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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5257047" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 193: May 1993part 3/6The known world Grimoire: Logistics, logistics, again there are nitpicks. Bruce goes back to the domain management stuff yet again in an attempt to singlehandedly support that playstyle in the face of widespread apathy. This time, it's the question of what you need in a castle to turn it into a self-sufficient mini community that can withstand months of siege. You need enough living quarters for an entire army, and storage space for food for said troops, plus toilet facilities, heating and general servants to maintain the place and feed everyone. Even a garrison of a hundred troops requires easily that again in support staff, and substantial daily expenditure. You know, someone ought to do a cost analysis, figure out exactly when it becomes more profitable to create undead and golem servants than train up and employ living ones. It'd probably come surprisingly quickly, especially for long term projects. Anyway, this once again slips quite heavily into dullness. Graah. Surely there must be some way of making ruling nations and commanding armies interesting, and not too mechanically onerous. Anyone? No wonder it fell out of fashion at this rate. Fiction: Bainnor's last ballad by Ralph W Bundy. Or how to learn to sing the blues, D&D style. In this world, all it takes is a lifetime of poverty, heartbreak and alcoholism.  There, rather more killing things, taking their stuff, and losing loved ones when monsters do likewise is involved, as an inevitable result of the XP system. So yeah, technically skilled but cloistered bard learns some hard but crucial lessons that you need to actually be able to sing with feeling and get the public engaged. No great surprises. The monsters are a bit vague, but it's all about the relationships built up and broken along the way anyway. Fairly average overall. The role of computers has one of it's spates of many small reviews. This is a bit tiresome. Amazon: Guardians of Eden takes you into the rainforest to find your brother and solve the many puzzles of the deep jungle. With puzzles, arcade action sequences, cut scenes and bits where you control other characters, it's a big and varied game. Even more than usual, saving regularly is important, with backups several stages back handy for making sure you get everything you need without starting all over again. Castles II: Siege and Conquest expands on the original to enable you to administer kingdoms and attack other people's castles. This actually means you'll spend less time building castles than in the original, but such are the perils of making your game more generic. As we saw in the minigames reviews, it can actually take away what makes you special and unique and interesting in the first place. The Incredible Machine is a game where you create incredibly elaborate cartoon like machines to solve puzzles. That's a fairly original idea. With a ton of different pieces, it's easy to start, but hard to master, and produces funny results even when you get it wrong. Sounds like you could have hours of fun mucking around even ignoring the supposed objectives. Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis once again shows lucasarts knows what they're doing with a multi-pathed, fully original follow-up game. With plenty of different ways you can complete it, and high quality cut-scenes, it's a good attempt at having a cinematic atmosphere, while not compromising the game aspect. I seem to recall there being plenty more in this vein to come over the years. Lemmings gets a pretty good mac conversion. Psygnosis have had several years to get this formula really working, and they have the brutal puzzles down to a tee. Remember, Blockers are vital so you can experiment without losing everyone. M4 has you commanding said class of tank in WWII. Unlike many sims of this sort, it's actually fairly accessable, with point and click making things far easier than old programs where you had to learn hundreds of button commands. Convert the newbies! Gotta keep wargaming alive in some form! Push-Over is a tremendously fun variant on dominos, where you control an ant trying to set things up so that when you push, all the pieces fall in the right order. Since some of the pieces do weird stuff, this can be a real brain teaser, but you can skip some levels if you do well enough in others. This sounds pretty familiar. Space Legions lets you play the bad guys from the previous games in the series. Invade and conquer planets with great brutality! Failure will not be tolerated! It doesn't take itself too seriously, obviously. Carriers at War is another WWII game this one focussed on the navy & air force. Well, I guess the 50th anniversary of various WWII events are passing as we speak. That probably contributed to a resurgence in interest. Eric the Unready is yet another game that they can't really recommend wholeheartedly due to the magazine's family friendly policy. Toilet humour is not to be tolerated around here, no matter how much people may be laughing. :sticks up nose: Paladin II feels several years out of date in terms of graphics and gameplay. One for adventure genre addicts. Task Force 1942 gets a buggie. It simply didn't work on their system. You suck microprose, and need to fix it.</blockquote>

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