{"id":56,"date":"2010-01-13T21:18:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-13T21:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/?p=56"},"modified":"2010-01-13T21:18:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-13T21:18:00","slug":"digital-rooftop-prelude-to-the-war-tom-clancys-endwar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"Digital rooftop: Prelude to the war (Tom Clancy’s EndWar)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Tom Clancy’s EndWar review, Part 1 of 3)<\/span><\/p>\n

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So, today I bought Tom Clancy’s EndWar on PS3 (found it for a tiny 15\u20ac) and invested about 45 minutes in it, just enough to see how it played like. To be fair, the test conditions where far from ideal: small SD screen, and much worse no headset.<\/p>\n

Which is a shame, because I’m sure this is going to get a thousand times more awesome played with speech recognition. It will…<\/p>\n

What ? What do I mean with speech recognition ?<\/p>\n

Well, EndWar is a real-time strategy game, which is a genre that always struggled on console. So, as it became clear that a gamepad would probably never trump a good ol’ keyboard-mouse combo, Ubisoft sat and thought about a new way to control the units on the battlefield. And they came up with a speech control scheme that, I read, works flawlessly. It’s one of the two things that made me buy this game.<\/p>\n

The other is the setting, World War III (well, more like Northern Hemisphere War III, but I guess it doesn’t have the same ring to it). I must say the perspective of playing the role of a commander uttering commands to his troops on near-future battlefields sold me pretty fast.<\/p>\n

And as I tried the first two missions, I quickly saw how speaking instead of navigating menus would make for a much more dynamic experience. It’s a thousand time faster to say “Unit 5, Attack Hostile 3” than to click through 4 or 5 menus to achieve the same thing.<\/p>\n

That being said, the game promises to be quite frantic, even a bit too frantic for me, but ultimately it promises a great deal of fun. The battlefields are large enough, the rock-paper-scissor mechanic for a relatively easy decision-making process, and everything looks rather good.<\/p>\n

Should the speech recognition system live up to my expectations, this may very well become the first console game I try to play online. Its semi-persistant World War mode looks like a lot of fun. But first I’ll need to invest quite a bit of time in the single player modes, and we’ll see how it goes. See you for part 2 !<\/p>\n

Part 1 score : 7\/10<\/span><\/p>\n

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(Tom Clancy’s EndWar review, Part 1 of 3) So, today I bought Tom Clancy’s EndWar on PS3 (found it for a tiny 15\u20ac) and invested about 45 minutes in it, just enough to see how it played like. To be fair, the test conditions where far from ideal: small SD screen, and much worse no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31,29,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/grungi.gsmproductions.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}