project. If the current rights holder, that would be EA if my information are correct, would put an end to the project. Nevertheless, the game shows great promise, and I personally would not mind playing through the campaign again in a web browser, provided that it works smoothly in there.
What’s your take? Let me know in the comments.
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