Try my game on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/2503550/Operation_Octo/ (DEMO also available in Arabic and Turkish) When I was half-way done with this video, I accidentally deleted all my audio recordings then foolishly cleared the recycle bin. Literal days of work down the drain! To make it worse, the video was already edited using my original vocal recordings - So if the narration sounds pieced together, it’s because I had to re-recording everything multiple times line by line to ensure the narration matched what was being shown, while trying not to cry (The new version actually sounds way cheerier lol).

Thanks for not using the voice filter, my ears aren't bleeding anymore :D

Excellent work! The details you managed to realize from each mission was outstanding!

Oh, one more detail you forgot to mention in the opening moments of the Allied intro, when you're sending Tanya to deal with the Dreadnoughts! As she blows them up with C4, she'll gain veterancy, and in a way that'll have her go to Veteran, Elite, and Heroic status, with a little trumpet and an army stripe accompanying each promotion, culminating in a military star. It might not teach them the exact goings on behind promotions, but you've now got an idea that, not only is this a mechanic, but something to look out for. Bonus points for letting the player start with a Heroic Tanya, making that overall introduction just that littlest bit more friendly to new players.

You vastly underestimate the importance of reading manuals back then. I knew about all the key combinations simply because they were in the booklet.

I want to add a fun little fact about all of this: Mission 1: failing to sink the Dreadnaughts by force firing on the Patriot Missiles, will ultimately see the Dreadnaughts float away, failing the mission. The second mission: Destroying certain civilian buildings will reveal soem bonus crates 4th mission: Making your way to the top left, you can garrison the SEARS building to reveal the full map

At first I was like, "I'm not watching a full hour!" However, After watching the entire hour I was like, "Why was this not 2 hours"!? That was seriously amazing. I've watched most your videos and this may be the best. Part 2, part 2, part 2!!!

My first and still my fav game to this day. Perfect combination of nostalgia, amazing music, cut scenes, gameplay, memes, mayonnaise graphics, a masterpiece

I can say the game is so easy to understand and fun that when I was like 6-7, I can still play, have fun, clear the campaign despite not understanding English. Everything is so intuitive and straight forward

Nice! I could learn a bit of thinking from your analysis. Something I could add for Mission 1: Lone Guardian. This first objective is quite a subversion of expectations. Remember that this game is Red Alert 2. In the first Allied mission of Red Alert 1, you are also presented with Tanya, and the very important task of rescuing an iconic Einstein. Sounds like rescuing an iconic Statue of Liberty, but nope, the Statue does not survive like Einstein did. And that mission ends with four Allied Cruisers that decimates the Soviet base. The Allied Cruiser is about the most powerful unit in that game, and the only naval long-range artillery unit. When a Red Alert 1 veteran plays Red Alert 2 for the first time, they have not seen Dreadnoughts before. Now there are four of them. Guess what unit Westwood is trying to remind us of and mix with that fresh shiny new mechanic of being able to C4 them. Mission 1: Lone Guardian is quite a nostalgia trip. :D

2:17 Not just the talents of the actors but the casting director, Joseph Kucan, is also responsible for the brilliant acting. "Comrade Chairman, I *am* the future..." Also, the par time does affect the debriefing. Usually going over time yields a less congradulatory outlook (though there are a few downers) while under par time gives you high remarks like "Hail to the Chief" saying that you prevented the Soviets from learning top secret information with how fast you recovered the President and top brass.

I am in school for game design. If I get half a chance, I will cite you. Congratulations for graduating!

Yes please more missions more talk about game design, this is amazing. Maybe you could also do this for other games in the series to. I can see all of them being very popular and informational videos.

Now that you mention Part 2, I gotta say I'm excited for it. Partially because oh boy, Prism Tanks are the fun kind of balance elimination. (Also, I wanna give a heads up and/or spoiler about Allied 7 being hilariously easy to skip if you know that you know exactly what to do: drop everything to build Rocketeers, and sending them straight to the lone turret, setting off the "Destroy All Building" victory condition and thus completing the mission in the middle of the Soviet Invasion)

This is a fantastic video! Breaking down each mission and telling each quirks about how little things actually helping the player. I never knew in mission 4 they actually used a conscript to warn player of incoming v3 attack. That is so cool. In mission 3, I believe the enemy have garrisoned buildings in either side of psychic beacon to add challenges and prevent the player to flank around the main base. hence, new trainable rocketeers and harriers come in handy. Missed opportunity to mention the tower building in mission 4 at top left corner. If garrisoned, can reveal the entire map for player. Otherwise added more replayability like you said. I enjoyed this a lot. Can't wait for the next one!

Watched it all, and it was so educating!

Aw my favorite c&c game! I definitely have to watch this

The good thing about training camp is it's for people who never seen an RTS before when the start of the campaign helps you understand how to play this rts

I almost reached the end of the video and thought about how OP the Prism Tank is, then you mentioned about them immediately lol Nice video! It's amazing how well-developed game design can guide players around unknowingly without them getting bored. Hope to see you doing more takes on the rest of the campaign, as well as other campaigns (and maybe also take on RA3 campaign?)

Congratz getting your degree/diploma/whatever-it-is-called!

This game is really great, as is this analysis! Looking forward for more of this.

nice video my man can we also talk about the idea that the soundtracks do fit the missions

Also: a video for þe Soviet campaign would be very short because it's great for one reason alone: YURI!

Amazing content! Congratulations to your graduation! 🎉🎉

Simplicity and solidity with how easy it was and somewhat challenging on hard mode made me really into a series when I was child

great video! hoping for part 2 :)

Great video, sadly there is not a lot of c&c content anymore so its always nice seeing some.

Great analysis.

Wonderful video, XYHC, I actually had a video exactly like this planned and was ready to collect footage soon, but I'll be damned you did it better than I ever could. You're consistently right about everything here, although one very, very minor thing regarding Eagle Dawn is the fact that Westwood fucked up an easter egg that'd otherwise be an awesome learning tutorial: There are small little houses all around the map, they're all in flames and nearly destroyed, naturally, for WHATEVER reason instead of getting a crate for repairing the houses, the player gets crates for *destroying* them, it's a shame because that could have served as an excellent little tutorial for garrisons, as a cool little "Hey, you can repair buildings and then garrison them", but unfortunately the scripting sort of screwed it up.

Great analysis and video

Star Wars Battlefront was my FPS Red Alert 2 was my RTS

of how much i played RA2 both competitive and casually in campaigns, i never knew eva would say to use a nuke to attack the other nuke silo if you captured one, i always just tanyaed them both

Very good video. Waiting with anticipation the Soviet Campaign video.

what a great video!

There's also an off chance you might discover that Rocketeers can shoot down V3 missiles in the Chicago mission. The Naval Route also teaches you that the Ospreys can get shot down fast by flak. When you play Soviets, you end up pairing Subs with Sea Scorpions.

Would love to see campaign analyses of all campaigns from ra2 and ra3

Brilliant analysis, loved it! 6:10 can confirm you also have to remember the engine-limits in game-design. The C&C engine doesn't allow for such overlay-text like SAGE does. That said, Westwood could've just had the trigger writing that text repeat that action every X frames until the Player is about to enter the mainland, and repeat it there again when meeting the next 2 GIs, just to dbl-chk the player didn't miss it. 6:29 too bad those crate boons are only applied to Tanya 'cuz of CrateRadius = 3.0 :/ 7:25 I, too, remember the Americans valiantly battling for Burger King in World in Conflict :P 7:40 I must counter-argue: if that were the case you'd a) get a text-prompt suggesting garrisoning and, more importantly, b) how to eject them. (btw, only reason Tanya gets a NoEnter cursor instead of C4 on civvie buildings is because she's allied with the Civvie House that owns them all) 8:10 side-note: the trigger for this is never disabled, you can get those tanks when-ever. 8:50 wasn't there also a prompt to build the Barracks? Can't remember. 9:04 fun-fact about those paratroops: they can overwhelm and destroy the base with enough time. If the ConYard goes down, you get an engi or two, can't remember. 10:18 oh? Lemme chk. Yep, OilExplosionWarhead got nerfed: CellSpread from 4 to 2, PercentAtMax from .5 to .25 So pretty much only 50% as good as usual/skirmish. Nominal Damage at point-blank is unchanged. 10:45 uh... the only auto-saves RA2 and YR make are at the very start of a mission, with the difficulty set at the time of the initial loading. Notably, this was omitted in later C&C games and only came back in RA3 and TibTwi via "chapter-select"-thingy - they are also the only C&C games to do auto-saves during the mission after specific moments. 11:04 I'd like to note here that Pillboxes and Sentry Guns are identical in every aspect - except for looks and sound, obviously. 11:53 I'd also like to note here the V3 that took down the statue got Harrier-ed :) 12:02 roughly 16.4% 12:20 reminder placing actual C4 on non-Buildings is not possible. To blow up vehicles in a similar-looking (naval or regular), use a short-range, high-damage weapon. 16:52 I can not confirm this but IIRC the team just targets whoever attacked it until it's gone (IIRC the tent can reach the Rhino), then moves on with the Script. If more enemies show up or not only delays that. 18:08 could someone who knows AA guns confirm/deny their useful-ness and effective-ness (or lack thereof) vs. ground targets please, thank you. I'm curios. 20:19 triggered when capturing the ACHQ (which also captures any docked units - here: the Harriers). Shame RA2All02 doesn't allow lost Harriers to be re-built. 23:26 correction: happens when losing 4 units of any kind. The game can't handle counting specific units lost (except for '1'), but can handle counting units lost by a House - which is exactly how all mission fails involving Tanya work. 24:59 occurs on all difficulties, not just hard. 25:59 I believe the rank doesn't change, unlike the de-brief; not because there's no support for that, it's just not used. My gripe with RA2All03 is how the Beacon is passive - no count-down to losing the mission like RA2All04. This could've been fixed with such triggers only active on Hard difficulty, or active on all difficulties but being more than generous with the activation times for Easy and Normal/Medium. 29:04 you hit the mark much closer than you think with that remark, considering that ore and gems are just non-toxic re-skins of TibSun's Tiberiums Riparius and Cruentus. 30:36 they're not, actually, since they spawn with the Conscripts, but I get what you were going for. 31:16 'cuz Allies don't have dedicated Radar Dome/Tower any more like they did in RA1. You should complain about the ACHQ and Radar requiring the Ore Refinery :P 37:00 side-note: the DEST's ASWLauncher actually has infinite range, so they can and will launch from anywhere, as long as the subs remain in detection-radius. 38:00 no, this triggers if 180frames have passed since player-ConYard was deployed. You got this one backwards - the quicker the more rewarding. 40:40 lol wut. Unfortunately I can't find anything regarding this. 41:45 note GI's garrison weapon is stronger than Conscripts': 10 damage more, 5 frames less to reload. 53:36 this only possible because of buffing the NukePayload to deliver 6000 nominal Damage instead of 600.

I will def state the maps in RA2 are fun to mess around on. I actually once spent hours rebuilding new york with engineers to repair every possible structure i could before fully taking over the Soviet supply base in mission one :D

the greatest game review of all time!

Only 1 question where is Boris in Red Alert 2 original before Yuri's Revenge? ❤ This is so detailed and i love it! Such a hard work and effort amazing!

Was the rerecording fun to do? Prob not, but while im here ill give my opinion on the Red Alert 2 Allied Campaign from an Engineer who works for a high quality coding (not that kinda of coding that your thinking) company. The games models do kinda get in a way for some things (such as high building blocking views), but the graphics for a game that old are so good for that time, so i cant imagine why this game whouldnt be downlaoded and played a billion times. May our childhood live in us forever. I do plan to do a "deep game anylisis" for games i play alot (such as RTS games and so on) anyway X i hope you have fun with the game development, the game is very good for what it is. I wish i can support you more in your adventures other then emotional!

The are 2 things that can rival the Red Alert 2's campaign design are Tiberium Wars and Generals(With the Zero Hour as well). Also, it was heavily implied that if you win as Soviets in Red Alert 1, then it would lead to Tiberium universe where the spread of Tiberium never contained, During the Scrin Invasion in the 3rd Tiberium Wars Yuri(Kane's Acolyte responsible for reverse engineering Scrin's mind control tech) was accidentally thrown into a chronosphere thus created the Red Alert 2 timeline. But if you win as Allies in Red Alert 1, then it would lead to Generals universe. Kane will be dead. Brotherhood of Nod never existed. But Tiberium would come to Earth in 1995 but it's spread will be contained by US and Dr Thrax himself. GLA use Tiberium as toxin weapons and USA capitalize the Tiberium as a new energy source.

Also at 18.55, if you manage to get one of your GI to rank up heroically, you can just let heroic GI deployed and outranged the turrets.

I played a mod where the maps for the missions for soviet and allied are changed to match them up with how the real locations are. In the 1st allied mission after taking out the Dreadnoughts and the Statue of Liberty get's destroyed, has to swim for longer then I would like, because the real SoL is located on an island and that island is pretty from the rest of the city and there is no bridge that you can use to walk to the SoL.

2:04 StarCraft 2 is also my Middle School game.

Your videos are so much more watchable without that voice filter

Good video. A little nitpick though: ra2 does have two safe tutorial levels. Aoe2 has its own big opening battle moment in Joan of Arc 1

Level design so brilliant that RA2 devs put Kremlin on the middle of a road, indeed

One þing we can note is, back þen campaigns had to be good, to make þe game a seller. Þe oþer day, þey didn't have fancy graphics to impress people wiþ, so customers wouldn't be vigilant about slovenly work by any remaining aspect of þe game. Oh how times have changed....

31:23 *when Soviet players forego radar for more war factories* Slight tangent but radar is ironically not a priority in online games, especially for Soviets

55 minutes of my problem solution.

I just shocked this is almost a hour video

Would like to know your opinions on the campaign design for the Mental Omega mod as well, either on its own merits or as an extension of RA2.

I'd like to share my experience with the game, to give a player's perspective. You know, there's a lot a critique down here, but it's not due to me not liking the game - rather it's because you only talking about good parts, and every point that i didn't answer in this comment is the point i agree with. Btw, 5:24 - it isn't really a skill gate. I didn't even noticed that you can select GIs and ventured with only Tanya. Needless to say, that Tanya OP enough to make it to the base unscratched. 10:50 - devs probably thought that you would see how fast Tanya's health bar goes to red. There's enough time to react, if player pays attention. 11:34 - well, it didn't really give me any subconscious messages, since I've only noticed this pass on third or fourth walkthrough. Honestly, i don't like part with the turrets. You're required to destroy them even if Tanya flank them, and unless you've found secret tanks, your only option is to amass GIs to attack the sentries. Sending your men into machineguns and suffering heavy losses feels wrong, and even after you see you're succeed you feel that you didn't do right thing. 14:40 - i totally did. If restrictions to build vehicles didn't make it clear, text instructions seal the deal. 14:55 - well... This is stick with two ends. People, who did make it through tutorial, feel annoyed that they has to go through same stuff again. People, who read 60 pages manual beforehand (remember these?) - especially. And you kind of need to read manual, because that's the only place where you can learn about shortkeys and group command, which make playing campaign a loot easier (i had nightmares about Dark Knight mission before i learned "stop" command) and essential in multiplayer. 17:10 - I've evaded tank a second i saw it (briefing did say to be careful after all, and i really didn't want to lose two GIs and engineers that i can't replace). So i didn't know that rocketeers were effective against vehicles. 18:02 - yeah, and you know what else tolds that they anti air? Your assistant does. 18:55 - you can apply that knowledge. Or you can use the ones that paradrop immediately after Tanya blows up flaks. Kind of undermines that lesson. 19:35 - it's a miracle I've avoided every one of that lesson then. 20:50 - or you start scouting with your rocketeers, locking your attention elsewhere. Since you've told to attack a nearby base, it encourages you to attack right away. I've also did that because my rocketeers were idling this whole time and o wanted to find some use for them. I've also failed to notice that there's two gold field (which could be just dev randomly placed road through the one field as scenery bit, lol) and that you can create shortcomings (doesn't that gate opens automatically anyway?). Btw, i didn't realize that you can build multiple harvesters until i finished the game, start playing again, and halfway through the soviet campaign. In the one mission there's a lone island with gems on it. I've built refinery there, mined it out, sold refinery, and transported harvester back to main island since it pained to see idle unit. Then i suddenly understand that i have a lot more money, looked at production tab where harvester inconspicuously sat, and though: "wait, i could do it this whole time". I got to admit - doing one harvester per mission challenge is doable, but frustrating. 20:35 Remember how i said, that I've started to scout right away? Well, after flying around the base, I've found an electric plant, that wasn't covered by flaks and was blocked from rest of the base by wall. Destroying it cut power from the enemy base and let me to destroy said base with only rocketeers with minimal effort. This is bad for two reasons. First, this teached me wrong way of using rocketeers. Find opening in base defenses, destroy power, destroy the rest. But in other missions there's no openings in AA of enemy, thus making rocketeers seem useless. Second, this mission not only introduces air units, but also tanks. But in my playthroughs of this mission tanks hasn't play any role, except with help to clean up last of the flack trucks after most of the base was destroyed. Since first mission was infantry based and second air based, i didn't see any value in tanks and tried to play rest of the missions without them. With tanks being only unit that doesn't die after few hits from anything but other tank and high level defenses, you can see how my style ended poorly. 26:08 *cries in not being able to beat par time until the third playthroughs* Ill probably add stuff later, when i watch full video.

The only gripe I will have to rant here is... How both Westwood and EA just can't get Liberty Island right! In RA2, Liberty Island is small, it's a little close to Manhattan, and there's a (destroyed)bridge and a walkway leading to Manhattan!... In RA3, they got Liberty Island sort of right but it has the Statue of Liberty facing the wrong way!... It's supposed to be facing the Atlantic, not at Manhattan!... Sorry, it's just my geography nut venting out here but it just don't seem right to me...

Uh can i ask how can you play red alert 3 online, and if there’s a mod then can you suggest the mod to me?

As a StarCraft II player myself, I would say that you absolutely cannot apply any knowledge learned in the campaign in multiplayer games, since campaign units are highly modified in that game.

the best level desings are on red alert 3

"Many of us have grown up watching our relatives play it"- I mean I'm old enough to have played the Original C&C and Red Alert 1 lol. Also, Red Alert 2 would technically be World War 3 not 2: in the C and C universe WW1 happened normally, then the timeline diverges when Einstein deletes Hitler from history, which lets the Soviets launch an invasion (the events of RA1). An Allied victory in RA1 leads to the Allies putting Premier Romanov in charge, who goes on to be corrupted by Yuri, which leads to WW3 (RA2). On the other hand, a Soviet victory in RA1 lets the player character become Premier of the world when Kane leaves you in charge, which seems to connect to the original C&C (in the intervening years Communism still crumbles with many former Soviet states becoming Nod strongholds, which leads to a formation of the UN and later GDI)