RICK@QUCDNAST.BITNET (Rick Pim) (12/15/88)
> > So, what other games besides the ones we've mentioned are good Amiga >citizens? I haven't seen a review of this, so what the heck: Universal Military Simulator (Rainbird) The game consists of two disks, a booklet describing the scenarios, the Atari ST instruction booklet, and a one-or-two-page sheet describing the differences between the ST version and the Amiga version. (This last is either dreadfully written or dreadfully translated from another language; I found that I was better off ignoring it completely.) The manual is resonably clear but hardly essential to play the game. The scenarios book is a description of order of battle, etc for the 5 scenarios included with the game distribution. Note: the disks aren't copy protected, but the game is: upon initial startup (and then only) of the game it asks for a word from the scenarios manual. The game runs as a window on the Workbench screen and need not be booted from its own disk. (It DOES expect to find things in fonts: and libs:, if it doesn't find them, well, it crashed my 1000 back to kickstart... Either copy files or make assigns as necessary. :-) It multitasks reasonably well, the only problem I've noticed being that it chews reasonably healthy amounts of memory. (It also changes the workbench screen colours, but has a menu item for putting them back. I usually use mwb and run it from it's own screen.) Game play is pretty good. The screen display is nice, although all of the possible viewing points of view are perspective views of the battlefield. A 'straight-down' POV (as in conventional board games) would be a useful addition. Also, the program seems to redraw the screen MUCH more often than truly necessary, which makes some parts of the game rather slow. Issuing commands to units takes more time than it should; the user interface during this section of game play could stand an improvement. Example: you zoom in to part of the battlefield, and start issuing orders. It would be rather better if it only asked you for orders for those units that appear on-screen, rather than *every unit in your army*. Each scenario takes some time to play, so I haven't played through the lot of them yet. My first impressions are that the machine makes a decent (but not great) opponent. I was a bit diasppointed that I won a (marginal) victory in my first game, in what I would have thought to be one of the tougher scenarios (Arbela). With sitations reversed I was unable to win, so it's a reasonable opponent. Pluses - reasonable opponent, flexibility (any army vs any other army, ability to design your own armies/units: Rainbird has expansion scenario disks on the market), disks non-copy protected, multitasks, quite enjoyable if you like boardgames: a keeper Minuses - annoying amount of fiddling necessary to give orders to units, too-frequent gratuitous screen rewrites Neither + nor -: one title screen, irrelevant sound. (On the other hand, this ain't no arcade game; who cares?) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Think I'll stay in bed Rick Pim, Physics Department Dream all day Queen's University, Kingston World outside bugs me anyway. rick@qucdnast.bitnet