I am completely unaware of this connotation. You will need to inform me if you expect me to stop using it. =Ăľ
Anyway, I checked out the demo. It's fairly limited. Tutorial, prologue, 1 mission in the campaign, and 1 skirmish mission with very limited options. You get to play only as GDI, and only against Nod (in all contexts). The Scrin don't make an appearance in the demo itself.
The movies and razzledazz look great—strong C&C tradition. What little music there is seems good, as well. Gameplay isn't bad—things blow up quick in traditional C&C fashion, and various other elements of the game feel very traditional. Graphic quality is quite good, if the terrain is a bit dreary. Nod has received a major makeover, and I'm not particularly keen on it—they just feel less like Nod and more like Scrin to me. I also have no clue about the uniqueness of efficacy of Nod units—some of them clearly have stealth abilities, but when I play against them, Nod has a total of 6 units as far as I'm concerned: Infantry, Missile Infantry, Vehicles, Flame Tanks, Harpies (or whatever they call them now), and Bombers. I'm sure it's a little different for the Nod player, but oh well. I just send Mammoth tanks against them all and blow them to smithereens.
Base expansion is a big part of C&C 3—you can always repack your MCV and send it somewhere else, and you can buy mobile outpost vehicles that can set up camp somewhere else to allow you to build there. Every production building now has its own queue, as well, so that 2 barracks will allow you to produce infantry twice as fast, but through the medium of two individual queues. You can also buy buildings which will provide additional building queues, meaning that it's quite easy to build up a huge base quickly. Moreover, every MCV/extension has 2 inherent queues—one for the major buildings in the game, and one for support buildings like turrets.
Two things I'm not particularly hot about in C&C 3: the superweapons, and teching. Fortunately, like the original, the nuke in C&C 3 is quite devastating, clearing an entire screen of most buildings. Unfortunately, however, the Ion Cannon is (as far as I can tell) identical in all ways except for in the visual presentation. Visually, the Nuclear bomb in C&C:Generals was (IMO) much better-looking/visually satisfying. In addition, you are limited to only one Ion Cannon (and presumably nuclear attack) at a time—and as these take 6 minutes to charge, they fall only very, very rarely. When this is contrasted against the break-neck speed at which bases can be built, superweapon attacks are now more of an intense irritation than anything game-breaking like they were in C&C 1.
The thing I don't like about the teching is the number of useless buildings in the game—as GDI, there are two buildings which do absolutely nothing but a) are required to build certain things and b) provide a place to "upgrade" unit tech. I'm not really impressed. Additionally, there are two more buildings that do almost nothing—the command center is required to build stuff, and provides radar, and there's some other building which isn't required to tech, but does nothing but give you the option of purchasing certain support options (maybe 2-3, like artillery strikes). I tend to dislike heavy "tiering", and C&C3 seems like a tiered game (though it perhaps only has 2 general tiers of units, which is better than some).
The base sprawl now makes it feel more chaotic than previous C&C games—it's easier to just pump out harvesters on the side if one desires, and when I was playing against hard AI, they must have had at LEAST half a dozen refineries by the time I got to their base—which is really overkill, especially considering their limited access to Tiberium. I think that base-building sprawl, while definitely very innovative and interesting, ups the micromanagement nature of the game, and hurts the strategic aspects.
Overall, however, it seems like a pretty fun game. I'd need to see what it's like playing as Nod before I could really give an opinion on it. I'm sure I'll buy it eventually, but I might wait for a bit now.