Future Conflict, an obscure Command & Conquer clone

[MrFlibble]

Recently I found, via the Wayback Machine, this little and apparently highly obscure gem: Future Conflict.

It's a free (technically shareware) DOS RTS game, lovingly copied almost verbatim from Command & Conquer and Red Alert (and not in the least ashamed of that mind you!) by Chris Jones, better known for being the author of the Adventure Game Studio toolkit. If you look past the "programmer art" level graphics (that aren't very bad, actually), it's a fully-fledged game with a single-player campaign (only one side though), skirmish mode against up to three AI opponents, and functional multiplayer mode. There's even an equivalent of Red Alert's rules.ini.

The author accepted registrations, which would endow the user with a mission builder, a unit editor and a campaign editor (no idea if anyone registered). But otherwise the unregistered game is fully featured and has no limitations. Oh, and it fits on a single 3.5" floppy disk too. It's a bit tricky to get it work with sounds in DOSBox though, but a pre-installed version is available here. Make sure you use the current SVN build of DOSBox, not the latest stable version (0.74-3) from the DOSBox website.