Loose Wire: War Games
By Jeremy Wagstaff
01/10/2002 Far Eastern Economic Review (Copyright (c) 2002, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
I’m not going to venture an opinion on the state of the war against terror, but I’m probably the only one. Think you can do better than the military? Try your hand at Real War, which isn’t just another warfare strategy shoot ’em up-well OK, it is, but it does have the added kudos of being “the commercial version of the official military Joint Forces game being used to train the United States armed forces.” This may actually explain more than I’d care to know about the U.S. armed forces: if they’re training on this then they’re in trouble.
For one thing, the units — tanks, aircraft, and ships — tend to run over one another quite regularly. For another, they don’t always do the logical thing when encountering an enemy, like opening fire on them. (Instead, the tanks move around aimlessly in the vicinity, a bit like dogs checking each other out.) Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun game, and it extends the genre considerably. It’s just, well, I don’t like thinking the world is being saved for democracy by a bunch of guys whose training consisted of playing games like this.
A better bet, in my view, is World War III from JoWood, which has a bunch of features that raise the bar. First is the possibility of moving your point of view from high above the battlefield to right down next to the tanks you’re controlling. The terrain is beautiful, including snowfall and clouds. The tanks sport headlights that flick on after about 7 p.m., depending on whether you’re fighting in snowbound northern terrain or in the sand-spattered Middle East. Trains trundle disconcertingly past, even while you’re in the middle of a battle. All in all, the game’s worth it just for the view.
If you’re looking for a less violent way to prove your worth, then you might want to try Tropico, which makes you president of a poor Caribbean island. Your task is to make people happy and become popular, but most importantly to stay in power. This shouldn’t be too hard, given what a nice person you are, but as in any happy-go-lucky country there are always possibilities of violent overthrow — from popular uprisings to guerrilla attacks to coups d’etat by your own soldiers.
Ominously, the instruction manual is peppered with short biographies of illustrious leaders like Nicolae Ceausescu, Manuel Noriega and Ferdinand Marcos, which serve either as cautionary tales or role models, depending on what kind of mood you are in.
For the less political, there’s a welcome addition to games which are offshoots of Monopoly, that timeless board game that’s bound to cause ruptures in even the happiest family gathering. Monopoly Tycoon, from Infogrames, matches the best of Monopoly, the game, with what computers have to offer. It has great graphics — which actually show the sun going down over your town and street lights casting their pallid glow over the city — and configurability. As a would-be tycoon you must beat your opponent to build a chain of shops and apartment blocks and juggle distribution, pricing and location to woo the city’s fickle populace.
One that’s definitely not for the kids: Dope Wars, from Beermat Software, now into its second version, is a kind of Monopoly game for drug dealers. Despite its somewhat tasteless premise, it’s actually quite good fun, and there are enough warning flags for you to realize this is not an attempt to glamorize the seedy world of narcotics. Instead, you get a feel for the fact that, were it not illegal and highly destructive, drug dealing is a business like any other.
For glamorizing the tasteless, you’ll have to wait for Hooligans — The Game, a real-time strategy game where your objective is to become the most notorious group of soccer supporters in Europe. Designed by Dutch software house Darxabre, it was due for release in November but at the time of writing shows little sign of life.
That may be no bad thing: While their argument that games that involve killing, maiming and destroying your opponents are legion, there’s something pretty sad about soccer fans causing mayhem in real life, let alone on a computer. Unless of course, the graphics are so good that the police cars have got cool headlights and you can see individual flakes of snow as they drift down across the finely detailed city, in which case perhaps the U.S. army could use the program for urban guerrilla training.
Write to me at jeremy.wagstaff@feer.com