This must be "Crazy Things Said By the Lead Designers of Upcoming Real Time Strategy Games" week. After the Dawn of War 2 lead designer chastised the media for believing what he'd told them, now we have the Halo Wars lead designer boasting that his game controls better with a gamepad than a PC-based game with a mouse and keyboard. I know, it's hard to believe anyone would say such a thing, but here is lead designer Graeme Devine in an interview with Computer ang Video Games:

CVG: You say the controls are better than PC RTS games. That's quite a bold claim...

Graeme Devine: Yes I realise that, and you're going to back that up for me when you play the game. It's a brash thing to say but I wouldn't say it if I didn't believe it.

Devine doesn't elaborate, but he does offer a little hearsay.

One of our testers, who's a hardcore RTS PC guy came over and told us that it's easier to play with the controller than it is with a mouse and keyboard...I've seen enough people converted to be pretty confident about it.

I've seen a demo of Halo Wars. If they're doing anything particularly bold with the controls, which look streamlined but still a compromise from the ease-of-use you get playing an RTS with a mouse, I couldn't tell.

Later in the interview, Devine cites both Herzog Zwei and Pikmin as RTSs that work on console systems because they weren't based on how such games work on a PC. I didn't see much of either game in Halo Wars, which seems to rely on the traditional PC-based RTS model. I hope the game turns out well, and I'll be the first to jump up and down gleefully if Devine's boast is true. But for now, the only real time strategy game that has any business crowing about how it's solved the interface problem on a console system is Ubisoft's EndWar. And even that one would be easier to play with a mouse and keyboard.

Tune in tomorrow when one of the designers of Starcraft II says something about this season of Heroes not being terrible.

(Thanks to Evil Avatar!)