Dune II

Dune II wasn't a sequel to Dune in the way we are used to sequels nowadays. It was just the second game based on this franchise. It was created by US-based Westwood Studios, while Dune was a French game, and it was on the PC first and ported to the Amiga afterwards.

Dune was an adventure, albeit with strong strategy elements. It basically cast the player in the role of Paul Atreides from the well-known 1984 movie. Dune II is, from the beginning, a game. It takes the world of the novels, the graphics of the movie, but uses them for something new.

The Emperor has proposed a challenge to each of the Houses. Whoever harvests most spice will control Dune. There are no set territories. And no rules of engagements.

As you can imagine, this is the beginning of an outright war. It can be said with some justification (though it has been challenged over and over again) that with this game Westwood Studios invented the real-time strategy as we know it today.

RTS Basics

Whether or not you consider Dune II to be the first RTS ever, it defines nicely what the RTS genre is all about:

• Two or more factions fight each other for the limited resources on the map. Here we have three houses, though in most missions only two of them will be present. The resource is spice, which, when harvested, is turned into credits and can be used to build structures or build/train units.
• The factions will be slightly different, but well-balanced. Here, each house has one type of advanced weaponry all of its own, and there are other fine differences. The Ordos, for example, cannot build certain units, but start out with more money in some missions.
• You get to play a series of missions, once you have fulfilled one, you move on to the next. In the first mission you will have only a limited scope of structures and units which expands by and by.

Actually, that's it; you can describe any classical RTS in this way. Dune II is certainly a gem of this genre, after ten years it is still surprisingly fresh and very playable. Main chagrin is that you cannot select more than one unit at a time.

The Houses

• The noble Atreides are of course well-known from the movie. They specialize in light, fast units. Only they can recruit freemen once they have a palace. Their special weapon is the sonic tank.
• The evil Harkonnen are for players who like brute force. They have the heaviest units, including the devastating, but imprecise Death Hand missile and the appropriately named Devastator, a heavy tank that is, however, very slow.
• The insiduous Ordos do not feature in the movie and are hardly mentioned in the novels. There is a certain air of Renaissance Italy around them. They have more money at their disposal, and a starport, for buying those units they cannot build, is crucial to them. Their special weapons are the Deviator, which can turn enemy units around, the very fast Raider Trike, and the Saboteur.

Some Oddities

• Some buildings can require others to be built before, which is not always entirely logic. You have to build a light vehicle factory (which you will not need in the later missions) before you can build a heavy vehicle factory or a repair facility, and you need a radar outpost to build rocket turrets. Of course, this kind of thing became standard in later RTS games. In Age of Empires, you have to build a granary before you can build a market.
• Enemy AI sometimes fails completely. Sometimes I could send a trike right into the enemy camp and destroy building after building, unmolested by the heavy tanks that waited there and sometimes set off to attack my base, going around my trike in a graceful circle.
• Once it is built and placed, the only way to remove a building is to attack it with your units.
• The scoring system is rather strange. Only spice harvested and units and buildings destroyed count. The spice harvested by the computer is not counted correctly, still you get the highest scores by simply dragging each mission out as long as possible, giving the computer ample time to rebuild. Of course, scores do not influence gameplay in any way.

Like all the early RTS games, Dune II suffers somewhat under its interface: You cannot select more than one unit at a time, and the system of building structures in your construction yard and placing them when finished accounts for a lot of extra clicking and scrolling. But in general Dune II is still a highly enjoyable game, and I prefer it over the later Warcraft.

Of course, a game as successful as Dune II could not go without sequels: In 1998, there was a rather bad remake under the name Dune 2000, and in 2001 there was Emperor: Battle for Dune, a new game, though similar to the two earlier ones. It came on no less than four CDs.

Technical Stuff

While official requirements are a 386/16 with 3MB of RAM, I found it plays very nicely on a 286/10, too. While a mouse is not absolutely necessary, I would not try to play it without one.

Sound and Music

If you have a wavetable device, try the Sound Canvas setting. It worked with my Terratec daughterboard on a standard Soundblaster 16. Don't choose MT-32/LAPC-1 unless you really have one of these, it will work, but at least the sound effects will be all wrong.

Originally, Dune II supported only one sound device. So you had to choose between cheesy MIDI music and no speech. A tough choice, for as good as the music is with a Roland or GM device, that slightly mechanical voice announcing Atreides harvester deployed or enemy unit approaching does add a lot to the atmosphere in the game.

Fortunately there is a later, but official, patch that adds support for two different sound devices. You can get it here.

Links and Reviews

Fan Sites

There are still a few, though not many, websites dedicated to Dune II.

• Dune 2: The building of an Empire: While the actual title of the game is Dune II: The Building of A Dynasty this is still a full-fledged fan page with descriptions of game controls, terrain types, buildings, and units, and an editor for download.
• Dune II on FED2k, a site about all the Dune games. Nice, detailed descriptions of all the units and structures. Showed me how much I missed by playing the game only half through…
• Nahoo has a mission editor and house-specific strategy tips.
• Dune II – The Maker is a clone by Stefan Hendriks. In April 2005 the first two alphas came out. The Maker will run in several screen resolutions, the 16×16 tiles are blown up to 32×32 and refined. In short, The Maker looks as Dune II should have looked to begin with.
• Acorn version

Reviews

• Despite popular beliefs, there is nothing original about Dune II, Netdanzr says:

  Except of one thing, which enabled Westwood to become a powerhouse among games developers. As for gameplay, however, the game did not revolutionarize, create a new style of gaming or became the first of its kind. All it did was to combine several games already out in the market. The developer did this very skillfully, however, creating an unique experience and one of the most entertaining games ever.

• No gamer should be without this game, Erde Kaiser thinks:

  Dune 2 is a fantastic game and all realtime strategy games still take the basic idea from this one. There are however numerous bugs and exploits that both you and the computer can use the most obvious of which is that the computer has an endless supply of credits. Others are quite strange like setting the game speed to lower/faster will change the range of the Atreides sonic tank which can be used by you both for advantage when attacking as well as when an enemy sonic tank attacks you. Dispite these bugs the game is still very enjoyable, it might not be as polished as later RTS games but this is the one that started it all.

• Short review by Justin Hall with some nice screenshots.

  […] essentially it's like a fast moving chess with overt warfare spelled out by the pieces.

• Review by Angus Manwaring:

  If you look at any of the Command and Conquer games, you'll know that it started with Dune II. Okay, the graphics have had a facelift, but very little else has changed. Westwood tapped a rich vein and have stuck with it. The graphics are a little basic by today's standards, although the music is spot on. It's an extremely compulsive game and unless this sort of thing doesn't appeal at all, you should definitely have it in your collection.