Military History and Stuff

So for those of you that aren't aware (which is an interesting thought, what's zero divided by zero? well... zero I suppose, be much cooler if it was infinity or something (which in fact it might be, you can't actually divide anything by zero, but I digress)) I'm currently reading Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative. It's a great series, a monster too, it's three books all about a thousand pages each, clocks in at about 1.2 million words. I'm currently about halfway through the second book, in the lead up to the battle of Gettysburg.


I really enjoy reading it, which is kind of strange. I've read other sorts of historical writing, and I have to tell you, despite being a history major, most of it is a chore. The only saving grace of the stuff is that I'm interested in what happens. After all, I do like history. But Foote makes it, well, engaging. He describes the leaders in detail, goes off on random descriptive tangents (he compared General Hooker's state of mind at the battle of Chancellorsville to a character in a Hemingway novel for example) talks about the battles in glorious depth, ties it all together on political and military levels, and also throws in these random stories about the events that add this great human element. For example, during the siege of Vicksburg, General Grant blew up a mine under the confederate trenches. Now ultimately, the mine didn't do anything of significance, (besides the fact that it was a military action in a historic and pivotal battle) but what it did do was blow a black slave cook through the air, and into the Union lines. This obviously, has all the historical significance of swiss cheese, but it makes for great reading.

In any event, kudos to Foote for making the Civil War readable and most of all, enjoyable. You should pick it up if you have any interest in the Civil War, just don't expect to finish it for about 6 months, I've been reading it since August or late July... can't remember when I started it exactly.

Stuff

Recently, I got bored (surprise, surprise!) and I was looking for a some sort of play by email or over the internet game, to maybe screw around with. In my searches I started to look for this game I had heard about a couple of years back, I couldn't remember any specifics, but I knew it was some kind of sci-fi tactical game, and that you could play it by e-mail. Using the amazing powers of Wikipedia and Google, I actually manged to find it. It's called Laser Squad Nemesis, and it's pretty sweet.

It's made by the same guys who created X-COM: UFO Defense, and man was that game a life sucker. I remember when I first got X-COM a few years back, I had no idea what I was in for. But to stay slightly on tangent, I'll come back to that.

Laser Squad Nemesis (LSN for short) is a futuristic tactical game, pitting four races against one another in a turn based arena. It's fairly cliche in that regard, and the story is non-existent. The sinlge player is basically a training ground for the multi player arena too. In addition, the production value on the thing is simply not there, it looks like it was made in 1996 or something. So why on earth am I talking about it?

Because the multi player rocks. It's not without problems though.

What makes it stand out is its method of turn based play. In most turn based tactical games, there's a strict I go then you go mentality. You'll see it everywhere, and while that can be fun, it most certainly doesn't take advantage of the fact that you're playing on a computer as opposed to a board. Now some games do switch it up a bit, mainly by changing it from; you move all your pieces then I move all of mine, to I move one of mine and then you move one of yours until we've moved all the pieces once; and then start over. What LSN does is give you simultaneous turns.

What I mean by that, is that you have all your units on the map and then you give them orders for the next ten seconds of play (ten seconds in the length of a turn). It fairly simple stuff usually, run up to that wall, shoot to the left if you see a bad guy, cover this zone, etc.. But what really makes it fun is that is gives this amazing element of realism to the game. Quite suddenly, real world tactics such as flanking, suppression fire, leapfrog advancement, all of it, becomes pertinent, useful, and above all, necessary. You can't really do that in a normal turn based game, the system just isn't built for it in any real kind of fashion.


Plus with the play by e-mail system, you can play on your own time. Test our your orders, plan that perfect double envelopment maneuver, and in general, just have a fun time being an armchair General.

Flaws

The Game can be hard to get a hold of at times, mainly because the production value is pretty low (I suppose you get what you pay for, it is a 17$ game). Units are hard to tell apart, the sounds and graphics leave everything to be desired, and sometimes despite your best efforts, you can't get those little buggers on screen to do what you want. In essence though, that's all superficial nonsense. I still play games from years ago, snazzy graphics do not good game play make. If you don't believe me, check out pretty much any of the lackluster big budget titles to come out the past couple of years. The thing that really gets you, is the multi player interface.

Now above, I said I like the play by email style. And I do, but it really sucks at times. And I wish they had put a couple more options in here, like maybe an option for a real time game. And yes you can do that, there is a hot seat option (no one does hot seat though, I mean come on), but I'd like to just long on to server, hop into a game, and just play for an hour or two. Instead, I have to sit around and wait for the bugger on the other end to get off his fat ass and send me his orders for the next turn. For example, I'm currently in two games, both started about 2 days ago. In one, I'm on turn five. In the other I haven't even got to move my troops yet, I set out my deployment orders and then... nothing, not a peep from the guy. Irksome, to say the least.

Now this problem is easily fixable, play with friends! At least then you can go and talk to the guy, and tell him to send his orders already. And I'm working on that angle too, but nobody gets into this stuff really. And as you can probably surmise, you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to the good stuff in this game. Who wants to do that? Well me for one, but I don't count.

Laser Squad Nemesis, a great game that has a lot of flaws.

As far as X-COM goes, I've got enough stuff to do a whole other post. So I'm going to do that sometime in the future. But to be honest, I won't say anything you haven't read or heard from everyone else who's played the game. So do a Google search, and maybe I'll talk about something else next time I feel like posting.