What can I say. The demo has been released and I had to play it before posting about it.

They capture it. That’s all I really need to say. It feels like I just played Red Alert yesterday (I promise I didn’t!) and then melded right into this demo. As I said before, the cut scenes are exactly the same feel as Red Alert ones, just better quality and a lot more familiar faces.

The graphics are perfect. I’m not going to say “stunning” or breathtaking”, they just feel like a awesome upgrade to the C&C line. Gameplay also follows suit. I don’t know how to explain it without it sounding as if it’s just “more of the same”. The only thing I can say about that is I did not really enjoy Command & Conquer: Generals very much. It felt like a hasty addon with blah gameplay, but purty graphics. This C&C3 demo showed that the story and gameplay and graphics have all taken a big, but even step forward.

As usual, I got the demo from fileplanet, as they seem to always have the exclusive demos and betas.

I tried a bunch of combinations of key presses in-game to take screenshots, but apparently they didn’t accomplish anything, so here’s some stock shots that definitely capture the look while playing:

Trailers and cutscenes aren’t my bag, with very few exceptions. I think it stems from the relatively older days of PC gaming, where cutscenes meant waiting for the CDROM drive to spin up and spit out some horribly drawn and/or acted scene that took you away from the game and didn’t really add much to it. And in later games, I would immediately start hunting and pecking for the right key combination to end any video as soon as it started.

The most notable exception to this is the Command and Conquer series, especially the Red Alert saga. I feel that those cutscenes and trailers were stylistic and came up at ideal moments in the game to fill and color the story. Plus, when you heard that CDROM rev up, you knew some serious crap was about to go down! The way I remember, it was a feeling akin to when you first watched Wargames (at least, if you watched it first as a kid, as I did).

Today, I come across the official release of the C&C:TW trailer, and I downloaded it from fileplanet.

I already knew that the original actor who played Kane, Joe Kucan, would be reprising his role. But I was really happy to see other familiar faces in this trailer. Grace Park and Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica, Michael Ironsides, and even Billy Dee Williams… Lando himself.

Here’s the list of the cast in the game:

• Michael Ironside / Top Gun, voice of Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher
• Billy Dee Williams / Empire Strikes Back, Colt .45 Spokesperson
• Josh Holloway / Lost, CSI
• Tricia Helfer / Battlestar Galactica, CSI
• Grace Park / Battlestar Galactica, L.A. Law: The Movie
• Ivana Bozilovic / Wedding Crashers, Van Wilder
• Shanon Cook / CNN reporter
• John Huck / Las Vegas Fox News anchor
• Shauntay Hinton / former Miss USA
• Joe Kucan / Command & Conquer series

and here’s the official website.