Decided to try Tiberium Twilight and Red Alert 1.
Tiberium Twilight is a miserable excuse for a C&C game. Someone looked at the basic game mechanics of the C&C series, which had worked great since Dune II, and decided to fix what wasn't broken by developing a completely new set of game mechanics that mainly served to make the game more complex on paper while making the strategy and tactics much simpler by limiting the player's available options. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to include an Headcount limit in a franchise who's biggest attraction (aside from either bombastic or hilarious LA FMV plotlines) has always been the ability to make massive armies? Who are YOU to tell me I can only have a measly FOUR MASTODONS at once?!?
Aaaand while they were so busy remaking the gameplay, no one (except maybe Joe Kucan) bothered to make sure the story was any good. Look at it. It's a shoot the shaggy dog story for crying out loud! The choice between staying with GDI or defecting to Nod is an excessively bad plot point, both because no one in their right mind is actually going to think siding with KANE is a good idea, and because no matter what you do, the story turns out the same way. If you side with GDI, Chavra does everything you would have done for Nod, while if you side with Nod, Nash takes your place with GDI. That's right, no matter which side you join, the war goes the same way; nothing you do matters! Except maybe opening the portal, and the GDI ending even fails to explain why I did that. Arg.
Finally (and this particularly grates on me) are the characters. Kane is still, well, Kane, and that's good. But look at the GDI campaign. And Colonel Louis. Look, for I while I was actually like, "Hey, this is neat, Louis is a really well-done, intelligent, likeable character, someone I like working under; GDI finally has someone who's close to being as interesting as Kane!" And then it turns out that the smart character (Louis) was wrong, and the Chamberlain-esque moron (Rios) was right, NOT because Louis was stupid or Rios wasn't, BUT BECAUSE THE WRITERS WANTED IT TO BE THAT WAY! The GDI campaign gets you all hyped up about overthrowing the obstructive beauracrats and stopping Kane, only to make that whole struggle meaningless in end. Seriously, the whole game is blasted nihilistic. At least the Nod campaign is honest about that.
I'm just getting started with Red Alert, but, poorly-aged graphics aside, it at least looks like a proper C&C game.