Producer: PSS
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: John Bethell

Some months after its release on the Commodore 64, PSS's simulation of the battle for the Falklands has become available to Spectrum owners. The game comes in a small but neat cassette box complete with instructions for play, army lists and (brief) designer's notes. The game is intended as an introduction to war-gaming and potential buyers should be aware that its detail and scope are in no way as thorough as say, Desert Rats. The program is a very simple simulation of the ground based conflict across the North Eastern part of the Falkland Isles with only limited appreciation of air power.

The game loads fairly quickly and immediately presents the levels, with a choice of difficulty levels. These range from 1 (Easy) to 5 (Masochistic) and reflect increasing morale and competence on the part of the Argentinian forces. At this point, I should note that the game is a single player only simulation and there is no option to play the Argentinian forces.

Once the difficulty level has been selected, the player must allocate priority missions to ships in the task force fleet sitting off the island's shores. This simply consists of telling each ship in turn whether it should concentrate its firepower on ground fire support for the land forces or whether it should concentrate on defending the task force itself. Here is the first fault of the game. All the ships are said to have the same firepower available for the sake of simplicity and playability. I do not see why a more accurate evaluation of each ship's attack and defence potential (perhaps considered on a points basis) should have complicated matters for the player. Depending on how you select the balance of priorities, the task force's vulnerability to enemy air raids is altered. Because the gameplay concentrates on the land based forces, you just have to grin and bear it while the Argentinian forces attack your fleet.

Next, you have a choice of four possible landing sites for your forces. Two of your units (SBS and SAS Recce units) have the ability to carry out intelligence gathering missions at this point to select the best possible site. Sites available are Port Stanley, Uranie Bay, Cow Bay and San Carlos Bay, the historical site of the landings. Once a site has been selected, all future landings must take place their.

The entire play area is displayed at once, so following the progress of the battle is very straightforward indeed. The whole of the map is very clear with one exception: mountains. These are drawn in yellow on a green background making them extremely difficult to distinguish from the background. Incidentally, some of the text causes this problem as well, appearing as white or yellow on a green background and is quite hard to make out as a result. As some combat results are only shown briefly, this can be annoying. Units are displayed as single characters with only colour to differentiate between British and Argentinian units. This is not a problem however, as when a unit is being dealt with, its full identification and combat status are displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Units have a number of factors which affect their ability to fight and move. AF is the aggression factor, the value set against another unit's DF (defence factor) to determine the outcome of combat. AF may be decreased but never increased. DF, on the other hand, may be increased if such details as terrain features prove favourable to the defending unit. MV is the movement factor, indicating the speed at which a unit may move. This may also be reduced by terrain. Lastly, RG is the range factor. Only artillery and armoured units may engage in ranged fire.

Ordering units is simplicity itself and is merely a question of following the prompts, Attack, Move, Pass, Recce (S8S and SAS only). Results of combat are displayed immediately. Depending on the weather, Air Support and Ship's Guns may be brought to bear on an enemy unit. However, for some reason, these options are available only after your ground unit has attacked the enemy. Again, I can see no reason why the game would become substantially more complex if the logical option of pre-emptive air strikes was given. It would avoid an unnecessary build up of casualties. To be fair, if a unit is ordered to attack an enemy group which is out of range, a message will point out this fact but still allow ranged missions from the task force to be carried out. This, I feel, is a clumsy and unnecessary way of getting around the problem.

Depending on the difficulty level set, the player must retake all ten settlements and hold them for one full turn afterwards. The enemy's air strikes will be random and may be intercepted by Sea Harriers on patrol. During the game, you have no control over this aspect of the game. The game makes use of zone of control and limited intelligence during play and sound effects are used to emphasise certain events.

Falklands '82 is definitely the beginner's game. It doesn't include helicopters (as the author decided their use would hopelessly unbalance the game) or logistics. Nor does it allow the player to experiment with choices the real task force commanders never had, like directing high level bomber strikes against the Argentinian mainland to reduce enemy air effectiveness. The result is a highly simplified game which is easy to complete successfully. It fails to offer a serious challenge and, whilst being good as far as it goes, ultimately fails to achieve its aims.

PSS
£7.95

This is the sort of game that gets a lot of flak from people who see it as nothing more than exploitative bad taste. In fact, Falklands 82 is a serious wargame and its intentions are undoubtedly honourable, which only raises the question of why a simulation of contemporary history is considered tasteless when a simulation of the mud and blood of the Somme isn't.

You play the British, against an Argentinian micro, in a strategy game that concentrates on land activity. But the task force is still an important factor as it supplies both reinforcements and the aircraft carriers, Hermes and Invincible. You start the game by allocating fifteen ships between the task force's protective screen and land gunning. Then it's to a map of the island and a decision which of four landing spots you'll choose as your beach head - it's wise to bring in the SAS or SBS to provide intelligence as they can reconnoitre a five sector radius without committing you to a major landing.

After that it's a question of occupying, or being the last to occupy, the ten tiny towns of those windswept rocks. And though you can have a crack at landing at Port Stanley, the concentration of Argentinian troops is likely to make it your final objective. Unless you use the Recce option carefully, the first you'll know of the Argentinians is when you bump into them, though at turn twenty any remaining pockets of resistance will be revealed. The shape of the island presents problems of bottlenecks forming, and you'll need to plan carefully for terrain, particularly if you're to have the long range gunning of the artillery. Fog and rough conditions can rob you of air and sea support, but if they're fit for you they'll also be fit for the Argentinians. In that case you hope your Harriers can see them off.

And that's it in a nutshell. With its single key entries, using initials for the options, it plays smoothly, though what seems like a large amount of Basic means annoyingly slow responses at times. The instructions claim that the British are white and the Argentinians black when in fact the Brits are blue and the Argies red and yellow - and to confuse things further British units under command flash red and yellow too. Though it's done away with grid references it still plays rather 'blockily'. In its favour, though, it has five levels, the easiest of which is a good learning mode and the simplicity and relatively small scale of the game could make it ideal for newcomers.

Publisher: PSS
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K

Yomp. Yomp yomp yomp. Don't cry for me, sergeant major, this time it's only a game. Falklands 82 is PSS' contribution to Anglo-Argentinian relations. You, needless to say, play the British in your attempt to recapture the Falkland Islands and make the world a safer place.

The PSS game is really quite competent, if not in the same league as Desert Rats. You control the British Land forces for the final part of the war, the 25 odd days from the landing at San Carlos to the capture of Port Stanley.

The screen shows a map of the north-eastern Falklands. The whole map occupies about half of the screen, and units are represented by single character squares showing a foot-soldier, tank or field gun depending on type. Terrain is the usual simple graphics for mountains, settlements - why aren't Falklanders allowed to have towns? - and rough country. Argentinian units remain hidden until you walk into them or they choose to reveal their positions by moving or attacking you.

The rules are very simple, and the ridiculously overblown explanation in the 18 page rulebook is off-putting and mainly redundant. Basically, each unit has an attack factor, a defence factor, a movement rate and range. The first is also the unit's strength, the second is modified by terrain, as is the third, and the fourth is how far the unit can attack. Artillery gets six squares, tanks and the like two, while infantry has to be next to a unit to attack it.

You can also call in air strikes and gunfire from offshore ships as and when weather permits. You allocate a number of ships to these duties at the beginning, and if the main fleet is badly attacked by the Argentinian air force, then the Harriers will not be available for land duties. The weather tends to get increasingly bad as the game goes on, so strafe everything you can early on. These facilities are triggered by the Attack command, so even if a unit is out of range it can still call in an air strike or barrage as long as it does not move.

Only one unit is allowed on a square at a time, so bottlenecks can easily occur. Since you can't move and attack at the same time you will tend to take initial casualties when advancing on Argentinian positions - it's wise to soften them up first with shelling.

The objective is not to destroy all the Argentinian units but to re-occupy all the settlements. If you waste time attacking irrelevant Argentinians, you will run out of time - the game must be over between 25 and 30 moves, depending on the difficulty factor.

By wargame standards, Falklands 82 is reasonably swift. It's very easy to play, and has some nice touches such as using the SAS and SBS to reconnoitre potential landing sites at the beginning of the game. What I find difficult to swallow is the idea that I might lose. The Falklands War was one of the most one-sided affairs imaginable and the outcome was hardly in doubt.

You can elect to play at masochist level - the PSS description - which gives a good tough game but the strength of the Argentinian units seems way out of proportion with reality. At the lower levels, though, it's easy to beat the Argentinians as long as you remember to go for the settlements and not for the enemy units, except when they threaten you.

That said, Falklands 82 is a good wargame for beginners, and hard to beat at the top level. Presentation is not excellent, but clear and adequate for the scale of the game. It's certainly a lot better than the Midway game I last reviewed from PSS.

It's a pity, though, that you can't play on the Argentinian side. Maybe PSS thought it might be a bit tasteless, but by those standards all wargames are in dubious taste anyway. I should rather have liked to have a go, myself...

MACHINE: Spectrum/CBM64
SUPPLIER: PSS
PRICE: £7.95 (tape)

Falklands 82 is the latest war game offering from PSS, a campaign game of the land forces in East Falkland from the British landing to capture of Port Stanley.

The game was put out before much of the research on the Falklands had been published, and as a result some details, notably the Argentine order of battle, are slightly wrong. But this is nothing compared to the errors in the overall conception of the game. In order, they say, to improve playability, the authors have "intentionally understated" the poor fighting abilities of the Argentine troops, who will only start to surrender when all the major settlements on the island have been occupied by the British. Once the British have landed they may not again use sea transport or land in another location (making the Fitzroy landing impossible) nor have they any helicopter lift capacity, which the game designers thought made things too easy for thaw.

Presumably in compensation, there are no supply rules at all and the whole of East Falkland is treated as passable terrain for all units, including Argentine armour.

This complete disregard of realism would not matter so much if the playing mechanism was a good one. In fact it is slow moving and unimaginative, with the battalions behaving like chess pieces.

I wish I could find something good to say about this game. Five years ago it would have been a remarkable programming achievement. As it stands it is an insult, not only to anyone who buys it but to those who fought in the Falklands War.

PSS
£7.95

The latest in the Wargamer series from PSS centres on the Falklands Campaign, and features a nicely drawn but non-scrolling map of the north eastern area. There's no sign of the defenders until you have done a recce and decided which of four possible landing sites to use - San Carlos is not always the best, that would take all the fun out of it!

Once chosen, all your forces must land, and as you deploy them around the island, the dreaded 'Argies' show themselves, in a similar symbolic form to your own forces. The symbols are rather small, but identifiable; your real knowledge of strengths and weaknesses comes from the displayed code next to each unit's name, showing the balance of aggression and defence factors, which themselves depend on casualties taken and type of terrain occupied. Three differing types of terrain are shown on the map and each consumes differing amounts of movement points according to difficulty.

At each turn you may select movement, attack or the status quo. If you choose to attack then, weather permitting, you may also call upon air and naval gun support. The weather is often stormy or foggy which reduces your strength in this respect. After each attack however, your position is betrayed, so expect an air strike in the shape of small flickery shapes zooming across the screen. If you're lucky, the Harriers will see them off!

To be fair, I don't suppose hardened wargamers are all that interested in graphical sophistication. This will keep fans of the genre happy for hours - it beat me on the simplest level - and might just be the scenario to attract new, younger users to try a war game.

GOING TO BATTLE

War simulations are becoming ever more popular Tom Courtenay examines some of the best.

War games have come a long way from the time H.G. Wells wrote Little Wars at the turn of the century. He wrote it as a result of trying to regulate the battles on the Kitchen table against his friends involving a handful of pained tin soldiers. These days, war-gamers revel in the complexity and realism of their simulations - ify ou call it playing soldiers they would be very upset. Any game worth its salt will involve tape measures, dice, sets of tables, vast numbers of troops, or even cardboard counters representing regiments or divisions.

So it is scarcely surprising that the home computer was welcomed by the war-gaming lobby with open arms. Two approaches were taken: either the computer could be used to referee a traditional war game fought on a table-top in traditional manner, or the whole thing could be transferred to the computer.

The pioneer of the latter approach was Lothlorien, which began to produce war games written in Basic on the Spectrum. Obviously they look primitive by today's standards but they attempted to be accurate representations of historical events. To the mainstream games enthusiast, they played slowly and you could not kill anything.

The first truly modern game was Nato Commander from Microprose. It takes place in northern Europe and features that almost constant American obsession, the Reds pouring over the border and trying to take over Europe. The game covers the most critical period, between the initial invasion and the U.S. getting huge reinforcements to the front. Thus, the Nato commander is severely outnumbered and is fighting a delaying action, trying to hold on to as much ground as possible, and possibly inflicting significant losses on the Soviets.

However distasteful you may find the scenario, it is a very good game. Success depends on falling back in stages, each rearguard action allowing time for the forces to the rear to dig in, then fall back, and so on. In that way, the steam is taken out of the Soviet advance. Any Soviet forces not in contact with friendly forces may disappear from the map, depending on how many aircraft are flying reconnaissance missions.

Aircraft can also run air superiority or ground attack missions. It is important to keep open supply lines and make the best possible use of terrain. The computer opponent is fairly intelligent, although by following particularly outrageous tactics it might be very confused.

Microprose recently followed this with Decision in the Desert and Crusade in Europe. They are a real tour de force. Covering two famous campaigns in WWII, they are about as near to a board game on a computer as you are likely to see. Almost everything is there, the different strengths and weaknesses of units, use of terrain, supply - in both strategic and tactical senses - fog of war, and a two-player option.

Again, the computer could be a little lacking in the old grey matter, especially when called on to defend, but the two-player option is what the game was about. Both games feature several different scenarios which portray different battles within the campaign. Although the games can be long, the speed of play can be varied to slow things when things become difficult. Orders are made in real time - the battle does not stop while you input orders. Tactics are very subtle. All-out effort rarely works; you will just run out of supplies and exhaust your troops. It is all about probing for weaknesses and then exploiting them quickly. The games are on C64, Atari and Apple.

Microprose recently capped even that success with its chart-topping Silent Service, in the same three formats, with ST, Amstrad and Spectrum versions promised. It is a superb simulation of submarine warfare in the Pacific. Almost without being aware of it, the player is subject to many rules about sighting, detection, firing and hidden movement. It knocks spots off all the board games devoted to the same subject - and you can shoot things.

You command one submarine on patrol in the Pacific. After a convoy is detected, a quick squint through the periscope to see whether its worth the risk - how heavy is the escort? Then check the time. Should you wait until dusk? Check the speed and course of the convoy. What is the best attack course to evade detection? A little on the slow side for the shoot-'em-up fraternity but a superb and exciting simulation which will take some beating.

That is not to say British programmers are not starting to get their acts together. Particularly Robert Smith, who has produced two fine simulations, Arnhem and Desert Rats, published by CCS on the Spectrum and Amstrad.

Another company specialising in this field is PSS. It has attempted to popularise the genre by including an arcade element in most of its games. Unfortunately that tends to mean the realism of the game suffers - precious memory and development time is lavished on a rather tedious shoot-'em-up.

Neither is the company a stranger to controversy. Its titles include Theatre Europe, all about the jolly little subject of a European war escalating into a thermonuclear holocaust. The scenario is much the same as Nato Commander but the addition of a complex air war, the arcade sequences and the thermonuclear option has left in its wake a rather dull land game.

The game falls between four stools. Falklands '82 was another landmark of good taste. It features the Argentinians and the British locked in a struggle to save their respective governments from the wrath of the electorates. The game stayed mainly with the land campaign, and it aroused much anger as it demonstrated the possibility of the British losing - something fairly obvious to anyone of even a semi-rational disposition.

Possibly the company's best game to date is Battle of Midway, about the decisive carrier battle in the central Pacific in the middle of 1942 which effectively ended Japanese chances of winning the war. The player controls the American task forces in an attempt to seek and destroy the Japanese aircraft carriers protecting an invasion of the American base at Midway island.

Although the tactics employed would make most military historians turn pale, it is not a bad game. The player has to find, identify and then shadow the enemy task force as, his strike aircraft close in from his carriers. Naturally, the enemy is trying to do the same, or even get to grips with his surface units. The player must plan his raids, try to evade the enemy, and control the strikes, making sure they find their targets and have sufficient fuel to return to their carriers.

The same system was developed further in the PSS Battle of Britain. It covers the Luftwaffe attempt to destroy the RAF in the summer of 1940. The main pre-occupation of the player is to preserve his fighters, taking on the Germans only if he can do so on favourable terms. There are problems; after each interception the fighters must land, re-fuel and re-arm. The nightmare is that a German raid will catch the fighters on the ground. The campaign is fought through several turns, with the British meeting raiders as their losses permit. It is a long game, of slightly dubious accuracy, but a fascinating struggle.

On the same subject, Their Finest Hour from Hutchinson is a flawed attempt to be a real simulation of the battle. Although highly-detailed, some of the mistakes are almost laughable. First, defensive flak can zip from target to target as if on wheels; ME109s have huge fuel tanks, along with the Spitfires which also have inexhaustible ammunition. Time and again, a squadron can shoot down 200 aircraft and usually the Luftwaffe is defeated on the first day. It is a pity, because it had the makings of a fine game.

The most recent PSS game returns to the Western Desert, Tobruk, on the Amstrad, features an exceptional network option where two Amstrads are connected using the joystick ports so that two players can battle with highly-realistic Fog of War. Neither can see each other's pieces. The game design is a little artificial, with the British having fixed supply dumps and the Germans being able to zip around at will but it is a fine game which is great fun to play.

Most of the games have been set in WWII. If you crave for the age of the horse and the cannon, there is a grave shortage of quality material from that era. The Lothlorien Waterloo and Austerlitz are not bad. Although they lack detail, the games go some way to recreating the Napoleonic era, but if you are looking for dramatic cavalry charges, forget it.

Possibly the best thing Lothlorian has done to date is Jonny Reb, a semi-abstract simulation of tactics in the American Civil War, seen in retrospect as the transition from the Napoleonic to the modern era. As firepower became more formidable, so the only way to stay alive was to take cover. The infantry charge became a rather rare commodity. That is dealt with very well in this game. The Confederate army's job is to try to take a bridge from a small force of troops before a large number of Union reinforcements can arrive.

The tactic is to move up men with covering fire from artillery, then open fire with the infantry. If that does not work, send in the cavalry as a last resort - demoralised troops will tend to run rather than face a cavalry charge. Endless variations of troops and terrain can be tried with a kind of battlefield designer.

The major criticism is that such a complex game has completely inadequate instructions. The terrain is placed there with little explanation of its effects. Despite that, and the usual monumentally thick computer opponent. It is a game which will reward plenty of experimentation.

Computer war games have progressed a long way from their humble origins but they still have some way to go before they reach the level of accuracy and subtlety of most board war games. Perhaps the new generation of 68000-'based machines might just fulfil that potential.