Not sure how you were trying to link those videos but it didn’t work, not even without the “blob” part.
Oh, you’re right. Had the youtube default context menu disabled and the regular right click apparently gives bad links. And now it’s too late to edit, but here they are in case anybody is interested anyway:
It was too long ago, so I don’t remember the details, but it was certainly not as subtle as that. When I think of it, what you suggest would probably be doable (my first impression was that it wasn’t). I’d like it, but I doubt there would be much of a market for it, especially since wargames in general are already a niche market.
I played a quite mainstream space 4x game where it was mostly the same (although you could order a retreat at any time). But anyway, I don’t really want to have no control at all, this is easily simulated by “resolve battle automatically”. I’d just like, once in a while, to play a game where the control you have is realistic. Of course, I might be fed up with it in quick order after some defeats caused by my orders not being followed, and want to come back to a more complete control of the battle.
I’ll go you one better: not only have I played it, I’ve repaired it. I grew up in an electronics repair shop, and we occasionally got arcade machines in to fix when I was a kid. We got a Mr. Do in once, and I got it working before any of the adults even looked at it.
I didn’t like the game, though. I regarded it as an inferior knockoff of Dig-Dug, which was one of my favorites at the time.
I owned mr do and the sequel mr dos castle in the coleco vision…
ahh the glorious shareware revolution…….
you know there were 3 or 4 caste sequels?
I was going to play it, but I died of dysentery.
Anyone else play the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text game? That was fun, particularly as you could store everything in that thing your aunt gave you which you didn’t know what it was but was apparently made in Ibiza. The game came with assorted goodies including a “Don’t Panic” badge (which I may still have) and some pocket fluff.
That’s pretty cool, except for the “sometimes commanders chuck your orders” part, yeah, which adds a random factor that can’t really be mitigated or worked around especially with delayed orders & reports compounding the issue. I really disliked Medieval TW’s “feature” that most of the knight units had the Impetuous tag meaning they would sometimes decide to charge at the nearest guys with no warning or fanfare - yeah, it did happen sometimes in history to disastrous effect (though not without early warning to their king, in the form of being a roid raging tosspot at them repeatedly) but it’s not fun and in practice it merely forced you to micromanage them, always keep an aye on them and put them back in the line. Uncontrollable busywork isn’t good or interesting.
I suppose it could be workable and interesting if the likelihood of the general doing whatever instead of what you told them to was a specific knowable quantity, which would introduce another layer of historical verisimilitude : you’d have to know your immediate subordinates personalities, know which ones are unreliable tosspots who shouldn’t be in charge of anything besides just holding a line, which ones are likely to get lost in the woods on the way to the battlefield (hi, Grouchy !) and so on and could then formulate part of your strategic layer around these factors.
But anyway, the closest I’ve come to something like what you describe in modern gaming is the Combat Mission series of WW2 (and now modern, then back to WW2) games, where battles are divided into 1 minute increments. You only know where your own troops are and what they report seeing or hearing - which may or may not be accurate depending on various factors (crack vets are grizzled enough not to report a couple dudes they saw as a full battalion, whereas green recruits will often show massively inflated numbers).
Both sides’ players give their little pixeltroops orders of various degrees of complexity during a pause between minutes, then those orders are processed in real time by the pixeltroops with a delay on execution that depends on the complexity of the order - a “just walk thataway until I tell you to stop” order will put troops in motion almost immediately, while “split into 5 man squads that’ll leapfrog each other from cover to cover up to here then lay suppressing fire for 10s around that corner while *those *other guys leg it between two buildings” might take them 30s to grok and start acting on. You can’t order troops around in real time, and in the meantime they’ll use their own initiative should something unexpected happen - such as half of them suddenly getting schwacked by 3 heavy machine guns nobody had seen before or they see a “Tiger tank” cresting the hill (really an armored car, but c’mon, it’s an honest mistake while it’s shooting at you). There was also a chain of communications aspect to it - you could always give troops orders no matter how isolated, but individual grunts had to be within speaking/radio/visual range of their immediate superior or there would be further delays before orders were obeyed. As well, off map arty and air support requests were modeled, which could be either asked for before the battle starts (in which case you know exactly when and where it’ll land) or requested during battle (in which case the accuracy and delay depend entirely on who’s asking - a dedicated forward observer officer with binoculars, a good view of the target and his own radio would provide better results than Franz the NCO huddled inside a trench in the fetal position, whimpering coordinates at no one in particular)
Are you thinking of Highway to the Reich (Operation Market Garden) and Battle of the Bulge by Command Ops/Matrix games? You play as an operational-level commander, so you do not, and can not, control individual soldiers.
Nope. These games. You don’t control individual soldiers (I think the smallest unit is the 5-man half squad), but they’re tactical games at heart even though you can have battles featuring entire regiments. At that scale it becomes nigh unmanageable though - too much stuff to deal with and micro.
As a kid, I had the E.T. game for the Atari 2600. :o
Though, even at the time, it struck me as a poor knock-off of the Indiana Jones game.
I had a couple of attempts at this years ago, on a web-based emulator. Never got very far with it, probably from lack of patience. Are you saying that the thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is effectively allowed you to have an infinitely large inventory? Never worked that out at the time! I did like the way the game would take your commands very literally, and provide amusing responses in the Adams style (not surprising, since he was closely involved in the development of the original).
I know I wasn’t the only one to play it but I’m surprised I never see Project Firestart get more love in discussions about old games. It was a pretty memorable experience and is the grand-daddy of the modern “survival horror” game genre. You were exploring a space station that lost radio contact and, after some surprisingly graphic moments for a C-64 commercially produced game, find that the place is infested with space monsters. Your blaster is laughably inadequate so you’re usually forced to avoid, run or hide from the beasts. Solve the mystery as the clock ticks down between a self-destruct and a super-monster preparing to hatch.
On the Amiga 500 - Projectyle
On the PC - Under a Killing Moon;The Ancient Art of War at Sea
I’ve played almost every Infocom text adventure ever made. I grew up using the first commercial Macintosh computers and Infocom always had versions for the Mac OS so we tended to end up with them. (I think Leather Goddesses of Phobos was my favorite; the humor was fantastic in that game.)
HGTTG was ridiculously difficult. Douglas Adams himself was involved in creating the game and I’m pretty sure he got great joy out of making it as frustrating as possible for the player. He also helped create the game Bureaucracy for Infocom, which was based around frustration:
Wikipedia Article on Bureaucracy
Infocom called their goodies “Feelies.”
I never saw that game for real but it showed up all the time in the TV show Starcade.
Or, for that matter, which generals are genuinely smart and show good initiative, so you could send them to the more distant fronts where the information lag is longer, and trust that they’d still do something useful.
Played all of those except for Projectyle…
Here’s one I ran across accidentally: Paaman for NES
I’ve always assumed you got your handle from the infocom game. And I approve.