ALL.

C&C 1 and RA 1 are classics. Clunky in some of the design but overall still very playable and enjoyable. TS and RA 2 are the cream of the crop for both respective universes. Both eliminated the clunkiness of the previous games and flesh everything out much, much more.

Renegade, while not an RTS, I found bland and uninspiring as far as FPS go. The MP was fun for a short while, and it's cool to see everything from ground level, but the novelty wears thin quickly and it's completely forgettable.

Generals is enjoyable if you like that sort of setting. It's modern warfare but with the signature C&C twist of unique units and sides with their own personalities. Not bad, just different.

C&C 3 is a decent continuation of the Tiberium storyline. I dislike some of the game design decisions, but overall it's enjoyable and should be played considering it was the last good Tiberium based C&C game. RA 3 is decent but has a heavy emphasis on co-op, which can hinder the experience a bit. However this is without a doubt, the LAST decent C&C game I'd say is worth playing.

C&C 4 is utter trash, and the nail in the coffin for the series. Let me tell you something, there are a few games I follow very, very closely and love dearly with all my heart. Games that I grew up with, and games that grew up with me. Since the day me and my dad got the first one back in the mid-90's, every few years it was always a joy to keep up with the new C&C game coming out. Getting hyped up for it, seeing the screenshots, reading the reviews... C&C was and is a series of games I remain loyal to, to this day (thanks to awesome ports like OpenRA)

When I played C&C 4 and completed it, I was filled with actual rage. It ruined my whole mood for the rest of the day. The gameplay, the story... what they did to Kane.... Just avoid it. Never play it. Don't even give it the time of day or even the thought. It doesn't exist. That is what you call, a rape of a beloved series of games and a giant fuck you to the loyal fanbase. If you ever come across a physical copy, break it.

tl;dr play all of them except 4 and maybe Renegade since it's so forgettable.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/24810/discussions/0/541907675763229548/

The decline I think started with Generals but the franchise didn't become bad until 4 or the free to play game, whichever came first.

I hope GOG gets the early Command and Conquer games soon. They've already been modded to work on a modern system for Origin and the first 10 years collection so getting them to work for GOG should be pretty simple.

You're an idiot.

No idea, but after the second game i'd had enough of it anyway...crap loads of other stuff i'd rather play.
Maybe oversaturation, don't know, carn't remember what was out at the time they came out.....so fuck knows.

Don't think so, even though it is now possible to play it without install limit SecuROM.

there still is 1 bug in Command & conquer Zero hour when you play 8 player you will most of the time get a error message, i own both ultimate collection and the first decade and it happens in both games

Well, frankly I'm convinced that already many games on GOG use "very dirty binary hacks" in the form of no-cd fixes. In many cases, particularly older games, GOG surely wasn't given a DRM-free executable by the current rightsholder and they had to resort to ones developed back in the day by crack teams. From what I recall most problems I had with the Ultimate Collection revolved around glitchy copy protection (Zero Hour and Yuri's Revenge asked for a CD, I think) and could be solved by using an old cracked executable.

And from what I remember the binary hacks in the C&C patches were about forcing the games to not use VRAM and maybe lock the game speed, both of which can be achieved by ddraw wrappers instead by now. And again, something GOG has already been doing many times (there's a number of titles on GOG which fail to work in DirectX or OpenGL mode on modern systems so GOG bundled them with nGlide - and glitchy games like Desperados, which suffers from the same issues as Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2, can be manually fixed by using acqrit's ddraw wrapper). And I haven't tried playing one of the older C&C titles' multiplayer in ages but I think back in the XP and Vista days it was also another wrapper that allowed playing those online.

I agree that GOG's use of cracks of questionable origin is unsavory. But from a technical perspective that's not what I meant by "dirty". Writing no-cd cracks (for older games) is done in a very systematic and reliable way, to the degree that I would call pretty good engineering.

Anyway, did you actually use the wrappers you mentioned with any success with these games? I'd be interested to know if there is a reliable way to make them run correctly these days, they only work on some of my machines.

Okay, I actually just tried. I was still able to play the original unpatched games on Windows 7 and I believe even Windows 8 but admittedly they refuse to launch on Windows 10. I'm not sure if it's just the wrappers that don't work with Windows 10 anymore or the games are indeed completely impossible to launch without serious alterations to the executable. Well crap. I'm actually quite the purist and always refused to play the singleplayer campaigns with the community patches. This sucks.

That's a bummer.

I am no expert on low-level graphics stuff but I suspected that the solution wouldn't be as simple as forwarding calls from old directx APIs to new ones :( The First Decade games behave completely differently on my two near-identical Win7 boxes except for the GPUs.

I'll later give it a try with Virtual Box, on an older OS. All this discussion made me want to *properly* play some RA2.

I think the first hints of decline for the series began with Renegade and Generals thanks to how divorced they are from previous games, but the actual decline started to set in with Red Alert 3 (while enjoyable, some gameplay decisions leave a lot to be desired), while Command & Conquer 4 simply marked its death for fans and Generals 2's cancellation confirmed it.

C&C: Tiberian Sun - devs had promised a lot of things that they didn't deliver at all, or made some "plugs" instead. For example, destruction of terrain was not made properly, if you destroyed the damb it didn't change water level (despite ability to flud enemy base that way was adveritsed in earlier interviews). Campaign was promised to be far mor non-linear then in original C&C, with side missions like destruction of supply train affecting future missions - nothing of that was implemented, except for one secret mission in case you capture one train.

However, note that TS started the decline, but franchise was actually alive until C&C4 - that game, you could say, ended the decline, by burying C&C franchise for good.

Very interesting, I did not know that history. I've enjoyed all the C&C, Red Alert, Renegade and Generals titles, as they were being released, since the very first. I've only recently started reading up on the behind the scenes happenings, so personally, it felt more like a catastrophic bang(C&C 4), rather than a gradual decline.

IMHO, It was the Red Alert 3 and it's expansion pack. The always online DRM requirement was and still is unacceptable. With RA3, the game was cracked quickly to work around that crap, but it was still a pain.