From: D. Tomato (dicedtomato1@yahoo.com) Subject: Review: War in the Pacific Review: War in the Pacific War in the Pacific is a blessing and a curse, a game that I'm glad was born, but perhaps should never have been born. Without a doubt, it is the biggest computer wargame in history. Other than simulations in the Pentagon basement, WITP is the Big Bopper, the Strategy Game on Steroids, the....words fail. What do you say about a game whose campaigns run almost 1,500 turns? That models individual pilots, squads and tons (!) of supply across the entire Pacific theater? That will take almost as long to play as the real-life campaign? WITP is essentially an vastly expanded version of Gary Grigsby's Uncommon Valor, which in turn is a descendant of his previous spreadsheet games such as Battle of Britain and Bombing the Reich. It's made for hard-core gamers, the kind who spend all night on the computer and ignore their entreaties of their wives to come sit with them. The game system is identical to Uncommon Valor, WITP's predecessor that focused on the Guadalcanal campaign. Players move their ships in task forces, command squadrons of aircraft, and maneuver ground units ranging from brigades to battalions. There are some new wrinkles: task forces can be assigned new missions like ASW and Escort, ground units get bonuses if they spend time preparing to assault an objective, etc. If you've played UV, you'll be able to get right into the new game. If you've played his old Pacific War, you'll have an idea what's going on. If you've played neither, this system takes some getting used to. It's not the interface is bad – Matrix Games did a good job with Grigsby's notoriously poor interfaces. But even the best interface can only go so far in easing a player's workload. The blessing and curse of this game is that it includes everything. Grigsby is a numbers cruncher, but his genius lies in an uncanny knack for focusing on the key variables of battle. Uncommon Valor was a remarkable game for teaching the importance of careful preparation in warfare, and especially a vast oceanic campaign like the Pacific War. Players learned the hard way to stockpile supplies, rest their squadrons and regiments, and keep their ships in port instead of mechanically wearing them down. The game had a lot of detail that required a fair amount of work from players, but by focusing solely on the Solomons operation, the workload was manageable enough that players could enjoy perhaps the best simulation ever of campaign-level joint operations. The problem with WITP is that it magnifies the workload ten-fold. Instead of a single campaign, it covers the entire Pacific theater, including India, Burma, China, Manchuria, the Dutch East Indies and the South Pacific, as well as Japan and the West Coast of the United States. On a typical daily turn, an Allied player might shift corps in China, launch an airstrike in Burma, order a B-17 squadron to train in New Caledonia, send a carrier task force from Pearl Harbor to Australia, and a supply from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor. The game also includes a complete production system for Japan, so those who would expand the power of the Rising Sun will spend time arranging convoys to ship resources and oil to the homeland. Micromanagers will thrive on this. But if you don't thrive on controlling every little detail, the game still works. With almost 1,500 turns in a campaign game, you don't have to do everything every turn, though the sort of players that thrive on WITP will probably do just that. In my PBEM games, I'm finding that after the first turn (which can take hours due to chores like assembling your scattered merchant shipping), a quiet turn – and there are a lot of those – can be completed in 20 minutes. What's amazing is that WITP is enjoyable, at least to the true grognard. Like Hannibal Smith said, "I love it when a plan comes together." There is something satisfying about spending turns amassing supply, positioning ships and aircraft, and then suddenly swooping down on an island outpost. There is savage joy in carefully hoarding your carriers, and ambushing your opponent where he least expects it. So it WITP worth a staggering $70 (and that's a for digital download – spending an extra $10 just gets you a CD but not a printed copy of the 220-page manual)? The answer is "maybe." The problem with WITP isn't that the game fails to deliver what it promised. The problem is the lack of creativity and vision that went into it. WITP is just a vastly inflated version of Uncommon Valor. There is an incredible amount of detail, a cornucopia of order-of-battle information. The game system was proven with Uncommon Valor and still delivers a fascinating and thoughtful experience. But there is no elegance to the design, no sense that someone really thought about or cared whether grafting an operational-level system to a giant strategic game was the best way to model it. Would it have been so terrible to abstract the supply system? Micromanaging grognards would be furious, and indeed Matrix doesn't disguise the fact that the game was designed for them. But by concentrating on a small segment in the niche market that is wargaming, Matrix and Grigsby missed a chance to develop a game that would be classic because its brilliant design as well as its size. One gets the feeling that Matrix and Grigsby did this game because they felt they had to, rather than a real passion for creating a beautiful game. WITP will probably be the last game of its kind. We should mourn their passing, but we should also realize that their time has passed. DT