Do all boys burn their model airplanes? Or was it just me? Am I the only one who went through that weirdly destructive phase of watching with fascination as fire melted the plastic of the precious creations I had painstakingly pieced together and glued and held tight overnight with rubber bands while the glue dried and painted — all those tiny vials like a woman’s collection of lipsticks — and plastered with decals slipping wetly from my fingertips at all the wrong angles? So much time spent lining up a tiny “no step” decal, one tenth the size of a postage stamp, along the seam of an F-86 Saber’s aileron. And all reduced to sickening black smoke curling out from under an underpass near the apartments where we lived when I was a kid. There I was, willingly sacrificing something precious into my terrible newfound fascination with fire, gradually emptying my bedroom ceiling of the treasures I had carefully hung, each at just the right angle.
After the jump, I grew out of that and then years later found Little Inferno Continue reading →
Bruce, playing the cowardly Soviets, is trying to slink his way into the liberated cities of Zhitomir and Korsun. So far, his vast advantage in brainwashed farmers and sheet metal vehicles has done little to help him take these two objectives. Tim, playing the noble Axis, with a strong tradition of discipline and excellence, is putting the finishing touches on a dramatic counterattack that is sure to be praised for decades.
Yes, there are advantages to being the one who writes the intro.
After the jump, Bruce gets me back. Continue reading →
A very accomplished game designer once told me his best ideas were mostly borrowed, but that he made them his own in the way he arranged and adapted them to a setting. Part of good design, he said, is knowing what works in a particular situation, and why. Good ideas keep coming around in new forms for a reason. They are borrowed, adapted and thus evolve, while the bad ones are discarded.
So it always puzzled me that computer wargames didn’t seem to have this evolving pool of good ideas. Instead, too often they were races to the bottom of some massive simulation pit, at the nadir of which was presumably an infinitely complex reality modeling engine. In retrospect, it was logical: when your platform is a supremely powerful computation device, it makes sense to make it compute as much as possible.
But nothing shakes up the status quo like a new platform that behaves like a new habitat, forcing its inhabitants to adapt or die. John Butterfield’s Battle of the Bulge feels like a game designed from the ground up for the tablet and its touchscreen*, where simple rules and clean design are ambitions instead of compromises. It’s also a fascinating example of how a hobby that once strove for superlative accuracy is willing to compromise in the name of superlative gameplay.
After the jump, dance of the wargaming masters Continue reading →
