[Thaluikhain]

As an RTS player I must say bravo on the criticism. I pity the fool playing an RTS on a console, the inability to select a group of units and assign it a grouping number makes multi-faceted complex manuevers impossible, so yes the RTS genre is safe from the unwashed hairy masses of halo players. And I hope Yahtzee reviews Dawn of War 2 (MOAR SPACE MARINEZ!), just so I don't have to if it turns out to be just a terrible MMORPG with RTS elements.

IIRC, though, the first RTS game of any note, Dune 2, didn't allow you to select more than one unit at a time. Warcraft, the first RTS game of any note, only allowed you to select 4 units at a time. It was only when Command and Conquer, the first RTS game of any note, came out that you could select as many as you wanted.

[Patch]

I can kind of see where they were coming from, though. Halo brought FPS's to consoles in a way they hadn't before (anybody who says GoldenEye did it better is objectively wrong). Even though I'm no fan of Halo, I can see the effect it had on other console owners.

I guess Halo Wars was just trying to do the same thing with RTS's but failed.

Let's see. Goldeneye is older. Comparing them in stupid. Like, really stupid. But let me put it this way;
Halo was easier then most other FPS's. You didn't have to worry about health, you just hid until it came back. You never failed, you just respawned. It got worse in multiplayer when you could die and come back on full health (in halo 1) and ammo. Also, you were limited to two guns. That's probably the key point in Halo. It balances difficulty. Players can't win just because they have 'that' gun. It runs out of ammo too fast.

Then again... the tank...

EDIT: Thal, why did you say all three were the first RTS of any note? Doesn't that contradi- ah forget it.

This post has been edited by Patch: 06 April 2009 - 02:48 AM

[Thaluikhain]

Well, people find different places to draw the line with "of any note". Without Dune2, there wouldn't have been C&C, but does that make Dune2 the first RTS, or the precursor to the first RTS?

Likewise...for FPS, you have DOOM as the iconic, original game...but Wolfenstein 3D came first. Is that the first, or doesn't it count, because it was really only 2D? DOOM wasn't exactly 3D...you could move in 3 directions...but you couldn't go under and over the same spot, each place on the map has one possible height value. Duke-Nukem 3D had levels which allowed you to do that, so is that the first? But by the time it came out, the FPS thing was fairly well established already...personally I think DOOM was better...it had less clever gimmicks, but used the ones it had more cleverly...and the over the top macho bullshit of DN was really annoying.