@mathematics654
Eh, I was actually joking there; the "mission failed burned into your retinas" line comes from a guide on beating the Covert Operations, the (really hard) expansion missions in C&C1's "New Missions" menu. I think the normal campaigns have about one or two missions per side which I think are really hard, usually because you have some contrived start situation in the mission before you can get a base. Mostly they are meant to build up your unit micromanagement skills, which, to be fair, are good skills to build up in an RTS.
But, since you have mission choices in C&C1, it's always advised to just save at the end of a mission, so that, if you somehow pick a really hard mission in the next map choices, you can always go back and see if there aren't any more forgiving choices. The Nod campaign especially has a few that even I generally prefer to avoid, unless I'm specifically looking for a challenge.
(Side note: if you installed the unofficial 1.06 patch for C&C1 I made, not all missions in the New Missions menu are super-hard, since I added the exclusive bonus missions from the Playstation and N64 versions of the game in there. Especially the N64 ones were quite dumbed down, because an N64 controller isn't really a handy tool for unit micromanagement 😉 )
C&C4 is... kind of dumb. Personally, I stopped playing through the campaign a few missions into it, because of the unrewarding XP system. See, normally, tech in a campaign should just unlock depending on the mission progress, and be adapted to what you need in the current mission. This is not true in C&C4. They instead made it linked to gaining XP in both single play and multiplay, and, as some contrived way to encourage multiplay, playing through the campaign missions isn't actually sufficient to get enough XP there to beat the missions.
Since I don't really do multiplayer in general, this basically meant I had to replay missions multiple times just to get a somewhat decent tech level that would allow me to beat the next mission. I just stopped playing at that point and looked at the videos on youtube, because that's just completely dumb.
Even worse, especially for a game with an always-online requirement as DRM: I later found out that this XP isn't even stored in the cloud, but in a text file on your disk.
And then of course there's the fact that the game itself is basically nothing but a reverse tug-of-war between two factories that pour out a line of (completely free) units towards each other, with a constant battle in the middle which shifts until it reaches one of the two factories and manages to destroy it. I honestly don't see the point.
