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From: rouaix@margaux.inria.fr (Francois Rouaix)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.games
Subject: Re: FAUG demo of Powermonger by E.A. -- long review
Summary: other comments
Keywords: simply incredible
Message-ID: <1787@seti.inria.fr>
Date: 6 Dec 90 14:01:51 GMT
References: <1950@unlisys.in-berlin.de> <1990Dec5.110344.6364@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
Sender: news@seti.inria.fr
Organization: The Software Winery
Lines: 52


Well, PowerMonger hit the shelves yesterday in France.
So I spent a good amount of last night playing it ;-)
Rough comments are:
	- as said by Kent, the simulation is really amazing. This game
really uses the sound to convey information. You have to listen to the
noise to figure out if you're doing right or not. So much for the good
points, you'll find them in the previous posting.
On the other hand, I was rather deceived by the graphics. There are
some nice things, such as full 3D rotation of the detailed map, but I
find the display to be less readable than Populous's one. There are
many little objects (soldiers, farmers, sheeps, trees, objets), and
there are difficult to distinguish. On the global map (maps all the
word), the objects of the game are represented by points (one pixel)
of different colors. I find it difficult to tell a yellow point among
white points !. 
	- on the game itself: if you found Populous hard to play, then
you will have a hard time with PowerMonger. The game *is* complex, and
will require much experiment to find out the good strategy. It took me
about 10 minutes for the first level, but almost 4 hours for the
second... and there are 195 of them. The results of the commands
(orders to your captains) are much less intuitive than expected.
I think there are many things to discover in the game. A first
example: to get food for your army, the natural thing to do is to
kill a sheep. However, in spring, you will notice that there are flocks
of birds in the woods. If you give the order to attack the birds, all
your soldiers will begin to chase the birds around. This is amazing !
	- copy protection: the game is protected BOTH with special
disk format AND look-in-the-manual. The manual protection is
*tedious*. I fudged the first time, and was offered only ONE
chance to get the good answer. It seems that you have to
*reboot* of you don't want to stay in demo-mode.
	- save game: the game nukes the system, to the point that if
you have a second floppy drive, you HAVE to leave a disk in it to be
able to save a game to df0:. This is mentionned in the docs, although
quite unbelievable !
	- documentation: very good (and translated to french in my
case).
	- works in NTSC and PAL. The display is nicely centered on the
screen.

To conclude: although I mentionned mostly bad points in this posting,
PowerMonger appears to be one of the best simulation games in its
kind. Don't hesitate ! It's cheap as well (at the current FF/US$
exchange rate for SOFTWARE, it would be around 30$).

--Francois
--
*- Francois Rouaix                 //       We are all prisoners here,       *
*- rouaix@inria.inria.fr         \X/           of our own device             *
*- SYSOP of Sgt. Flam's Lonely Amigas Club. (33) (1) 39-55-84-59 (Videotex)  *
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are my own, not those of my employer.