While games based on movies and TV shows have a long and proud tradition of sucking really, really hard, there are a few out there I’d love to see make the jump to real-time strategy. Picking them out ended up being harder than I thought, since most movies and shows have small groups of central characters, which doesn’t really work well in a game where you need disposable units. After much deliberation, here are my top four picks:

STAR TREK
I could easily do an entire column—or a book, for that matter—about what I’d like to see in a Star Trek RTS (hint: it’s not Armada 1 or 2, or Dominion Wars), but I’ll spare you that nerdfest…for now. However, with the new J.J. Abrams–directed movie coming out next year, it’s all the more important that this franchise be resurrected in RTS form. We don’t even know for certain that there will be heavy space combat in the new movie, but thanks to the IMDb page, we do know there will be at least one Romulan running around (played by Eric Bana), so that’s reason enough to finally do the great RTS that Star Trek has always deserved. (Of course, my ideal Star Trek RTS would be based in the Dominion War era, but I’d settle for any time period besides Enterprise.)


Battlestar Galactica has some amazing battles I'd love to reenact as "Galactica Actual"

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
One could argue that there has already been a great RTS game involving a fleet of spaceships from a destroyed world searching for their long-lost home planet, but since the next Homeworld game is still unannounced (THQ, owners of Homeworld creator Relic, inconspicuously bought the franchise rights from Sierra a year ago, so I figure it’s just a matter of time before we see Homeworld 3), we need something to fill the gap. A BSG game would be a design challenge, since the Colonial fleet has no way of replenishing itself, and the military has only one Battlestar (two, briefly) and two types of fighters (Vipers and Raptors) against the Cylons’ Basestars, Raiders, and Heavy Raiders. I could see this as a basic but entertaining strategy game where the colonials try to escort their civilian ships from point A to point B while the Cylons attack. But please, just don’t invent 10 new varieties of Viper fighters—if I wanted to play with a bunch of stuff that wasn’t in the show, I’d play an entirely different game.

28 DAYS/WEEKS LATER
There just aren’t enough zombies in strategy games. How about one where you’re a military commander charged with containing a zombie outbreak in a heavily populated urban area? Try to keep as many citizens alive and uninfected as possible by positioning your troops around the map with machine guns, sniper rifles, and flame throwers—but watch them closely or they’ll become zombies themselves. And with fast zombies like those in 28 Days Later, that’d be harder than it sounds.


The Terminator: Salvation trailer shows there could be a variety of SkyNet units

TERMINATOR: SALVATION
I don’t have high hopes for this movie being any good (it’s being directed by McG), but the war between mankind and SkyNet is a perfect setup for an RTS. Of course, like in BSG, there is the complication of humans being the heavily outmatched underdogs, and that’s hard to do in a balanced strategy game. We’ll have to wait and see how the movie portrays the war to get a real idea of how it could translate.

October 3, 2008