EA just surprised launched the Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection on Steam in a big bundle, along with a few other classic titles. As someone who grew up playing Command & Conquer, I love to see them all revived like this making them really easy to pick up properly.
The downside to how EA have done it; you have to buy them all in one big bundle.
Command & Conquer The Ultimate Collection includes:
- Command & Conquer
- Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert: Counterstrike
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert: The Aftermath
- Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
- Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Firestorm
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge
- Command & Conquer: Renegade
- Command & Conquer: Generals
- Command & Conquer: Generals: Zero Hour
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: Kane's Wrath
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Uprising
- Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
Writing about it on Steam, EA's Jim Vessella (Producer on C&C Remaster), wrote in an announcement about it:
How did this come to happen? Well, a while back I heard some team members at EA had the desire to launch some of our classic titles on Steam. After hearing about this initiative, several of us proposed we include the C&C Ultimate Collection. We knew this has been a request of the C&C community for over a decade, and has been an equal goal of us passionate C&C folks around the company. As such, a dedicated strike team here at EA has been pushing to make this a reality - but we knew we couldn't do it alone. So in the spirit of our community collaboration from the Remastered Collection, we reached out to a small group of the C&C Community to understand how we could best deliver the Ultimate Collection on Steam.
In addition they've launched the map editors FinalSun and FinalAlert 2 as open source under the GPL, these can be launched directly from Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. The source code appears packaged with the games on Steam in the installed folder.
If C&C is not your thing, a bunch of other EA classics also launched on Steam including:
- SimCity 3000 Unlimited
- Populous
- Populous 2: Trials of the Olympic Gods
- Populous: The Beginning
- Dungeon Keeper Gold
- Dungeon Keeper 2
- Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Planetary Pack
- The Saboteur
Thanks to Valve's Proton, some of them should be playable on Linux / Steam Deck too in only a few clicks. Although it seems a few of them do have problems running right now, so hopefully we will see Valve implement some fixes. For any problems you do encounter, remember to check for a post on the Proton GitHub and add your log files.
Let me know how you get on with them in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
slaapliedje Mar 11
Quoting: boltronicsI purchased all of the games, and just finished performing limited testing via Proton. They all seem to work perfectly out of the box, with just these exceptions:I had to use Proton Experimental for Dungeon Keeper 2 to not run at like 4 frames per second.
* Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun and Firestorm - some in-game options menus are rendered black or missing
* Command & Conquer Renegade - the mouse cursor doesn't move, although the menus can mostly be navigated with the keyboard
* Commnad & Conquer Red Alert 2 - the screen goes entirely black after the intro video finishes playing
It's quite impressive how far Proton has came. According to one reporter on protondb, https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw can be used to fix Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. I've tried it and it does indeed make the game playable... but it's not a great experience. It includes a "cnc-ddraw config.exe" utility and a custom ddraw.dll file that you can use by setting the game launch options in Steam to this:
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ddraw.dll=n,b" %command%
With these changes, the missing menus will now appear, but they'll be rendered at the top-left hand side of the screen in their native 800x600 resolution (which is quite tiny on my 4k panel). No amount of tinkering I've done so far has been able to solve this.
Furthermore, the actual gameplay is stretched to fullscreen (when it's clearly meant for a 4:3 monitor) and I was unable to find a work-around. The game speed also had to be turned down somewhat or it was completely unplayable. I'm on a 7950X3D, it's possible that YMMV.
Tested on Arch with a RX 7900 XTX with the free software driver stack, and graphics details maxed out for all games (and a resolution of 1600x1200 for games meant for 4:3).
We got a remaster for the original C&C, so hopefully we can get one for Tiberian Sun and Firestorm next.
Edit: To clarify, all the non-C&C EA classics seem to work fine as well without any tinkering — aside from telling some games to use Proton 9.0 (Beta) although I can't remember if that was ever necessary. Populous: The Beginning looks like it doesn't remember the selected resolution when set from the main menu, but it looks like actual gameplay does use higher resolutions so I think that it's just a quirk of the game and is actually running as intended.
boltronics Mar 11
Quoting: slaapliedjeI had to use Proton Experimental for Dungeon Keeper 2 to not run at like 4 frames per second.Works perfectly for me out of the box (defaulting to Proton 8.0-5). I just played a few levels.
Edit: I missed the "2" there. Yes that was one I had switched to 9.0 (Beta).
Last edited by boltronics on 11 March 2024 at 11:24 am UTC
Did try out the Renegade with the tutorial and didn't notice mouse issues. I'm not sure if I have missed some lore as I originally played only C&C and Red Alert and then moved on to Total Annihilation. Also switched to FreeBSD so wasn't really into Windows games when the sequels came out. Have to see how they're like without the nostalgia. Having too much replaying the originals though, so it might take a while to really start playing them.
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