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pasternakski -> RE: VADM Halsey Taken Out by the Remove Halsey Code (12/10/2005 6:47:55 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: dtravel
Sorry, for some reason my cranky pants are set on "extra cranky" today
Well, it's probably very irritating to have an extra cranky in your pants.
Good post, man. I'm sure you can gather from what I have had to say about this game that I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Here's what I think went wrong with UV/WitP. Matrix was just firing up and looking for a way to get into the profitable side of the computer game business. Pacwar and WiR had a reputation steeped in the Grigsby tradition that would give them "instant credibility," so they recycled them for free distribution in order to get everybody's attention while Grigsby worked his next piece of magic.
Then, everybody stood back in awe and said, "Ooh, Gary, you is so good, we wants you to do whatever you wants with us." Unfortunately, nobody stopped to realize that Grigsby's "great successes" were back in the 8-bit computer days when he had to squeeze what he could out of about 40k (plus what a Commodore 1571 floppy drive could add on the side from a 1.44 mB disk). The grand idea was great: let's create the be-all and end-all of strategic Pacific WWII games, finishing the work begun in PacWar.
The execution left a lot to be desired. If only someone in authority had stepped up and said, "Okay, Gary, show me your project plan. I want to see what the product is you intend to create," things might have worked out differently. There might have been some quality control.
As it turned out, unfortunately, we the consumers got a mess that was beyond Grigsby's capacity to create successfully. I hate to be so critical of someone who once made games that entertained and kept hope alive, but a substantial share of the blame for this - and I can only characterize it as such - failure resides with the designer - and those who didn't have the balls to step up and say, "Gary, we need to take a look at what you're doing here and make sure it's going to work."
I'm not going to criticize once again the poor design "decisions" reflected in the very fabric of the game. I'm not going to review the awful mechanics of combat, search, and logistics built into it. I'm not going to yammer again about the leader bugs and other unfixed faults. Others have debated these points at length. Note, however, that a well-designed game would not have generated such heated discussion. It would have been published, it would have "worked as designed," and we would either have accepted it or not.
The way it is now, for me, it's a matter of "not."
I wish I had something constructive to say, but I've been saying this for years now, and all I get is, "Ah, you always see the glass as half empty," and "I like giving Posterhoosky sh1t because he's such an @$$hole."
I will say this, however. If the leader system from PacWar had been adopted and developed for this game system, we would all be happy (those unfamiliar with it ought to take a look: it's at the strategic level, and decisions about who's leading what actually made sense). If Grigsby had adopted a land combat system from any number of good paper-and-cardboard games, we would all be happy (why we have to suffer from a system that never figured out whether terrain features were hexside or hex internal, I will never know). If the air combat system had just been stated rather than left open to debate, with the myriad oddball changes that have been made as a result, we would all be happy (if F4Fs and Zeroes behave in a certain way in the game, well, that's the game, take it or leave it, and the 16 tons of discussion are for another day when you're older and deeper in debt).
And so it goes. Hi ho. There it is. Woo hoo. Woolly bully. Yeah yeah yeah. Nuts.
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