Looks great and very much Halo-ish, but I wouldnt' call it the best looking strategy game, I think World in Conflict wins that one.

Dude, we've banned more people than I can count, we just don't always make it a public announcement.

As I was getting ready to leave, Tina Conley caught me and took me up to the suite where they were demoing Halo Wars for the last time. It was after midnight, but what the heck. It’s E3. They showed off a scene with a lot of flying gunship transports flying to a combat base.

The base had a lot of typical things you find in a real-time strategy game, like a factory, but there was a lot of human activity. You could see welders repairing warthogs. Those were cool little details that made the scene seem more real. Graham Devine of Ensemble led the demo and showed off the unique controls they came up with to make an RTS work on the Xbox 360. He said that his team focused on doing just a console-only title.

This game won’t ship this year. But it looks great. It takes place in the year 2531. You see all of the characters in the Halo universe, from the Elites to the marines. You can use the analog and four buttons to control the squads and vehicles, up t o about 20 at a time. The analog stick is used to navigate a circle with menu options, kind of like the iPod scroll circle interface. The characters are small but you can make out their individual movements. The Elites yell and behave like they do in Halo. It’s like a set of miniatures. If you send soldiers alone against a pack of the Covenant foes, you may not have much luck. But if you support them with warthogs, they’ll do better at breaking through. The warthogs have the same great physics. They fish tail and you can use them to leap over ravines.

At the close of the demo, Graham showed how you could generate a huge battle with scores of enemies on the screen fighting against marines, aircraft, anti-aircraft Wolverines, battle tanks, and other things. A big giant Covenant scarab came out of a hole in the ground and proceeded to wipe out everything. But Graham called for the spaceship in the sky to lay down an “orbital bombardment.” The bombardment took out the scarab, with cool explosion animations.

The game uses a resource system built around Pelicans bringing down supplies from a mother ship to the planet. Seeing a game like this reminds me that there are fresh ideas. It remains to be seen if it will really be playable. RTS games and consoles just haven’t gone together well.

That’s all for me. I’m ready to pass out. No more midnight demos, please.