In this new Dev Blog Nick Laviers discusses in more detail the meaning of the Soviet March Theme lyrics and how they made them sound so authentic.

We decided that the best way of representing the Soviets musically was to use a male voice ‘Cossack’ choir. As many of the Russian listeners of the game picked-up-on this was not a bunch of Cossacks but in fact a San Francisco based choir, although they did frequently sing in Russian (in fact they had been performing in a Russian opera the night before we recorded). There are many reasons why we didn’t choose to go with native Russian singers, time and cost were definitely two of the main ones, but with the choir we had we were very keen to get the singing as authentic as possible.

You can read the rest of the blog here.

In this interview the Premier discusses his plans to rule the world, his obsession with his candy bowl, his historic film and singing career, and answers a ton of fan questions from our message boards. There are also some exclusive wallpapers to download as well. Check it out here.

Patch 1.04 for Red Alert 3 can now be downloaded using the ingame auto-updater. This patch corrects the following issues:

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Command & Conquer Red Alert 3
Version 1.04 Patch Notes - November, 2008
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Improves the reporting of online games to the ladder and player’s stats.

This patch also changes player names in online lobbies to be listed alphabetically.

The final 3rd qualification round of the Kane’s Wrath Ladder Season came to a close late last month, granting 16 more top players from the ladder a spot in our upcoming Grand Championship tournament! They will join the qualifiers from Round 1 and 2 in an epic 32-player tournament battle. This is the big one Commanders, the world’s best Kane’s Wrath players from our official ladder will all converge online for a shot to win $6,000 and be crowned our official 2008 Kane’s Wrath World-wide Champion. It doesn’t get much bigger than that for competitive Command & Conquer players around the world, and many of the world’s best will be competing in our grand tournament.

Check out the ladder here.

Heres a message from APOC regarding the gifts for beta testers:

Hey everyone,

If you were a beta tester and received our recent e-mail a few weeks ago about a special gift around launch time, well i’d like to let you know we have a special multiplayer map for you which we’ll be sending via e-mail by the end of this week.

So there ya go

-APOC

The new commandandconquer.com if finally here. You can visit the website here or view the new forums here.

In order to start posting in the new forums you will need a new forum name, read how to sign up here.

Watch the 2 hour Season 2 Premiere of BattleCast Primetime here.

The new commandandconquer.com will launch Monday 3rd November and will bring all the C&C games together onto one website. There will also be a host of new features which can be read about here.

Red Alert 3 has officially been launched and should be arriving in stores around the world this week. On the official Red Alert website is a launch trailer showing of the epic war that awaits. You can download the trailer here.

Gamasutra posted an interview with senior producer Amer Ajami called “Inside the heritage of C&C: Red Alert 3“. Here’s a snippet:

Was that a challenge with the Japanese faction, since there was no existing Red Alert faction to draw from?

GK: Yes, though with that faction, we had so many cool places to dig into, so many pop culture allusions. And we have a lot of people on the team who love giant robots or anime. Those influences all went into a big melting pot and hopefully we came up with something that doesn’t feel slapdash. It still feels very cohesive, but it’s pop-culture inspired.

AA: At the same time, if you look at the history that the Red Alert franchise concerns itself with — alternate versions of World War II — the only major world player that Red Alert 1 and Red Alert 2 didn’t explore was Japan. Of course, Japan was a huge part of World War II.

It felt logical as well to include them into the game and use them as the vehicle with which we drive a lot of our experimental gameplay, such as transforming units. It’s stuff that we wanted to do in the game, but we really didn’t want to affect the Soviets and Allies too much. Those are two factions where fans of the series would have felt disillusioned if we transformed them too much.