Good to see again Commander (Unofficail third patch for C&C: The First Decade)

(I made that)

Command & Conquer: The First Decade, is a great collection of the C&C games taking you from the original game, released in 1995, up to Generals and Zero Hour from 2003. Which you can now get for as little as £10, all bundled into one DVD and updated to run optimally on Windows XP.

Unfortunately EA sort of mess up this version, because many faults and bugs were reported. With many of them didn't actually effect the original games! The first two patches just fixed these problems and didn't add anything extra to it.

Now there's an unofficial third patch, (download from here) which is available. Now EA were planning a third patch, but they have been beaten to it by the user NathanCNC, with help from other community members.

Now this patch is pretty hot stuff and is not a buggy piece of software. It's a must have if you got C&C: The First Decade and it's better than any previous patch EA or Westwood have ever done for any C&C game.

OK, so what so special about it?

The unofficial patch, which is 115Mb, fixes bugs in Command & Conquer and the Red Alert, (updated to version 1.06 and 3.03 respectively), which are now both playable over the net. You could do this before, but it took some hacking, to get it right.

It removes unnecessary video files, freeing up a gigabyte of HDD space, therefore dropping the install from 9.8GB (if you are have install the very ugly and not talk about much C&C Renegade), to around 8.8 GB and has integrated extra official Westwood maps from downloadable map packs. The quality of those video files is not effected by this new patch.

Online/LAN has also been fixed for Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, and Yuri’s Revenge. Manuals in PDF form for all the games have also been added with the patch. The paper manual in the compilation unfortunately does not contain any backstory of information on the Command & Conquer series. Instead, the 70 page booklet only contains unit and structure descriptions for each of the games, as well as the standard pages such as warnings for epilepsy and the obligatory 'notes' section. Only Command & Conquer has its original manual provided which is in PDF form in its installed folder. However, the unofficial 1.03 patch installed PDF files for each additional game.

You also get registry entry fixes, (Generals installation/uninstall program is pants! Don't get me started on that one, it's a long story), as well as the unique missions for Command and Conquer from the N64 and the PS1 versions of the game.

But this is only the start of the list, (full list at Commandandconquer.com), but the best new feature by far in the patch is the inclusion of a game launcher for all 12 games! Where you don't need the disk to play any of the games. Yes even for Generals and Zero Hour!

There is a disclaimer from EA on that page about how they don’t offer any help with any specific issues for Patch 1.0.3, but the patch has been download thousands of time by now and it seems to work fine, so they "feel" the need to promote the new patch rather than looking incompetent.

One thing I would like to see, if there is ever a fourth patch by EA or whoever, is the inclusion of wide-screen resolution options in every game, without having to go into the INI file for each game and editing it to the right resolution and camera hight. I can do it for Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2 and Generals, but why should I have to!? I do know that they are recruiting people to do a future stand alone patch for Renegade and are promising great and wonderful things for it!

But what a difference wide-screen makes! Until l than I would recommend Widescreen Gaming Forum if you want to do this too.

Copy and pasted from the other forum thanks for this i think i will install it this time! If i install the box set again! OBTW you spelt third wrong in the title!

What! You think I'm going to let my some of my best posts go to waste on another forum? No way I'm letting that happening.

And yahooo, you're finally going to install it!

So I can post up my game reviews? Awesome!

Yep, going to do the same with some of my hardware reviews.