I feel Westwood's games were always more about the single player experience. The maps were pretty well designed as sort of puzzle boxes you needed to figure out. The amazing soundtracks and cheesy FMVs were also very good at building atmosphere. Multiplayer felt unbalanced in a not very fun way.

Agreed, StarCraft and friends got a big multiplayer scene that I was never into; I'm not a good enough player.

But C&C were fun to play through, and felt accessible to scrubs like me. (To be fair to Blizzard, StarCraft 2 is the ONLY Blizzard RTS I ever completed - or at least the episodes I bought ; they did exceptionally well on the difficulty scaling for that game.)

Competitive multiplayer was always meh for us, we loved comp stomps, and I somewhat am sad that the AI was so "bad" that you never really could get a good balance between "destroyed you instantly" and "easily overwhelmed".

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/08/04/the-armageddon...

Capitalism 2 also, I played that extensively.

I picked up a copy of C&C red alert a year ago. Sadly, it's unplayable on modern PCs. At least it was for me. Too many issues, crashes and the game speed not being changeable before game launch and by the time you can change it in game, it's too late and you're basically already way too behind to catch up. It's a shame because it was one of my favorites from the era.

There are open source engine reimplementations which use the original assets to play the c&c games on modern machines. See https://www.openra.net/

Both the first C&C game and Red Alert were remastered in 2020 as a part of the "Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection".

That version should run on modern machines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_Remaster...

They're currently on sale for a few bucks on Steam too.