Command & Conquer
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PSP
| Command & Conquer

Napoleonic complexes don't get much more acute than those inspired by the brilliant Command & Conquer real-time strategy series, so with the game making its most diminutive outing yet as a PSone classic ported to the PSP Store, you would think that it would have even more than usual to prove.

Not that a game of such calibre would ever really need to prove its worth. Developed by Westwood Studios and built on the back of the enormously popular Dune 2, Command & Conquer was a smash hit PC RTS that was in the right place at the right time (i.e. 1995) for a PlayStation release. It may not have been as good on PSone as it was on PC (and nor was it as good as the subsequent Red Alert follow-up) but it was Command & Conquer, which was good enough for most players keen to pit their resource management skills against an enemy intent on crushing their virtual existence.

Sadly, though the parts of the game that do work – strategically building and deploying a unit-based army while trying to outwit and out-gun that of the enemy's – are still just as much fun as they ever were, some truly shoddy porting makes Command & Conquer on the PSP look like a smoking blast crater where there should be a tightly functioning war room.

The first sign of trouble comes before you even reach the title screen. After the first clutch of cut-scenes introduce the C&C universe, a feminine cyborg like voice bellows, "GDI disc detected; to play the Brotherhood of Nod missions, please insert the Nod disc." The thing is, there are no discs so switching between them proves a little tricky. After extensive menu fumbling, it turns out that you can switch campaign modes via the Home button, but in the absence of any sort of instruction, many could be forgiven for overlooking this and assuming that the campaign has been cut in half. (I did, initially.)

At any rate, with the GDI missions queued up, you set about tackling the Nod menace only to discover that the game is pretty much unplayable. You see, bizarrely, the speed at which things play out has been set to warp factor 9. In practice this means the AI is ruthlessly bearing down on you like a herd of grumpy well-armed Tyrannosaurus rex within the first two minutes of every level, while you and your pathetic human brain are still trying to figure out where to deploy your command centre.

Remarkably, there is no option to change the speed at which the action unfolds. So beyond the initial complement of easy introductory levels things get harder than granite-coated conkers, making progression past the early stages of the game pretty much impossible.

Then there is the save system which appears absent altogether, with the game relying instead on a Dark Ages-esque password set-up that requires a pen and paper to make use of (sadly, that isn't even a joke).

Rounding things off is the game's size. At a whopping 905MB Command & Conquer consumes a greedy amount of Memory Stick space, mostly at the behest of a seemingly endless supply of bland cut-scenes that could easily have been chopped down or at least compressed.

It all smacks of laziness and 'copy and paste' porting that feels very out of place in an official release on the PSP Store. The result, disappointingly, is a horrible example of a good game ruined.

Command & Conquer

A bullet point list of how to port a game badly and a crushing blow against those hoping to relive fond Command & Conquer memories on their PSP
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