Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars revived the series after years of dormancy, returning players to the conflict between the military organization GDI, the terrorist Brotherhood of Nod, and, new to the trio, the alien faction Scrin, which brought an entirely different playstyle. The game returned to the live-action cutscenes with real actors that the series had been famous for back in the nineties. It launched on PC in March 2007 and arrived on Xbox 360 that November, practically the same year as the original.

The console version carried over the full campaign for all three factions and the online multiplayer, but the controls were reworked for the gamepad — unit selection uses a circular menu, contextual quick commands, and automated formations instead of manually dragging a selection box with the mouse, which sped up some basic actions but noticeably slowed down fine unit micromanagement in the middle of combat. EA also adjusted the interface, text size, and map readability for comfortable viewing from the couch on a TV screen, as opposed to a nearby monitor. The graphics ran at a quality comparable to contemporary PC rigs, but the game was somewhat stricter about the maximum number of units displayable at once due to the console's limited power, so the largest battles in the later missions were noticeably more modest than on a powerful PC.

The Xbox 360 release was also one of the first in the series to offer full-fledged online multiplayer via Xbox Live directly on the console, which helped the RTS genre — until then seen almost exclusively as a PC-and-mouse domain — find its way to players sitting in front of a TV with a gamepad in hand. The campaign with its live-action cutscenes between missions remained unchanged, as did the expansion packs EA gradually released for both versions. Content-wise, it was therefore the same game as on PC — no missions, units, or buildings were missing — just with controls thoroughly adapted for the gamepad, which reviewers praised as a surprisingly functional solution to the old problem of bringing strategy games to consoles without sacrificing tactical depth.

Why play it: For players sitting in front of the TV with a gamepad, the Xbox 360 release opened up the real-time strategy genre, previously tied to mouse and keyboard, thanks to functionally reworked controls and full multiplayer over Xbox Live.