Supreme Commander Comments by Robert Purchese

Looks nice.

I wonder what the controls will be like?

Damn that looks poor.

Every time I see screens like these and try to imagine controlling them with a 360 pad I shudder.

I'm really interested to see how Halo Wars and Endwar turn out, as they were designed from the ground up for consoles, but I don't hold out much hope for these PC to console ports.

PC version was £6 in Woolies at the weekend.
Gold edition was a tenner.

Great game, I'll buy it again on console. I didnt play the PC version enough (I only played through the first race) theres something about playing games on PC that makes me get restless - give me my sofa and a pad, not a desk and a hunched back.

I hope this turns out to be a decent port because I fancy this game (not as much as your sister obviously) but much depends on control in the heat of the moment.
I'm always amazed that Rome and Medieval Total War games weren't ported to the 360.
I mean there are hotbuttons on the keyboard but they could actually be very easily managed with a just the mouse.

So that's right thumbstick for moving the 'mouse' and left thumbstick to click down for a left click, and . . . . well you get the idea.

agree with moonprince, those shots look kinda poor

"give me my sofa and a pad, not a desk and a hunched back"

Every time I read this I want to punch someone in the face.

Buy a better chair! I'm anything but hunched in mine...
Or put the damn computer in the living room, tis probably quieter that the 360 anyway, mine certainly is! But then I'd have to argue with the girlfriend more over who gets the TV. So prefer the TV to be separate. Luckily I haven't played the 360 for ages so no arguments recently :)

Those screenshots look ok I suppose, although the terrain textures look a bit bland and the units like they are superimposed one terrain rather than being on it. Question is what is the frame rate like with a screen full of units.

Also is this a direct port? If it's not dumbed down in anyway I just can't imagine this being playable with a pad, but I guess we will know soon enough. Being quite a hectic RTS with loads of micromanagement things might just get a little messy on a pad.

The graphics look alright considering how many units there are and that each one is individually controlled and monitored by the AI, down to the bullets and shells that it fires.

The issues with the PC version were the huge hit on the CPU (not graphics) and you really needed two decent size monitors to enjoy the spectacle (one for overview, one for close-ups). Patches lowered the CPU requirement so I can see it sort-of working on the XBox, but I don't see how they can "fix" the graphics to work at 720 or even 1080 output.

Battle Engine Aquila looked better than this clunge!

if ever a game screamed "not for consoles", this was it

i could barely make this work with a decent pc....

i just dont see how this could work on the xbox :(

Ii have been keeping an eye on this and watching some of the vids on IGN suggest they have done quite a good job with translating the control scheme onto a pad.

Just to stop any more graphic bashing, it doesn't look that much better on the PC. It's a CPU killer.

That looks like a disgrace

As a fan of Sup Com gotta say that I agree with the comments, the graphics look poor, but what can you expect from a console anyway!? :)

I'm led to believe the 360 can do shadows these days. Someone should tell these guys.

@ FooAtari

"Every time I read this I want to punch someone in the face."

That's ok, because I have a sudden hankering to kick you in the kidneys.

Lounging on my bean bag / sofa will be much more comfortable than pretty much any chair, even an extremely comfortable one (for example, pretty difficult to lie down on a chair last time I tried...), but unfortunately that kind of furniture arrangement means adequate keyboard / mouse control goes right out the window. When sprawled in a haphazard fashion, a control pad gives you the best mix of precision and comfort. So, ya know, horses for courses and all that.

Controller-wise, it really isn't that hard to do fairly complex and in-depth commands - The Outfit managed it, with the little pop-up selection wheel. As did Counter-Strike on Xbox. Hold down a button and waggle a stick around to the options you want. You can add as many layers as you want to that. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat had a pretty quick and slick implementation of that method - was for selecting weapons and equipment and was only one layer deep, but no reason whatsoever why it coudn't have been expanded.

@ anomagnus

"i could barely make this work with a decent pc....

i just dont see how this could work on the xbox :("

Welcome to the wonders of a closed system (consoles) versus an open system (PCs). The amount of extra trickery and oomph you can squeeze out of a closed system is phenomenal - look at the original Halo as the best example I can think of right now without resorting to Google and Wikipedia research. No way could you get a PC with the same spec as the original Xbox (733 MHz Intel Celeron, 64 MB total RAM [system and GPU], GPU with similar architecture to GeForce 3 and 4 cards) and get Halo to run even half as good.

Basically, the quality of Supreme Commander on consoles will come down to however much effort and time the devs spend on tweaking and optimising.

I hope this will run and control well on the 360. I was very interested in the game at the time but my PC just couldn't handle the load.