If there's one developer out there that's boldly pushing the boundaries of the real-time strategy genre with great games, it's got to be Relic. Look at 2006's Company of Heroes, the company's acclaimed World War II title. CoH masterfully blended a morale system, destructible environments, a cool resource system that forced you to expand around the map, and top-notch graphics. The end result was a game that felt like a World War II battlefield come to life on your desktop. Now Relic is coming back with Company of Heroes: Tales of Valor. Instead of simply delivering more of the same, Relic continues to tinker and experiment. Tales of Valor almost feels like a blend of action and real-time strategy gaming, something we got to experience first-hand.
ENLARGE
Tales of Valor isn't an expansion that requires you to own CoH; it's a stand-alone game that focuses on you controlling a handful of units at a time. In fact, this isn't a "traditional" RTS game, as the single-player campaign doesn't feature any kind of base building or node capturing as seen in CoH. This is a much more tactical game in that sometimes you'll control only a single tank and its crew. The reason is because you become much more invested in your units if you don't have an endless supply of them being churned out at some base. And if you don't have to manage a dozen vehicles and squads over an entire battlefield, you can focus on carefully controlling a small team as it navigates around the map.
To illustrate this, Relic let me play through several of the Tiger Ace missions in the game. In it, you play as an elite German tank crew in the battle of Villers-Bocage in Normandy. In the first mission you must take your tank and attack an Allied-held village, maneuvering your way through the roads and alleyways to take out Allied tanks and antitank guns, as well as shred buildings that infantry have fortified. However, the bad news is that you advance too far, too fast, and your tank is knocked out.
The next battle takes place in the same village, but it begins the crew having to abandon the tank. Now, stuck behind enemy lines, you must work your way on foot back to safety; not an easy task when the village is crawling with Allied infantry. Thankfully, your crewman can recover heavy weapons from the battlefield, as well as call in artillery, to make their escape.
The third battle represents payback, as your tank crew has a tank again, and you lead a large offensive into the village. While there are other German tanks and infantry units beside yours, you do not control them directly. Instead, you must focus on having your tank serve as the catalyst in the battle, helping to break deadlocks as well as bail out other units that get in trouble.
It's important to note that the damage that you do to the village is persistent. If you destroy a house in the first battle, it stays destroyed throughout the second and third battles. This means that you what happens in the first battle can effect what happens in the third depending on the state of the battlefield.
To give the gameplay more of a kick there's something called a direct-fire mode. Instead of you giving an order for the tank to destroy something, you control the tank and its turret. It's basically like an action game, as drive the tank around the map yourself and try and engage targets by using the mouse as an aiming cursor. You'll find yourself mashing the button to get a round off, or be in such a hurry that you miss the target. It makes the action much more immediate and personal as you're not just sitting back and giving orders, you're caught up in the battle directly.
There's also a reason you should blow things up aside from just having fun. The resource system no longer depends on capturing nodes that provide fuel or ammo. In fact, there are no capture nodes. Instead, you're rewarded fuel and ammo for killing enemy units and vehicles. And as for repairing damage, there is a repair ability that costs munitions points. You want to ration it out, though, not only because of the point cost, but because it immobilizes the tank, making it a nice fat target.
Meanwhile, each of your crewman have special abilities that they can unlock, not unlike the doctrine abilities seen in CoH. Litzke, the loader, can unlock high-explosive rounds, rapid fire, and improved rapid fire, letting him load the gun faster. Schraf, the driver, can unlock flank speed to drive faster as well as turret overdrive, which lets the turret move faster. Burndt, the commander, can unlock a machine gun atop the turret, as well as a smoke grenade launcher and the ability to call in an artillery barrage. Schultz, the gunner, can improve his marksmanship. All these skills are persistent, so if you unlock them in one mission they carry over to subsequent missions.
Playing through that campaign really did feel like a blend of action and RTS gaming. This feels like there will be an expansion's worth of content, too, as Tales of Valor will feature three campaigns consisting of three to four missions each. Now, fans of COH's superb multiplayer suite should note that Relic barely discussed multiplayer at all when we were there. That's to be revealed in the future, but the developer did say that the multiplayer doesn't feature the same massive changes as the single-player campaign. There's a big COH multiplayer community out there, so they're looking to deliver more content to feed that. There will also be some new multiplayer modes, such as a co-op mode called invasion. Up to four players see how long they can last against waves of enemies.
Tales of Valor looks to be a nice change for the series, especially since people were wondering just how Relic could expand Company of Heroes further without creating a Pacific campaign. It's also a sign that risk taking is alive and well at the development house. Tales of Valor will ship sometime in 2009.
The latest fighting game to be turned into a movie is 
Let's get this much out of the way: Shoryuken for shoryuken, the 
Here's what I mean: With the old pad, on average, I would successfully execute Fei Long's rising dragon kick (or insert any dragon punch-based maneuver) about 5-7 times out of 10 tries. With the FightPad, it's like 9 times out of 10. Moves requiring 720-degree motions, like Zangief's super, come off much easier as well, and exactly when I want it to (when someone's up in my face—PILEDRIVER). Back, forward, back forward style specials, like with Honda or Blanka, aren't noticeably easier to perform, though.
The shape and layout of the FightPad kinda reminds me of a Sega Genesis controller, and is for the most part, excellent, though if you have elven hands it might feel a little too big. For me, with medium mitts, it fits perfectly, no matter which way I hold it (I actually turn my right hand palm side down, so I can mash the buttons with my fingers whenever I play fighting games) and there's some breathing room for gorilla-handed people too.
But there are some things you should know about that would be dealbreakers if beating people didn't matter above all else. Numero uno, on the Xbox 360, this sucker is wired, which is lame balls for a $40 controller. It also feels very cheaply made, with glossy plastic Mad Catz found and melted down after it fell off a Christmas ornament truck. The rubber coating on the sides and back helps a little bit. Last, the sound quality coming through the headset on this thing is really terrible, like I was stranded on a desert island with a cellphone from 1987—it's noticeably crappier than it is on the regular Xbox 360 controllers.
Those things said, if you wanna do better 
The Pentagon has just given the U.S. Office of Naval Research $36 million for what it calls a "futuristic" experiment in training soldiers to deal with terrorists by using immersive virtual reality scenarios.
