14 DAY TRIAL // As consoles grow more popular and more and more people tend to say that the PC is dead as a games platform, there's still a small but noticeable minority of people that brings clarity to the discussion and contradicts some of the more spread assumptions about game consoles.
One of the major flaws of both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are their control peripherals, their game controllers. There are still many shooter fans that can't get the same mileage out of those controllers as they can get out of a mouse and keyboard setup.
And Chris Corry, one of the people behind the development of Electronic Arts' Red Alert 3, thinks that the controller issue will be much more important when it comes to taking the RTS on consoles. The producer declared that: "Console RTS design has come a long way, but I don't know if you will be able to lead design of a true RTS, which is so inherently reliant on the mouse and keyboard combination, on the console." Corry should know as the Command & Conquer series has a long history of console ports behind it, beginning with the original C&C being ported to the PSone and Saturn all the way back in 1996.
Different controller capabilities is one of the main reasons for which the upcoming Kane's Wrath expansion for Command & Conquer 3 won't allow cross platform play, even if it is due to launch for both PC and Xbox 360. Any player using the mouse and keyboard combination can get things done much quicker than his console wielding counterpart, which would result in very imbalanced multiplayer matches.
But Corry says radical improvements in the control setup for consoles are coming in Red Alert 3, which is due out next year and that the RTS genre in general is becoming more at home on consoles with each title that gets an Xbox or PlayStation release.