Buttoned Up: Why PC Remains the RTS King

War is Hell, according to General William Tecumseh Sherman.

Given that whole “the best way to cure a gangrene bullet wound is with a bone saw” methodology espoused by Civil War doctors, I’d say Mr. Sherman was on to something. Trying to play any sort of RTS game on a console gives credence to the General’s brash claim. Playing RTS’s with a controller gets me in touch with my inner Civil War amputee, mostly because the clunky controls make me feel like I’m missing a hand.

The point I’m ambling toward is how much better suited PCs are to handle to the frantic micromanagement intrinsic to waging digital war on a mass scale. There’s a lot going on in any given battle — what with the assorted factions embracing mob mentality and trying their damndest to kill one another — and having more buttons means having more control. The ability to assign hotkeys to groups of soldiers sets the PC apart as an RTS powerhouse.

Console RTS games have tried to emulate the hotkey system, but they just don’t have the grapes. Or more accurately, the buttons. In the PC version of StarCraft, players can section off their troops into 10 groups, able to summon any battalion by pressing 0 through 9. However, in StarCraft 64, players’ posses were cut in half and then some. A group of units could be assigned to the each of the N64’s C-buttons, but as I’m sure you’re well aware, 4 ain’t 10. Also, it was StarCraft 64, which was like dressing up some lobotomy patient in your best friend’s clothing so you could hang out. Try as you might, you’d inevitably fail to assure yourself it’s as good as the original.

I realize StarCraft was released a decade ago, and the console port is eight years old (two facts that make me wax nostalgic, and then feel really, really old), but even in this here “modern” age, the PC is still at the top of the Real-Time Strategy chain of command. Between the 104 keys on the average Windows keyboard and the mouse’s devious double-clicking precision, it’s hard to find a more masterful way to manage any kind of conflict, from global to intergalactic.

Next-gen console games have tried to circumvent the limitations of controllers, but that hasn’t really panned out. Take Tom Clancy’s EndWar, for example. Rather than frantically issuing orders with joysticks and colorful buttons, players scream at their troops via microphone. Although a clever way to bring RTS’s to a console audience, EndWar bungles the execution. You need to chatter commands incessantly, lest your units decide to break for lunch in the middle of a hot lead exchange.

However, “console RTS” may cease to be a dirty word further down the road. Halo Wars’ lead designer Graeme Devine said the game would be easier to play on the XBOX 360’s controller than with a keyboard and mouse, according to an interview with CVG last month. Unfortunately, we’ll need to wait until next March to verify his claim.

And even if the newest installment does destroy decades of console RTS stigma, it will still be difficult to bring console players into the modding fold. Popular mods of the PC’s older RTS offerings such as Defense of the Ancients or the Gundam RTS still grace the sundry pages of the Internet, but I have difficulty believing a new, user-made iteration of EndWar will find its way onto XBOX Live Arcade any time soon.