Category: Reviews

06/18/15

Scourge of War: Waterloo

Boggit returns from his own exile on the 200th anniversary of (arguably) the most consequential battle in Western History to conquer Scourge of War: Waterloo.

By Boggit, 18 June 2015

Developed by NorbSoftDev and Published by Slitherine

 

I was intrigued by NorbSoftDev’s Scourge of War: Waterloo. I had played some of the earlier iterations of the game engine (1st Bull Run, and 2nd Manassas), which had been good. With that in mind, and knowing that the development team had worked on several other titles in the meantime, it would be interesting to see how far they had advanced the game, and how well it captured the flavour of Napoleonic combat, as hitherto all their games were from the American Civil War.

The Menu and loading screens all use contemporary art, which adds a nice period feel.
The Menu and loading screens all use contemporary art, which adds a nice period feel.

Scourge of War: Waterloo is a pausable real-time representation of small to very large actions (including the whole battle) of Waterloo. It comes with 20 historical scenarios ranging from small brigade size actions to the ‘full Monty’ at army level. In addition there is a sandbox campaign, a sandbox mode (in which you can take any units from the order of battle (OB), and fight on eight different battlefields), and modifications, which include the OB for the entire French Grand Armée (i.e. with Marshal Grouchy at Waterloo), and a Grog mode for extra realism.

 

Here are the French scenarios, rising in complexity from clearing the woods at the Chateau of Goumont (aka Hougoumont) to the full battle (shown here).
Here are the French scenarios, rising in complexity from clearing the woods at the Chateau of Goumont (aka Hougoumont) to the full battle (shown here).

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06/17/15

Classic Simulations: Jane’s AH-64D Longbow

Andy takes a look at one of the most influential attack helicopter simulations in PC gaming history

Andy Mills, 17 June 2015

Those were the days

A boxshot of the original Jane’s AH-64D Longbow
A boxshot of the original Jane’s AH-64D Longbow

Back in 1996 the competition for air supremacy in the attack helicopter sim market was intense. Publishers like Domark, Digital Integration and EA/Jane’s Information Group were all homing in on gunship simulations for the PC. Digital Integration had already released AH-64 Apache and was in the process of finishing up HIND for release in 1997. Unfortunately, Domark’s title, Flying Nightmare’s 2, never saw the light of day, leaving EA/Jane’s AH-64D Longbow as the most significant rotary-wing sim release of 1996. Longbow did not disappoint. Built on the solid heritage of the Gunship franchise, Longbow became the benchmark by which all other helo sims would be judged for many years to come.

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06/13/15

Grogheads Reviews YAAH! magazine issue #1

Flying Pig’s new magazine is out there.  We’ve already interviewed the editor.  Now see what Vance thinks about the finished product.

Vance Strickland, 13 June 2015

Click images to enlarge

I usually don’t read magazines. Not sure why, but the format to me seems to never have enough information on any particular story contain therein. Books are great and for fast information I usually prefer the interwebs or radio or TV. Wargame magazines are different however. I love to pick one up and devour the articles about games that I might be interested in or have never even heard of.

When I heard that Mark Walker’s new company, Flying Pig Games, was putting out a new magazine as well,  I had to pick it up. mark stated early on that the magazine was not going to be a mouth piece for his game company and that it would be about more than just “war games”.

YAAH! comes with a right bold cover and in a very large ziplock bag
YAAH! comes with a right bold cover and in a very large ziplock bag

Just inside the front cover Tom Russell introduces himself as the editor. Now I had never heard of Tom before this moment, but it appears that he is an accomplished writer and creator of board games. In the EZOC, Editor’s Zone of Control, he lays out that YAAH! is striving to be a magazine about all type of conflict based game not just war games in the traditional sense. This, to me, is great because it will expose me to a variety of new games that I normally might miss because of my usual narrow focus on traditional hex and counter “War Games”.

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05/29/15

Classic Reviews:
Aria – Canticle of the Monomyth Book II (Worlds)

Brant Guillory, 29 May 2015

An RPG book you could show off on an academic bookshelf.  But what’s the payoff?

click images to enlarge

archive-Aria-74
The front cover is gorgeous.

Digging through my boxes of game books (if you ever want to know exactly how much game stuff you really have, pack up and move a few times) I found this old treasure.

I can remember when I bought it – it looked like what all of us gamers had been holding our breath for all these years: A serious intellectual take on role-playing, which addressed an adult audience in an adult fashion.

It succeeded on that level.

Aria Worlds addressed world design from the ground up, and you could do it in any one of a dozen different ways. You could first design the planet and the ecology and build up from there; adventurers expanding their world through their travels could start small and get bigger as they went; you could even (very easily) pick an historical period and adapt it to game term (Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.)

The book did not address much beyond the initial age of gunpowder. It was intended as a fantasy game supplement. And it did this very well. Continue reading →

04/25/15

GrogHeads Reviews Battle Academy 2 – Eastern Front expansion Kursk

The first expansion for BA2 Eastern Front is here.  How does Kursk stack up?

Lloyd Sabin – April 20, 2015

Largess

Here in the West we tend to be a bit short-sighted when it comes to history. Take a look at the majority of American movies and books on World War II and the Western Front will almost always be the main focus. The Eastern Front, if discussed at all, is framed as a distant, alien component of World War II, not more than a sideshow because of its foreign nature to Americans.

As grogs, we know this is a huge mistake. World War II’s Eastern Front was the central land combat theater of the entire war, far larger and certainly more pivotal than the Western Front, dwarfing land combat operations anywhere else on the globe during World War II. It was on the Eastern Front that Adolf Hitler attempted to establish his concept of lebensraum for the Third Reich, where the Reich’s logistics and supply systems were severely tested by distance and weather, and, ultimately, where World War II was decided in a massive, bloody, total war to the death between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

And within this bloody total war, the central, deciding push was The Battle of Kursk (German offensive Operation Citadel), begun in July, 1943. It pitted almost 800,000 German troops under the command of Generals von Manstein, Kluge, Hoth, and Model (among others) against almost 2,000,000 Soviet troops led by General Zhukov and a cabal of other generals. In 2015 it’s almost impossible to conceive of these gigantic numbers of men, not including the thousands of tanks and heavy guns arrayed on both sides. In the end, The Battle of Kursk would further evolve beyond just being the most colossal battle on the most pivotal front of the war – it would also morph into the most gigantic clash of armor the world has ever seen.

Hard to resist the Kursk campaign now that is available, especially playing as the Germans.
Hard to resist the Kursk campaign now that is available, especially playing as the Germans.

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