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CM engine meets OGRE!


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I must say, this engine seems perfect for a remake of that classic Steve Jackson strategy gem called OGRE. Massive computer driven killing machine versus ground vehicles, artillery, and infantry! HINT HINT HINT.

Anyone who has ever played the board game or the early computer adaptation will remember how much fun this one was. I also think they will agree that the marriage of CM's engine, BattleFront's penchant for detail, and OGRE's fun design would make for a surefire strategy game hit.

Merry Christmas,

TeAcH

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Damn, I had actually forgot that game. We used to play the original pocket game version over and over again. We made up our own Ogres, had regular unit battles, new terrain.

The game system will be great for so many periodes in history. My only hestitaion is the range factor. The ranges of WWII weapons is so much less than the ranges of modern weapons and even less than the ranges of the missiles in the Ogre universe.

MikeT

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Guest Madmatt

GEV and the squad level power armor game(Battlesuit maybe?) were also alot of fun!

I still have many of these MetaGames (before Steve Jackson Games bought them out) and my dad still plays Melee and Death Test...Ahhh those were the days! The pocket games!

Car Wars

Truck Driver

Sunday Drivers

Ogre

GEV

Melee

Wizard

Death Test

Rivets (not sure if this was by the same company or not)

Chiltin (some insect game)

and a bunch of other SCI-FI games that I can't recall anymore. 6 bucks or so and you had a complete game with two six siders and everything!

Madmatt out...and dreaming of when gaming WAS gaming...Well with CM it is all over again!

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What fond memories of gaming beyond Ogre you two brought up for me Madmatt and Mike! Matt, you hit the nail on the head! Great games and six bucks! Man! I must say that if there ever was a game company out there that could pull off a true conversion of some of these games making them both fun and playable it would have to be BTS.

CarWars! Loved it! Even the computer clone called AutoDuel on the Apple was fun in its day.

Hmm..what great memories!

TeAcH

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SFB, oh damn and damnation. I worked with Steve Cole in the early years of SFB. The first version of the game were great. The rules made sense and were manageable but Steve only understands what he called "feeding the beast", i.e., keep pouring out rules for the sake of rules and make them as complex as possible. He turned a quick and easy game into a mess. He loved the tax code and if you look at the explosion forumla used in the game it was the 401 form.

After a couple of years I quit and started gaming for fun.

MikeT

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Guest L Tankersley

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>..."feeding the beast", i.e., keep pouring out rules for the sake of rules and make them as complex as possible.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Yeah, SFB was great. But after a while it became obvious to me that they were adding things just to add things. Everyone has a PF, everyone has a heavy carrier, everyone an SCS, shield refits, phaser refits ... the individual character that made the original game so much fun was drowned in a sea of sameness where only the shapes of the ships differed. The nice thing is, you don't have to play with the new stuff - the old ships, rules and scenarios are still great fun.

Melee & Wizard were good, quick fun. There was an RPG system using their rules, but it suffered from the flaw that combat was extremely deadly - not conducive to character development.

"Chiltin" was I think "Chitin-1," a game in which two insect hives fought a war over food - the primary source of which was the bodies of dead combatants.

And how about this blast from the past: The Creature That Ate Sheboygan. There was also a nifty 3d space combat game called Vector-3 IIRC, you tracked ship positions on two sheets of graph paper (one for X-Y plane and the other for X-Z) using Newtonian laws of motion (I remember there was a table of square roots in the charts & tables).

Leland J. Tankersley

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Guest Madmatt

Getting really deep here on the progression of the Melee system. After Melee, Death Test (dungoun supliment) and Wizard were released. Just about then D&D started to gain a huge market share (which was actaully started by an even older game T&T for Tunnels and Trolls, although I am not which actually came first. I still have my orginal copy of the D&D rules that came in a ziplock bag and had a picture of a girl on a sacrifical alter!) and non RPG games needed to adapt or get outa the way. Several years after the original release of Melee a RPG version was released called: Labyrinth and you are right about the combat system, they had some cool critical hit charts though, things like being impailed by a spear etc...That series spawned a Deluxe Wizard game and some other products but never did go very far if I remember correctly.

The Creature that Ate Sheboygan was the first game (or close to the first) from the , then new, game company West End Games. They had an excellant Modern game called ummm..drawing a blank here, I remember what was cool about this game was the turn order and resolution. Basically you were alloted a set amount of command points per turn. And these were diveded into chits (small counters) that had numbers on them, during the movement phase each player pulled one of his color coded chits outa a cup and they could use up to the amount printed for orders (each unit was rated on how many points it took to move, fire etc..). What was so novel about this was in how the chits were different for each side. The Nato guy might have more points but his chits were all low numbers and hence more chits so he could give alot of units commands during one turn while the Warsaw pact had few chits but they had big numbers so the Pact player could do very large scale manouvers and fire but all in the same phase and didn't have the flexibilty that the Nato player had. Very cool and I was surprised that such a system never manifested itself elsewhere.

I am sorry that my recall isnt a little more clear but I used to play this game and it is STILL in my gaming closet, I will post later with the name.

A few other games that were a blast were from Yaquinta games. My favorite was Marine 2004 (2010? Maybe Dang! I cant remember anymore!) ether way it was a game of squad scale that took place on the moon between Soviet and American forces, the coolest part of this game was the BOX art, it was very cool. I even bought a second copy a few years ago when I saw it in the used bin at my local gaming store. The scenarios also had very nice story backgrounds and pulled you into the game much better than just the standard TOE and Objective text. One neat game feature was that units could walk, Bound (small jet assisted hops along the surface of the moon) or go 'Full burn" with the spacesuit jets. Had a nice article about the use of coventional weapons in space in the designer notes too!

They also made Ironclads which was a family favorite, although I think there was something wrong with the hit tables as no matter how large of a battle I played by turn 15 90% of my ironclads had a jammed right rudder!

Madmatt out, and thinking of opening up the 'ole closet again!

p.s. In regards to my name, its just one capital letter! I am not that bigheaded! wink.gif

[This message has been edited by Madmatt (edited 12-20-99).]

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OK, since we are taking a stroll down memory lane. Does anyone remember a pocket game set in the future about two mining companies battling it out on an asteriod that was actually donut shaped? The map was rectangular with one part darkened to represent the inside of the donut hole. Missiles could literally travel around the asteriod to hit people anywhere. You could launcher backwards to hit the person in front who might have actually been on your flank but you had to look up to see him, ????? Now lets see Fionn work his way around that one. HaHa

About Chitin-1, great product. I wish it had sold enough $3 copies to make a sequel or expanded version possible.

MikeT

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<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Does anyone remember a pocket game set in the future about two mining companies battling it out on an asteriod that was actually donut shaped?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Oh yeah, that was called "Black Hole." Man, I thought I was the only person who'd ever bought that one. Loved the way you could fire missiles to "spiral" around the map wink.gif.

Talking about innovative maps, one of Metagaming's early games (mid-70s) was "Godsfire," a full-fledged strategic space wargame. The map was unique in having big squares arranged in staggered rows to have the same arrangement as hexes. Within each square was a spiral of like 15 steps to give you a 3D map.

-Bullethead

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Guest L Tankersley

Wow, topic drift...

remember seeing Black Hole but never played.

The Melee/Wizard expansion was called The Fantasy Trip: Into the Labyrinth IIRC. Included Advanced Wizard and Advanced Melee (added a skill system, more spells, more detailed combat/action system) and a gamemastering book.

I didn't have the ziplock D&D set, but I had the three little books (maybe 5"x8"?) in the white box. That was pre-Greyhawk I think.

Ah, West End games. They'll always have a dear place in my heart for creating Paranoia. Hands down the funniest RPG ever. I still dig out the adventure modules every once in awhile, just to read them - they're a blast.

From what I remember, Sheyboygan and Vector-3 were part of a four game series of minigame offerings from what I guess was/became West End. The third was Titan Strike, a fairly conventional game set on a mining colony on Titan. Don't remember what #4 was.

Leland J. Tankersley

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Guest Madmatt

Ahhh Paranoia! One of my greatest campaigns ever in that game was one in which the players never got out of the briefing room!

By the end of it the whole security complex was ablaze and they were all on their seventh or eigth clones! Good thing too as I think I had left my GM notes at home and was just making up on the fly. A game system that rewarded multiple player deaths! Those were the days, Although this past year at Gencon (Milwaukee) I saw quite a few people still playing it! biggrin.gif

Madmatt out and showing his twitcher roots! And as I recently told Fionn, I was there when that term was coined back in the mid seventies! wink.gif But thats a story for another day! smile.gif

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The Asteroid game was called "Asteroid Zero-Four".

My first group of ziplocs were SFB, A 0-4, Cerberus, and Starfire.

My thoughts on the direction of SFB mirror MikeT's. All fun games, and I wish I hadn't cannibalized their componenets over the years.

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MikeT,

Just had to check myself, and yes indeed, I still have the SFB ziplock with complete rules, counters, etc, etc. just waiting on my eldest son to get a little bit older.

Great game, great game. In college, we used to take over a huge table and have like 15 people all piloting individual ships for fleet action.

Aahh, the good ol' days...

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Mein Herr, at one time I had designed a version of SFB that I called Star Fleet Admiral. It was essentially a 1/4 scale version of the game. You could control whole fleets quickly and easily. Steve didn't like the idea, hell it wasn't his and that seemed to bother him greatly. A friend borrowed the rules, all display sheets, and weapon tables and I never saw him again.

I also came up with a simple 3D, yes I said simple, that worked well. It used a square map and we did some interesting games in 3D. Again nothing happed with it since Steve said that a square map would be laughed off the market, he ignored my observation that there was a WWI sim game that used square maps. Oh well.

Mike

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SFB is one of those games, that given the time (which never seems to appear), I would love to do a simple 3D program for.

The trick is to keep it as eminently playable as the P&P version is, but give the visual feedback, etc.

Now there's that Star Fleet stuff coming out that seems to do it, but I haven't looked too closely.

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Guest L Tankersley

I haven't played it myself, but some other SFB players I know that have say that Star Fleet Command is an excellent computer conversion of SFB.

Leland J. Tankersley

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Guest Madmatt

I own it and just picked up two more copies for my brothers. It is a Blast! Great fun for the both the SFB and just plain jane Star Trek fan! Highly recommended!

Madmatt...

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If it's in Combat Mission, it's on Combat Mission HQ!

combathq.thegamers.net

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I was a beta tester for SFC. I was in the "multiplayer only" part, and it was loads of fun even when severely buggy. One of my favorite things was to play using Game Commander. "Phasers fire!" "Shields up!" "Transporter bomb!" Come to think of it, using GC to set for t-bombs was the only way to shovel them out as fast as the CPU.

It was very interesting to read the discussions of the truly hardcore players. That forum is still active, and I check it once in a while. It had been a long time since I played SFB seriously, but I *never* knew the rules that well! Too many Squad Leader rules in my head, I like to think...

I am embarassed to say I still have not purchased the full game, though it occupies a prominent spot on my Christmas list. I hear all testers were mentioned in the read.me, but only a select few of the very, very involved made it into the game itself. That would not include me, unfortunately.

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Brad "Supertanker" Wohlenberg

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