westwood-studios posts

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Now that Red Alert and Tiberian Sun have been released as freeware in anticipation of C&C4's release, Red Alert 2 is the oldest Command and Conquer game that one can still buy. For many people, it's also the best game in the franchise. This may be due to the fact that this was the last Command and Conquer game (RTS, anyway) Westwood Studios ever made. After Renegade, which wasn't an RTS, Westwood largely moved to Petroglyph and the series was taken over by internal EA studios. Red Alert 2 is the last main Command and Conquer game to bear the Westwood label, and it is definitely worthy of it. After all, nothing quite says "awesome" as 10 bomb-bearing airships descending upon an enemy base!

Sometimes you just need to sit down, slide a floppy into your A: drive, and enjoy gaming retro style. We know this all too well! That's why we have a list of the best and brightest from days long gone. These are some of our favorite games of all time, and we're sure that you'll love them as much as we do, if not more. Welcome to Boot Disk, and enjoy the retro ride!

Once upon a time, there was a wildly popular real-time strategy game that helped create the genre as we know it. Westwood's Dune 2 created the modern real-time strategy game, and almost all of the features introduced in it have been used widely in other real-time strategy games since. While it is a great game, it wasn't until Westwood's second game in the genre that real-time strategy as both a single-player experience and as a multiplayer phenomenon became apparent. Command and Conquer (sometimes referred to as Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn to separate it from the other games) has one of the most lasting effects on the genre, with only Blizzard's games being this influential to real-time strategy on this sort of scale. There's a reason that Command and Conquer has recieved a long-running franchise with fantastic games.

Las Vegas-based Westwood Studios was responsible for the first RTS game ever made (in Dune II) and made its big mark by creating the Command and Conquer game franchise. Electronic Arts bought that series and then shut down Westwood to bring the franchise to their Los Angeles studios.

Some of the original Westwood team members stayed in Vegas to form Petroglyph Games (Star Wars: Empire at War; Universe at War: Earth Assault and the upcoming Mytheon). Now another Westwood Games co-founder, Brett Sperry, has helped to form yet another Las Vegas-based developer, Jet Set Games. He also has a number of former Westwood team members with him.

Unfortunately for PC gamers it looks like Jet Set is concentrating its development efforts (currently unrevealed) for console and iPhone platforms. Still it's nice to know that some of the folks behind the original C&C titles are back making games ..and who knows? They may decide they could return to the platform that got them famous in the first place.