W&W, a wonderful game. NOT ! From: Karel Driesen <kjdriese@vnet3.vub.ac.be> Date: Wed, 02 Feb 1994 16:16:13 +0000 Sorry to bother this newsgroup with flame talk, but I have to get this off my chest. You can consider this a review of a game by a thouroughly disappointed player. I any of you have played W&W (a fantasy wargame, medium complexity, closed-ended) at PBM-Express in Holland, you will probably know what I am talking about. I will try to list the pro's and con's of both game and company: PRO game: - you can design your starting province, choose your starting armies - there are several hunderds of army types - armies have a lot of detail, gain experience, can have magic items, familiars CON game: - practically no mapping: I spent several hours each turn updating my own map, while excellent laserprinted sections of the map can be printed, but for a very small portion of your empire. Why not for all of it ? - you don't know what each of your own army types can do. Lists compiled by players circulate, but this is a definite turn-off for people not connected to the net. - only a few of the 100 spells are of any use. Saving throws of heavy monsters are so high that you have to resort to hack&slash anyway. For the lighter monsters, it isn't worth the magic points. - maximum of 200 moves. Although this is reasonable, to suppress typing costs, it means that large portions of your army are useless, because you can't get them to the frontier. Hardly realistic. PRO company: - highly reliable turnaround CON company: - there is only one situation in the game that takes GM intervention: the casting of a wish. All the rest is taken care of by the program. You can only do this about every four turns, because the magic cost is too great, so it is not a lot of trouble. Still, I tried it two times, and though the program recorded that a wish was cast, nothing happened. The wish is not open-ended either. In one case I wished to tranform one of my units into another type, something which is well documented in the manual. Nothing, not even an explanation why it didn't work. - I am fairly sure that the game was started up with a LOT of dummy positions. Of the 9 empires which I mapped, 6 had the same layout (and a very stupid one at that). Moreover, I have never encountered a live player (probably they were smarter than me and dropped out after 2 turns), so nobody fought back. Why did I play on then ? See further. - When the game was finished (I was ahead from the first to the last turn, probably also because of the drop-outs), not even a small message appeared saying that it was over, who had won, if there was any prize connected to my victory, whatever. Even if the program lacks victory shouts, I think it is the company's duty to provide some kind of congrats to the winner. - It is a debatable point, but I think that a company should inform you if you are the only player in the game, because it's no fun whatsoever to reach the finish, look behind you, and notice there is no one competing. You feel kind of ridiculous 8^). The reason why you don't notice straight away in W&W is that it seems you gather victory points for an empire that is not expanding any more. The player's ranking keeps rising, even if it is a dropout. CONCLUSION: I do not recommend this game, and surely not with this company (understatement of the year 8^). At Fl 17 per turn* (if you use 200 orders, which you need fairly early), you do not get bang for your buck. *this is about 8$ +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Karel Driesen E-mail: kjdriese@vnet3.vub.ac.be | | PROG (WE) Phone: (+32) 2-6413306 | | Vrije Universiteit Brussel Fax: (+32) 2-6413495 | | Pleinlaan 2 1050 Brussels | | Belgium | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ Up