Visiting Old Friends
For the last couple of months I’ve been working overseas, and will be until the end of the year. With my Xbox 360 firmly sequestered back in Blighty, I’ve been getting reacquainted with an old friend: PC gaming.[1]
Actually, a lot of it has just reminded me why I left PC gaming in the first place. I enjoyed Crysis, but spent my whole time with it wishing I was using a gamepad rather than a mouse and keyboard. Yes, I know the mouse allows for more accurate aiming, but moving without an analogue stick? What is this, the dark ages? Besides, I like a controller I can use while sitting back with my feet up.
Finding myself being metaphorically beaten around the head by copy protection was an unpleasant experience, too. Ok, I get that games companies have to do all they can to counteract piracy, really I do. But when a game takes every available opportunity to point out that you are only being allowed to play it on sufferance (I’m looking at you, Company of Heroes), it’s gone to far. And, gah, having to fiddle with a game’s settings to get it running properly. An hour spent tweaking graphics options to get the best balance between performance and quality? No thanks. Just stick the disk in the drive and start playing, that’s more my style.
On the bright side, the PC has allowed me to go back to enjoying the one genre that has never worked on the consoles: real-time strategy.
There’s something about the classic RTS interface that just doesn’t work without the speed and precision of the mouse. Company of Heroes, the WWII RTS, proved to be an unexpected joy (once I got past the aforementioned hellish copy protection). It managed to capture a real sense of drama, something that the strategy genre has traditionally struggled with, by adding in elements more commonly associated with action games, like a great physics engine and destructible terrain.
Medieval 2: Total War also made an impression, and joined the select ranks of games that have caused me to actually shout at the computer, in this case when the damn treacherous Dutch launched a sneak attack on my French holdings. The bastards.
We do have, though, a couple of exciting, console specific RTS’ coming up in the near future. Or, more specifically, one exciting console RTS, and one that is sounding increasingly like a missed opportunity.
The exciting prospect is EndWar, another game from Ubisoft’s increasingly capacious Tom Clancy stable (although the association between the games and Tom Clancy is becoming ever more tenuous[2]). It’s voiced controlled, which if it works will be absolutely amazing, and takes a troops-eye rather than a top-down camera angle. There is some question about whether it will all come together as intended, but major kudos goes to Ubisoft for trying to develop something with console controls in mind, rather than adapting PC controls to a gamepad.
Halo Wars, the other console RTS on the cards, is something I really should be more excited about than I am. I mean, it’s Halo for crying out loud! Unfortunately, from what I’ve read, it sounds like Ensemble Studios (the developers of Halo Wars) have decided to hammer the square peg of top-down RTS micromanagement into the round hole of console gameplay. Given that I still wake up screaming with thoughts of The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2 on the 360, an optimistic prediction is that Halo Wars is going to be ‘adequate’.
Gaming Wisdom of the Crafty Banana 
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