[MC Lothlorien, Commodore 64]
It has been some time since we talked about MC Lothlorien, one of the oldest and most prolific British wargame companies. After 2 years of churning out low-quality wargames or proto-wargames, Roger Lees and Mike Cohen of Lothlorien tried to move away from wargames and publish action and adventure games in 1984, for instance the intriguing Special Operations. However, this does not seem to have paid off, presumably because Lothlorien had no comparative advantage vs the other British game publishers in popular genres. And so Lees and Cohen returned to the less-crowded wargaming genre, with titles like the ridiculous Panzer Attack around February 1985 and the multiplayer-only Overlords one month later, in addition to a second (and last) scenario disk for the also-multiplayer Confrontation that had first been released back in 1983.
However, the market was moving fast and a boutique like Lothlorien no longer had the shoulders to bear the cost and risk of a production at the scale necessary to be present in every magazine and every video game shop. That’s why in March 1985, Lothlorien associated with the much larger Argus Press Software [APS) to handle the “production and marketing” of some of its wargames, starting with The Bulge. For the few Lothlorien games that APS ultimately agreed to market, this made Lothlorien a simple middleman between the developer and APS which was assuming the role of publisher. Meanwhile, Lothlorien continued to have its own projects independent of APS, and in particular nailed later in 1985 a publishing agreement with Ken Wright.
It is unclear to me why developers would accept a middleman when they could go directly to APS, and from my limited investigation only one company did so, thanks to an earlier collaboration: Choice Software. Choice Software was founded in early 1983 in Carrickfergus (Northern Ireland) by David Bolton, Colin Gordon and “a third partner”. Gordon immediately wrote the first game for Spectrum (Cityfighter), which didn’t sell, and then for almost a year Choice had to survive on odd computing jobs. Somewhere in 1984, one of those odd jobs was porting Mogul’s Fire Ant from Commodore 64 to Amstrad. The Amstrad was a new machine (released in April 1984) and developers familiar with it were rare, and so Choice Software became the company to contact for Amstrad ports – and that’s how Choice Software ended up working with Lothlorien for the first time, porting Redcoats to Amstrad. Eventually, Choice Software would become the go-to company for Ocean Software to port US or Japanese titles to British machines in 1987 – in addition to all the expected sports games, Choice even had the privilege to port Mario Bros to Spectrum!
In addition to being a coder, Bolton was a wargame fan, having started at 13 with Avalon Hill games and Strategy & Tactics, and so with Gordon and a third developer (Ken Baker), he coded The Bulge and naturally turned toward a wargame publisher they knew: Lothlorien. Lothlorien must have seen that as a windfall, particularly as they were at the time already discussing with Argus, and of course accepted.
The Bulge had a version for Spectrum and another for Commodore 64, both published around April 1985 – it’s the latter that I will now showcase.
The game
The Bulge opens the morning of the 16th, with German and Allied troops facing each other in the snow. The player can choose which side to control – in my case I took the Germans because of course I am taking the side that attacks.
The objective is to hold as many victory points (= cities & villages) by the 3rd of January. Each location gives a different amount of victory points, but is otherwise unremarkable. All, except one: Spa and its fuel depot. If the Germans don’t control it by the 22nd of December, then they will fight at half capacity!
The Bulge is played in real-time, and there are a lot of units to control. Alas, the cursor moves and scrolls the map at a somewhat slow pace, so just looking at a specific part of the front is a time commitment. All my attention at the beginning of the battle is therefore concentrated on Spa, micromanaging the movement of my units and the support of my artillery – I try to attack the enemies from several directions while keeping the infantry in difficult terrain, the tanks in open terrain and moving the artillery along the advance.
Thankfully, the enemy is still weak and either falls back before contact or just dies quickly. For my units not within reach of Spa, once the way is open the order is to stay on the same row but advance to the middle of the map – I’ll check in with them later.
On the morning of the 17th, both sides receive reinforcements, including in my case paratroopers not too far from Spa.
This is a devious trap! My paratroopers could easily occupy Spa… but they’re extremely weak (10 in strength points when the weakest allied unit starts at 30) and if the enemy retakes Spa they destroy the fuel depot forever – this is what put an end to my test game. I order the paratroopers to take position North of Spa while my tanks, who have cleared the initial resistance in front of them, are now beelining for the depot.
It is very hard to make a satisfying narration of the events that follow, because I am racing across the screen taking either very local & short-term decisions, or ordering my units to go as far as possible in a straight line – you can’t draw waypoints and I have better things to do than to manage a good pathing manually. There is a pause in the game, but when in pause you can’t check what units are doing, nor even who controls which city. The game also has no visual feedback telling you a unit is moving, so I occasionally find out that some of my “moving” units are blocked behind another that’s currently idle. Irritating. Still, I keep receiving memos that “US unit XXX has been wiped out”, and really the map clears out of enemies.
The 21st at 7 PM, just on time, I capture the fuel depot at Spa with one of my most elite Panzer Divisions.
What follows is annoying: there is still a US infantry unit nearby, so I receive the message that the depot has been blown up, another that it has been captured, another that it has been blown up, etc, and this until I finally destroy the enemy unit near Spa – which ends the situation at “captured”. It seems the depot was never blown up after all, but the message was coded to be sent when an enemy unit is near the depot.
The situation after the capture of Spa is excellent, with only 11 remaining allied units and almost half the map crossed:
I destroy two more Allied units before the end of the day… and then the Allied receive 10 more units in reinforcement on the 17th, including some in the bottom-right border of the map, behind my units. This last surprise, followed by more allied units spawning to support them the following day, requires intense micro-management in the South and my progression there is totally stalled. Similarly, in the North, the Allies receive every day way more units than I can destroy, particularly as a good number of my units are blocking one another in the back – those who make it to the front destroy one or two Allied units and then die. As for the middle of the map, I simply do not have the time to manage it.
Jumping quickly through the days, this is what I face in the North the 24th:
The situation around Spa suddenly clarifies thanks to an unexpected bug on the 26th: as one of my mechanized divisions reaches Liege after hugging the border of the map, most of the Allied in the area are rerouted to it, but they somehow block one another and never engage my force.
This takes away a lot of the pressure in the North, just at a moment when I had finally countered the flanking force in the South. This allows me to organize the conquest of as many landmarks as possible. Note that I still can’t take a breath, it’s just that I can move forward. After one more hectic week of combat & conquest week, the game ends with a German victory:
The final map of the game, with two-thirds of the enemy force stuck near Liege:
I can’t say I had a lot of fun, but I can confirm I was kept occupied every single second of the exactly 67 minutes the battle lasted.
The review
The Bulge – Battle for Antwerp is a skillfully coded real-time tactic game – this is still sufficiently rare in UK in 1985 to be noted – but I had no fun playing it.
The first issue is that the UI does not adapt to the constraints of real-time. In particular, you are unable to assess the situation at a glance, even though the code had everything needed to be able to do that:
- control of cities is not colour-coded: you have to select them to check the ownership, even though there are different icons of different colours for different cities,
- there is no icon change when units are on the move (important given ticks are relatively slow and in difficult terrain units may move every 2 or 3 ticks), even though tanks and infantry of the same faction have different (cosmetic) icons and the artillery icon is different between “support” and “anything else”,
- there is no icon nor notification when a unit has stopped movement,
There is a way to pause the game, but you can’t examine units or towns during the pause. The game also features a strategic map view, which does show units without orders by making them blink… but the strategic view does not show the whole map, so you still need to scroll while in it, and it does not pause the game either so you won’t use it a lot.
Even controls are not at seamless as they should be. With such a large front, you are always pressed for time, particularly as the cursor is not automatically recentered on your units after you give an order: the optimal way to do it is therefore to pause immediately after giving an order, then drag the cursor back into position – annoying. As units do not take the fastest route to their targets and you can’t set up waypoints either, you can forget whatever the manual says about the usage of terrain -you will almost never have the time to optimize your tactics based on the terrain.
At this point, I am used to subpar UI and control, so the game could still have been decent… but just like Sharp’s Ardennes, there isn’t much to do in this game besides advancing: with the exception of Spa, there is no geographical feature you care about, no supply route to keep open, no bottleneck to cross. You don’t even care that much of the terrain because you don’t have time to, so you just advance as much as you can to destroy enemy units and capture towns. That’s why I had so little to say, and that’s why, while a technical improvement on the primitive Stonkers (1983), The Bulge is a worse game.
I had a look at the Spectrum version of the Bulge and it is roughly the same experience. Both versions came with a 2-player mode that’s turn-based with simultaneous resolution – I think I would have preferred to play like this in solitaire too. Finally, the Bulge came with a beautiful if succinct manual that included historical notes.
Total time played : 2 hours
Did I make interesting decisions? Mostly on how to allocate my attention between my different units.
Final rating: Obsolete. Playing The Bulge is neither boring – the game keeps you occupied – nor interesting; it is a simple and pointless destruction of your time.
Ranking at the time of review: 111/188
The reception
Argus knew how to market a game, and made sure The Bulge received a throng of reviews – though all over the place in terms of rating, but then there is no such thing as bad publicity. Lemon64 and SpectrumComputing list 12 reviews in aggregate. I am amused by the fact that most reviews agree on the qualitative feedback, but not on the final rating, which depends on how much they weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the game. The general vibe off all reviews is that The Bulge is technically excellent (fast cursor, smooth scrolling, etc), with great graphics and easy on beginners, but even reviewers who praised the game struggled to keep track of too many things at once. For those who praised the game, this is part of the fun (“fast and furious war simulation, unlike the slow-paced ones.” – Zzap64 in July 1985). For those more sceptical, it makes the game worse: “one is frequently reduced to hurling forces willy-nilly into the fray without much regard for tactics” explained Sinclair Users in its 1986 special issue.
Four reviews stand out:
- Your Spectrum (August 1985) in which 2 of the 3 reviewers panned the game because, as they explained, they simply did not like wargames in general!
- On the other hand, the British wargame expert Angus Ryall gave the game a coveted SMASH award on behalf of Crash (June 1985). His opinion was not only confirmed in the same magazine by his successor Sean Masterson (May 1986), but by the readership, which gave the game the third position in the Crash Readers Awards in the wargame category (2nd place went to Commando, which is not even a wargame).
- Computer & Video Games asked a historian to review the game in January 1986, and let me tell you he did not find anything redeemable about the game. The magazine ignored whatever he said, and gave the game 7/10 in “value”,
- Finally, Your Computer Magazine gave the Bulge only two stars before summarizing everything I wanted to say about the game in only one paragraph:
To say that this is an improvement on Lothlorien’s previous effort, Panzer Attack, would be true but would be no recommendation. The Bulge is in real time, and as the German commander, you simply haven’t got time to issue all the orders you need to. As the game progresses and units get spread far and wide, you spend most of your time chasing round the map after errant units. Any Bulge game which doesn’t feature roads is doomed to failure.
I don’t have any numbers for the sales, but Lothlorien was sufficiently happy with the game that they tasked Choice to code the sequel to their success Johnny Reb in 1986, so we’ll see them again. David Bolton would leave Choice to do business software immediately after finishing Johnny Reb II in May 1986, while Colin Gordon would hold the line for 3 more years before joining Ocean somewhere around 1989-1990.