YMMV / Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn

YMMV page for the overall series:

• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series

Tiberian Dawn:

• Awesome Music: "Act on Instinct" is far and away the best song on the original soundtrack and the first to be played by default on missions. Updated remixes, sadly, don't do it justice, until the Command & Conquer Remastered compilation released 25 years after Tiberian Dawn included a fully remastered version of "Act on Instinct" that is not the OST version with sampled audio clips.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Two, in fact.
  • After you complete the 12th Nod campaign mission, you're treated to a cutscene of a spy plane crashing into a minaret. It's never really shown why the spy plane is crashing or even what faction it belongs to. Furthermore, the spy plane crashing has really nothing to do with the mission you just accomplished, which involves capturing a GDI Advanced Communication Center to steal Ion Cannon codes.
  • In the end credits for either faction (after the anchorwoman's report) you are shown random scenes along the left side of the screen. One of which shows underwater divers with diver propulsion vehicles who appear to be investigating something deep in the ocean. Then, a fourth diver swims nearby and fires some sort of bazooka that kills the other three divers and destroys their vehicles. Again, it's completely random with no explanation whatsoever of the divers, the factions they belong to, what the divers were looking for, or why the fourth diver killed them.
• Bizarro Episode: The PS1-exclusive "S3cr3t M1ss10n", accessed by inputting the password "PATSUX", is... strange, and definitely not canon. It puts you in control of GDI and you start with 12 Commandos and an MCV, an absolute ton of Tiberium north of you and a Nod base behind a river north-east of you that just sits there doing nothing and has no production structures. Oh, and your Orcas fire Obelisk of Light lasers instead of missiles, which only trivializes the level even more. The mission briefing is the silly cherry on top:

You have just been laid off without a month's pay from Weirdis. Your former bosses have hired the Frankekiiii mercenaries to protect them. You and eleven other former employees are to build a base and wipe them out! We have made special modifications to your Orcas to aid you in your quest for justice.

• Breather Level: Assuming you're playing the missions in order from the base game's campaigns, to the Covert Operations missions, to the console missions in the Remastered pack, the console missions are a huge step down in difficulty compared to the Covert Operations missions. The Covert Operations are notoriously difficult in terms of cryptic puzzle solving and general relentlessness from the enemy. The console missions, on the other hand, are more straightforward. Probably justified in that those missions were created with a controller in mind,^note the PS1 version advertised support for the then-upcoming PS Mouse and then never shipped with that support, while the N64 never had such a peripheral which would have required the difficulty to be lowered in order to compensate for the slower, more wonky controls.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • GDI's Grenadiers or Nod's Flamethrower Infantry can serve this role depending on who you're playing as in the campaign mode. While they can be easy to kill, both units can decimate your infantry and light armor very easily if you're not careful. This can be quite bothersome in certain campaign missions (notably Nod) that require you to infiltrate the enemy base with a small squad of units with no way to replace them.
  • The game's basic infantry, Minigunners, are easily overlooked, but can actually deal a ton of damage. Survivors from destroyed buildings can chip away at invading enemies and deal a lot more damage than expected. And since a money-starved AI will sell severely-damaged buildings, your forces may quickly be dealing with a serious swarm of them.
  • GDI's Airstrike, if you're on the receiving end. While the planes can be shot down, they move quite fast. They also drop payloads of napalm bombs that do big damage to buildings. Usually one plane will survive to bomb your buildings. However, if both planes ^note They usually come in pairs. drop their entire payloads on your Construction Yard, it will likely get destroyed and cause you some major headaches.
    • It gets even worse in the open-source port included in OpenRA, where the Airstrike is usable with both factions and can be used to decimate an entire army.
    • In the original game, the Airstrike had a quirk where the A.I would target any unit or structure that was the furthest north on the map. This meant that you could bait the airstrike by sending out units or building a durable structure furthest north to lure the planes away from critical targets. However, in the 2020 remaster this quirk was fixed and now the airstrike will target specific units and buildings, making it more dangerous.
  • If you're playing the GDI single-player campaign, then Nod's gun turrets will serve this purpose. They tend to be plopped randomly around the map (since the AI can apparently build structures anywhere). The gun turrets will take potshots at your forces from a range far beyond what any of them can retaliate, but the worst threat is that they can possibly take out your harvesters as they wander around to gather tiberium and can put your economy in danger. Thankfully, they get a little easier to deal with starting with the tenth GDI mission when the Orca is introduced.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Tiberian Dawn was originally released in 1995. Its story involves the substance of Tiberium which is highly fatal to human contact and spreads across the globe. One of the exposition cutscenes also explains that Tiberium is named after the Tiber River in Italy where it was first discovered. In real life 1995, there was an outbreak of Ebola in the African country of Zaire. Ebola, like Tiberium, is highly fatal, spreads easily, and also named after a river where it was first discovered.
  • The Nod campaign ending has you cyber-jacking GDI's Ion Cannon to destroy a random world monument. Afterwards, an anchorwoman delivers a somber news report mentioning that hundreds of innocent civilians were killed and rescue workers were still uncovering more bodies. Also, the anchorwoman mentions that the attack took place on a Tuesday. All of this eerily resembles the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon that would later take place years later on September 11th, 2001 (which was a Tuesday morning at the time).
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • EVA always says "Building" when you prompt a Barracks/Hand of Nod to produce infantry units. In the German port, the blood was recolored from red to black in compliance with the country's strict anti-violence regulations. In turn, this created the implication that the infantry are actually robots and not humans. Additionally, the next game added cyborgs as a Nod infantry unit.
  • The Nod ending allows the player to choose one of four targets to destroy with the Ion Cannon. Choosing the White House shows a cutscene that is very similar to the infamous destruction of the same building in the next year's Independence Day.
• Memetic Mutation: If you ask anyone what they remember about this game, the answer will probably be a combination of 1) the Mammoth tank, 2) the narmtastic FMV cutscenes, or 3) the hilariously stupid tiberium harvesters. The latter in particular were so memetic among the fandom that EA made sure to emphasize that the 2020 remaster didn't change anything about the game's harvester behavior.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • "Ion Cannon ready."
  • As for the Remastered version, hearing the newly-upscaled version of the original installation FMV end with "Installation complete. Welcome back, Commander."
• Polished Port:
  • The N64 version of Command & Conquer sacrificed full motion video to make the maps, vehicles, buildings, and superweapons in 3D, as well as a handful of exclusive missions.
  • The Sony PlayStation edition is a more minor case, featuring the Covert Operations expansion and its own set of exclusive missions.
  • The 2020 remaster adds upscaled graphics both in game and in cutscenes and features the option to switch between the new graphics and the classic version, as well as customisable controls, all of the missions from the Covert Operations expansion and both console ports, a skirmish mode, and a huge soundtrack, including original and remastered versions of the original tracks and even allowing the player to use some tracks from later games, so, yes you can play "Hell March" in this version. It also has Steam workshop support, opening the floodgates to various mods, some of which can make the game even easier!
• Porting Disaster: The PS1 port itself might or might not be unplayable, depending on your tastes. Despite the advertising hype before release that stated otherwise, it didn't actually support the yet-to-be-released PlayStation Mouse, so it's all thrown on the regular, non-analog gamepad. None of the advance commands that may come in use (like team creation and selection) are ever pointed out ingame, so the manual is your only savior. Apart from that, though, the controls are at their most comfortable, but then you need to know that C&C runs at really lush speed... which can't be changed anywhere. And you can't save within a mission, the game only giving you mission passwords. About all it has going for it is the inclusion of the expansion's missions and the FMVs, which the later N64 port had to axe.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Loading infantry up into transports has to be done one at a time; even if you group-select them and tell them to get into the APC or transport chopper, only one guy will go at a time. This was fixed in Red Alert and beyond, including the remaster, though some of the original behavior still bleeds through in that groups of units sent in all at once will sometimes stop loading up partway through for any reason they can come up with.
  • Having to build right next to a structure, rather than within a certain area of it. This mechanic made it so that player-created bases are often cluttered and hard to maneuver through, which is not at all helped by poor AI pathfinding. Like the above, it was fixed in Red Alert and all subsequent titles, though the remaster retains this behavior for authenticity.
  • The AI, conversely, being able to build anywhere can make base assaults extremely frustrating, especially when the enemy has two or more bases with construction yards. Any buildings you take out (base defenses in particular) will often be rebuilt faster than you can destroy them, and even if you wipe out a base entirely, the computer will most likely have rebuilt it by the time you're done with the other base unless you go in with multiple armies.
  • When Commandos destroy buildings, infantry still pop out, resulting in many cheap shots at said commando as he crawls from the building wreckage. Later games would ensure that structures destroyed this way would never spawn infantry units.
• Spiritual Successor: Dune II, not In Space. In turn, Red Alert is C&C VERSUS STALIN!
• That One Level:
  • Many people who were either playing through the game for the first time or were very used to the concept of base-building and unit-production usually got stuck on a mission where you couldn't produce any units. Such was the case of GDI Mission 4 and Nod Mission 6 which required you to just retrieve an important item instead of using brute force to destroy all the enemies.
  • Nod Mission 6 is notoriously unforgiving. Regardless of which path you choose, you must get into a GDI base, steal the Nuclear Detonator Crate, then get out through the other way to rendezvous with your extraction chopper. To make it worse, due to you assaulting the enemy base, almost all enemy troops are converging on your units.
  • Nod Mission 8 is notorious for being one of those trial and error missions which can go awry at every second. To paraphrase, you must overtake an abandoned GDI base and repurpose it into your own - but this isn't easy as you're only given 8 infantry units. You're supposed to first find a way to get an engineer over to the GDI base to capture it, with light attack vehicles and attack planes constantly bombarding your position. Doesn't help when you're scarce on resources the entire time, meaning you must try alot of possible strategies to actually beat the mission.
  • Nod Mission 11 has you start without a base, with units split on both sides of a river, to re-capture a small base whose entrance is blocked by guard towers. You're supposed to use the artilleries South of the river to destroy the guard towers so your infantry North of it can enter, but the matter is complicated by harvesters that do all they can to get you to shoot at them, inviting retribution in the form of grenadiers and tanks, and a GDI gunboat patrolling said river, essentially constraining you to its rhythm. And to top it all off, you're also open to GDI airstrikes, the same ones mentioned in The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, which more-or-less turn that part into a Timed Mission (yes, a timed mission that forces you to wait for enemy units to move out of the way).

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