More Computer musings...

Growing up in the 1980's and 90's and being interested in tech, his meant that I read voraciously about home computing. True, it is a topic that still interests me now but, compared to that period, the market today seems so... boring. By that, I mean that whilst there was a lack of standardisation, there was a vivacity that is lacking today. True, todays machines and software are infinitely more powerful and capable but at heart, they are pretty much the same. From different formats to weird designs, the computer market did suffer from beige box hell but you could still find some individuality. These days, it's black box hell with some neon strip lighting if you feel the need

As the years passed by, there were a handful of machines that appealed to me, either because of the way they looked and/or the functionality they offered. The following is a list of five machines that at some point, appeared on my wish list. I will add though that at no point have I ever owned these machines. I doubt I will as they are of their time and perhaps should remain there. Operating systems, however, do not follow that rule as my previous posts have noted. Having said that, if one of these machines was available, I'd give it a go just to see how much things have changed.

Amstrad PC 5286

First up, the Amstrad PC 5286. Why, you may ask? Well, I have always had a thing for tidy little desktop machines, designed from the ground up to do a job reasonably well without taking up half the floor or desk space in the room. This was a neat little machine that had enough power to work, 1Mb of Ram and a 40Mb hard drive, and a neat little case design that Amstrad used for several of its later PC ranges. Expandability was extremely limited, this machine was a sold as a straight forward package . I do recall that the monitors were horrible and the later 7xxx series were offered with a 10 inch VGA monitor that must have played hell with your eyes! This was a machine that could have seen me through most of my secondary school years but instead, we picked up a cheaper but much bigger LG Goldstar 286 that lasted a few years.

Apple PowerBook Duo 230

Now this machine covered two areas of personal computing, desktop and laptop, by way of a rather clever and tidy docking system. By day, a mild mannered, decently spec'd portable; by night, a decently spec'd desktop by the way of a companion dock.

Monitor and accessories were extra (naturally)

Remember, this was long before the time of fast and secure remote working so the idea was valid back then. It compared well with buying multiple machines (At launch the Powerbook Duo was $2,160 - a corresponding Powerbook 140 was north of $1,600 and a Color Classic was another $1,400, though you needed to add the dock, monitor, keyboard and mouse for the Duo. The Duo combination was a one fits all solution, rather than a multi-device kludge). The Duo did its job rather well, a 33 Mhz Motorola 68030 processor, 4Mb of RAM and an 80Mb hard drive was not too bad a spec for a portable warrior. The dock added a full range of ports, room for an expansion slot, more video memory and a hard drive bay. Altogether, a practical set up and one that worked well. True, it was expensive (and the prime reason this was never on my reality based shopping list - but that can be said of so much Apple kit throughout the years!), but for early 1990's tech, it was rather good. It was probably the sub-notebook format that worked best for me and I eventually got into that format with the Asus eee-PC, which still works as a handy little Linux device to this day. The Duo, however, was the portable for me at the time. Before that, however...

Amstrad PPC 512

Dialling back a few years, this was the machine on this list I came closest to being able to buy. Not that I did as the Amiga 500 was the computer of choice back then and, looking back, it would not have worked well. The PPC 512 was Amstrad's attempt at a luggable. I say luggable and not laptop as seriously, would you put this on your lap??? And which train/plane seat would you occupy? Admittedly, its size does allow it to sport a full sized keyboard and it can be powered by 10 (ten!!!) C-batteries, but the while thing is totally impractical.
Yet at the same time, it isn't. It was an eye opener back then and thirty years of advances make it ludicrous now, but I still like it. Why? Because it offered a chance of portable computing at a price that wasn't stratospheric. Okay, it was only a slight improvement on the likes of the Osborne 1 from several years prior but this was fully PC compatible, offered an MDA/CGA compatible monochrome screen and you could have two floppy drives. Aftermarket accessories included internal hard drives so there was a decent ecosystem around the machine. The 8Mhz NEC V30 processor did the job and there was a non-too shabby for the time 512Kb of RAM. And it looked cool in that 80's industrial plastic kind of way. Buying one today is relatively easy and cheap on ebay, the only downside being that they all seem to lack system disks. But still, not that tempting for me...

Acorn Risc PC

This one came with a pizza oven and the kitchen sink! Seriously, look at the pic below:

The full monty (including the kitchen sink!)

The Risc PC was the follow up to the Archimedes range and, for its time, offered a bang per buck that was hard to match. Using the (then) new StrongArm processors, the Risc PC was a bit of a powerhouse that had been carefully designed around slice based casing.

The bog-standard casing

You see, each slice had space for a 3.5" and a 5.25" drive bay so slice one could handle your floppy drive and CD-ROM, slice two could take an additional hard drive and a tape back-up drive and so on. Each slice could also fit two podule expansions and were easily stack-able, sometime to the extreme. As you have seen above, at one show, a demo machine was set up with every bell and whistle they could think of, including a pizza oven and working tap and sink. Comedy value aside, the industrial design is superb and extremely forward thinking. 

The back end, showing podule expansion backplanes.

If there was a fault, well two in be specific, they were the lack of shielding that scuppered the design when changes were made to electrical specifications and the speed of the bus connecting the motherboard components. However, for the latter, direct access expansion cards allowed new processor and RAM expansions to run without being slowed down by the motherboard. 

By the time this machine came out, I was at the tail end of my Amiga phase and it wouldn't be too long before I joined the Windows PC brigade. It was priced too highly for what I needed and could afford so a cheaper generic PC was the order of the day instead.

Only a couple of re-sellers stock these today and prices are quite high for what you get. Buying one would be for novelty value only as Risc-OS has moved on since then but the physical design has an almost timeless quality and one that I think would work well today. It's just a shame that no-one else took this up.

Commodore Amiga 1200

Finally, we have the Amiga 1200. The last of the affordable Amiga range to be released before Commodore's demise, this was the machine that could, maybe, have saved the company if they had released it a couple of years earlier. Well, probably not saved, but at least let it have another shot in the mid-90's. As it was, company politics and some downright immoral behaviour by the company's management meant that it would have been a tough challenge no matter what the company had produced. 

Similar in style to the Amiga 500 but with a more compact design, the 1200 had enough oomph to act as a basic but decent internet capable machine, even in the mid-90's. It was expandable and more than a few have been converted to tower configurations where the wealth of third-party add-ons in surprising.

It offered a hefty bump in power from the A500/A500 Plus range and demonstrated that with the tools and finance, Commodore's engineers could do the business. The less said about the management pushed A600 (the successor to the A500 range, the better). 

However, the era of cheaper PC's was beginning and it wouldn't be long before Windows 95 ushered in a (relatively) user friendly experience on hardware that was much more capable (albeit more expensive but better value). The closest I came to getting one of these was when Escom bought out the remnants of Commodore and released an internet-access based pack. Alas, I was torn between this and the Risc-PC so settled on a PC (yeah, I know), and as it turned out, Escom was not long for this world anyway.

So there you have it, a short list of the computers that interested me back in the day. Like I said, I doubt I will ever buy any of these for use in the present day but that doesn't mean to say I haven't been a little bit busy on E-bay either, but more of that in the future.

Flight of the Bat - A Book Review

Hot off the presses (in 1963), Flight of the Bat is the second novel by Donald Gordon. His first, Star-raker, is on my reading pile so I'll come back to that in the future). Set in the early to mid 1960's (probably '63 as it is post Cuban missile crisis), the Soviets land a capsule via ICBM to each of the Western capitals (London, Washington DC, Paris and Bonn) daring them to send a response by a similar method within seven days, otherwise they expect surrender talks  they blatantly have superior technology.

The novel sets out the Soviet superiority in missiles and defence technology in general. The West's missile replies are ineffective or shot down, a Polaris boat is lost in the Arctic and hope seems lost.

Except for the RAF who have managed to husband an aircraft programme (the Bat of the title), to the point where it is ready for service. From its description, it feels like a cross between the Valiant B2 Pathfinder and the TSR 2, though more the former than the latter. With two plucky pilots (one British, the other an American exchange officer) plus a bright young lady in the tech department, Flight of the Bat follows the reaction to the Soviet ultimatum and the sacrifices made for the mission to deliver the reply.

Now before I say anything else, the novel is of its time and it would be wrong to tear into it for that reason alone. Given its age, the novel does have one instance of racism from one main character that is quickly rebuked by another, but that is about it, unlike the Nevil Shute novel "In the Wet", which although one of my favourite aircraft related novels, does lay racist terms quite thickly. There is also smoking galore and whilst some of the technical details ring true, there is a lack of detail that modern day readers might find surprising given that public access to weapons technology information has been quite easy since the late 70's onwards.

Still, I will not be too harsh, it's a briskly written tale and rather enjoyable overall. There is a fault with the characterisation (almost stereotypical but then again, the British are terribly British, even when the character is American). When reading this, I was definitely reminded of the films of the period with their clipped, crisp pronunciation, the stiff upper lip and the stoic fatalism that seems to be an RAF entry requirement. At the same time, there is a techno-thriller vibe that feels very Tom Clancy and the combined spy trawler mission and flight to Moscow feel as if they are from a similar, Clancy-esq vein.

I first read this when I was at secondary school and somehow lost that copy. Replacing it cost a few pounds from Amazon and I am glad I have a copy again. If you have a fondness of Nevil Shute and his aviation novels (as stated before, In the Wet is superb), certainly give this a try.

Computing from the past??? 2 - The Acorn Risc-OS family

Depending upon where and when you went, chances are that, if you attended school between 1989 and 1996, you would have had the pleasure of using an Acorn Archimedes. Following the success of the BBC Micro, Acorn followed up with the Archimedes range to decent praise and sales, primarily but not exclusively to the UK education market.

The Archimedes range was powerful for their cost and offered a viable alternative to the Mac and DOS/Windows computers of the time. However, marketing, perceived abilities plus some god-awful business decisions meant they remained a minnow to other formats. A legacy does, however, exist in the form of the ARM processing architecture, used by a huge proportion of mobile tech today. ARM, meaning Advanced Risc Machine used to stand for Acorn Risc Machine.

As a quick comparison, here are three screenshots, showing the desktop systems of 1993:

Windows in all of it's glory, still residing upon DOS

System 7 for the Mac

Risc OS 3.11

Now, from a personal point of view, I have always liked the way Risc OS looked. It felt clean and relatively uncluttered compared to the other main desktop operating systems of the time. Indeed, apart from the low screen resolutions that people just had to deal with, the current RISC OS is still a pretty sharp looking OS.

Modern day Risc OS

It also had what still to this day seems to be a very straight forward and versatile mouse set up: three buttons - select, menu and adjust. I have used both Windows and Mac systems since the 80's and still, to this day, the slight amount of extra effort needed to deal with three buttons is more than made up for by the sheer versatility of the set up compared to one and two button systems.

Hardware wise, I only ever owned one Archimedes, the A3000, picked up as a surplus machine when my old school was disposing of them. Although large compared to the similarly styled Amiga 500/Atari ST, it was built like a tank and the example I had still worked perfectly even after several years service.

The A3000 - not the one I owned.

The computer carried over the red function keys of the BBC Micro, a look that was discarded by the follow-on A3010 and A3020 where red gave way to a sickeningly bright green. The keyboard itself, as I recall, was a little spongy but it was robust. The operating system and basic apps were held on ROM chips, allowing them to be upgraded by swapping the chips out. The machine came with a single 3.5 inch floppy drive, no hard drive but did have built in networking (Econet). The system itself was very stable and practically crash proof, something that could not always be said of the Amiga (Guru Meditations, they were called on the Amiga, f***ing annoyances was my term).Whilst they were a tad pricey compared to the 16-bit competition, they offered 32-bit/26bit RISC processing power (32-bit internal to CPU, 26-bit address to the rest of the system - I believe, correct me please if I am wrong). This also meant they compared well to the more expensive DOS/Windows and Mac systems of the time. In fact, in some areas, these other formats were left far behind. They also came bundled with BBC Basic, which in my humble opinion, is the best Basic ever to grace a computer. The Comprehensive school I attended had two networks connected by Econet and I gained a decent grounding in networking because of this. Moving to PC's in the mid-90's seemed very much like a retrograde step compared to the Econet days.

As with the Amiga, there is still a Risc OS community in being today, with quite a few hardware options from the likes of Armini and Raspberry Ro and the operating system itself is supported by two vendors, one covering version 4.29 and 6, whilst the other covers the more open sourced version 5. Version 5 seems to be the most up to date and available version of the OS, which may seem strange but there was a fork in the OS history when two companies developed separate versions and they have kind of travelled in parallel. There is also CJE Micros, who stock an exhaustive range of Risc OS related hardware and software.

Modern hardware is based on ARM based dev boards or the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. Basic systems can be had for a couple of hundred pounds and it's not beyond the ken of many to do it yourself - source a Pi, grab a download of the OS (which is very cheap) and then off you go. The Raspberry Ro Lite is the aforementioned £200 system and whilst it may lack in the area of storage (easily remedied) and Wi-Fi (Risc-OS doesn't have support for this yet), it's a good beginners option and it can form the basis of a decent main system. The low cost of the hardware makes this a tempting hobby machine for anyone interested in alternatives to Windows, Mac-OS and Linux. If you want something more substantial, the Titanium board based systems can be bought which, if you must have the best, are a very good choice.

Personally, I am tempted by the Ro Lite, it being cheap enough but well-spec'd enough to act as a hobby/secondary system to tinker and get to grips with. And, unlike the Amiga, replacement hardware (the Pi) will never be extraordinarily expensive.

What has struck me with the retrospectives on the Amiga and Risc OS is that both formats remain, to this day, very capable alternatives to the mainstream formats. That is not to say you should bin your existing PC, as there are several areas where even the most up to date versions of OS4 and Risc OS 5 cannot compete It is, however, interesting that despite the passage of time since their originating companies closed their doors, there remains a substantial hobbyist market that keeps these older operating systems ticking along. Certainly, I will be keeping an eye on both formats in future. 

Computing from the past??? The Amiga

Having a rootle around an upstairs cupboard led me to two diskette boxes full of 3.5 inch floppy disks. I had forgotten I had these, they made the move a couple of years ago, been dumped and that was it. Until now...

The dust says it all...

I started having a look through them and soon realised they were the sum total of my Commodore Amiga software collection, some of which dates back twenty seven years! I mentioned this to people at work the next day and had to explain to a couple under the tender age of 25 what a floppy disk was, despite them seeing one everyday when they click save in MS Office. And come to that, why is the floppy disk icon still used when most PC's haven't had one as standard for years?

Anyhoo, amongst the disks were the three pack in games that came with the A500 I bought so long ago: F29 Retaliator (initially the bugged version where the aircraft exploded directly after take off, soon replaced by a working copy), Rainbow Islands (a decent port of a coin-op) and Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters (a glorious 50's sci-fi pastiche of a shooter). My favourite at the time was F29 and the developer, DID, went on to make several more impressive flight sims through the years.

Some other gems in the boxes included 688 Attack Sub and Silent Service 2 - both early attempts at submarine simulations. The former placed you in command of a Los Angeles class nuclear attack sub and did a great job too, it's one title I really enjoyed and would happily play again. As a fan of the book and the film, "The Hunt for Red October", this game captured a lot of the atmosphere that the actual THFRO game did not. The manual that came with the game was also quite informative too. Game manuals back in the day used to be, these days, you're more likely to get a one sheet with an advert(!). Silent Service 2 was a WW2 sub simulator that was equally good at the lower tech end, especially when you were caught on the surface by a couple of enemy destroyers charging towards you!

When games manuals were games manuals...

Finally, there were the classic point and click adventures The Secret of Monkey Island (1 and 2) and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. The latter came on ten disks and as a teenager, I stared longingly at the adverts for a GVP 20Mb hard drive that I think cost as much as the computer itself. That didn't matter though, it meant no more swapping!!! Sadly, it was never to be.

There were also a load of cover disks, this being back in the day when computer magazines put demo disks on their front covers. One magazine (Amiga Power as memory serves but I could be wrong), started offering full games but that was frowned upon by the industry and the practice soon stopped. Demo diskettes eventually gave way to demo CD's when the 32-bit console era arrived, whilst PC magazines continued until the late naughties when downloading became the norm.

They look ok, but whether they still work is a different matter

The Amiga cover disks varied between giving utilities, game demos and tech demos, the latter highlighting the best of amateur coders and what they could achieve on the hardware at the time. I remember some seriously impressive stuff for the time.

Naturally, I don't have any hardware to try these disks out on, but it did get me thinking about the Amiga as a platform and what form it exists in today. With a vague plan, it was off to Google...

A couple of quick searches led my to Hyperion Entertainment  (the rights holder to the modern day Amiga OS) and A-EON, the only supplier of hardware currently supported by the modern day OS. There is also an Italian outfit, Armiga Project, who are offering Amiga 500 compatible boxes for a couple of hundred euros which look quite interesting and might be worth a look if you fancy re-living the Amiga during its heyday.

So, modern hardware for Amiga systems is pretty much limited to either the aforementioned A-EON X5000 (Ars Technica ran a review a few months back) or the Vampire accelerator cards that emulate the original hardware at almost current day speeds. The main downside to these is cost: The X5000 costs £1750 as a full system and the Vampire boards are currently just add-ons to existing hardware though that may change in future. Niche stuff indeed.

Having said that, let's put this in context. Commodore went bust back in 1994, so to have any market in 2017 is pretty amazing and a sure sign of a passionate community. It also means there is at least some money in it. The amounts may not be high, buy it has to be worthwhile for business to run.

I do have the option of buying an original (if slightly yellowed) Amiga, with all of the pitfalls that entails. There are issues with leaking motherboard batteries and twenty five years of wear and tear (or neglect) means that is not really a practical option, especially with some of the prices that e-bayers are asking. There are one or two places selling original refurbished Amiga kit, such as Amigakit, but as with the Armiga, you can go through a couple of hundred pounds easily and that is a lot just to have a trip down memory lane.

However, there are two cheaper options. Amiga Forever is the officially licensed emulator, with various versions ranging from £10 to £50. This allows you to easily re-live the software that made the Amiga the computer it was. This is the cheapest and easiest way to experience the Amiga. If you want dedicated hardware, then the way to go is with the Raspberry Pi. You can get emulators that will happily run on the Pi and give you near flawless performance. The Pi is cheap, a starter kit will cost about £60-£70 and gives you the flexibility to run other operating systems as well.

Would I buy a modern day Amiga? Well, no, not at the current cost of the X5000. Hell, £1750 would get me a kick-ass gaming PC so niche versus mainstream means niche loses. There is the up and coming A1222 board, but that is still expected to be several hundred just for the main board when it is finally released, so cost will still be a barrier to experiencing the modern day OS4. That does leave the emulation route which seems the most likely way I will go.

Rose tinted spectacles aside, the Amiga was a cracking computer for its time. That some enthusiasts have kept the spirit and hardware alive for nearly twenty five years after Commodore died is a testament to its enduring popularity. I cherished by A500 for several years before space and utility dictated that it had to go. It was one of the two personal computers of the era that I enjoyed using. The other, another format that still lives on to this day, and the Acorn Archimedes and the Risc-OS family.

You say Halo, and I say Goodbye... (apologies to Paul and John!)

Finally, after months of aborted attempts, I have finished Halo 5: Guardians. to be honest, I perhaps could have finished this game earlier but it turned out to be a bit of a slog.

Firstly though, a bit of background...

I have been playing Halo games since the original Halo: Combat Evolved back on the original X-Box. Indeed, since then, the only titles of the series I have missed are the two Halo Wars titles (never in 20 years have I gotten used to playing a real time strategy game using a console controller) and the twin stick shooter Spartan Assault.

I shall be honest and admit that I have enjoyed the storyline of the first three games, even forgiving that ending in Halo 2 but, looking back, cracks started to show in thst title that grew progressively worse as the series continued.

Halo: Combat Evolved was a marvellous, self contained adventure which, leaving room for an obvious sequel, did a fine job lof having a beginning, middle and end. Halo 2 pushed that story further yet made a cardinal error that Guardians repeated: you kept being pulled away from the series main character, the Master Chief. Indeed, whilst Halo 2 added to the series mythos that paid off handsomely in Halo 3, the first sequel suffered from a rushed devlopment, off-kilter game design and a terrible, terrible ending.

Halo 3 stepped up the pace when it debuted on the X-Box 360 and gave the first game a close run for it's money quality wise. The extra development time allowed Bungie to properly flesh out the story and add a degree of polish that demonstrated what Microsoft's then new console could do. It's companion piece, Halo 3: ODST provided a nice little side story and offered a different way of playing in the Halo universe as you were no longer a super soldier, just a trained grunt. Having said that, they did feel a little soulless despite the promise that the story would be wrapped up in a proper conclusion. All told, though, the trilogy was complete.

Of course, the success of the trilogy meant that it was worth too much money to let things lie there. Enter stage right, Halo 4. This title introduced a new set of villains to take over from the Covenant and the Flood. This time, it was to be the Prometheans. As the first proper game created by 343 Industries after the handover from Bungie (whose final Halo game, Halo: Reach was perhaps their best after Halo: CE), it had a lot to live up and it tried really, really hard. But... (there is always s but)...

The Prometheans were boring, too much a bullet sponge and just plain annoying. The story piled complexity upon complexity in order to kick start another trilogy and felt undercooked. Halo 4 was both a technical wonder and a sign that the decline hinted at in 2 and 3 had been joined in the move to a new developer by something worse: Hubris.

You see, by this time, there were Halo books, comics, webisodes, limited TV series and the like that built upon and expanded the mythology. And yeah, these were designed to hoover up your money, never mind the quality. I did read a couple of the early novels but soon lost interest. There was a short series, "Forward Unto Dawn", followed by "Halo: Nightfall" that, given their budgets and background, were not too shabby at all. They provided background to the new series of games and, when Halo 5: Guardians was released, the story of that game required a hefty level of knowledge from these additional sources if you wanted to understand what the hell was going on. I didn't have that knowledge.

So, after piling through the missions, watching the cutscenes (and marvelling at gaining an achievement for one mission by walking and pressing X once to talk to a character), I finished the game feeling at best ambivalent and, at worst, like I had wasted my time. I cared not for the characters and the story made no sense, mostly because I lacked the background knowledge that spending a couple of hundred pounds would have fixed. The gane itself had a co-op mode that was of no use to mesonI had three AI colleagues who, no matter what happened to them, remained with me at the end of each level because the story demanded that. There was also the issue that you spent half the game not playing as the titular lead character. It may have helped the story but the whole point of playing Halo (certainly CE, 3 and 4) was that you are the Master Chief. Guardians took another step away from the clean design and style of CE (which itself stands up very well after 16 years or so) and brought in too many extra ingredients that spoiled the broth.

Looking back from every game in the series I have played, Halo CE remains, in my humble opinion, the best of the bunch. Halo's 3, 3 ODST and Reach all stack up pretty well, but 2, 4 and Guardians are poorer relations.

Where does this leave me? Well, I still have the Master Chief Collection so I can see a time where I will have another play through of CE again. Will I play Guardians again? Probably not. Will I buy the next Halo game when it is eventually released? Hmmm, maybe... Maybe not. I picked up Guardians for £15 and that, to be honest, was probably a tad pricey. If Halo 6 (or whatever it ends up being called) follows Guardians in style and gameplay, then I'm out. If they step back from the co-op play and set out a cleaner, more focussed story, then possibly, nay probably, I'll get a copy at somepoint. however, looking at the slaes figures and critical reaction for Guardians, I don't think i am the only one whobmay be leaving the series...

2020 World at War - a book review

This book neatly and succinctly sets its aims out at the very beginning. What if there were a modern day take on the seminal work "The Third World War" by General Sir John Hackett? Bookending the contributor scenarios, the editor does a good job of highlighting not only the dangers of predicting the future but also the timey, wimey, wibbly, wobbly nature of such works. Sadly, it falls foul of the very goal it aims for.

Each of the sections takes a slightly different take on world geopolitics between 2017 and 2020. Needless to say, Brexit, Islamic terrorism and China feature heavily. To be fair, some aren't bad, though real life events have already taken over several of these scenarios (the 2017 General Election being just one example). As such, it falters in its, admittedly "we are not worthy" comparision to Hackett's work.

The key problem is that Hackett and his contributors had time on their side. Their book was published in 1978 (and the follow up in 1982) and this gave them plenty of time between publication and their speculative future 1985. With 2020, there isn't that gap. already dated in some aspects, it becomes far less interesting when the speculation it provides has already been removed from the bounds of probability by actual events. A similar fate has befallen 2017: War with Russia, although that tome did smack of being an opportunist rather than a more considered approach like 2020.

Still, some of the scenarios are interesting and there are one or two that could have been expanded, rather than just being left as more of a teaser.

Overall, it's not a bad book by any means and if you have any interest in speculative fiction, I advise you to give it a go. Just try not to hold them to their Hackett comparisons.

Cough up, TB is here...

Travel Battle has arrived on the wargaming scene and has garnered mixed views, namely here and here. The first link is a review, the second an opinion piece and, to be honest, I fall firmly in the latter camp.

As I have stated before, I am an historical wargamer. To those of you who don't understand that, it means that my preference in the hobby is in the order of History, then Toys, then (in the far distance) Games. So, when I first found out about TB, I was unimpressed. Having read the above posts, and a few others, I am still unimpressed.

Perhaps it's the facade that it's vaguely Napoleonic, the only link to which I can see is the box art. Pretty as it is, it adds nothing to the game. Identikit plastic soldiers, cavalry, artillery and houses (all in equal number - since when did that ever happen in the real world???), unpainted because, well, it's just a travel game, isn't it(?) and thin of rule book, it comes across as an attempt to sell to wargamers who maybe should know better, £50 for the box set, though judging by some posts and comments here, there are some who have bought multiple copies and are planning mini campaigns! Forgive me, but why the hell would you want to create a mini-campaign for a travel game? You'd need several boards, so at least three copies of the game (unless you can buy them separately). More figures, buildings, everything. Not exactly fitting in with the travel ethos. If you wanted to go bigger, why not a room, tables, terrain cloths or boards and scenics??? Hell, why not get a few friends, some painted armies, a vaguely historical ruleset and a pub. Oh wait. That's what we already do. I am sure you can find several vendors who'll sort out a 6mm or 10mm set up for £50 or so. Just takes a tad more effort on your part though if you've ever painted 6mm, not that much effort.

Maybe it's the gaming side of it I don't get. Now don't get me wrong, I like a good wargame. But take, for example, a weekend show. I go with the rest of the crew, we do our show thing and then, on an evening, I whip out my TB extravaganza. Erm, no! Apart from the fact that one would laugh himself into a coma and the other practice aggressive insertion techniques with said pretty box art (though with that cavalry, my condition would be anything but stable afterwards!), there is only so much wargaming I can take.

Where is the challenge? Everything is determined by dice rolls. By that, I mean, it uses dice rolls to try to hide the fact that it is so limited. Where is the room for tactics, manoeuvre, sneakiness? I can't see it with those rules. For the cost of TB, I could buy a travel chess set (which has a greater variety of units, strategies and no dice) and with the change, pay for a decent meal and a few drinks.

Maybe it's me. I am not a fan of dice heavy games as it is. If you want to dice away for anything, as some gamers seem to want to do, try a Live Action Role Playing game where you have to dice for how your food is cooked. You want to boil an egg? Roll a six, it's solid, roll a one, prepare for food poisoning. Roll low on prawns and I'll send flowers and condolences). TB seems just like that because it is so limited.There is only so much you can do with what the box offers. It is designed to be limited but, and this is how I roll(!), that would just bore me.

TB is yet another step removed from historical gaming that I see at shows these days. I can't see the point of it. Not when, with a bit of a thinking brain, there are far better options for people who WARgame rather than warGAME. It's probably not overpriced for the kit you get, buy in my eyes, £50 could be spent on more productive choices. Or should I say £45. Yep, already discounted by 10% at Carronade. I wonder what they'll be going for at 1st Partizan on Sunday...?