Related Sections: DS Music Games Strategy Games Xbox 360
I'll take platform pitfalls for five hundred, Alex
"These two games were released this week and they both made you kind of go, 'Oh, um, okay, that's what you're going to do? Really?'"Maybe I just haven't played On Tour enough, but it doesn't have any of the excitement of playing Elite Beat Agents, much less Guitar Hero, for the first time. Peering into my palm while I presumably finger a guitar neck and strum its frets just feels, well, unnatural. You just can't cup rock."What are
Supreme Commander for the Xbox 360 and Guitar Hero On Tour for the Nintendo DS."
Then there's Supreme Commander on a 360's gamepad. After going through the tutorial – and then figuring out the rest of the interface by reading the manual – it's painfully obvious that the developers have no new ideas for how to adapt a real time strategy game to a console system.
And they didn't change the overly fussy gameplay at all. With a yeoman's revision, Supreme Commander could have been a perfect license for a console RTS, considering the automated economy, the central role of the commander unit, and the clean robot graphics. Instead, it's an utter embarrassment. This thing is seriously almost unplayable.
Both games should look at the upcoming Civilization Revolutions from Firaxis. The developer of the in-depth Civilization series clearly understands that certain types of gameplay need to be drastically changed for certain types of platforms.
By Troy Goodfellow at 3:33 PM ON 06/25/08
To be fair to SupCom 360 (which I agree is much, much, much inferior to the PC version - which I didn't love in any case), the comparison with CivRevolution is a little disingenuous since consoles have already proven themselves, I think, as TBS platforms. The lack of time pressure and requirement to quickly scroll and grab whatever tanks you have lying around makes a huge difference.
For example, Shattered Union was equally average on the 360 and PC, board games have made a nice jump to XBLA and the DS is great for this sort of stuff. CivRev may be very different from Civ 4, but it still is a slow tile based city centered game. The basic mechanics of unit selection and movement translate easily to the imprecise controller.
I think that adapting an RTS for a console is the wrong approach in any case. If an RTS is going to work on a console, it will need to be designed with the console in mind. I think that Bioware has demonstrated that a console RPG can translate well to a PC, and I suspect the same would be true of a console RTS. But I doubt that any game can easily make the leap down from arm/mouse driven gameplay to a multi-button gamepad system.
By Tom Chick at 5:23 PM ON 06/25/08
Guitar Hero has also proven itself on console systems. My point -- and I'm honestly* not being disingenuous -- is that when you move a game onto a different platform, you really can't just lift it up and plop it down without doing some rethinking. My feeling is that both Guitar Hero On Tour and Supreme Commander didn't do this rethinking, whereas Civilization Revolutions did.
And don't get me started on putting RTSs on consoles or I'll roll out a column or two, or three, or four on the subject! :)
* After all, how else are you going to not be disingenuous?
By jab at 6:28 PM ON 06/25/08
Having tried (and failed) to play SupCom in any sense on the PC, I can't even imagine playing the game with a gamepad and having the same exact gameplay work. I just recently slammed the original one in a blog entry as well.
Regarding strategy titles fit for the console market. I would think a game like Savage could be great on the console as there is no real sense of microing units in it. I'm still waiting for someone to do a successor to Sacrifice.
By Troy Goodfellow at 8:14 PM ON 06/25/08
Disingenuous was a bad word choice.
No doubt that someone did the rethinking and someone else didn't, but TBS requires a lot less rethinking for the console since you can easily manage menus and unit selection when there's no time pressure or a constantly changing tactical situation. We had Civ2 on the Playstation didn't we? And it worked fine.
Where a mouse certainly makes playing a TBS game easier, it's nowhere near the sine qua non that you have in the dominant RTS model.
Rethinking SupCom for a 360 would require almost an entirely different game from the PC version, certainly much more radical than what Meier has done with CivRev. The entire RTS genre needs a radical do over if it is to work with gamepads. Yes, GPG decided not to do that re-imagining, and few will until we get an RTS designed specifically with the gamepad in mind. I suspect it can be done, but the result will look more like Pikmin than Age of Empires.
Could you do an RTS for the Wii? Maybe use the balance board for something.
By Mono at 10:03 PM ON 06/25/08
So I take it that SupCom360's rapid zoom out/zoom-to-cursor/zoom out system doesn't work too well?
Chris Taylor was talking about it as quite the breakthrough on a GFW podcast last year.
Mono:
So I take it that SupCom360's rapid zoom out/zoom-to-cursor/zoom out system doesn't work too well? Chris Taylor wa...More »