Post by Kapitänleutnant Erwin on Jul 6, 2007 10:16:23 GMT 1
Very few extant game titles can trace their lineage as far back into the Bronze Age of digital entertainment as Carriers at War. The first version reached American stores in late 1986, in MAC and Commodore format, but reached the height of its popularity in 1987, when the PC version came out. Carriers at War II—with much improved art, but basically unchanged game-play, was published in 1993 (I’m looking at a review from an old issue of PC Gamer, in which the game’s “Basic Requirements” are given as a “486” processor, 2 MB of memory, and 5 MB of “free disc space”—Oooooh! Hot stuff in those days!). Instead of trying to milk the same cow, by hurriedly throwing together CAW III, SSG took its own sweet time polishing a hugely popular utility program (somewhat quaintly described as a “construction kit”), which enabled CAW addicts to get their hands on the code and create their own scenarios, thus helping to kick off a little phenomenon now known as “modding”. The success of this off-shoot product surprised many of the bigger, less agile companies in the industry, and that commercial success helped put SSG on such a solid financial foundation that the Australian company was able to ride out the tsunamis caused by expensive new technologies, predatory vulture…oops, I meant to say venture capitalists and ruthless hostile take-overs, all of which traumatized the American gaming community during the Nineties. SSG resisted the siren song of mindless expansion (usually coupled with crushing debts); the company was as big as it wanted to be, and with no international conglomerate dictating its agenda, it was able to develop the games it really cared about. SSG survived, and in its own quiet, understated way, it continued to enjoy robust financial health while numerous other smallish, independent developers (one thinks immediately of SSI, which had played such a critical role in the maturation of digital wargames) were suffering the Death of a Thousand Cuts. When the blood-letting finally stopped, SSG was serenely still there, still producing excellent games, unfettered by crushing corporate debt, and still doing its Own Thing, publishing exactly the games it wanted to publish, in exactly the manner it wanted to publish them. Although I have seen SSG described as a “marginal player” in the digital entertainment industry, it should rather be studied as a paradigm of good business practices and solid, trustworthy, creativity. The number of game developers who have survived since the mid-Eighties can be counted on the fingers of one maimed hand—Ian Trout, Roger Keating, and their close-knit team of colleagues, must be doing something right!
Even so, many veteran gamers (myself among them) were very much surprised when they learned, late in 2006, that a THIRD iteration of Carriers at War was in development. Fans of the older editions wondered what sort of enhancements and/or expansions SSG would incorporate with all the new technology at its disposal.
As one who played many a game of the earlier editions, I was both hopeful and a wee bit apprehensive when I read the press releases – would SSG pull out all the stops and incorporate animated, controllable battle scenes? Would they give us so many new bells and whistles that the addictive playability of their earlier classics might be swamped by an over-abundance of speed-freak “shooter” conventions and elaborate cinematics? After all, the world of PC gaming had undergone near-millennial changes during the long years since CAW II made its debut—would SSG be able to retain the freshness, vitality, and tense, addictive game-play that had made their earlier designs so compelling?
After three very intense weeks of deep immersion in the new Carriers at War, I can answer those questions thusly: “sort of;” no; and definitely yes.
Prepare to Launch Aircraft!
CAW aims at reproducing the scope, the intensity, and the sudden, dramatic reversals-of-fortune that characterized the major carrier battles of the Pacific War. There’s no need to over-dramatize that last-named factor (recall that until the very last hour of battle, the U.S. Navy was taking a bitter, costly shellacking at Midway, and if the Japanese hadn’t been distracted by slaughtering our torpedo bombers, that last, forlorn-hope, strike by Dauntless dive bombers wouldn’t have gotten through and, in the space of perhaps fifteen minutes, turned the looming Japanese victory into a stunning upset catastrophe. The scenarios in CAW are very successful at capturing that edge-of-the-sword drama—as your strikes head for the enemy, you’ll find yourself biting your nails as the suspense mounts. If, while you sweating-out the results of your own strikes, a few waves of Japanese planes suddenly launch an attack of their own, you’ll do more than bite your nails—you’ll probably howl in anguish as you watch the sizzling white tracks of devastating “Long Lance” torpedoes unerringly carve their white furrows straight at your flattops.
Carriers at War is played in “pausible real-time” (with overall game speed fully adjustable); if memory serves, SSG was the first game developer to utilize this system (for many years, the company’s in-house magazine was entitled “Run 5”, and when we neophyte PC reviewers first saw that, we assumed it was some kind of inscrutable Macintosh term!). It’s the perfect mode for simulating carrier battles, because it lets you “speed-shift” to a lower gear for watching the action, then compress the flow of time during the hours of darkness or during long periods when the opposing fleets are maneuvering and not likely to encounter any sign of each other (the game clock will, of course, pause as soon as any form of enemy contact occurs, even a remote and very iffy reconnaissance sighting).
www.wargamer.com/reviews/carriersatwar/
Even so, many veteran gamers (myself among them) were very much surprised when they learned, late in 2006, that a THIRD iteration of Carriers at War was in development. Fans of the older editions wondered what sort of enhancements and/or expansions SSG would incorporate with all the new technology at its disposal.
As one who played many a game of the earlier editions, I was both hopeful and a wee bit apprehensive when I read the press releases – would SSG pull out all the stops and incorporate animated, controllable battle scenes? Would they give us so many new bells and whistles that the addictive playability of their earlier classics might be swamped by an over-abundance of speed-freak “shooter” conventions and elaborate cinematics? After all, the world of PC gaming had undergone near-millennial changes during the long years since CAW II made its debut—would SSG be able to retain the freshness, vitality, and tense, addictive game-play that had made their earlier designs so compelling?
After three very intense weeks of deep immersion in the new Carriers at War, I can answer those questions thusly: “sort of;” no; and definitely yes.
Prepare to Launch Aircraft!
CAW aims at reproducing the scope, the intensity, and the sudden, dramatic reversals-of-fortune that characterized the major carrier battles of the Pacific War. There’s no need to over-dramatize that last-named factor (recall that until the very last hour of battle, the U.S. Navy was taking a bitter, costly shellacking at Midway, and if the Japanese hadn’t been distracted by slaughtering our torpedo bombers, that last, forlorn-hope, strike by Dauntless dive bombers wouldn’t have gotten through and, in the space of perhaps fifteen minutes, turned the looming Japanese victory into a stunning upset catastrophe. The scenarios in CAW are very successful at capturing that edge-of-the-sword drama—as your strikes head for the enemy, you’ll find yourself biting your nails as the suspense mounts. If, while you sweating-out the results of your own strikes, a few waves of Japanese planes suddenly launch an attack of their own, you’ll do more than bite your nails—you’ll probably howl in anguish as you watch the sizzling white tracks of devastating “Long Lance” torpedoes unerringly carve their white furrows straight at your flattops.
Carriers at War is played in “pausible real-time” (with overall game speed fully adjustable); if memory serves, SSG was the first game developer to utilize this system (for many years, the company’s in-house magazine was entitled “Run 5”, and when we neophyte PC reviewers first saw that, we assumed it was some kind of inscrutable Macintosh term!). It’s the perfect mode for simulating carrier battles, because it lets you “speed-shift” to a lower gear for watching the action, then compress the flow of time during the hours of darkness or during long periods when the opposing fleets are maneuvering and not likely to encounter any sign of each other (the game clock will, of course, pause as soon as any form of enemy contact occurs, even a remote and very iffy reconnaissance sighting).
www.wargamer.com/reviews/carriersatwar/
