Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty

Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty (released in Europe as Dune II: Battle for Arrakis) is a landmark real-time strategy game developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Games, released for MS-DOS in 1992. Widely recognized as the founding title of modern RTS genre, it created the core gameplay template including base building, resource harvesting, fog of war and tech tree, which heavily inspired later classics such as Command & Conquer and Warcraft. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, three great houses Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos fight for control of the universe’s most valuable substance: spice melange. The Emperor lets the factions wage brutal war on Arrakis; whoever dominates spice production gains dominion over the cosmos. Spice is the sole resource. Send harvester vehicles to gather spice from desert fields and deliver it to refineries to convert spice into credits. Spend credits to erect buildings and produce combat units. Buildings can only be placed on rocky terrain and require concrete foundations to avoid continuous damage. Giant sandworms lurk across sand regions; moving units draw their attention. Sandworms are nearly invulnerable and can swallow tanks and infantry whole as an environmental hazard. Each house has exclusive units and unique palace super abilities: Atreides excels at infantry and sonic tanks; Harkonnen wields the devastating Devastator siege unit; Ordos specializes in poison and trickery weapons. The game features single-player campaigns for all three houses with nine main missions total. Early missions require accumulating a target amount of spice credits, while later objectives demand full destruction of enemy bases. Fog of war hides unexplored territory. The tech tree unlocks power plants, radar, repair facilities, defensive turrets and advanced military units step by step. There is no skirmish or multiplayer mode. Original gameplay only allows selecting one unit at a time, and opening the build menu pauses the game. The atmospheric soundtrack is composed by Frank Klepacki, with support for Sound Blaster and AdLib sound cards. It was later ported to Amiga and Sega Mega Drive. Modern players run it via DOSBox emulators. As the foundational RTS masterpiece, Dune II defined the rules of real-time strategy games and remains an iconic classic DOS strategy title.

Ces jeux reçoivent le clavier directement : les touches sont celles que le jeu définit lui-même, en général dans son écran d’aide ou d’options. Les manettes sont détectées automatiquement. Sur téléphone, des boutons virtuels s’affichent.