I’ve never been a RTS fan, especially when the genre tries to break into the console market.  At best there is a distinct sense of a lack of control in the game, and at worst it’s unplayable.  Obviously, any excitement for Halo Wars was lost on me.  Recently, however, I got to reminiscing about the entire Halo franchise and how substantially things have changed over the course of it’s history, many of them in part due to the franchise’s own innovations.

Part of what got me to thinking about all of this was that it’s pretty much the same way I felt about first-person shooters on consoles before I played Halo.  A controller would never hold a candle to a mouse and keyboard.  There is more accuracy with a mouse than a game pad and getting weapons and items would always be quicker on a keyboard when you can just press one button for whatever weapon you needed.  Hell, at that time I was very much not an Xbox fan.

I remember hearing from friends about this awesome game they’ve been playing in their rooms called Halo.  They invited me up a few times, but the idea of sitting around playing a FPS on a console that wasn’t GoldenEye was insane.  I certainly wasn’t going to play some crappy Microsoft game on their crappy system.  Besides, I told myself, at best it’s just another first-person shooter, and they’re never that good.  Hell, my friends probably only liked it because it was extra gory or something.

It wasn’t until I was deployed in Iraq and had gone through two separate PS2s that I was willing to even give the Xbox a chance.  We were having problems with our PS2s in the desert constantly getting messed up from the sand.  We did what we could, but there is just no way to keep things sand free with the set up that we were working with.  I had heard that the Xbox is a little more durable than the PlayStation from some people we were supporting, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

Of course, they also told me that I HAD to get Halo.  It was simply one of those games that every person had to own if they owned the system.  I still didn’t buy into all that, and made several game purchases before I finally gave in and got Halo.  I had no idea what I was in for.

One of my teammates, Smith, and I spent pretty much all our waking hours for the next several weeks just playing the hell out of the game.  I had gotten several other ones in the mail and such, and they were great games, but Halo was just an awesome experience.  The story was spectacular, the characters were all great in their over the top way, and the gameplay was just phenomenal.  I honestly felt that I hadn’t had a gaming experience like this one since I first played Half-Life.

The very best part of the entire experience, however, was the co-op.  I probably would have only played through the game once and then forgotten about it if it wasn’t for the co-op.  It was one of the few games that I challenged myself to go through the harder difficulty settings simply because I wanted to make sure I had picked the bones of the game clean.

The entire control set up was fantastic and it really was a revolution in the genre as far as console based FPS were concerned.  Games before Halo always touted off how many weapons you could get or how many different bad guys you would see and things like that.  Things were limited in Halo, but in a good way.  You could only carry what makes sense to carry (I still don’t understand where Gordon Freeman keeps all his weapons).

With only having those weapons, you weren’t sitting around digging through some sort of inventory or dropdown to find the gun you wanted when you wanted it.  You simply pressed a button to switch.  It simplified controls but also made the game suddenly more complex.  You actually had to think about what weapons you wanted or needed now, not when to actually use them but if you even wanted to carry them.  I look at the sniper rifle and rocket launcher as great examples of the thought that had to go into what weapons you wanted to carry.

In most FPS, you had them available all the time, so you could just whip them out and snipe a bastard, or blow up their tank.  Suddenly with Halo, you really had to think about the pros and cons of each weapon.  A rocket launcher probably isn’t that great for using against a bunch of little guys, but if you drop it for that SMG, you won’t have it later.  You actually had to think about what was going on and figure out your play style.

The other great thing that Halo really introduced was the regenerating health system.  It’s all over the place these days simply because it streamlines the gameplay.  Everything before Halo had some sort of health pack or healing system where you simply had to try and survive to find more health, like it was ammo or something.  With Halo, you always had “something” to fall back on.  Granted, in the first Halo you still had health after your shield was taken out, and that you would need to find the traditional health packs for, but Bungie eventually got rid of that also.

Now you see it everywhere and most games don’t even have a solid lore reason for it.  The Spartans have regenerating shields to protect them, but what does Marcus Fenix have that allows him to regenerate?  Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Rainbow Six are just a few examples of games that use a regenerating health system that allows the action to progress at a steady pace instead of having to stop the fighting and go back through an entire level scouting for a missed health kit.

The last huge improvement the Halo series introduced was with multiplayer.  I mentioned GoldenEye before and I liken my experience with the first Halo to those wonder years of fun playing the N64.  It was fun, fast, and smooth, and there wasn’t a lot of goofiness in the way.  With Halo 2, they made perhaps the greatest online multiplayer matchmaking system ever and no one seemed to care.

For the longest time I wondered why no one was doing things the way Halo 2 did them.  Being able to set up parties and get into matches together was just awesome.  Everything before that involved inviting your friends after you joined or talking to them on the phone or something so you would all try and get into the same game.

So looking back at all that, I now ask myself what I was thinking when I dismissed Halo Wars out of hand.  There is so much pedigree there that they almost have no choice but to get it right.  Ensemble Studios certainly knows where they’re doing at the helm of RTS gaming, and Halo simply lends itself to the genre.  Hell, if you go back, Halo was originally going to be a RTS game before Bungie changed things up.

The thing that has really got me sold on it however is that there is a co-op mode.  To me, whatever else Halo has done, whatever you want to say about the story or the multiplayer or the graphics, it all really comes back to the co-op for me.  Being able to play through the entire game in co-op mode just screams Halo to me.

All I really know for sure is that Halo has constantly pushed things forward and now that the franchise is branching to another genre, I expect it to do just as much for the real-time strategery genre that it has done for first-person shooters.

Title: Halo Wars Publisher: Microsoft Rating: Teen Content: Mild Blood, Mild Language, Violence Platforms: Xbox 360 Halo Wars is a strategy game based on the Halo universe. Halo Wars will immerse gamers in an early period of the Halo universe, allowing them to experience events leading up to the first Halo title for Xbox.

The Ensemble Studios CGI department has definitely been working overtime cranking out stunning Halo Wars cinematic masterpieces, but what about the “real-time” aspect of the highly anticipated real-time strategy? Ask and you shall receive.

Here’s a brand new campaign focused video demonstration narrated by Halo Wars’ lead developer, Graeme Devine. It gives us some insight into the game’s straight forward interface design, the studio’s commitment to delivering an authentic Halo experience, as well as a brief glimpse of “The Flood.” Hit the jump for the video.

According to the folks over at the Angry Pixel, their source at Microsoft informs them that the upcoming Halo RTS, Halo Wars, will make its way to PC as well as Xbox 360 and feature cross-platform play via Microsoft’s Games for Windows – LIVE.

Not many games currently support cross-platform play, with Shadowrun and Universe at War: Earth Assault being two of them.

While this is good news for PC owners who don’t own an Xbox 360, I can’t imagine that playing an RTS on your 360 against an opponent on a PC would be very fair at all. Even though Ensemble Studios, the developers behind Halo Wars, have stated that they’ve worked out the kinks in controlling an RTS on a console, I can’t imagine that it’s anywhere near as fluid or as easy as using a keyboard and mouse.

UPDATE: When asked about a PC version of Halo Wars, a Microsoft Rep told IGN this:

“Halo Wars is being developed from the bottom up for the Xbox 360 and its control scheme to ensure that we deliver a groundbreaking console RTS experience. Given that, we have no plans to develop ‘Halo Wars’ for Windows Vista at this time.”