Red Alchemy - NiSoft

             Reviewed by James Judge on a P120

After the disappointment of the Red Alert Counterstrike mission
disk with no new units this little utility floated through the
ether and onto my hard disk. And what a little gem it is.  The
program is freeware and requires Red Alert to run. Upon
installation you enter where your RA directory is and then the
program starts, and this is where the fun starts.

What I really wanted from Counterstrike was a host of new units
with which I could do lots of new things with. What Red Alchemy
allows me to do is create my own units, up to a point. It allows
you to alter the statistics of any aspect of the original game, so
you can have napalm spitting, invisible dogs or Tesla tanks, or
Nuke firing infantry. You can change the damage of any special
weapon and can tweak things such as the crate availability, what
comes out of them as well as small things like gravity and the
time it takes a chronosphere to recharge.

Once all of your changes have been made, then you click on save
and the game saves a text file to your Red Alert directory called
rules.ini. This is the file that RA looks for to generate the
rules of combat. Normally, however, the entire text file is
encrypted within a larger file in your RA directory and the game
only ignores it when there is an alien rules.ini in the directory.

You can, if you want, extract the text needed to create your own
rules.ini by opening the file redalert.mix in a text editor and
cutting and pasting out the section that starts [RULES.INI],
however this is tricky and fiddly to do without making your game
crash or fail to load (it took me a few attempts).  Altering the
text file is also fiddly, and although it provides just as much
versatility as Red Alchemy, it is a lot harder to do successfully
as Red Alchemy has a cool front-end that is professionally
designed and is very simple to use. You want to give a dog an
automatic rifle? Click on Infantry, scroll down to Attack Dog and,
under Primary Weapon, select ChainGun. what the hell, under
Secondary Weapon select Nuke and then see the fun begin!!!!!

If you want to liven up your RA playing with a bit of ingenious
unit and building editing then you can't get much better than
this.  True, you lose your original unit and you can't change the
graphics, but you do get to play with some interesting units. And
never fear - anything you do can be undone to return the game to
its default settings, and Red Alchemy doesn't even allow you to
enter combinations of unit changes that are known to make Red
Alert crash.  Great fun and well worth a look - its free, so
what's the harm?  Get it either from SynTax or pay the official
Website a visit at:

http://users.aol.com/commandhq/ra/main.html

@~The program appears to have been renamed Red Alchemist Pro and
@~is now up to release 4. It also seems to have become shareware.
@~The unregistered version is on Disk 1194 and registration is a
@~mere $5 ... Sue

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