Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Ha! Civil War Battles: Campaign Peninsula! I had pretty much played the heck out of Campaign Gettysburg. Good timing!

Yes, I'm aware the games are historical garbage, the engine produces unchallenging, plodding, tedious piffle, and the AI is retarded. It still scratches an itch I can't reach, otherwise.

And when I say I've played the heck out of Campaign Gettysburg, I mean I've been playing nonsense like the hypothetical Williamsport scenario. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever tried the full three-day historical scenario. I've got the old Battlefield: Gettysburg sitting around here, somewhere. I can't imagine the new version was all that different. I *had* been trying to find a real South Mountain 1863 scenario variant, but I kept hitting scenarios on the Sharpsburg-Williamsport-Hagarstown axis.

Campaign Gettysburg has something like eight hundred and fifty scenarios, most of them being dozens of indistinguishable variants on twenty or so general concepts, most of them huge and ungainly. Campaign Peninsula is supposed to have only 128 scenarios, which should cut down some on the bloat. It's just Seven Pines through Malvern Hill. Actually, the game sounds pretty linear, given the scenario-writer's description.

Wagenhoffer wrote the scenarios on the most successful of the Campaign series so far, Campaign Corinth, so I'm somewhat sanguine. Dimitri ought to be annoyed, though - Wagenhoffer says that he used to the Gates of Richmond heavily in his research.

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