Be Excellent To Each Other

21 July marks the 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas if you are of the other persuasion). In order to truly trivialise the commemoration, and because I'm quietly regretting not being one of the 8,000 attending the re-enactment this weekend (Virginia is a bit of a trek from Oxford), I dug up an old computer game.

For about 30 years there has been a very popular Belgian comic book set during the American Civil War called 'Les Tunqiues Bleues' - the blue jackets. It follows the antics of two members of the 22nd Cavalry, the earnest Sergeant Chesterfield and the perennial slacker Corporal Blutch (who I use for my avatar). Only four books have been translated into English, and sadly the translation is a little flat, lacking the magisterial work that's been done on Asterix for example. I own about eight volumes in French, and satisfy myself by looking at the pictures. If anything, it's a far better way to spend one's time than watching the horrendously tedious Lost Cause jerkathon that is Gods and Generals, and probably more historically accurate too. Indeed, for a comic book, the battle scenes can be extremely graphic, but alas my schoolboy French is not good enough to understood the dialogue beyond the shout of 'Chaarrggeeezzz!'.

Now, in the early 1990s the series inspired a computer game, called North and South, which apparently was ported to almost all the leading formats of the period. After reading about it, I was suitably intrigued so I obtained a DOS version from ['a bored Confederate picket, in exchange for whiskey and recent northern newspapers' - Legal Ed.], and, after much tinkering with DOSBOX to slow the game down to a playable speed, poured myself a mint julep and started to play.

The loading scene has a silhouttee of a cavalry bugler whilst the PC speaker blurts out an assortment of period tunes whilst the credits roll. You can, of course, skip this and you're faced with the main menu.



You can play against a friend or against the computer. If the latter, you choose your skill level by selecting your preferred rank: captain, sergeant, or corporal. Amusingly, 'captain' is the easiest level whilst 'corporal' is the hardest. You can also change the controls, and enable or disable certain game features. Finally, you can choose the starting year (from 1861 to 1864), which will affect how many states and men the sides will start with.

The main playing area is a map of the United States. In a way, the gameplay reminds me a lot of 'Risk' - on your go you move your units and if you enter an occupied a space you must fight a battle. But unlike the map of the world in 'Risk', this game covers a smaller area and has a railway line running through key states which, if the train stops in a state you hold, gives you gold which is automatically converted into units once a certain threshold is met. This provides an incentive to keep hold of states where the line runs through, as it's obviously better for you to have a chance to get the resources than your opponent. The side which holds South Carolina will also receive regular re-inforcements from Europe, though sadly those holding New York don't get a supply of naive Irishmen who inadvertently enlisted after stepping off the boat.



As well as the train, from time to time a Native American will throw a tomahawk at the map, obliterating some the strength of whichever army is stationed where it lands. There's also a sleeping Mexican, who gets annoyed if you wake him, but I've not managed that. Sadly, there is no 'Pin the Bullet inside Emperor Maximilian' subgame, which is just as well, really.

So, after building up your forces and moving into the enemy's territory, it's time to fight. Initially, I thought this would all be automatic, and sat watching in horror as my noble Union volunteers stood completely motionless whilst being destroyed by artillery. Wondering what was going on, I hit the 'escape' key thinking that it would end the cut scene and saw my troops shamefully retreat off the screen. After a quick search online, I realised that unlike most strategy games, you actually control the units during the battle sequences. After adjusting the keys to something more comfortable, I finally found myself not losing battles (or at least, not as heavily). You can switch between artillery, cavalry, and infantry. I was quietly impressed that the infantry would move in columns of two, then form a line of battle when you started firing, and found myself wondering if they could do 'on the left, by file, company into line', because, lord knows, my comrades in the 200th Indiana can't. Another nice touch, which took me a while to notice, is that each time a cavalryman is hit the horse bolts off the screen.



The downside with having to flick between the various branches is that it's too easy to slip past, say, the cavalry, when you needed to control them to prevent a massacre. I also would have preferred it if units you weren't directly controlling had some degree of autonomy: if you're faffing around with artillery and the Rebel cavalry start charging the massed ranks of your infantry, they will just stand at attention prior to being felled. The cavalry, I noticed, will charge anyway, but forget to slash their sabres or do whatever it is horsemen do when they meet the enemy, unless you tell them too. But as a two-player game I can imagine it would be quite fun trying to obliterate your mate as he bashes the keys at the same time as you. Also, whilst retreating is dishonourable, it can be tactically wise if you want to spare your men to fight another day. The computer player is quite fond of this, I noticed.




If a state is held by the opposition, but it's not defended, you can usually march your men straight in and it becomes yours by default. However, from time to time the populace won't accept your rule and you'll be forced to play an arcade game. From what I can gather, it's a sideways scrolling beat 'em up, but with only one Rebel on screen at any one time, and I'm not entirely sure how you are supposed to win. Fail, and you lose the territory. But, hopefully, you can conquer it some other time without this, and it doesn't seem too important to win the game. After all, just as General Grant realised, you achieve victory by defeating the enemy's army, not seizing the capital.



North and South is a fun little strategy game. It lacks the complexity of AGEOD's American Civil War, which I keep on meaning to learn how to play properly, but then it doesn't set out to be anything like that. No doubt purists will bemoan its lack of historical accuracy and how there's no resource management other than an indication that states provide different amounts of men, horses, and cannon balls, but it doesn't aim to be a complicated 'Risk' clone. It's light-hearted and, reflecting its origins in the world of Belgian comic books, the graphics are cartoony and fun. I'm sure with practice the control system for the battles and the arcade sections would become second-nature, and I can imagine things get pretty competitive when there are two players huddled around the keyboard bashing the keys during a fraught battle.

All for the Union,

Kern

Oooh, I had this game on the amiga, I friggin' loved it. Lent it to a friend once and never got it back, though. Bastards.

READING COMMENCES NOW.

(Oh btw, did you try clicking on the cameraman's arse? DO IT)

Also, try capturing an enemy town - you have to play a side-scrolling fighter/race against the clock to do it. And you can hijack the train by placing an army on the track between two enemy-held towns - the train will avoid you if it can, but if the only available route is the one with your army on, it'll have no choice. The train one is bloody hard, but the side-scrolling sections are some of the most fun/difficult of the game.

The aim is to reach the end (a flag or the driver's carriage) before the clock at the bottom of the screen does. The more cities you have, the more money you get with each supply run, and therefore the more troops you get. If you capture a train, you get all the enemy's cash for that turn, giving you more troops and costing them some, so the arcade bits can be real game-changers.

(there's no actual money management - you're simply given a new army automatically once your vault is full)

If you're defending against a capture, you have a limited supply of defenders you can send out one at a time to delay the attacker by punching his lights out/knocking him off the train.


In the pitched battles, you can also blow up the bridge with the cannon, forcing troops/cavalry to cross the chasm vie the tiny land bridge, or the river via the stepping stones. And if you can hold one of the easternmost states you get reinforcements from the sea.

Ee, memories!

nice work, I enjoyed reading that. I might try to purchase it.

Oddly enough, no.



*clicks*
That wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.



Ah, that's what you're supposed to do in those scenes. Thanks - the game might make more sense now. It's still very playable even without those bits, though, which is a good thing, I think

Yeah, I still played it loads when I was a tiny person. It wasn't until I was older that I actually figured out what all the money stuff was about, and how to trigger a train robbery.

It had tonnes of character, that game.

OH! And if you watch the "you lose" game over screen for long enough...



Oh, and you can disable the acade battles from the main menu if you want to, which can be handy if you're curb stomping the AI or another player in the battles.

Ahem. Sorry, I realise you've covered some of this already, but I am excited to see this game get attention

I had a similar game entitled Vikings 2: Fields of Conquest, on my Amiga. Dealt with the Viking invasion of the British Isles, and it was great fun.

What did the vikings come in?

Dunno. They probably used their helmets, just turned upside down.

Hordes, Gazchap. They came in hordes.

Why are you dicking around with the PC version?

The Amiga version was the lead and is far better. However having played it the other day I prefer the CPC version.



It is one of the best games on the CPC. Really polished and very playable.

IMO the PC version comes way behind the Amiga, ST and CPC versions.

I'd forgotten quite how crap EGA graphics were. Still, could be worse:

Yup—you could be playing it on the C64, with its inexplicably poor battle graphics.

I had a game of the (decent-ish) NES port the other day as there's a big feature of it in the current Retrogamer. I was raised on the Atari ST version back in the day

When I fix my time machine I'm going to prevent the 10 year old me from wasting his time playing 'Zool' or, as was more common, changing the colours on 'Workbench', and force him to get hold of this game. I'd never played it until this week. Clearly, my childhood was wasted.

Thanks for the tip-off about 'Retrogamer': I might pick up a copy if I see it in town.

I bought my Amstrad copy here: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=bournemouth&hl=en&ll=50.721063,-1.875529&spn=0.002072,0.004404&gl=uk&t=h&z=18&layer=c&cbll=50.721122,-1.875495&panoid=vTJRNzs8pqVtGTIf_wyDCw&cbp=12,306.61,,0,8.55

That florist was the Bournemouth Amstrad centre. A mecca for Amstrad owners that place with the latest Amstrad games available on disc.

Ahh, memories. This was one of my favourite games on the Amiga. I particularily liked how when you ran on the side-scrollers it would play the music as you ran, like a player piano. Top theme as well. I'm a bit shocked how bad the sound is on the other versions. Why did the Amiga have such great sound and the PC so rubbish back then? Baffling. The battles go a bit faster than I remember too. I don't know if that's emulators for you or what.

North and South's sound was terrific, yeah. I remember every tune and sound effect, and I've not played it for more than fifteen years.

I particularly loved the native guy's theme tune. Dooo do do do do.... HEEE! (bom bom) HEE! (bom bom). Etc.

Not really.

At that time PC's were business machines. If you wanted sound you had to buy a soundcard such as an Ad Lib, or later, a Soundblaster. If you wanted better graphics you had to splash out on an EGA or VGA graphics card as well.

These initial cards were expensive and FM synthesis only. So basically you got the same kind of sound a CPC or ST could produce, except with more channels.

The Amiga on the other hand had 8 bit PCM audio. Less sound channels, but it played real sounds rather than generating them.

I used to enjoy playing this with a friend on his CPC and later on my Amiga. Good times.

this months retrogamer has an article on it, one of my top 10 amiga games for sure..

I had this on the NES. What you can do is set the horses off running automatically then control them once you get a bridge, good for using the cannon while they move.

Yes, that sounds like a good plan (especially as it involves cavalrymen having do something other than look pretty and steal women's hearts). There's certainly lots of possibilities about using the three branches together to outflank and crush the opposition. I need to master the controls first, though.

Also, being the right kind of drunk helped a lot in those days, i've heard.

I had a pirated version of this on my Amiga. It was pretty buggy and quite prone to crashing, though. I thought the little battles were great. But the sidescrolling bit was terrible. It had really shit control and terrible animation that made even moving sideways difficult. I'm not sure if they made it like that because they wanted it to be 'hard' or because they were incompetent.

From memory:

Destroy the bridge sharpish with your cannon, destroy their cannon and finish them off with the infantry when they try and cross the smaller bridge.

If you are really feeling clever, blow up the bridge when their troops are on it.

NB this doesn't work for the battles without the bridge. However in the Youtube videos I keep on seeing people retreating when they only have infantry left. It's perfectly possible to win with just one member of the infantry left with some quick moving and use of the scenery as cover.

One thing that always bugged me was the computer can use all 3 of their troops at the same time where as you can only use one.

Quite frustrating.

It's a serious flaw in the mechanics, and really gives the machine the upper hand (along with forgetting to slow the emulator down so the mortars don't fly at Mach 8 ). With practice I should be able to switch between them at speed, but it's going to take time.

Thinking about artillery, I watched a mortar firing competition whilst on holiday. Watching a ball fly through the air then ricochet off the ground gave me the shivers.

It's been a long time since I played this but couldn't you play those section two-player? I seem to remember controlling the cannon while someone else did the rest.

You could play competitively - one on joystick, one on keyboard. But I don't recall a co-op mode.

Infantry were deceptively powerful, as long as the enemy cannons were out of action or ammo. Took some practice to line the shots up, but once you get the hang of it you can take cavalry down about half the time.

Hmm.. I might be misremembering then. Last time I played it, I rigged up this -



and ran my Amiga through a PS2 screen. Sadly, my copy of the game wouldn't go past that options screen.

amazing how low they still turned out hercules games though.. we're talking well into the nineties, the amiga was out for 6 years..

played this against some school friends quite intensively, lots and lots of fun, but in the end in the arcade battles, the ones strting on the left always won..

Nobody plays North and South for a lecture on communism.

Not until the Korean-based sequel, at least

North and South and Oh Christ It's The Chinese?

Just come across this trailer for a remake:



Only been able to find one English article about it, but will keep my eyes open. Though I'm still quite happy playing the Amiga version over emulation. It's prettier than EGA, though still can't quite work the controls.

256-colour me interested!

Downloaded it on the ipad. Not quite got the controls yet...

88 mb ... It was 880 kb...

Ace.
Let us know how you get on.

Just won my first game

Huzzah!

(I've yet to achieve that in both the DOS and the Amiga versions...)

I bought a version of this for my kindle fire last night. it was £1.87.

Ace. Any good?

I have a very large collection of 'Les Tuniques Bleues' volumes now, in French, Dutch, and English... I'm rather fond of Sgt Chesterfield and Cpl Butch.

It is quite tricky although it was late when i was playing it. Good fun, though. I will report back later.

This is very hard. Especially the shooting sub game.