Conference hydra::amiga_v1

3618.0. "Risk (tm) game for the Amiga - Review " by NSSG::SULLIVAN (Steven E. Sullivan) Mon Mar 26 1990 18:53

Last Saturday I acquired Risk (tm) for the Amiga from the Software Shop
in Worcester. I had seen this game on a Macintosh and was impressed with
the implementation so was anxiously awating the Amiga implementation. You
might say I rather like the board game as well...

The game manufacturer is the Leisure Genius line of Virgin Mastertronic
(the company history takes up most of the inside front cover of the 
manual!). It has been promised by the publisher for delivery RSN for 
about a year. Last winter the product manager offered to let me field 
test the game, but I never got it.

So, after a long wait it is finally out. 

The package and documentation are quite professional in appearence. The manual
is for all three (IBM/PC, Mac, and Amiga) versions. The amiga specific
parts of the manual are brief. This can be attributed to the fine design
of intuition making operation obvious, or just a lack of documentation.
An example may clarify: while several paragraphs are dedicated to operation
with IBM and Apple computers, a single sentence is provided for the Amiga - 
which equates to use the normal intuition mechanisms for operating Risk.

The game is not copy protected, but there is no mechanism for installing the
game on a hard disk. It is not difficult to figure out. The game needs to be 
booted from the game disk (or a copy) to operate without assigning fonts
to the game disk. Moving the game font to the Fonts: directory will make the
game runnable without mucking around.

Once started, there is a title screen. A click of the mouse brings the player
to the main screen. It consists of a decorative boarder area with information 
on the right side. This information includes player color codes, and dice.
The center area of the screen is a scrolling map. It is a quite faithful 
reproduction of a risk game board, except there are no names in any of the 
countries. Holding down the right mouse button while the pointer is over the 
map will cause the map to scroll with the mouse. The map scrolls quite 
smoothly and wraps around seemlessly. I was surprised and pleased by this.

To get at the game menus it is necessary to move the mouse to the top of the 
screen. The menus are normal amiga menus. Nothing unexpected here. There are
a wide variety of options in playing the game: US and UK variants of long and 
short games plus a "roll your own" variation. There are numerous controls
of program parameters that make the game faster to play, that is less time
spent doing unnecessary screen moves and automatic selection of options like
how many dice to roll. 

As in the board game one to six players can be selected and any combination
of human and computer players are supported. Computers players come in 3
levels of quality. The most difficult level is very challenging indeed!
Games can be saved and recalled. Even a computer version can take quite a
while to play a full game.

There are no provisions I am aware of in this game to allow for multitasking.
This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because board games like Risk are ideal
as a background activity: just the think while that large compile is 
crunching away downloading that mega file. It is possible to multitask using 
Left Amiga M/N to shuffle screens, even though these are defined as
keyboard equivalences in the menus (for new attack).

Keyboard equivalences use the Left Amiga key rather than the Right Amiga key.
The Right Amiga key acts as a scroll lock with the mouse pointer on the map.
I am not sure where the convention came from but I found it confusing at first.
There was no mention (I could find) in the manual of these controls.

When it is time to quit the only option is to select shutdown from the 
second from the left menu. This puts up a "are you sure" requester. Answering
yes results in an alert asking the user to press Control Amiga Amiga. Pressing
the left mouse button results in a blank screen...

Impressions...

The Risk main screen is a low res and only appears to have 16 colors.
The game could have been greatly enhanced and scrolling reduced or eliminated
by using a high res (perhaps interlace) screen. Even so, the scrolling is 
so well implemented this may not be a major point.

I would like to see the game able to be hard disk installed with a proceedure
for doing so. It is documented as being hard disk installable on the IBM
PC's.

The no copy protection policy of Master Virgintronic is a real plus in my
opinion. Even though it takes a little hacking it is possible to get the 
game to run from a hard disk. It looks for the logical name "pix:" for
the support files so assigning this name to the hard disk directory where 
the files are copied would make it possible to run the game from the hard
disk.

I would prefer it not to require a re-boot on exit. It is documented as 
returning to the desktop in the Macintosh version. I would also like to see
the default Intuition support for multitasking - front and back gadgets, etc.

The disk label is "pix:" and the state of the game files gives me the 
impression the game was rushed to market before fully polished and ready.
Even though there are points I find irritating about Risk the games plays 
well and that is why I bought it.

	-SES


 

There is also a similar [RISK] game called jeopard (wjg::amiga:jeopard.zoo).

john

RE:.-1

>   There is also a similar [RISK] game called jeopard (wjg::amiga:jeopard.zoo).

John

    I  downloaded it this evening. I like the display better than the
commercial version. Though I have not fully read the docs it  is  not
apparent  to  me whether jeopard can play a computer vs user game. It
seems only to be a computer implementation of the board, dice,  etc..
The  commerical  version  plays  a  quite credible game and this is a
major part of what I was looking for.

    The  automated  attack  is  nice  and I wish (it may be hidden in
there) it was available on the commerical version.

	Thanks,
		-SES

> apparent  to  me whether jeopard can play a computer vs user game. It


I'm not sure. I pulled it of a BBS one night and just made sure it
ran before putting it here. I did like the display.

john