Forget ponies, I got sandworms! · 11:48am Jan 23rd, 2015
People who know me a bit are probably aware I'm literally the biggest fan of Command & Conquer 1 on the web. (This is not a boast, but a sad fact. The community lives and dies with my interest in the game. That's right. Ponies killed C&C1.) But besides that, I am generally a collector of all classic Westwood games, though mostly focused on RTS. The first game I played that fell in both of these categories, and, in fact, the game for which the genre term "Real-Time Strategy" was invented, was Dune II.
So I was more than a little thrilled to find this bad boy on Ebay for no more than fifteen dollars. Despite the shipping to Belgium adding an additional $33 to that, I could absolutely not resist it:
The box arrived yesterday, and I immediately got to work. Sadly my current PC doesn't have a floppy drive, so I couldn't get the content off the disks, but I'm fairly sure I already got it anyway, since I collected file archives for all released versions of the game years ago. The main reasons I had for buying this didn't really include the floppies, anyway.
These reasons, besides the fact this is a treasure of gaming history, and the fact the box is complete even down to the original receipt of the sale in a game store, are these:
-The cover art. I haven't found any place online that has a high resolution version of that, or even a good quality one.
-That cute little newspaper thingy, which is more or less their newsletter with added internal development anecdotes, and some hints and tricks for their games.
-The lovely ring-bound manual.
Now, with my work on Dune II, I actually remade the manual as PDF file with colour images, so there wasn't much use in scanning that. Not to mention, A) there must be plenty of scans of that going around, and B) it's ring-bound, which is annoying to scan 
However, the other stuff is now scanned, and my goodness, it is lovely 
Here's the whole set of them:
Scan of the cover image
Full scan of the cover
Newspaper page 1
Newspaper page 2
Newspaper page 3
Newspaper page 4
Oh that is just gorgeous.
You say command and conquer, I say WHY NO GENERALS 2 YET?
Oh sweet find on ebay. A westwood fan, to nail that kind of gaming swag is a treat. Bravo!
2741712
2741723
Yeah, I'm totally loving this one
And the newspaper thingy.... well, you just gotta read it. There are some hilarious things in there
2741722
You didn't hear? It got cancelled more than a year ago. The whole dev team got sacked. There is literally no one at EA working on anything C&C now
2741737 I recall this one pretty fondly as a kid for good games, alongside the old xcom series that would eat up hours over at my neighbors house.
2741750
We originally got it when my older brother brought it home on copied floppies. Everyone at home got addicted to it.
My mom plays a mean game of Dune II (and she's really good at Warcraft II as well, lol). She says the unit management in such games isn't hard when you're used to five kids
2741756 The macro and micro must be insane with that many kids!
But heh! Its a rarity for games to bring so many together anymore.
2741737 I did hear. I was really pissed about it. I still want to know why.
2741887
I'd link you to the reactions of the dev team on the official boards, but the official boards suddenly stopped existing about a week ago
Basically, they were all collectively told they were fired from one day to the next, with the apparent reason being that the management wasn't satisfied with beta tester response. That is all anyone knows
It was such a drastic and sudden move that they didn't even have anyone to update the official website to inform people the game was cancelled, and many, many people still bought The Ultimate Collection lured in by the promise of a beta key in Generals 2. Needless to say, even without going into what a poor job they did bringing the games to Origin, said people were not exactly satisfied customers
In fact, when this all hit the community, the devs informed us with some degree of mirth and satisfaction that the beta test servers were in fact not shut down either, for the same reason, plus the fact it would take the management a while to figure out exactly where they were. And indeed, they kept running for a few more months
I played the game in GamesCom 2013 in Cologne, and talked with the devs too, since I was invited as VIP as part of the delegation sent from one of the fan sites (CNCNZ, whose main staff, being from NZ, found the jet lag of coming to Europe to not be worth it). I personally thought they had a good thing going... in fact, I thought that was the general feeling in the community. So no one is really sure why it was cancelled
On a similar note, none of the staff or moderators of the official boards were informed about anything at all when the board was suddenly removed just now.
There. Now you know everything I do. Now STFU about new C&C! This is about old Dune II!