88 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
88 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
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THE GLOBAL DILEMMA: GUNS OR BUTTER
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With the previous successes and standard-setting precedents of Chris Crawford's
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games, we've come to expect good things from him. Unfortunately, THE GLOBAL
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DILEMMA: GUNS OR BUTTER suffers from several key weaknesses, as well as a level
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of playablity that can only be described as tedious. (This review is based on
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the IBM-PC version.)
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The object of the game is to balance your nation's economy in order to
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ultimately conquer the other nations that inhabit your continent. In order to do
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this, you are forced to basically choose between two options: Military (Guns),
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or Food (Butter). The first allows your nation to defend itself or attack its
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enemies. The second allows your population to grow or decline. Perhaps this is
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the first weakness of the game: It boils down to only two real and effective
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options. Although there are several different ways to produce guns and butter,
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your alternatives are still very limited: Either you build military, or you
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build people.
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As you are attempting to balance your economy, you must allocate a certain
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percentage of workers to each of the factories. Using simple and primitive bars,
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you increase or decrease the percentage of workers by moving the bar to either
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the left or right. But allocation is not that easy: Once you alter the
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percentage of one factory, your total worker pool is decreased. This forces
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other factories to lose personnel; consequently, a shortage of that good is
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almost always the result. You then must go to the factories that were reduced
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and reset their percentages.
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Once these factories are correct, you may very well find that others have been
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altered in the same way. In the process of trying to get all the factories
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(there can be literally hundreds in the advanced game) balanced just the way you
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want, you might have already spent one hour: That's one hour of tedious bar
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manipulation and economic frustration. Crawford attempts to reduce this by
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implementing a "lock" feature to prevent your worker pool from being altered.
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This works to an extent, but there are still several instances in which it's not
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very effective.
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After your economy is balanced, the military portion of the game begins.
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Distribution of your "guns" occurs among the five to eight provinces in your
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nation. You have no control over where the forces are built. Any territory that
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had armies in the previous turn has priority over unoccupied areas. This is yet
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another weakness in the game system: As an avid wargamer, I was disappointed to
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see that I had no control over a territory's armed production. You are forced to
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mobilize your forces by (once again) manipulating bars to the left and right,
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and then pointing in the direction which they should go.
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As you're attempting to carry out your military plans, you must attack your
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enemies and ignore your friends. What makes this so very hard is that GUNS OR
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BUTTER is 95% black-and-white. There is absolutely no distinction between your
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nation, your enemy's nation, or your friend's nation. In order to find the right
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nation to attack, you must call up a black-and-white map of the continent, and
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display in black the territories the other nation controls. You are not able to
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see more than one nation at a time. In the advanced game, you are playing
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against seven other nations. All of these nations could quite possibly be
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adjacent to you in some way or another. Therefore, in order to see who controls
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what, you must display all seven maps and attempt to keep the pictures in your
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mind for comparison. It's not impossible, just difficult. It's amazing to think
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how much easier it would've been if Crawford had implemented simple color in the
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military portion of the game. At the conclusion of the military phase, the ranks
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of the nations are displayed, and you begin the tedious process of balancing
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your economy again.
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What makes this game so disappointing is that simple, easy-to-implement
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features could have made this Crawford's greatest accomplishment. In the manual,
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he mentions several features or functions that were removed "at the last minute"
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because they're weren't fun: Color, the ability to trade between nations, and a
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monetary system were all cut. Had they been implemented, this game would have
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stood a chance.
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Another apparent problem involves a consistent memory error. If you have _any_
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TSRs, or you're using a customized DOS, then you won't be able to play the
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advanced level. Even with 2Mb of RAM and no TSRs, the game tossed me out with a
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memory allocation error. It seems that the only way to play is to remove your
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CONFIG.SYS file and use absolutely no RAM-resident programs -- a simple problem
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that could have been avoided had more substantial playtesting been conducted.
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(I'm curious to know just who _did_ playtest this thing....)
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Economic fanatics will more than likely find this game enjoyable. Others will
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probably be disappointed. GUNS OR BUTTER suffers from a lack of playablity, poor
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design, and a total disregard for the practice of pre-publication playtesting.
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Mark this as Crawford's first (and hopefully last) dud.
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THE GLOBAL DILEMMA: GUNS OR BUTTER is published by Mindscape and distributed by
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The Software Toolworks.
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*****DOWNLOADED FROM P-80 SYSTEMS (304) 744-2253
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