I'd only ever read one review by Wargamer before, for Kohan, and was quite impressed with the depth they had gone into. I was quite surprised, then, when I went back to read this bizarre review, by one of the co-authors of the original article I'd been impressed by:

http://www.wargamer.com/reviews/realwar_main.asp

It gives such a glowing report for what I would consider to be one of the worst games I've played all year, Real War. If someone had only read this review I would imagine that they would strongly consider buying it, and then be extremely disappointed. The review concludes not with an overview of the games strong and weak points, but on a rant about the attitude of civilians towards the military after 9/11:

"It is particularly nice to see a strategy wargame that does not deal with World War II; how long can we continue to beat that dead horse, as though it is the only marketable wargaming subject and genre? The eerily particular relevance, especially following the September 11th tragedy, of a wargame portraying a modern worldwide terrorist network as the "bad guys" rather than an established enemy nation-state (although many still exist to threaten our freedom) is very timely and appropriate now. How prophetic for what we might expect in the future. Perhaps kids (or parents) will see what their neighbors, parents, older brothers and sisters (or kids) are doing to fight evil and preserve freedom and civilization across the world. Taxpayers who never spent time in the military may better appreciate the diverse, capable, and flexible forces their tax dollars go to support and how complex the missions are they may be assigned to accomplish. "We'll Never Forget!""

I guess it's different strokes for different folks...

'A "Bone" sprinkles a full load of CBU onto a Taliban supply depot and gets some nice secondaries!'

Wargamers are the absolute worst of the obsessive camps at evaluating their games on feature fetishism instead of fun. "Sure, it's no fun, but I can individually supply my recon units with petrol!"

Because on some level, feature fetishism *is* fun. Once you understand that, you'll understand why people are shooter gods, 3l1t3 haxxors, grognards, RPG nuts, or whatever a whole lot better.

--- Alan

By itself it's not fun. A shitty game isn't made any better by letting you spend hours distributing grenades to your squad individually.