Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 coming to Mac

TransGaming on Thursday began accepting pre-orders for its Macintosh conversion of Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 from Electronic Arts. It’s coming in late March, 2009 and will cost $29.95.

Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 is a recently-released installment of EA’s long-running real-time strategy game series. It came out for Windows in late October, 2008. The Red Alert series takes a different tack than other Command & Conquer titles, depicting an alternate Earth where allied forces led by the United States fight the Soviet Union across multiple theaters of war, with futuristic weaponry. The game also goes over the top with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and wacky story.

Red Alert 3 picks up where previous games have left off: The first game featured a world war between the Soviet Union and Allies, and the second game featured a Soviet invasion of North America (an expansion pack took gameplay to the Moon). While allied forces and the Soviet Union make a return, a third faction — the Empire of the Rising Sun — also makes an appearance. The game features time-traveling Soviets, a Japanese empire that threatens the world with giant robots, and more.

Red Alert 3 features different story-based single-player campaigns for each faction in the game, co-op gameplay, naval warfare, live-action videos and more.

This marks the series’ debut on the Macintosh. Previous Red Alert games were not available for the Mac platform, although in 2007 EA released Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, a major release of the “original” Command & Conquer series. As with Red Alert 3, that game was developed using TransGaming’s Cider technology; unlike Red Alert 3, EA published Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars itself.

System requirements will call for Mac OS X 10.5.6 or later, Intel Core Duo Processor, 1024MB RAM, ATI X1600 or Nvidia 7300GT or better 3D card, and 10GB hard disk space.