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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

This could never beat Dune 1 from 1992.

What I really loved about this game was the shifting gameplay from strong story-driven 1st person adventure to map-based RTS.

Obviously, this is my personal recollection from 30 years ago.

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Both Dune and Dune II were released in 1992, Dune was interactive adventure from Cryo, Dune II was RTS from Westwood. Dune II was also re-released as Dune 2000 for Windows.

Dune was not bad, but personally I love Dune II a lot. It was the first RTS I played, and it had such a huge influence on this genre for the years to come.

Annoyingly, neither Dune (1) nor Dune 2 seems likely to get a legal rerelease. I can't find the details atm, but apparently GOG made quite a serious try to get the rights, only to hit a brick wall with the Herbert estate which claimed to be uninterested in rereleasing old licensed games. Then it approved the rerelease of the 1979 Dune boardgame from Avalon Hill https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/9/20797781/dune-board-game-ga... . ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I think the social media team for this game is likely to be fielding a lot of questions about where the Westwood Dune II rerelease is.

Dune 2000 was really Command & Conquer reskinned more than a successor to Dune II, at least in how it played.

I didn't like the RTS part all that much. There's very little challenge there apart from making sure to send many Fremen and equipping them with the best weapons you can capture.

I recall deliberately trying to lose in the RTS section section and not managing to. You can either fall behind on Spice shipments and get annihilated by the Emperor (until you somehow could beat him) or lose Paul directly, but AFAIK there's no way to lose in the RTS itself.

That did give me enough time to explore the map in an Ornihopter - best part of the game IMHO.

Here's a pretty good YouTube video about Cryo's Dune (1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20h7pfLeSaE

and another from the same author covering every Dune computer game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YISKhMNI_XQ

Also Northgard - the other game by this developer - had a pretty dull story unfortunately.

Ideally it would be someone like David Gaider doing the story.

I'd hope a modern iteration could improve on a 30 year old game, but that's not always the case.

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