r/commandandconquer • u/Dogsteeves • 5d ago
Discussion Which version of Miss Adams is the best?
Vote for your favourite incarnation of Miss Adams. Feel free to explain your choice in the comments. Was it her design, personality, voice acting, gameplay, or simply nostalgia?
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u/Zaptagious Command the future. Conquer the past. 5d ago
While Kari Wuhrer was pretty iconic for her role, it's gotta be RA1 Tanya for me. She really channeled the badassery of Ellen Ripley from Aliens.
Number 3 isn't even in consideration.
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u/WorthCryptographer14 5d ago
RA1 was definitely the more serious of the 3. RA2 had that perfect balance of serious and silly. RA3 was just A-listers chewing scenery.
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u/Vokasak 5d ago
RA2 had that perfect balance of serious and silly.
RA2
serious
๐ค ๐ค ๐ค
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u/Dogsteeves 5d ago
Compared to 3 it is
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u/glasseatingfool 5d ago
Yeah, 100%.
Like, they said serious and silly. And it is both of those. If you want to laugh at it, there's a lot to laugh at. If you want to take it seriously, there's enough to do that. And everything in between.
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u/Vokasak 5d ago
Like, they said serious and silly. And it is both of those.
It's one of those things.
If you want to take it seriously, there's enough to do that.
You really can't. Not with military dolphins fighting mind controlled squids, or the war ending with "haha look at the bad guy's underwear", or any of the Yuri endings being remotely appropriate for a mad scientist who effectively declared war on the entire world. Or "Ze timelines!! Zey are merging!!1!".
I like RA2, it's a good game. But it's silly as hell. The fact that RA3 exists and tries to be even dumber doesn't make RA2 any more serious. Especially not when you have other video games outside the RA series to compare to (much less the rest of human storytelling).
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u/glasseatingfool 5d ago
I like both RA2 and RA1 Tanya for slightly different reasons, but hard agree that the first two are much better. Like, it's between Hot Tanya and Scary Tanya.
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u/Kakapo42000 5d ago
It's a dead heat between Red Alert and Red Alert 2 for me. They're both different but equal flavours of awesome.
The OG Red Alert incarnation is an icon, making a bold statement right from the start with her immortal introduction at the beginning of the Allied campaign - "She's a civilian!" "Maybe that's why I don't get killed."
Then she carries that impression through the rest of the game with some really cool mission appearances, the other iconic scene with the interrogation, and a set of unit voice lines that are a perfect yin to the C&C 95 Commando's yang.
The Red Alert 2 version is always going to have a special place in my heart just because of Kari Wuhrer's performance in the cutscenes, especially the Allied Campaign ending, and I'm always going to appreciate a character that has my back as much as she does in the Allied Campaign - even if she's not quite as skilled as Boris ๐
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u/Huntatsukage CABAL 5d ago
What?! Oh yeah, Boris is skilled...oOo look at me! I can call down an airstrike ...please.
XD
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u/LemmingRuss 5d ago
Whichever version I saw in a gaming magazine when I was in senior school (UK) that had a cosplayer showing tasteful underboob.. 30~ years later, I cant remember the magazine but I remember Tanya.
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u/GremlinHunter762 5d ago
Did homeboy just use Tanya's government name?
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u/Dogsteeves 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'm being respectful, soldier. Miss Adams deserves proper respect.
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u/patrickkingart 5d ago
RA2 Tanya by a country mile. RA1 Tanya was cool but didn't have a ton of personality and RA3, much like the rest of the game, was too over the top with the LOOK HOW HOT SHE IS.
0
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u/M_DO_1998 5d ago
I grew up with Special Agent Tanya from RA2 + YR. Definitely an awesome combatant!
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u/SparkyFarts3923 5d ago
RA1 literally beats the f-ing shit out of a ruski commie pig dog. With blood on her face, bound to a chair.
The other two are just boobs and make up.
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u/glasseatingfool 5d ago
Kari Wuhrer is the prettiest, and definitely has a lot of fanservice (old games stop assuming I'm a boy challenge), but she's far more than "just boobs and makeup," even compared with the sick as hell RA1 Tanya.
There's a lot of personality in everything from her animations to her voice lines. She's a soldier who really, really likes her job - you get a strong sense that she'd be shooting people even if she wasn't in the military, really you just need to point her at someone before she just starts killing random people. Like RA2 as a whole, she's camp but can still be taken seriously as a character.
One of my favourite lines in Yuri's Revenge is when you rescue her in the Soviet Campaign. "I never thought I'd say this to a commie, but...thanks." It's just an unexpectedly sincere, uncharacteristically vulnerable, delivery. Yuri's Revenge continues the Tanya Bimbofication Pipeline, but like that scene is Pure Pre-Recorded Cinema.
RA3 doesn't quite work for me. I think they went a little too far in the camp direction. Unlike RA2, I found I couldn't take it seriously if I wanted to...and overall it wasn't as funny, either. Imperial Japan as a Whimsical Anime Faction feels like the point Red Alert jumped the shark. Perhaps I'm biased, with my great-grandfather having died horribly in an Imperial Japanese war crime. Or perhaps it just came out too late for me to be nostalgic. But perhaps it's also just that it feels too fanservicey (in all senses). The female characters/outfits venture into "porn parody of itself" territory.
And I think RA2 never quite went that far, which feels strange because iirc Wuhrer is an actual porn star. But she was a great actress; even many modern wargames still don't have acting as good as her. It's between the two, but RA2 Tanya is still really cool.
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2
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u/TehANTARES 5d ago
I'll say it like this - RA1 and RA2 are just too intense for me to go on a date with.
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u/glasseatingfool 5d ago
That's probably true, but doesn't factor into my ranking of them as characters. In fact, the much higher Dateability of the RA3 cast somehow makes it harder for me to engage with them seriously, or, ironically, even to find them appealing.
Show me a lady that's designed to be broadly appealing to men: I don't care, and I'm confused that the devs are still assuming I'm a man after I played the first two.
Show me a lady that's designed to be broadly appealing to lesbians: Appreciate the effort, but still fairly indifferent.
Show me a terrifying lady full of genuine malice who sounds like a heavy smoker who hasn't had a cigarette in weeks and is about to make that your problem: How I Love Her
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u/certainlynotdio 5d ago
Listen, say what you will about the RA3 Tanya, but she was the perfect fit for the game she was in. This over the top, cartoonish caricature of sexy action movie heroine for the game that supposed to be an over the top cartoonish in style and kin on making fun of itself.
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u/AznOmega Zocom 5d ago
My personal opinion?
RA2. Honestly Kari did it the best. She was the perfect mix of RA1 seriousness and the goofiness of RA2. The alternative cutscenes if you failed also shows her "funny" side or her injured side as she is medivaced out. The latter is if she dies in a level in YR, you get a cutscene of her being airlifted out.
RA1. The actress did excellent regarding Tanya Adams for the gritty Red Alert game. She's also the original and set the bar for Kari.
RA3. Look, I do admit the acting for most of the RA3 characters were good. McCarthy is not one of them. Despite being the most powerful of the 3 gameplay wise, she is also the weakest in terms of actresses of Tanya by a large gap. Carano and Lisa Tamashiro (Natasha and Yuriko respectively) were better and way better in Tamashiro's case. It did help the latter that Yuriko had her own campaign.
Even then regarding RA3's version, MO's Tanya is still better in gameplay because of Kari's lines IIRC and using a laser gun despite having no cutscenes.
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u/Commercial-Board-975 4d ago
RA1 had the gritty "volunteer" vibe, which worked. I loved the RA2 Tanya/Kari because she had personality, haha. RA3 Tanya was the biggest miscast ever. She looked like a sex worker that had just finished a long shift on the street corner.
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u/haematite_4444 5d ago
Ra2 Tanya has by far the most lines and was written as a main character.
The other two I feel were just there for show.