Age of Empires: Definitive Edition

The dawn of civilisation. Stone Age hunter-gatherers give way to Bronze Age farmers and Iron Age warriors. Across the world tribes are rising to greatness, founding villages that will become the first great cities and then the centres of vast empires.

Age of Empires, released in 1997, was a late addition to the real-time strategy genre, following on the heels of WarCraft (1994) and Command and Conquer (1995) and released almost simultaneously with Total Annihilation (1997). Whilst the other games in the nascent genre were fantasy or science fiction in genre, Age of Empires drew on history for its inspiration, and was particularly inspired by the historical, turn-based Civilization series.

Age of Empires is, at heart, an RTS as usual. You start off with a base - in this case a town centre - and can build worker units from the base. These gather resources, which can be used to construct further buildings, which in turn producer military units (archers, infantry, cavalry and ships) you can then take into battle. So far, so standard.

Age of Empires does do a few things differently, though. There's a huge amount of emphasis placed on support buildings which offer upgrades: send your 20 non-upgraded infantry guys into battle and they're likely to get slaughtered, but carefully choose from a selection of weapons and armour upgrades (you're rarely so flush with resources that you can upgrade everything) and they can turn into tanks capable of absorbing twice as much damage and dealing out more.

Resources are divided into several types: food is plentiful (effectively infinite, once you've researched upgraded farms) and wood is usually commonplace, but gold and stone can be much harder to track down and will require aggressive early exploration of the map and the securing and defending of resource points. Once you have a steady stream of resources, you have to protect them (sometimes a difficult task if you end up with half a dozen resourcing operations going on in remote parts of the map) and you also have to strike a balance between gathering resources and going on the offensive: the campaigns have a tight default limit of 50 units between both resource-gatherers and military forces, and it's not uncommon to have so many workers doing stuff that you realise you can't sustain an army of more than 10 or 15 guys. Go the other direction and you may end up with a nice, big army, but not enough resources coming in to replace losses in the field at a sufficient clip. There are some ways of increasing the population gap to sidestep this problem, though. One nice touch is that you can sometimes get the same resource from different sources: food can be acquired by any mixture of farms, hunters, berry-pickers and fishing boats.

The game is also notable for its slow pace versus its competitors: units take ages to build, and making your way through the tech and research tree can be slow going. The first two campaigns in the game do a good job of indulging this pace, but then the next few throw that out in the window and encourage a much more aggressive playstyle, which can be jarring. You can overcome the slow building issue by building more unit production centres (so construct four barracks rather than one), but this obviously stretches your resources even further.

Age of Empires does a lot right. The more complex resource management and pared-back military operations make this a somewhat more thoughtful game than its contemporaries, but also one where levelling up satisfyingly and getting a good loop of resource-gathering and then military deployment going can be tricky. The game is more challenging on this level than, say, Red Alert or WarCraft II, which both encourage and reward a far more speedy and aggressive commitment to warfare and much more simplistic resource management. There's also a nice historical intro and debriefing after each mission, setting events in a genuine historical context.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems. The Definitive Edition of the game, despite remastering the game's graphics beautifully, does not fix some of the old problems and introduces new one. Pathfinding is excruciating, perhaps the worst of all the classic RTS games, with armies in particular taking absurd routes to get to their destinations. There's little to no ability to control formations, so your slower, heavier tanks will simply fall behind your speedier skirmishers rather than staying in front of them to soak up damage. It does feel like almost every building takes twice as long to produce units as it really should, making for slow going at the start of each map.

There's also a plethora of bugs in the game. The most annoying is one that the game will sometimes "merge" a number of units standing near one another into some horrible mutant gestalt, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. The gestalt may break apart into its constituent members at some point, or stand there (presumably screaming in existential terror) until you put it out of its misery. Needless to say, it is incredibly irksome if half of your army decides to fold into a gibbering mass of limbs just before you launch your final assault on the enemy stronghold.

Another bug is related to difficulty. For some reason, the game defaults to the hardest difficulty on several missions rather than using the difficulty you've actually selected. This makes for unpredictable difficulty spikes where the game becomes so challenging it's borderline unplayable at times (and Age of Empires comes from that time period when "Hard" in games meant "actually really hard"), not helped by the pathfinding and units-merging issues.

The bugs, unfortunately, are prominent enough that they make playing and enjoying the game today much more challenging than it should be. When the bugs aren't happening and the player can get on with the game, there is enjoyment to be had. Unfortunately, this becomes more infrequent the deeper into the game you proceed.

Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (**½) is a beautiful-looking game and there's some fun to be had here (especially in the earlier campaigns), but a number of annoying bugs gradually escalate to make playing the game much more of a chore than it should be. The refusal to improve either the game's pathfinding or the sometimes-dunderheaded AI may have made a game that's true to its roots, but also one that's definitively been made obsolete by other games, most obviously the Definitive Edition of its own immediate sequel, Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, as well as the splendidly-updated Age of Mythology. Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is available for PC now.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS movie gets its star

The new Dungeons & Dragons movie has found its lead actor, with Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton) being cast in the lead role.

British-Zimbabwean actor Page is currently a hot property following his star role as Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings, on Bridgerton, which is now Netflix's biggest-ever TV show. His previous credits include Fresh Meat, Waterloo Road, Roots and For the People on television, and Survivor, Mortal Engines and Sylvie's Love in film. Page is slated to host Saturday Night Live in the USA this week, a sure sign of him being a hot ticket of the moment.

Page is joining an already-impressive cast, including Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Justice Smith. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Horrible Bosses, Game Night) are writing and directing the picture for Paramount.

Production is expected to start on the movie in the next few weeks at the Titanic Studios in Belfast, Northern Ireland, formerly home to Game of Thrones.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Vice City, Miami, 1986. Tommy Vercetti gets out of jail after doing fifteen years for his criminal gang. They reward him with a flight to Miami and a well-paying job. When the job goes south, Vercetti is left in debt to some angry gangsters and in order to survive, he has to carve his own criminal empire out of the sunshine city.

Vice City started life as an expansion for Grand Theft Auto III, Rockstar Games' enormous 2001 mega-hit. Early during development, the company looked at the enormous and rapid progress they were making and decided to turn it into its own standalone game. Released in 2002 - astonishingly barely a year after the previous title - it won immediate praise for its much greater scope and expanse.

Vice City is superficially identical to its forebear: you control a character, this time the named and voiced Tommy Vercetti, and guide him around a city. The goal is to make money, which Tommy achieves by doing various jobs for shady characters and gangs, as well as furthering the main story. You can get around on foot or by driving cars or sailing boats. There's also a lot of side-activities replicated from the previous game, such as working as a vigilante, a paramedic, a fireman or a taxi driver.

This game takes all these elements and expands them further. You have more vehicles to drive, including the welcome addition of motorbikes, and you can also pilot aircraft. There are helicopters (even a military chopper) and seaplanes available to speedily travel across the city, and a much greater variety of boats. The side-activities are also bolstered by the addition of a pizza delivery errand mission and being able to sell drugs from an ice cream van. There's likewise many more activities for racing (including aerial races and stock car racing). The city is also bigger, with Vice City clocking in at around twice the size of Liberty City, but being much easier to navigate thanks to a better street layout. There's a much vaster roster of weapons to use as well, with weapons now divided into categories.

In one of the game's biggest additions, you can buy up additional property in the form of businesses (including an ice cream company, a car showroom, a taxi rank and a boatyard) and, after completing a few jobs to get them up and running, collect a regular income from them.

These are all nice improvements on the formula, but the most noticeable change is the greater detail everything is presented in. Not just graphically (although the much more colourful backdrop of Vice City is a huge improvement over the grey-ish Liberty City), but in terms of story and character. Rockstar had refined the engine to more convincingly present character movement and conversations, so there's now more elaborate cutscenes before each mission, expanding on the story. Your character having a name and being able to talk immediately makes things more engaging (even if main voice actor Ray Liotta sounds like he's phoning it in about half the time) and relatable, and the game is able to better present your changing relationships with secondary characters like Lance, Kent Paul and Ken Rosenberg. Certainly the story and characterisation is a huge improvement over the very bare-bones narrative in Grand Theft Auto III.

These elements all make for a better, bigger, longer and more engrossing game than its forebear (Vice City clocks in at around 25-26 hours compared to under 20 for its forebear, though that's not counting really time-consuming activities like finding all the secret packages). The game's biggest asset, though, is its soundtrack. The game's radio stations are solid gold, packed with well-chosen tracks from the 1980s and earlier, and for many people there's still few open-world gaming moments to compare to cruising along the beach roads listening to the theme from Miami Vice.

There are problems. The game's shooting is unfortunately mostly the same as GTA3's meaning it's twitchy, over-responsive and it's difficult to be precise without using scoped weapons. Fortunately, combat is fairly forgiving and the AI's shooting is far worse than yours, meaning most fights should still be easily won. GTA3's harsh save system is also still in use: there is no auto-saving, at all, so you have to manually drive to a safehouse between missions to save, and if you die halfway through a really tough mission, tough luck, you have to start from scratch. Fortunately, as with its forebear there are rarely missions that are so long that this is a major problem.

The other problem - which will vary immensely by player - is that it's hard to feel much sympathy with the protagonist. Apart possibly from GTA5's Trevor, Tommy Vercetti is easily the most amoral psychopath of a protagonist the series has ever featured, someone who's quite happy to go and murder innocents to prove his value to a potential client. Tommy is supposed to be a monster (if nothing else does, the Scarface-aping drug kingpin missions make that abundantly clear) and it certainly explains the ultraviolence even the most careful player may find themselves inadvertently unleashing, but he does feel a bit of a cartoon character compared to the protagonists we've had in the series since then.

As with GTA3, the question arises if Vice City is worth playing in 2021. This game is nineteen years old and the open-world action genre has evolved a long way since then. But I'd say yes. It's a colourful action caper with a strong story and it's genuinely impressive to see how it improved on its predecessor in less than a year of development (I suspect more time will have been been spent on Grand Theft Auto VI's fire hydrants alone, when it finally comes out). It's arguably the game in the series - even now - with the best-developed sense of time and place as well.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (****) has aged much better than its predecessor and is an interesting and rich open-world action game, if you can overlook its obviously aged graphics and sometimes clunky game design decisions. The game is available now for PC, Android and Apple devices, and of course in compatibility mode for later generations of X-Box and PlayStation.

Technical Note: As with GTA3, for this replay I used Qualcom's Definitive Edition mod. This mod replaces and updates some textures and makes the game play nice in widescreen with modern resolutions. It also eliminates some old bugs from the game and fixes the multi-monitor problem that plagued its predecessor.

Offworld Trading Company

In the future, mankind is busy colonising Mars and the moons of Jupiter. The expansion has been privatised, with several corporations engaging in financial warfare to gain the initiative.

Offworld Trading Company is a strategy title from Mohawk Games where you play the head of a corporation trying to win the race to colonise Mars and, in the expansions Jupiter's Forge and The Europa Wager, the moons of Jupiter. In a novel move, there is no capacity here for military action. Aside from bribing pirates into interfering with your opponents' supply lines and occasionally sending a demolition team to blow up a single building, there is no way of directly confronting your rivals.

Instead, the game is about resources, supply lines and accumulating cash. At the start of each mission you have to choose where to place your base. You can scan for the optimal location, but if you take too long, the other players (AI or human) will get the best locations and you could end up losing out. But of course if you choose too soon, you may find a suboptimal location whilst another player gets cooler area surrounded by resources. That done, you get to build up to five resource-gathering operations. You can mine aluminium, iron, silicon, carbon or water. Additional buildings you construct at your base produce food, oxygen and fuel, glass, electronics and chemicals from those resources. However, you can only build five facilities at a time. You then have to pay a lot of money and resources to level up your base to a second tier, where you get another five facility slots and so on, up to five tiers. Each mission has different finances in operation, so you constantly have to adjust your strategy: you might find electronics nearly worthless on one level but vitally important on another.

Additional twists come in the form of supply and demand mechanics. You may find yourself producing vast quantities of water, which is in urgent need, so you sell lots of water...which brings the price crashing down and suddenly you're producing tons of a substance which is now effectively worthless. You can then hoard water for ages to send the price back up, or build a hacking station and get some tech guys to manipulate the market for you. Building a starport is also a great idea, allowing you to mass-transport resources back to Earth, which has a different supply and demand system going on, but a starport is hugely expensive and you may prefer to focus on building up your resource-gathering operation. But missions which require you to "buy out" your opponent by buying shares in their company require massive influxes of cash that only a starport can really generate.

The result is a game of Wall Street if it was written by Kim Stanley Robinson and set in space. Oh, and each game rarely lasts more than hour, frequently much less than that, with buy-outs being hard and brutal. This is not a slow, steady strategy game you can let unfold slowly over many days of carefully-weighed options, but a cutthroat game of backstabbing, commercial subterfuge and ruthless information control. It's like Civilization VI if it had the furious pacing of Street Fighter II Turbo.

The result is a finely-balanced game of give and take, supply and weaponised demand. It's fiendish, intelligent and at times frustrating (an early mistake in setting up a supply line can doom your entire campaign), but also rewarding. Blowing up enemy cities in strategy games may be entertaining, but buying out a rival corporation and firing their CEO with a smug grin on your face is far more satisfying.

Between the original game and the two expansions, there's a lot of content here. Multiple corporations, each with their own quirks (robots that don't need food, scrappy junkyard guys who specialise in cheap and cheerful operations, or hyper-advanced scientists who over-engineer every solution to a problem), are available to play, and new ideas trickle in during the game. Once you get used to playing on Mars, moving to Io or Europa can mean some readjusting as you adapt to the changing landscapes.

On the negative side of things, Offworld Trading Company shows most of its hand early. New mechanics and ideas do emerge in later campaigns, but these are variations on the theme. If you lock in and love the theme, there's a huge amount of game here. For those who want more novelty in their games, the relentless pace and repetitive moves may start to grate after a dozen or so hours. But it's one of those games you can easily put down for a while and come back a few weeks later and clock in a few more missions or campaigns.

Offworld Trading Company (****) is a refreshingly different kind of strategy game, one that is less interested in slow-paced turtling and more in a straight-for-the-jugular, hyper-capitalist form of (almost) non-violent warfare. It's different and interesting, but over the long run may be a little wearying. The game is available on PC now.

Happy 30th Anniversary to LEMMINGS

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most successful video games of all time, Lemmings.

Most people got their first chance to play Lemmings when a three-level demo of the game was attached to Amiga Format magazine for their Christmas 1990 issue. The response to the demo was enormous, inspiring the publisher, Psygnosis, to rush out a more substantial, paid demo of the game a few weeks later. People were so excited by the game that, on its release on Valentine's Day 1991, it immediately blew the top off the sales charts.

The game was subsequently ported to almost every single gaming format that can be thought of, including modern mobile platforms. Highly conservative figures suggest that at least 20 million copies of Lemmings have been sold, but the true figure is likely enormously higher.

Lemmings was developed by DMA Design, based in Dundee, Scotland. The game was inspired by an animation put together by artist Mike Dailly on Deluxe Paint 3, showing a small, pixelated figure walking with impressive fluidity. Designers Russell Kay and David Jones fleshed out the idea to have a huge number of these figures who would constantly walk without stopping, unless made to, even if meant their deaths. The behaviour was reminiscent of the (mostly apocryphal) idea that lemmings will keep walking even if it means drowning.

The game design came together quite quickly. Each level opens with a trapdoor in the sky opening and a stream of lemmings issuing forth to a cry of "Let's go!"; the number of lemmings and the frequency of their arrival varies according to the level. The lemmings then walk until they can walk no more, at which point they turn around or die. The player can give lemmings certain jobs, such as building bridges, digging through the ground, parachuting (which allows them to survive falls that are ordinarily fatal), blocking (causing other lemmings to retreat) or, in extreme cases, exploding. A common tactic is to separate several lemmings from the pack, block the others into a safe area, and then have the other lemmings explore ahead of the horde, building the route needed to guide the pack to safety. Some maps feature elaborate traps, metal ground (which can't be dug through) and other complications. The simplicity of the gameplay rapidly escalates into elaborate, torturously-designed levels that have players tearing their hair out in frustration.

Lemmings was succeeded by an expansion, Oh No! More Lemmings (1991) and multiple sequels: Lemmings 2: The Tribes (1993), All New World of Lemmings (1994), 3D Lemmings (1995) and Lemmings Revolution (2000). Surprisingly, the game has not seen a new title in more than twenty years, or even a high-quality remaster.

The reason for that might be because the developers got sidetracked by another project: the immense success of Lemmings gave them the financial resources required to make a series of ambitious games such as Hired Guns and Walker, and also a game about cops and robbers called Race 'n' Chase. A thorough redesign later, this game was finally released in 1997 under the title Grand Theft Auto, and DMA Design scored a hit to rival Lemmings. Rebranded Rockstar North, the studio went on to develop several of the biggest-selling video games of all time, including Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Maybe they'll get back to the green-haired guys one day.

Lemmings also had celebrity fans: fantasy author Terry Pratchett lost such a titanic amount of productivity to the game that he deleted it from his computer's hard drive and destroyed the floppy disks, and wrote a reference to the game into his novel Interesting Times (1994), in which a golem army is controlled through an identical interface to the game.

Grand Theft Auto III

Liberty City, 2001. A young man takes part in a bank robbery, is betrayed by his girlfriend and is sent to jail. Escaping from the prison van when another prisoner is busted out, he lays low in the Portland district of the city, doing jobs for the Mafia and building a reputation for getting work done, whilst he plots his revenge.

Released in October 2001, Grand Theft Auto III has been occasionally described as the most important video game ever made. It wasn't the first open-world game - Elite, at least, had that locked down in 1984 - and it wasn't the first game that allowed you to steal cars and commit crimes - see the top-down, 2D Grand Theft Auto (1997), its two expansions and first sequel - but it was the first game that combined the two elements with a 3D viewpoint to create the first open-world action game set in a city, with an eye to accessibility for the masses. Alongside The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released the following year, GTA3 set the scene for today's dominant genre of video games.

Being - somehow - twenty years old, GTA3 is still somewhat embryonic in its presentation of open-world gameplay and storytelling. The story is minimalist to the point of almost non-existence. There are very, very short cutscenes at the start of the game and before each mission, your character never speaks (making his motivations inscrutable) and doesn't even have a name ("Claude" was a retcon introduced in GTA: San Andreas three years later). This is weird and occasionally confusing, but also refreshing: later GTA and Red Dead Redemption games fell a little bit too much in love with their cutscenes, with it taking longer and longer to actually get into the action. GTA3's brisk pace is refreshing in comparison. You can play the entire game from start to finish in well under 20 hours, less than half of San Andreas or GTA4's playtime and less than a third of Red Dead Redemption 2, although if you decide to hunt down every secret package and stunt jump, without looking online, it might take a bit longer than that.

Liberty City v2.0* feels quite small these days. Not tiny, but definitely on the smaller side of things. This isn't completely a bad thing, and it's certainly possible to learn your way around the entire city by heart, something that is flat-out impossible in modern open world games where the city is gigantic but you never have reason to visit 75% of it. The small size of the city also alleviates some problems in UI and presentation. There isn't a discrete map screen, only your minimap in the corner, and the game only places dots showing the direction to your target, not the optimal route. On occasion you'll be thundering towards your destination with a tight time limit only to realise with horror that it's on the other side of a major river and you have to double back to find a bridge or tunnel. There's also no automated saving, at all, and certainly no automatic saving before missions: if you fail a mission you have to manually drive back to the trigger point. A much smaller city makes all of these problems far less aggravating than if it was as big as cities in later games in the series.

As with most open world games, you have the option of pursuing several goals at once. You usually have one or more missions available and can also jump in a taxi, police car, fire engine or ambulance to make extra money. It is possible to shut down questlines if you are asked in one mission to kill the mission-giver of another, which is realistic but can also be somewhat annoying if you're trying to 100% the game, so you have to be careful to make sure you're not about to make parts of the game's story inaccessible. The game also throws repeatable missions at you, usually racing of one kind or another.

Some missions also require combat, although not as much as you'd think. This is a good thing because combat in the game is weak. Shooting is unsatisfying and the mouse controls are fairly twitchy and sensitive, making precise shooting difficult. Fortunately the game is fairly forgiving about accuracy outside of using things like sniper rifles (and scoped weapons are much easier to use than the standard ones). 

The amount of content for the game was impressive back in 2001, although no great shakes these days. That does lead to a key question: is there any reason to play Grand Theft Auto III in 2021, beyond nostalgia? Certainly from a historic point of view, it's interesting to mess around in for a few hours, and I think people will be surprised to see what a game that's twenty years old was capable of, such as rideable subways and surface trains (which are missing from some of the later games in the series). The car handling is also surprisingly solid, better than some recent games (cough), the soundtrack remains quite decent, the satirical radio humour is (if anything) even more relevant today and what voice acting there is, is excellent.

Grand Theft Auto III (***½) is an important historical artefact of a video game, and has aged better than I was expecting. I wouldn't necessarily to recommend it as anyone's first open-world game today, but perhaps if you're a deeply invested fan of Grand Theft Auto V, it'll be worth going back to check out where series really got going. The game is available now for PC, Android and Apple devices, and of course on PlayStation 2 and X-Box (the original) if you still have one working (or for later consoles via compatibility mode).

Technical Note: For this replay of GTA3 I used Qualcom's "Definitive Edition" mod. This is a simple mod that makes the game work in widescreen at modern resolution and improves textures without changing the original aesthetics or intent of the game. This also removes a few outstanding bugs from the original version of the game (such as the famous one where running down a slope occasionally throws you hundreds of feet through the air, usually with fatal results). Obviously this is only works on the PC version of the game. It should be noted that GTA3 really dislikes multi-monitor setups and you have to disable your secondary monitors before launching the game if you want to play it properly.

* Liberty City v1.0 appears in Grand Theft Auto (1997); Liberty City v3.0 is the primary setting for Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and its expansions The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony (both 2009). Liberty City v2.0 also appears in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (2006).

Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection

In 1995, Westwood Studios released Command & Conquer. Building on the formula of their earlier title, Dune II, they helped perfect the real-time strategy genre. A year later, they did it again with a spin-off game, Red Alert. And twenty-five years later, the team got back together to update the two games for modern gamers.

Command & Conquer (retcon-subtitled Tiberian Dawn) wasn't the first RTS game - progenitors ranging from Cosmic Conquest (1982) to Herzog Zwei (1989) predated it - but it was arguably the game that exploded the genre into the mainstream. The core formula is present and correct. You build a base, set about gathering resources (in this case, tiberium, a mysterious crystal that has fallen to Earth in meteorites) and use that to construct additional buildings, such as barracks and war factories, which in turn produce vehicles and troops. You assemble an army and attack the enemy in real-time, with a careful balance having to be maintained between building up and protecting your resources and maintaining your war machine.

The formula is outstanding fun and remains so, but it should be noted that the OG C&C is not the best example of the genre. It's curiously slow paced, with it taking ages to get a base running and an army on the field. It takes a long time to build units and their effectiveness in battle is questionable: the unit roster is decidedly limited and the pathfinding and AI is ropey, at best. These things have only been marginally improved in the remaster, which is more focused on graphical fidelity. Being able to zoom in on your base and guide the wonderfully-animated units around in unthinkable levels of detail by 1995 standards is tremendous fun, as is experiencing the nostalgia generated by the soundtrack.

In terms of being an actual game you'll want to play in 2021, the original Command & Conquer is probably not going to hold your attention for too long. Map design is a mixed bag and there's far, far too many gimmicky missions where you can't build a base (the whole point of the game) and instead have to guide five easily-killed units on an escort mission or something. The truth is that the original Command & Conquer got a lot of passes for ropey gameplay because the core RTS loop it perfected is so compelling. But compared to StarCraft, Age of Empires or Total Annihilation, the lacklustre map design, and unit roster quickly tell against it.

Fortunately, for the sake of the project and the purchaser, Red Alert is a completely different kettle of fish. Despite using only a marginally modified version of the engine, the game is far sharper, much faster-paced, has a much stronger unit roster for both sides and an even better soundtrack. Establishing a base is much quicker and more intuitive, and there's less gimmicky missions, and those that are included are a lot more fun than their original counterparts. This is still a limited game by the standards of just a few years later, let alone twenty-five, but the fast, furious gameplay, knowing sense of humour and modest price makes a full revisit of Red Alert very worthwhile indeed.

As an overall package, you can't fault Command & Conquer: Remastered's fidelity to the original game whilst also improving what needed to be improved. Between the two games and three expansions, there's a ton of content here, and it's fascinating to revisit such iconic games. In terms of actual gameplay, C&C itself (***) has not aged well, but Red Alert (****) remains a thunderously enjoyable, fun game to play. In terms of deeper, more strategic gameplay, stronger unit selections and better map designs, you may want to check out Homeworld Remastered, StarCraft Remastered or Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, but this package is a lot of fun for a reasonably decent price. Hopefully EA will consider a second package focusing on Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and the best C&C game ever made, Red Alert 2.

Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection is available now on PC.

GAME OF THRONES prequel HOUSE OF THE DRAGON starts shooting in April, adds new castmembers

The Game of Thrones spin-off/prequel, House of the Dragon, will start shooting in the UK in April and has added another four castmembers.

The new series is primarily set 170 years before the events of Game of Thrones (not 300, as keeps being erroneously reported) and tells the story of the Dance of Dragons, a huge civil war between two branches of House Targaryen, sparked when the king dies and leaves the Iron Throne to his daughter Rhaenyra, but her much-younger, half-brother Aegon II claims the throne as well, splitting the Seven Kingdoms into two camps. The resulting war is brutal because both sides command dragons in battle.

It sounds like the first season will actually start some time before the war and will show the countdown to the conflict beginning. Announced castmembers so far include Paddy Considine, Olivia Cooke, Emma D'Arcy and Matt Smith.

HBO's chief content officer, Casey Bloys, has also confirmed that HBO is moving forward with development of a second round of script and series ideas, in consultation with A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin (the first round resulted in House of the Dragon and a pilot for another series tentatively called The Longest Night, but that project did not proceed further). This second round of discussions includes ideas previously off the table, such as a TV series based on Martin's popular Dunk & Egg short stories. Bloys also confirmed there had been "really embryonic" discussions about an adult, animated series set in the world for streaming service HBO Max.

The newly-announced castmembers are as follows:

Steven Toussaint is a British actor active since the 1990s. He has a history in shows such as Lewis, Berlin Station, Doctros, CSI: Miami, Doctor Who and Pine Gap. In House of the Dragon he is playing the role of Corlys Velaryon, the Sea Snake, the greatest sailor and explorer in the history of the Seven Kingdoms. Having sailed to the remotest corners of the known world, including the distant island of Ib and the mysterious city of Asshai beyond the Jade Sea, he has returned home to the islan dof Driftmark. He is one of the richest and most powerful mean in Westeros and an ally of Prince Daemon Targaryen.

Rhys Ifans is a Welsh actor of long standing. He has appeared in films such as Twin Town, Notting Hill, Enduring Love, The Amazing Spider-Man and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1. In television he is best-known for playing Mycroft Holmes on Elementary and Hector DeJean on Berlin Station. In House of the Dragon he is playing Lord Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King and the most powerful man in the realm behind only King Viserys. Lord Otto is a political enemy of Prince Daemon, whom he considers a threat to the realm due to his rash temper. Otto's daughter, the Lady Alicent, may be the most eligible would-be bride in the Seven Kingdoms.

Sonoya Mizuno is a Japanese-British actress, best-known for her collaborations with Alex Garland. She starred in his films Ex Machina and Annihilation, and his TV series Devs. Her other roles include La La Land, Beauty and the Beast, Crazy Rich Asians and Maniac. In House of the Dragon she is playing the role of Mysaria, a mysterious woman from Lys who becomes the paramour and confidante of Prince Daemon Targaryen. When war threatens, she reveals skills and talents that will become of great use to her lover.

Eve Best is a British actor best-known for playing Dr. Eleanor O'Hara in Nurse Jackie. She also appeared in The King's Speech as Wallis Simpson and The Challenger Disaster as Sally Ride. In House of the Dragon she is playing Princess Rhaenys Velaryon, the king's cousin who was married to Corlys Velaryon as a political marriage. At one time, Rhaenys was considered an heir to the Iron Throne but was passed over in favour of Viserys simply because of her gender. This has led to Rhaenys being dubbed "the Queen Who Never Was," a cause of some bitterness to her and her husband. Rhaenys is a dragonrider. Her steed, Meleys the Red Queen, is considered one of the most wily and cunning of the Targaryen dragons, and one of the fastest. 

Pedro Pascal joins THE LAST OF US TV series as Joel

Following yesterday's announcement that the Last of Us TV series had found its Ellie in former Game of Thrones actress Bella Ramsey, HBO has completed the main cast of the show with hot actor-of-the-moment Pedro Pascal. Pascal will play Joel, the male lead of the franchise.

Pascal rose to fame playing Prince Oberyn Martell, also in Game of Thrones (though he left the show long before Ramsey joined), and DEA agent Javier Peña in Netflix's Narcos. His film appearances include Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) and Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). Since 2019 he has starred as the main character in Disney+'s Star Wars: The Mandalorian. It has been confirmed that he will continue to star in The Mandalorian, with HBO and Disney working out a schedule to accommodate him.

The Last of Us Season 1 is in pre-production at HBO and should start shooting in the coming weeks for a 2022 debut. Season 3 of The Mandalorian should start shooting afterwards for a mid-to-late 2022 bow; the show has been pushed back in the schedule to accommodate a spin-off show, The Book of Boba Fett, which will take over its late 2021 airing slot.

Lucasfilm drops actress Gina Carano

Lucasfilm has parted ways with actress Gina Carano, who had played New Republic soldier Cara Dune in The Mandalorian and was poised for further appearances in the franchise.

The decision was made after Carano made social media posts mocking the Holocaust by comparing the "challenges" faced by conservative supporters in the USA to the fate of millions of people murdered by fascists in the Second World War. Carano quickly seemed to realise the error of her post by deleting the material, but too late.

Carano had faced previous criticism for her support for unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and social media posts mocking minorities, but had Disney's support after post some apologies and clarifications. However, the latest incident seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

Carano rose to fame as a mixed martial artist in the mid and late 2000s. She started acting in 2008, with video and voice appearances as Natasha in the video game Red Alert 3, and gained international fame for her performances in Fast & Furious 6 (2013) and Deadpool (2016). She starred in seven episodes of The Mandalorian and was reportedly being considered for return appearances in the show and possibly a larger role in the in-development spin-off, Rangers of the New Republic. Those projects will now continue without her involvement.