News

'Your base is under attack."

"You need more silos."

"Your mother called, something about her stove and the Internet."

You know that frantic feeling that swells when your multi-tasking abilities are overstretched, when the first item on the to-do list is to find the to-do list you made yesterday? That's the way I feel playing real-time strategy games, the kind that place the player in charge of building bases, collecting resources and giving orders to dozens of digital vehicles and tiny people marching in formation.

In every mission in every RTS game I have played - from The Ancient Art of War on an Apple IIe in 1984 to this spring's Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (rated Teen on Xbox 360 and PC) - there comes a moment when I freeze up. There are always four things I need to do right away to prevent certain defeat and my brain stalls when I try to do them all at once.

"Unit is being attacked. Unit is lost."

"Insufficient funds to build new unit."

"Revenue Canada on line two."

You never see this happen to the strategy professionals, the Starcraft and Warcraft III wunderkinds who input more than 500 commands per minute in tournaments that are televised in South Korea. It may happen once they become too old to keep up - around their 25th birthdays - but even then they probably won't lose track of their commando units in Cairo like I did in Tiberium Wars.

I have learned some coping techniques over the years. I always play the tutorial missions (you get justifiably mocked with a negative achievement in this new game if you skip its boot camp), and I pause often to unfreeze my noggin and come up with a plan. I also frequently save my progress. This does take a minute or two and it can be a drag, but conditions can spiral out of control quickly in the Command & Conquer games - the computer-controlled enemies, even on the easiest of three difficulty settings, consistently rush your bases - and it saves you from starting fresh over and over again.

"Building completed. Building destroyed."

"The dishes are piling up and the dog needs to be walked."

Regular saves also prevent repeat viewings of the introductory movies, or cut-scenes, for each mission in Command & Conquer's campy science-fiction universe, wherein the good guys at the Global Defence Initiative fight off the cult-like Brotherhood of Nod.

Video-game veterans Michael Ironside (Splinter Cell) and Billy Dee Williams (Star Wars) are joined here by moonlighting supporting actors from popular TV series - Josh Holloway (Sawyer on Lost), Jennifer Morrison (House's Dr. Cameron), and Grace Park and Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica) - but there isn't one original line in the tired briefings to get excited about. This stuff doesn't hold a candle to the live-action cut-scenes starring Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell in Wing Commander IV - and that came out in 1995.

"Pitbull vehicle reporting for duty."

"Missile launchers are online."

"Joe's sick so you need to do the presentation in Des Moines."

Yes, advances in storytelling move slowly in video-game land, but there are rewards that keep me coming back to the strategy genre even though the games don't exactly fit my skill set. The Command & Conquer games, for example, do a great job of changing up the missions, so a raid using one commando will be followed up by a full-scale challenge involving multiple objectives and the creation of sprawling bases.

If you survive those long challenges and continue through the game, the visuals get lovelier as you peer down on the action from the top-down view. After 20-plus hours of taking turns controlling the two human sides in Tiberium Wars, the developers introduce an alien race called the Scrin that has some wonderful creatures, buildings and abilities. As with last year's Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, I lost more than a few skirmishes because I stopped playing and started watching.

Finally, there are the interfaces, the buttons and menus that allow you to control those bases and creatures. I find these things fun to figure out - I can admit it - and EA has done a great job moving from the standard keyboard-and-mouse arrangement on PCs over to the 360 and its controller. Tiberium Wars has a control scheme that is very similar to the company's Lord of the Rings strategy games, the Battle for Middle-earth series, and it simplifies the command trees and building queues so that you only need two or three buttons.

In short, once I unclog the grey matter and seize upon a plan, I can usually get my little charges to play along, which is a large part of the appeal of these games. I will still probably never win a multiplayer match against real opponents - I'm 0-14 as of this writing - but at least several decades of strategy gaming have taught me one thing: How to lose in an entertaining way.

"Your base has been destroyed."

"But your mother fixed the stove and Joe's feeling better, so retry mission now."

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars was developed and published by Electronic Arts for PCs and the Xbox 360; rated Teen, age 13 and up.

scolbourne@globeandmail.com

This week in games

The other world series

The U.S. television network CBS has secured the rights to four events on the World Series of Video Games calendar. The competitions will be condensed into hour-long segments that will air as part of the CBS Sports Spectacular beginning Sunday, July 29. The canned segments will include footage from the finals of featured games - World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Guitar Hero II and Fight Night Round 3 - and interviews with the competitors.

Games of the future

Closer to home, Vortex 2007, a video-game competition that is part of the McLuhan International Festival of the Future, has extended its deadline for submissions to June 7. Vortex is looking for ideas and pitches, not finished games, in four categories: mobile, console, Internet and PC. Finalists will pitch their concepts to judges (this writer included) in Toronto, June 18 to 21. There will also be two free sessions, open to the public, where development veterans and venture capitalists will discuss game creation, financing and marketing. These will be held tomorrow and Monday; click vortexcompetition.org for more details.

Will patrick swayze voice himself?

Finally, two very questionable film-related announcements. Electronic Arts has sold movie rights to The Sims, the bestselling PC game, to Twentieth Century Fox. And Dirty Dancing: The Video Game was unveiled by Codemasters. The casual PC title will be an "action puzzler" following Baby's descent into the sordid world of organized crime ... oh, sorry, ballroom dancing. It will be released as part of the film's 20th anniversary this year. S.C.