POLITE APPLAUSEHalo Wars (Publisher: Microsoft. Developer: Ensemble Studios. $59.99. Real time strategy game for Xbox 360. ESRB Rating: Teen.)

Hard-core fans of the epic video game Halo - the kind who stay up all night playing the team deathmatch multiplayer option - probably aren't going to like Halo Wars. The new game is like Halo with training wheels, offering little of the innovation of its predecessors.

But it's still a decent title, particularly for casual gamers who are just getting into real-time strategy. Halo Wars looks great, sounds great and it's the rare game in the genre that doesn't require an advanced degree to play.

Real-time strategy, for those who have never played, is arguably the most addictive of the video game drugs. Instead of one character, you command entire forces - building bases, moving troops and engaging in battles in actual time (kind of like the board game Risk, except with less dice and more visible carnage). Real-time strategy games are mostly played on computers by people who know what they're doing and are thus very complicated.

Halo Wars often feels like a remedial game - real-time strategy for dummies. You control the space marines or aliens from the Halo series in simple battles on claustrophobic battlefields, and you can't do things like build walls or isolated turrets. But in many ways, the game's simplicity is an asset. The developers at Ensemble Studios knew that the Xbox 360 controls are limited and that console gamers are often less hard-core, and they built a game from the ground up for a different kind of audience. The tutorials that teach the game's basic rules are each less than five minutes long, and then you can start blowing up the Covenant.

The visuals and musical score are what you'd expect from a Halo game, and the controls are intuitive. But most importantly, the smaller-scale battles in Halo Wars have a frenetic pace that help to mask the lack of depth in the gameplay. You can wage a campaign with a longer narrative for several hours, or you can enjoy a 30-minute skirmish.

The difference between this game and a more complicated competitor such as Warcraft III may be the difference between checkers and chess, but that's not really a bad thing. Not everyone was born to play like Bobby Fischer.

New game releases

For the week of March 1-8 (partial list)

-- Empire: Total War for PC

-- Major League Baseball 2K9 for Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2 and PC

-- MLB 09: The Show for PS3, PS2 and PlayStation Portable