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Oh, look, I’m taking a single remark from a lengthy interview and making an entire post about it. It concerns Blizzard, the famed developer of World of Warcraft and Diablo. You may think of Blizzard as a PC developer, but that ignores games like The Lost Vikings. Anyhow, Blizzard has said in an interview with Gamasutra, which always does good stuff, that it is not averse to making a console game in the future, just that it needs to be the right game.
An RTS like StarCraft II? That’s probably not the right game: have you tried to play an RTS on a console? Even if a developer pulls it off, as pretty much happened with Halo Wars, compare that to a a proper mouse and keyboard control scheme. It’s almost not even worth the effort to re-invent the wheel like that.
What about an MMO, like You Know What? Again, it’s so crazy to think that you can effectively take a mouse and keyboard and map it over to a controller for such a game. Look at how many buttons this mouse has, and even then it takes a while to get used to it.
As for being so damn pro-PC:
It’s obviously because we’ve made only PC games for the last 15 years, but there’s a perception, I think, that Blizzard is anti-console, and that’s absolutely not the case. We just want to make the right game for the right platform. Think about StarCraft II. Some real-time strategy games have tried to happen on the console. Some of those have been successful, but overall, our experience is that it’s going to be a better game on the PC, ergo it’s developed on the PC.
So it’s not that Blizzard hates your PS3 or Xbox 360, just that its current big games are so PC that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense trying to pigeon-hole those onto consoles.
I don’t get a bonerd for LEGOs like some people I know whose names start with a J and end with an S and work for a site that rhymes with shmimono, but I have fond memories of spending countless hours as a youth erecting LEGO fortresses and castles and whatever else my imagination could conjure up. It was always about smashing the other fortress and kicking some tiny LEGO ass, but that was at least 20 years ago. Now fast forward to 2009 and while I still like to kick ass, I enjoy doing it on a much smaller scale. Enter LEGO Battles for the Nintendo DS.
If you’re a hardcore RTS gamer then Battles isn’t really for you, but it’s still fun to see tiny LEGO pirates, knights and moon men duke it out on the small screen. However, the charm dissipates rather quickly into story mode one of six. Think of Battles as an introductory course to real time strategy games. I hate RTS, but found LEGO Battles to be amusing and worth the time to review.
The cut scenes are fairly amusing and I have to say that the tiny actors portraying LEGO characters are hilarious, which made me laugh out loud. Multiplayer is about as good as your chosen opponent allows. In other words, find someone who is good at RTS and multiplayer can be pretty sweet on Battles. Another highlight is the free play mode where you can mix and match troops from the Space, Pirates and Castle series to do your bidding.
LEGO Battles isn’t perfect, though. With such a small screen on the DS (and even DSi), trying to control your troops when there’s so much going on can be a challenge. The artificial intelligence is pretty dumb and I spent a few minutes cursing them out when they decided to get lost or stop doing their jobs. Can you imagine a grown man yelling at a video game on a packed plane? Yeah, that was me over the weekend.
I enjoyed Battles but it’s not for everyone. Seasoned RTS gamers will want to pass unless they plan on handing it down to junior RTS nerds in the making. If anything, LEGO titles like Battles are much better than the licensed titles that involve non-LEGO characters like Batman. Just saying.
