The looks of characters? Yes, you have the all American General with a Kennedy haircut on the one and a bald guy with a goatee on the other side. Whose name sounds like the biblical "Cain". Figures.

But Mr Creosote, there is no good and bad in this world. I never thought of NOD as the bad guys. It is your prefabricated concepts that make you interpret this into the game.

In one scenario you kill many people (=bad) in the other only one person (=good), so in utilitarian ethical values (in this case measured in human lives avoided taking), it is quite obvious who is the "good" and who is the "bad" faction. But to me it seems you just based it on the color of suit they are wearing!

Maybe we have to begin counting killed npcs to determine utilitarian badness in the future!

Actually, in retrospect, I think this is exactly one point where the game shows its age. Or rather its limits. For some reason, we (the players) are supposed to believe that putting down "insurrentionist forces" with tanks is "good" whereas "assassinating a disagreeable figure" is "evil". Apart from the labels (insurrection, assassination etc.), I can't see any ethical or moral difference between the two.

Which is a major gripe I have with a lot of military-themed games in general. They usually follow a "good vs. evil" plotline without motivating effectively in what way the "good" side is different from the "evil" one. It is just assumed that players will swallow this ideological evaluation as is. Or, if that fails, the old hat of "beautiful people = good, ugly people = bad" is applied. Seriously!

Ahhh, I getcha. It's a shame that the industry went the way it did, both because innovation is healthy and because it hurt your perception of some entertaining games.

Because after those two games, the industry degenerated into a pure imitation machine: for many years, nothing but "3d shooters" and "RTS" (two really annoying labels) would be produced. Killing all the genres I liked.

Out of curiosity, why would you put DOOM and C&C on that list?

Fun fact: this game was a hot candidate (along with the also mentioned Doom) when I considered to introduce a list of "banned" games which should never appear on TGOD. This list was to include games which I considered responsible for the games market turning into utter crap.

Nowadays, I've become much more liberal

Feel free to share anything about Command & Conquer (1995) here!