By Eric T. Baker

Steel Panthers was a great DOS game. It was WW II tank combat at its best in the same format as all the wonderful Avalon Hill games people used to play before they had computers. This game is the same style right down to the hex grid board. Well, Matrix Games converted Steel Panthers to Windows and released it for free on the Internet. That’s right, free. Just type http://www.matrixgames.com/spwaw/whatsnew.asp into your favorite web browser and follow the links to download it. The only catch is that the game is 300 MB in size. Not a problem if you have a cable modem. If you don’t, the license allows someone else to downloaded it for you as long as they don’t charge you for the help.

There are many scenarios to play in Steel Panthers, but the coolest is the Long Campaign. The player chooses where to start in WW II and picks a country to play from among USA, USMC, Germany, Great Britain, Japan or the Soviet Union. He then fights a series of battles closely related to those fought during the actual war, with appropriate enemy forces and terrain. As the war continues, he may choose to switch to a new theater. After each battle, his troops gain experience and he is allowed to upgrade units.

If you have the scratch to pay for a game, and if you’re feeling a little medieval, check out Shogun: Total War from Electronic Arts. It is a real time strategy (RTS) game based in feudal Japan. I ran it on a P166 and with a 3-D card, exactly the game’s minimum hardware requirements. Sure enough, the game took a long time to load and was having a hard time playing the music and running the graphics in the background while I tried to get the mouse to click on the menu. You start with four tutorials that teach how to move and control the camera and your army. It took two minutes to load the first tutorial on my machine, but when it did come up, I was blown away. The visuals are great. A beautiful landscape of rolling hills and trees, with a castle on the high ground. The camera can be moved anywhere you want and was easy to control. The second tutorial added some troops. Unlike most RTS games, you control more than just a few units. Each group of men consisted of about 50 figures. I was also amazed that my machine had no problem playing the sample battle with about 250 men on a side. I saw no slowdowns or stutters from the video.

What was really cool was the way the groups of men would go about moving and changing formation. In the sample battle I had two groups of 50 pikemen, two groups of 50 archer/swordsmen and one group of 50 heavy cavalry. I selected all five groups and issued the “strong right” formation. Instantly all 250 men started moving in different directions. The cavalry moved from the back of the formation onto the right side. My pikemen moved to the center and left. The archers lined up behind the pikemen. In 30 seconds each group was in perfect lines waiting for further orders. I ordered the whole army to move to the crest of the ridge, and they moved in perfect lines to the top of the hill. I could see the other army working its way across the valley. I moved the camera across to get a closer look at the enemy formation. The camera glides above the battlefield like a helicopter. We danced around the map for half an hour until I got my pikemen on the flanks of the computer’s large group of archers. Then the computer decided I had done enough and ended the scenario.

My only complaint about the game is each individual man is so small that you can’t see any real detail. It is easy enough to tell a guy with a pike from an archer or man on horseback, but they are small. This in no way detracts from my enthusiasm for the game. It was very impressive. The complete game has much more to offer than just combat. You are trying to unite the people of Japan. You have diplomats and ninja at your disposal. There is a whole strategic game above the tactical one where you have to make treaties and assassinate enemy generals to gain power. You also have to spend money to improve your holdings. You can upgrade your farms or build roads. In all the game looked very complete.

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