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Charles2222 -> Did Someone Say BTR? (3/24/2002 12:02:45 AM)
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Ah Antonius, the I-never-get-to-finish-anything-because-new-patches-keep-coming-out blues. I'm in the same boat with SPWAW. About a week ago, I decided to give BTR a real go, but how far that will go I know not. I finally decided that nobody is ever going to fix the freeze-ray problem, nor cares to, so I'm playing in the realm of imagination. I figure if the Allied AI automatically knows where all my active airfields, even in Germany, are, then I can use the freeze-ray and not feel bad about it. The good thing is that I can't get it to work all the time, though I would prefer it never happen.
I think the campaign kings like ourselves, are the ones who suffer the most for products made which are patched into oblivion. I fear I'll never 'really' be campaigning in CL until a couple of years after it's released, and if that keeps being the case with practically every game I buy, I'll probably just quit playing games altogether. If I have to go 2 years (or more in BTR's case) before I can settle down and try to play the entire campaign (and I only settle down in BTR's case because I've accepted that they'll never fix the most childish bug - although it being a bug that cropped up as a result of a 'patch' does make it a little less annoying), it seems like such a waste of time to play it. Imagine if we watched movies in this manner, how it would ruin the experience. The only thing gained, perhaps, is that you learn the system really well, as opposed to letting it sit a couple of years and then pretending it's the perfect product and getting well involved.
As far as hardcore wargaming goes, I suppose the best effort went into WIR. I played that through the historic level, both sides, maybe 3 or 4 times total, and then I played it the next highest level maybe twice, and then the expert level maybe 4 or 5 times. In my really looney wargaming days, I even went so far as to install it at work and plat it often at lunch, then save it and bring the save home, and continue on, only to be followed by saving that and bringing the save to work (actually that got to be a hassle after a while and I stopped playing at work, but it was fun just to see that you could do it. I suppose what killed the practice was that if you forgot to bring the disk from work with the save on it, then you couldn't play where you left off at home, and using 30-45 minutes on something else at work wasn't too difficult). On the flip side, though a fairly similar campaign-style game, I've never finished Pacific War. I think either UV or WITP will get some VERY serious attention from me.
On a side, sort of, wimp out note, I have the RGW game now, and I'm doing the waiting game, that is, I'm waiting for it to get to a good state for play after patches. Unfortunately, in a sense, it's easy to stay away from it, because once I got it, I couldn't figure out how to move the units, and the act of moving, though I could discern it pretty easily through a little hit-and-miss, doesn't seem like it's worth it until it's patched better. I'm trembling slightly at the prospect of getting something of a hand on PacWar after sitting it down for like three years, but adapting to that is child's play compared to RGW.
On a little reminiscing here. I suppose my fervor for games in the old days had a lot to do with not having the internet. There was little or no threat of 'waiting on patches' whether the game was satisfactory or not, and so you could more easily abandon yourself into playing campaigns a billion times without thought of how the next fix would make you want to start all over again. It makes play difficult to relate to when others are on a different version than you, and even should you dare finish it, you ought to feel something like a dope, because there's a newer version out, a version which may show that your victory was possibly only achieved because something fairly drastic was omitted in the version you played. For example, and don't ask me why it's this way, if you told me you completed a SPWAW WWII campaign in version 1, it would be fairly meaningless to me, because then I would say "But have you beaten the latest version?" I always take it as a given that the latest version is always the best, but ironically enough, with this being an SPWAW thread, SPWAW is one of them that I consider an exception to that rule, that is, unless the upcoming latest version is better then 6.1 (which I think is the best). Oh, can't you see a viscious cyle here?!
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