malvasia bianca

I bought Battalion Wars for the Gamecube a month or so ago. Even as I bought it, I was thinking “why am I buying this when I have Jade Empire waiting to be played?” (Answer: I cut Gamecube games way too much slack.)

Anyways, I gave it a try. It’s a sort of RTS, which is a genre that I think I’d like but have essentially zero experience with, because of its PC-only nature. (Part of me is glad, because I suspect that its mouse usage would kill my hands.) It’s apparently a pretty basic example of the genre: you have set missions with set troops (both friendly and hostile), controlled from a third-person point of view (not top-down), where you’re directly controlling one character (you can change whom on the fly) while giving orders to other characters. No building units, no long-term development.

I could go into more details, but I won’t; after playing through four or five missions, my brain again asked why I was doing this instead of playing Jade Empire, to which I had no good answer. So I switched over to the latter, which proved an excellent choice.

(Addendum to my Xbox post: one thing I don’t like about the controller is the D-pad. It only has one major job, to tell if you’re pushing up, down, left, or right, but can’t do that reliably.)