Are wargame magazine games...
... fantastic little explorations of underappreciated topics?
... crappy little rush-jobs to fulfill publisher promises they never should've made?
Whaddaya think? Sound off below!
By: Brant
07 February 2012
Sound Off! Magazine Games
Are wargame magazine games...
... fantastic little explorations of underappreciated topics?
... crappy little rush-jobs to fulfill publisher promises they never should've made?
Whaddaya think? Sound off below!
By: Brant
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2 comments:
Both.
Every mag-with-a-game-in-it has had some of either category, and sometimes both. An example would be S&T 144, Chad The Toyota Wars, which is a great game about insurgency, but had terrible production and error control.
They fill a void that only people interested in history, and especially military history, feel.
For instance, have you ever wondered why a lot of good history books have very few maps?
There are two basic reasons. If the author is influenced by academia, the tradition was that maps were a crutch. The more maps you had in a history book, the weaker the text must be.
The other reason is that most publishers charged the author for putting in maps. The more maps, the less he got in royalties.
Military history magazines, though, need to have maps. SPI's Redmond Simonsen is owed a huge debt of gratitude by every gamer. He took the rather bland work by Avalon Hill, and saw how maps really effected the whole gaming experience.
Magazines are like every other commodity. They can be good, great, mediocre, and downright awful. But they use maps in a way that mainstream publishers never do.
As a result, I find that every magazine has something to appreciate.
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