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A Thinking Person's War Game
By Don Crabb
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN 2
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Rating: 10
An amazing game that brilliantly and accurately simulates fighting the Battle of Britain on your Macintosh computer. (Now available for Windows). List price 19.95.
Pros: Excellent simulation and game. Uses color and sound well. Focuses on both strategy and tactics, which gives the game some depth and breadth.
Cons: Printed documentation is very thin.
About halfway through witing another column, I found myself nearly asleep and in dire need of some serious fun.
Perhaps your summer is going the same way. In any case, I found a game simulation that blew me away. That super game is called The Battle of Britain 2 and it may very well make you forget all about whatever ails you too.
The Battle of Britain 2 (BOB2) comes from a small company called Deadly Games that makes another very slick war game, called Bomber. Unlike Bomber, which is a color arcade style game that puts you in the cockpit of a B-17 flying over Germany during the Second World War, BOB2 steps back from the direct action and puts you in command of the 11th Group RAF, trying to fend off the massed bombing attacks of the Luftwaffe over the British Isles. As such, BOB2 won't please the Nintendo addicts out there, but it will please you cerebral computing types who enjoy exercising your old noodle. BOB2 is a thinking person's computer game, strong on simulating what it was really like to be commanding the RAF's Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons during England's darkest hours.
As the 11th Group RAF commander, you view the battles from your control bunker, 50 feet underground in the English hamlet of Uxbridge, northwest of London. The game provides you with the same kind of information that the real commander, Keith Park and his boss, Air Marshall Sir Hugh Downing, had to use in countering the Nazis. You get reports form coastal radar sites the Ground Observer Corps (who were stationed on high ground and tall buildings along the coast and inland), and from British Intelligence.
You control all this tense drama from a screen-based replica of the same disposition map of souther England that Park and Downing used in the late summer of 1940. You can release fighter squadrons for repairs, reposition them, find out how many available squadrons you have at each of your eight airfields, put squadrons on alert so that they can quickly meet a Nazi bomber threat, order your squadrons into the air for patrol duty or for a raid against an identified Nazi bomber force, land and refuel your squadrons, and much more.
Nazi strikes vary each time, just as during the real war. Often, they launch multiple small strikes at dispersed cities or industrial sites to try to hide a massed strike against London, or a port city like Dover or Portsmouth. They even try to knock out the very coastal radars that give you the early warnings you need to scramble your fighters. And just to make your job even more frustrating, the weather changes constantly, affecting your ability to launch your fighters or see incoming bombers.
Just like the real Battle of Britain, playing BOB2 could easily turn into a Nazi victory. The outcomes in the game are not predetermined. You must show the same cleverness, courage, and strategic senses that the Brits showed in order to defeat the numerically superior Luftwaffe.
To help heighten the game's realism, you will receive flash intelligence reports (Ultra flashes) throughout the game, as well as complete and incomplete reports from your airfields, observers, and radar sites. You even get direct information about Nazi raids after they occur that you can study in order to try to defend against them better the next time.
I now find myself loading up BOB2 the first thing every morning, just to see if I can get my licks in on the Luftwaffe before starting another day of computing. If you like war games and simulations, or even if you have never tried one before, The Battle of Britain 2 deserves your attention. It's a superb, thinking persons computer game that proves you don't need arcade graphics to have fun playing computer games.
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