C&C on the N64 just about worked, but it was still awkward ass to play it. You don't realize how incredibly helpful a keyboard is until you don't have one.

Alien vs. Predator Extinction worked perfectly.

Oh, there's a relief. I thought the guys producing Halo had all simultaneously died, since there hasn't been another Halo game since number 3, which was released ages ago.

Please tell me I'm not the only one thinking that this is yet another attempt to cash in on Halo.

Did anyone else find the battles really easy? I've never been very good at other RTS games, but I win every battle easily, no matter what units I use.

My main annoyance with the game is that you can't group units. In the AOE games, you could group a bunch of units so that when you pressed a number key is would automatically select that group. There isn't any way to do this in Halo Wars, which I guess is because of the lack of a keyboard.

I'm also worried about the number of factions. In AOE 2, there were something like 15 different civilizations to choose from. In Halo Wars there’s 2. While the two are very different from each other, I'm not sure the game will be deep enough to justify a $60 price tag.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty fun game, maybe not worth buying, but definitely worth renting.

Just a guess, but it seems like it would appeal more to an FPS fan who is more interested in the Halo universe. Or it was trying to be more appealing to that demographic. Im not a big RTS fan (Star Trek Armada used to kick my ass back in the day. I may give that another try), but the demo seemed fun to me, so I may rent this.

Also, the story to this point is pretty interesting (to those who have played: does the entire game take place on Harvest, or does it jump to other UNSC planets? Are there playable space battles? Is there a Covenant campaign?), and the graphics are spectacular. I would say that these compare to that Final Fantasy movie that came out a few years ago.

I think they missed a cool opportunity by leaving out the flood as a playable faction. How cool would that be? Building huge facilities out of that flood biogootentacle stuff, capturing and turning enemy bases and vehicles, and selecting dead bodies to infect? THAT would be new and awesome.

Wouldn't that be cool, an RTS game with three completely different but well balanced races? One race could be the stalwart humans, one could be a futuristic warrior society, and one a horrifying mess of biological terror that's menacing the whole galaxy? If only someone had thought of that eleven years ago. They could have built a gaming empire by now!

I know, they might have even taken over the culture of a modern asian country, and have the sequel as one of 2009's most anticipated games.

Yes, I have always stood by my stance that Halo has always been completely original and revolutionary. That is totally what I was saying. You did a good job of pointing that out. How I said that.