I got up about 6am Vegas time and headed down to McDonalds for some breakfast. After eating a couple of Egg McMuffin's, I headed to the North entrance of the hotel where I met up with the other webmasters from around the community. Maniac (Red Alert II eXtreme), KellyX (RA2 Source), and Xynon (AOE Center) were already there. After introducing myself and telling them I was from RADEN, other webmasters and reporters soon joined us. JCal from HomeLan walked up, Rob from Red2World, a guy from GameSpot (can't remember his name! ack!), Enforcerman from SCLegacy and Gail from DiabloII.net & WarCraftIII.net. After the Blizzard guys were late, we finally head out to Westwood about 8:45 (we were supposed to leave at 8:15!).

When we arrived, we met Wanda Flathers, Westwood's Account Executive. She is the person who set most of our flights and stuff up. Once to where we were, she yelled for Chris Rubyer to hurry up and meet us. He came up a few seconds later. For those of you who don't know, Chris' online name is Delphi. Chris led us down a hallway to the room where we would soon be playing Yuri's Revenge. Before we got into the good stuff, Chris gave us a tour around Westwood. We dropped by many employee's offices. It was 9am and many were not in just yet. We saw where the game renderings are done and even passed someone playing Renegade (!) in one of their smaller buildings.

Yuri's Revenge Orientation:

After the 15 minute look around, we headed back to our community room where we met Westwood's public relations guru, Mike Schellings. He took us through a 10 minute slideshow (in Microsoft's Powerpoint) to give us an idea on what came in Yuri's Revenge and gave us a quick rundown of the storyline. Here's a few of the pointers Mike mentioned in his presentation:

14 Brand News Single Player Missions
* 7 for the Allies - Help the Allies defeat Yuri and his physic deminions. 
* 7 for the Soviets - The Soviet forces not only want to defeat Yuri, but also alter time so that they change the events in Red Alert 2 and defeat the Allied forces.
10 Co-Op Missions
New Environments: Desert, Urban, Artic
Many, many new locations such as these cities:
* San Francisco (check out the Gold Gate Bridge)
* London (get a glance at Big Ben
* Egypt (capture images of the Pyramids)
* Hollywood (destroy the Hollywood sign)
* Seattle (see the space needle)
You can even play a mission on the Moon! In addition, there are also a couple (I think only 2) Moon skirmish maps.
+ Yuri's Revenge introduces a brand new faction to the game. Playing without the expansion will seem "empty" to most fans after playing with it. No other expansion in gaming history has added a new faction. There are 30+ units and structures in the game, in addition to the new Allied and Soviet units and structures.
+ Adds a completely different storyline into the game. Not only that, you can alter the original's storyline and make it even more interesting and addicting!
+ Plus, get this, there is over 15 minutes of in-game footage on video. And there are alot more videos in the actual game up in the map screen. There is one is almost every mission. Especially in the beginning of the campaigns.

Many characters are back! General Carville, President Dugan, Eva, Romanov and Yuri. Oh yeah, and some hot chick is back to. Can't remember her name at the moment :) (It's Tanya you crazy cats!) The picture on your left was part of the Yuri's Revenge presentation we watched. Westwood put together quite a show!