BATTLE BUGS by Dynamix/Sierra On-Line

            Computer      Graphics       Memory      Disk Space
Minimum      386            VGA           2meg          8 meg
Max/Rec.     486          800X600         4meg          8 meg              

Control:   Mouse (necessary)
Sound:     Supports nearly all sound formats from PC speaker to Sound      
           Blaster to MIDI devices

Notes:    Warns about using disk caching in extended memory but I had no
problems with this.

Reviewed on:  IBM 486/33DX, 12 meg RAM, Pro Audio Studio 16 using 640X480
graphics mode.

This is the citation DYNAMIX uses to advertise their newest game: BATTLE BUGS, and it accurately represents both the motif, and the intrinsic humor of the game.

The game Battle Bugs intrigued me right from the start, and I had no choice but to give it a try and see what it was all about. This is a strategy/comedy game incorporating common household insects as your armies to pit against either the computer or a fellow bug-lover such like your best friend, spouse, or the queen bee of the household. You are given the role of Supreme Commander of the Armies of Insects. I felt rather like George Patton while playing this game, well, a George Patton with six arms and troops no bigger than an inch tall, but the comparison is the same, because of the win-at-all-costs directive you are given each time you start a campaign. The only games that really came to mind while playing this are: DUNE II: Building of a Dynasty, because of the way in which you control your ants, mosquitoes, etc; and SIMANT, for obvious insectoid reasons.

In Battle Bugs, you oversee your troops' movements and actions in a never- ending quest to gain food for you queen, and eradicate the other colonies of bugs that inhabit your area.

It contains the usual well-composed Sierra music, as well as sounds to accompany all actions performed by you or your troops.

Along with the music, there is a little speech associated with the game. For example, your commander will tell you the purpose of the mission, and the queen will speak to you as she pins her medal to your chest. The graphics and animation are similar to SID & AL'S INCREDIBLE TOONS, but with a three-dimensional overview perspective rather than a flat, two dimensional outlook.

The interface of this game is simple point-and-click, and is very easy to learn how to use. I picked it up in a matter of seconds, and I am not one to read instructions, just show me where the answers to the copy-protection are, and I am done with the manual! Once you are in the game, you have the field in front of you, and your controls are at the bottom. These consist of some kind of wristwatch for a timer, and a "Fony" mini-television which acts as your radar and your own personal information manager. It also comes with on-line help, which you can get to by tuning to channel five on the "Fony" TV.

At the beginning of the battle, after you have been briefed, you will see your troops standing at attention, awaiting your orders. If all of the battlefield isn't in view, you just move the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen and it scrolls over to give you a view of the objective, enemy, or whatever you couldn't see. At this point, time is paused, and you can give orders at your leisure. Click on your bug, tell him to fly, walk, attack, throw bombs, or whatever else your options are, and then repeat this for all your troops. This doesn't take too long as you aren't given a multitudinous throng of the little beasties to control. Then you click on the stopwatch, time starts, and the scene unfolds. Your troops go where you wanted them to, and the computer's does what it wanted to do. You can alter the course or actions of any of your bugs during play, or click on the stopwatch to pause time and think about your strategy. The battle ends when you have either achieved all you objectives or annihilated the enemy, (Many times this is the objective) or been defeated.

In each mission, you only have one of two game objectives: capture the food, or destroy the other army. This may seem a bit repetitive, but the landscapes are different in each scenario, as well as the types of bugs you are given for troops.

It is up to you how to combine the special abilities of each bug to attain the mission goals. For example, if you are given a pill bug and a grasshopper against the computer's praying mantis, a bug which can easily defeat the other two in the same scenario, but fighting one-on-one. You need to engineer it so that your pill bug attacks first, it has a higher defense capability than the grasshopper, taking the brunt of the mantis's attack, and then move you grasshopper in immediately to get the mantis from behind with its powerful hind legs.

In the next scenario, you may be given an army that can easily defeat the computer's, but you are blocked by water, or maybe you are too far away from the food that you must capture. In this case, use the moth that they so handily supplied you with, and have him airlift your army to the front lines.

Installation was a breeze, and it even recognized all my IRQ and DMAs for my sound card accurately, so all I had to do was hit enter on the lines that read: Pro Audio Spectrum 16 for the music; and Sound Blaster with OPL3 for sound effects. Playing head to head isn't too bad, but you have to make sure that you "friend" isn't looking at the screen when you make your battle plans. The biggest problem is that you have to share the mouse, so it gets hard to control all you bugs, tell them what to do, and get the game going. As soon as you have formulated your strategy to crush your opponent, they are sure to change their mind and moves, and the battle hasn't even begun yet. A nice feature in Battle Bugs is that if you are unable to complete a particular mission in two or three tries, you can skip to the next battle, preventing you from getting bogged down on one particularly troublesome mission. You can then go back and play that mission anytime you wish, by choosing it at the enrollment office. This would have been a really big advantage in XWING, because there were always those really hard missions followed by about three easy ones. The missions you have not completed are highlighted in red so you can easily see which ones they are.

I am not exactly sure what I expected from this game, but it has definitely provided me with hours of entertainment to break up the drudgery of studying. I do wish that there was a modem-playable feature on the head- to-head action so that you could play against a friend in real-time and see the two of you clash antennae and rip each others' abdomens apart. Also, I think it would be a suitable addition if you could construct your own scenarios: hordes of ants against a nest of cockroaches, I do hate cockroaches! But this game is a humorous strategy game that doesn't involve supply lines, construction of fortresses, morale, the sentiment for or against the war on the home front, or any of that other stuff; it's just your bugs against theirs, and the one with the most legs remaining at the end wins!