That's because C&C4 is a real-time strategy game, which means it'll be more like juggling first three balls, then five, and eventually maybe 10 or 15. It'll be about knowing where all the chess pieces you control go, or ought to, given a cascade of escalating strategic and tactical permutations. It'll take hand-eye coordination but also a peculiar kind of spatially multiplexing brain-eye finesse. All things the limited buttons and in particular the ungainly thumbsticks on a gamepad aren't designed to accommodate (your thumbs, marvelous as they are, are independently your least dextrous digits).

But if both C&C3 and its expansion were ported to the Xbox 360, why not C&C4? Simple. C&C3 was dud-on-delivery for the 360. And while two or three RTS Windows ports have recently tiptoed across the aisle, they just don't sell. Universe at War? Red Alert 3? The Battle for Middle-earth II? Peanuts, compared to sales of their PC betters, the happy exception being , which (a) wasn't a port and (b) worked because Ensemble crafted it for gamepad-play (well...okay, and also because it's Halo).

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