May 02, 2017

Today At Work, I Cried...

...but in a good way.  Let me explain.

Anybody here ever play the Command & Conquer games?  I played one of them, and that experience, along with the time spent playing the original Warcraft game, convinced me that I really disliked the Real Time Strategy genre.  One thing that C&C was really well known for, though, is the music.  One track in particular, the theme song to C&C: Red Alert, is still famous today:  Hell March.


It appears to be quite the thing to make military hype videos using the track, ranging from the deadly serious:


...to the not so serious:


...to the flat-out hilarious:


So this afternoon, whilst in the middle of a particularly uncomfortable claim, the original Hell March began playing in my ears.  And I had one of my creative visions.  It wasn't nearly as complete as the one that drove me to create "...Angel.", but I'll be darned if it didn't hit me just as hard.  I immediately began to grin as I thought about it, and after a minute or two I began to laugh as quietly as I could.  It became harder and harder to not just begin guffawing, and tears began rolling down my cheeks from the amount of jocularity involved.

So what was the great idea?  Something a little like this.  Except more

In tears, I was.  Even now, it makes me giggle.  A lot.  I want this.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:59 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 241 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Thank you, I needed that laugh.

Posted by: GreyDuck at May 02, 2017 10:38 PM (rKFiU)

2 Steven's greatest fear has finally come to pass.  The Anatidae army is on the march!

Posted by: Siergen at May 03, 2017 10:54 AM (fqStN)

3 At some point in the long lost mists of time, I acquired copies of the OST for C&C, RA, RA2, and C&C:TS, and many memories and feels surface when one of the tracks comes up in the shuffle. The RA2 remix of Hell March is okay, but doesn't hold up to the original. Even kids many years younger than the song seem to recognize it.

Posted by: Will at May 03, 2017 12:07 PM (tWuac)

4 You are a very silly man, and I'm not going to interview you.

Posted by: Ed Hering at May 03, 2017 01:06 PM (kublq)

5 I played a TON of C&C, Red Alert, Warcraft II, and Total Annihilation.  For a long time, RTS was my favorite game genre, and my friends and I would frequently gather for a weekend, set up a LAN, and play for 16 hours at a stretch or more.  Unfortunately, with all of us in one room like that, we'd usually turn the game music off,  I don't recall that song at all, which is a shame, as it's quite good.
OT: This book on the battle of Midway came up in my Amazon recommendations today.  Are you familiar with it, and does it look worthwhile?

Posted by: David at May 03, 2017 02:25 PM (Kdr95)

6 David, I had a copy of that book in my hot, sweaty hands a day or two after it came out.  It breaks no new ground, but it spends more time than usual on the run-up to the Battle itself.  So that's good.  I come at it from the point of view of someone who knows as much about the Battle as any amateur and more than most, so my view on it may be a little "more superior than thou", however.

If you're looking for a good basic overview of the Battle, though, you can do a lot worse.

Posted by: Wonderduck at May 03, 2017 08:33 PM (KNafx)

7 Thanks for the answer, onto the wish list it goes.  Now I just need to decide whether to get that next, or some of the Norman Friedman books...

Posted by: David at May 03, 2017 09:48 PM (JMkaQ)

8 Similar RTS from the same publisher: the Dune series. Dune 2 (probably too old), Dune 2000, and Emperor: Battle for Dune.
Identical basic format to C&C, deploy your construction building, harvest stuff, build units, crush enemies. Different stories, etc, but I enjoyed the Dune series a little more than the various C&C ones.

Posted by: bloatboy at May 05, 2017 11:26 AM (ldlZp)

9 I loved Dune 2.  Played it on my Amiga.  But there was a particular stage where I got walloped by enemy ornithopters every time, before I could build up any significant troop numbers.


Never knew there were sequels.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at May 06, 2017 06:17 AM (2yngH)

Hide Comments | Add Comment




What colour is a green orange?




30kb generated in CPU 0.017, elapsed 0.5099 seconds.
49 queries taking 0.4989 seconds, 287 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.