Long time ago, one of the first war games I ever played was "The Ancient Art of War." It was a real-time strategy game which gave you control - you could create your own games, and set the parameters of the battle. The way to victory was either by destroying all of your opponent’s soldiers or capturing their flag (the capture the flag victory seems to be taken over by many computer games after this). Certainly the strategy of the different AI’s are simple in comparison to today's standards, but this is, in my opinion, where it began.
Where would Warcraft be if we didn't have "The Ancient Art of War"? So, this is a classic game for the influence it has had on the market more than what one can get out of it now Nostalgia, however, means we might want to play it again. As such, if you remember this game, or if you are too young to have ever played it, but you want to play a game which is an influence on the genre, here it is. Get it.
However, for as good as it was, one thing I always thought about this game is that it was inspired by Stratego. Capture the flag indeed! So, I remember one of the games I tried to make was
a reconstruction of the Stratego board game. I tried it many times. It could never work. Try making the board like a Stratego board, and things end real quickly. You must put more thought into your game creation in order to make your own board. However, this does not mean you can't try to do what I was unable to achieve: to make a live-action Stratego board. You can do it with this software, and tell us about your success. That's because this was one of those games which did allow you to create your own war game situations. Certainly in today's standard, what you are given is limited, but for its time, I really appreciated this. You could make a game and give it to a friend to try, and vice versa. Within limits, it really was flexible. Of course, those limits today seem to be quite big. Do you care? Not if you are into the old games and remember the ingenuity it took to create them.
Were there any weaknesses to this game? You bet. This was not a perfect game, but it was a fun game. What weaknesses were there? Well, the generals were often easy to predict in how they would play. But is this anything surprising? I mean it took a long time for computers to be able to produce AIs which could become a real challenge and adapt. Indeed, many great games still don't have the proper AI.
Score: 4/5 for the time it was made.
