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Greyshaft -> About time! (10/27/2003 4:39:56 AM)
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CWiF finally did it. It made me graduate from being a lurker into a Poster
I’ve played dozens of Face-to-face WIF with teams of up to six people and been fortunate enough to watch Harry (co-designer of WIF) playing in a few games. I have also designed software applications as a day job and have spent years talking to users about what they want out of software applications. That doesn’t make me Superman, but it hopefully adds a bit more punch to my following comment.
IMHO the Maricinni version tried too hard to duplicate the “boardgame” feel of WiF. The software divided up the game into all of the standard boardgame phases and even represented the airpower with clunky counter representations. I’m sure Chris did what was being asked of him but I felt frustrated that the computer game didn’t take full advantage of the new medium.
I’m not about to tell Matrix how to suck eggs, but I’d like to vote for an evolutionary approach to cWiF. That is, if a module of the existing game doesn’t work well in a computer environment then replace it with something that does work e.g.
* Don’t show us a screen half full of aircraft counters attacking a stack of ship counters when a Table of data (a la Pacific War – Matrix Project) will represent the data more effectively
* Add some smarts to the UI like the Convoy list in HoI which showed an individual convoy in red when the number of ships fell below the minimum required.
* When selecting an air unit then automatically shade in the hexes which that unit can reach and conversely, if a player selects a target hex then automatically highlight the friendly air units which could reach that hex.
OK… maybe I am trying to tell Matrix how to suck eggs… sorry about that, but as a long term Wif player I had given up on ever seeing the game on my computer and now you’ve got me all excited. Dammit all it’s almost enough to make me give up the American Civil War and return to WWII !
Only trouble is... we have no timeline... (mutter mutter mumble)
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