The Lamer Gamer

Borrowed Halo Wars from a buddy as I still had a number of achievements to finish up.  For whatever reason, I’m totally into unlocking the avatar gear in Halo Waypoint, and that of course requires finishing a bunch of these games.

Most of what I had left in Halo Wars was just time consuming, only requiring a little skill and some reasonable planning.  But I got stuck bad on one mission trying to hit par time on Heroic for “Mr. Punctual”.

Mission 6: Dome of Light was such a damned pain in the ass.  If you don’t get it done well under the par time, the covenant troops get their upgrades and you’re out of luck against the bad ass Hunters without air units.  Finally figured out a reasonable strategy of Gauss Hogs and Flamers and a short script for how to start out so as to get production really running in the shortest amount of time.  As you progress, a lot of it has to do with having your units placed before the mini-bases pop up locations 2, 4 and 5.  Otherwise it’s again a time consuming bitch to get through each of those.

1. *Save (saving as at your leisure but I’m suggesting it in a few places to save time if you mess up and need to replay)
2. *Skulls (since score doesn’t matter, you’ll want 5 of the 6 skulls that boost you, but drop the score)
3. Build 1st Supplypad
4. Capture NW Reactor (use the existing Marine unit, quickly before the get killed in combat.  This is crucial as you need Tech 1 to upgrade supply pads)
5. Build 2nd Supplypad
6. Upgrade 1st Supplypad
7. Position your Spartans where they’ll do the most good.  The three towers 1 right next to your base, 2 at Rhino position 1, and 3 roughly ESE of your base are perfect.  I like turret in the 1 spot, rocket in 2, and spartan laser in 3, but whatever works for you.
8. Build 3rd and 4th Supplypad
9. Upgrade 2nd Supplypad
10. Upgrade 3rd Supplypad
11. Build Barracks
12. Upgrade to Fortress
13. Upgrade 4th Supplypad
14. Build 5th Supplypad
15. Build SE Turret
16. Train Marine
17. Build Field Armory
18. Build NE Turret
19. Upgrade 5th Supplypad
20. *Save
21. Train 2 Flamers
22. Research Adrenaline
23. Build NW and SW Turrets
24. Research Reserves
25. Train Hog
26. Research Napalm Adherent
27. Research Medium Turret
28. Train 2 Hogs
29. Recycle 1 Supplypad
30. Build Reactor
31. Research Reinforcements
32. Research Large Turret
33. Recycle Field Armory (once research is done)
34. Build Supplypad
35. Upgrade Supplypad
36. Research Gauss Hog
37. Research Oxide Tank
38. Research Grenadier
39. Recycle Reactor (you don’t need it once you pay for the research)
40. Build Supplypad
41. Upgrade Supplypad
42. *SAVE

Now that you’re set up, build the hell out of Warthogs and Flamers, and keep them coming, both aren’t particularly tough to kill.  You’ll want to dispatch a group of each to the first Rhino area and then send a ton of units up the the 2nd area and only then order the 1st Rhino and deliver it.  Once you place the 1st Rhino, the mini-base will spawn at area 2, your troops up there might cause some of the buildings not to spawn, but I don’t think I’ve seen that often.  Use the Hogs to take out the turrets and then the building.  Use your Heal ability too.  Essentially use the same tactic on the 4 and 5 areas.  3 is cake just transport a few units over.  I finished in under 20 minutes this way.

Where to begin?  Halo Wars is both pleasantly surprising and underwhelming at the same time.  The controls work better than in other console RTSs that I’ve played, but they’re dumbed down.  There is a nice amount of material for those who are really in to Halo.  Gameplay is fun, but fairly one dimensional.  Strict RTS fans will probably be disappointed.  Even so, Ensemble Studios in its swansong, did right by the franchise.

Halo fans are treated to a short story from the universe, with some nice Spartan-II porn FMV sequences.  There are also an number of unlockables between Skulls and Black Boxes.  Each of these adds something else to do during a mission other than kill baddies.  The Black Box elements add to a Halo Timeline in the main menu which is fun to look at, but I can’t say if it contains any in-universe  material I wasn’t aware of already.

Gameplay is easy to pick up and the economy is simple to manage.  Even so, there are a number of tricks to making everything work better, and getting off to a running start.  I took a long time researching all of the tech tree the first several missions before I’d do much else, that can take some time.  Most players will probably focus on one or two types of units.  Combat was supposed to have a rock-paper-scissors mechanic, but the focus seems to be on groups of vehicles, and that’s all I needed to finish levels.  Aside from on Legendary, I didn’t need more than 3-4 Scorpions to carve a swath through most maps.  In that way, I didn’t feel there was a lot of balance.  I have a feeling that this is more of a failing of the AI, than the game design.  Humans will no doubt perform better on the other end of skirmish.  Still, Scorpions win out overall I think.  The other option is Uber units, which I’ll pick up on later.  Spartan-IIs were an obvious but well thought out and useful unit.  I never found the Spartan Laser to be easy aiming in Halo 3, but the can’t miss nature in this game makes it fun to see used.  Their carjacking ability is also amusing, especially in what time I devoted to limited multiplayer.

The UNSC campaign has a nice pace and decent variations on the somewhat limited scope of play.  You’re introduced a little slowly to all the goodies, which I feel could have been left in the Tutorial.  The maps are beautiful and of reasonable size, nothing on the scale of what you saw with Supreme Commander.  But right there, that’s the end, the UNSC campaign feels a little short.  There is no Covenant campaign, which I have to say is a pretty big bummer.  So for the Covenant, it just means you’re limited to skirmish games.  The Flood is not a playable faction.  I can see why that’s the case, given how The Flood is presented.  So playing against Flood units, particularly buildings ends up being hard to figure out as their structures don’t follow the same template that the UNSC and Covenant do, nor are they covered in the manual. I suppose it doesn’t matter as you just end up killing everything anyway, and generally shooting at whatever is shooting at you.

When the demo came out I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the controls were, but after playing for an extended period of time I do find them lacking.  The selection tools are very usable.  Local and Global select work for the Halo Wars.  Painting while holding down (A) is a bit of an art.  Typically, I tried to select all and then (RT) to the type I wanted.  The unit AI is touted in the in-menu crawl, but units don’t do simple things like engage the most appropriate target in the rock-paper-scissors way.  The special ability controls (Y) were glitchy in my opinion. It feels like the timer is triggered immediately rather than on weapon release.  Having no defined grouping ability is a pain.  The sub-select mode on Right Trigger while I made use of it, wasn’t as helpful as it could have been.    Largely this means either A) unit spamming, or B) Uber unit massacre.  I chose B.  

Wandering around the board with either a bunch of UNSC Vultures, or a Scarab is a quick way to clear out enemy units.  I felt like it was too easy to build Vultures, perhaps only slightly harder to build Scarabs.  What it took to build a Krogoth in Total Annihilation felt like years, this is like seconds, well minutes.  In that way skirmish games are probably meant to be fast.  So I wouldn’t expect hours long standoffs like you’d have in TA or Starcraft.  

Numbers wise it’s a 3 out of 5.  If you’re not a Halo fan, I don’t know why you’d be interested anyway, but it probably only loses half a point.   There was a lot of room for improvement, but I dare say there probably won’t be much in the way of updates or sequels.  I really would have loved there to be more, but there wasn’t.  I’m going to try devoting some extra time to online play, but I wasn’t crazy about  it the first time.  2nd time is the charm I hear.

I didn’t manage to play Halo Wars yet, but I noticed a friend did.  While browsing the list of achievements that he’d gotten I took a minute to look over the rest.

FUCK!

Why in gods name does this achievement exist?

24 Hours of Quality

Play Halo Wars for at least 24 Total Hours
 

It should be an achievement to complete the game in less than 24 hours, not to leave it paused over night gambling that your Xbox doesn’t overheat.

Among other stellar achievement inclusions

• Ram 50 Grunts with Warthogs
• Kill at least 5 Covenant Units with the Bridge
• Win a Matchmade Skirmish Game on Xbox LIVE
• Win and have the Highest Score in a Matchmade Skirmish Game on Xbox LIVE

I’ll forgive them the lame, do X Y times, but I’ve never understood what the fascination is with multiplayer achievements.  Worse, they have the Gears-esque complete the game in Co-op achievement, which to me should be the same as completing the game.  Might as well be a “Wow, you have friends?” achievement.

Since I’ve been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2, I’ve been hitting a lot of the grinder achievements as I go.  They’re all fairly trivial, so over the course of a few weeks they’ve just been popping up.  It too has its own annoying co-op achievement, which I’ll probably never get. 

With Friends Like these…

Play in a game with seven or more players from your friends list.
 

Why would anyone care?

The demo for Halo Wars was released yesterday and I immediately dove into it.  I’d heard the rumor of it containing a multiplayer map a few times, so it was a disappointment when I selected multiplayer and all it did was pop up an ad for the game itself, booo.

There were, however, the promised 2 campaign missions, which don’t get very deep into game play, but show me enough of the story to hook me and get a good feel for the controls.  HW looks to have much of the same story driven action that the rest of the Halo series employs.  Still works for me.  The better thing to disect is of course the controls.

First, and foremost, Ensemble did something I haven’t seen from other console RTS games; they stopped thinking of the controller as an analog of  mouse.  Any game controller is not as precise as a mouse, which is pretty much the root of all flaws of trying to emulate said rodent interface.  

Halo Wars corrects how you interact in a few ways:

• There are no drag box selections – Instead these are replaced with controls that really do work better on a console.  There is of course the select all button, but the major change is the paintbrush.  Hold down the A-button, and sweep it over units to select them.  Since you won’t be as nimble with the controller as a mouse, it’s hard to keep the dragbox around moving units.  Having the paintbrush makes it much easier to make mass selections quicklyand accurately.
• Select and cancel selection are exclusive controls – With the mouse, typically clicking off a unit deselects.  Halo Wars limits deselect to the B-button only.
• Unit move speed changes based on grouping - if you put Marines on foot and Warthog in the same group and issue a move command, they travel together keeping the advantages of both.  I always found it frustrating that in other games, you purposely build units that support each other well but end up having to micromanage their movement as a group so they don’t get separated and picked off if one type is faster than the other.  I realize this has nothing to do with it being on a console, but recent games still haven’t implemented this and it annoys me.
• What you can build and where it can be built are limited – For those used to StarCraft-like games, it might be a downer that your base is monolithic, and so the structure strategy of building masses of photon cannons near some choke point is lost.  Also, there isn’t what appears to be a ton of overlap in unit purpose, and that’s fine.  There’s no need for 3 levels of aircraft that do largely the same thing only slighly better than the last level.  Variety may be the spice of life, but it’s the death of a console RTS.  Things become way too complicate with too many different unit types.

As for gameplay, the game, already being somewhat simplified by having less types of units, and thusly less types of buildings necessary to produce units, is fairly easy to control.  As mentioned, units keep in their heterogeneous groups, and fight somewhat intelligently together. There are the typical advantage units, which are disadvantaged against some other unit, which are disadvantaged against… eh, you’ve seen it before.   Warthog beats Infantry, Tank beats Warthog, Infantry beats Tank.  It’s not quite that cut and dry as there are upgrades which make each unit more effective outside of its designed purpose, but that’s generally it.  

Overall, I didn’t feel like micromanaging was all that important, nor do the tutorials particularly suggest it.  There are occasionally reasons to point unit X at unit Y and use some special ability or use cover in the environment, but I’m an old school rushing kinda guy.  Rushing held up as a good strategy in the demo for me though.  Build a whole bunch of units, send them all in, mix in “Leader Powers” as they call them, repeat.  

I have to draw some comparisons between the HW interface and Supreme Commander’s on the 360.  Both share a bit of the same failings in trying to implement “stickyness” with the cursor.  I’d rather that someone figured out how better to handle acceleration with the thumbstick.  To me it speeds up too fast, and doesn’t land where I want.  This is particularly more frustrating in HW since there’s specifically a trigger dedicated to fast scrolling.  Both use a wheel style selector, but Halo Wars has far less options, making it easier to accurately select what you actually want.  I know I’m harping on the whole “less is more” maxim but there’s a reason.  The problem has always been that there are two categories, PC RTS and Console RTS, and they aren’t the same, or portable.  Pikmin wouldn’t be anything special on a PC and Command and Conquer was terrible on a console.   Unfortunately I feel like I’m advocating putting lame, simple games on a console is the only way to handle that the RTS issue, but I’m eager to see the whole of Halo Wars and how far they can go before it breaks.

Should you want to grab the demo, you can queue it up to download the next time you sign into Live by following this link.  I’m still thinking this is a rental, without the multiplayer demo, I can’t say that I’d want to keep playing it for sure.  Plus, the addition of the Mythic map pack comes at a higher cost, so it’s probably a wash on that front.

The release of the Halo Wars playable demo on Xbox Live is already shaping up to be a make or break moment.  Because of its Halo heritage, Halo Wars is enjoying significant interest, and I’m sure scrutiny as well.  Since no other RTS has enjoyed what I’d consider measurable success on a console, this demo needs to wow people, particularly with the interface.  But if the interface fails in the demo, the release on 2009-03-03 will likely be over before it begins.  So far I’m slotting this as a rental, though picking up the Collectors Edition, which will include the Mythic map pack for Halo 3 has crossed my mind.  Since the demo will include one multiplayer map along with two campaign missions, my mind will probably be made up on the buy/rent issue well in advance of the March release.  Here’s hoping it doesn’t disappoint, which in and of itself would be a huge disappointment.  With the folding of Ensemble Studios, whose AOE/AOM titles are so good I still play them from time to time, I’m truly looking to Halo Wars as their last hurrah.

I’m the Master Chief’s little bitch.  They could put out “Halo: The Musical in 3D” and I’d be there.  So I’m obviously excited about the impending release of Halo Wars (2009-02-28 if you believe what you hear from CES).  The Halo franchise has been so consistently good over the years that I was kind of sad that Halo 3 would likely be the last we’d see of the Master Chief.  This of course means that Halo Wars has a lot to live up to, especially since they can’t rely on the chief as a crutch.  Since the story for any of these games comes from Bungie’s bible, that part at least should be solid, and from the video I’ve seen, they’ve put great care into conveying Halo’s iconic look and feel.  But what about the gameplay?

The controls are apparently built from the ground up, expressly for the 360, so you’ve gotta think there’s some hope that it will be more playable than say C&C3 or Supreme Commander.  I really wanted to love SC, after all, it’s from the guy that brought you Total Annihilation (only the best RTS ever!).  But Supreme Commander on the 360 was terrible.  The controls didn’t (couldn’t?) compete with a mouse/keyboard, and the fact that the damned thing might lock-up the 360 every time you attemped to save, or worse every time you finished a level.

From the preview videos out there, the controls look somewhat similar to those on Supreme Commander.  Ensemble has essentially re-invented “The Wheel” again.  For anyone that remember “The Wheel” in SC, it’s a menu that is arranged in a circle, that’s contextual to whatever is selected.  It’s not a bad idea, but I thought it was still a little hard to work reliably.  That could really just have been a issue of accuracy.  When the Wheel was full, it got a little hard to select exactly what you wanted quickly.

Perhaps the real problem is always going to be that any game controller is no match for the mighty mouse, with its comparatively stunning accuracy and awesome right-click.  We’ll see after getting our grubby paws on Halo Wars I guess.