Games 473-475: Early Hudson Soft

 

Hudson Soft, a now defunct telecommunications shop in Hokkaido, is undoubtedly best known today for the Bomberman series, their long-running partnership with Nintendo, and to a lesser extent in the U.S. but a greater extent in Japan, the PC Engine console. Appropriately, the Famicom version of Bomberman is their first whale, but in exploring Hudson's back catalog we can see bias in my selection methods; their early output had quite a bit on NEC and Sharp computers, including text adventures Dezeni Land and Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom which look absolutely insane and would interest me if I could read Japanese. They would also port Nintendo's early games to these computers, and some of these ports are downright strange, such as a version of Super Mario Bros. with page-flip scrolling and unique levels and enemies. However, my initial selection are all arcade-style computer games which would eventually be ported or remade on the Famicom.

Incidentally, Wikipedia says the earlier Sega-published Pengo was an influence on Bomberman, citing Zero magazine as a sole reference. Having played Pengo, I can say it's not half bad, but I can't say it's definitely a predecessor. And so we begin this Hudsonsoft retrospective with... Bomberman. The PC-8801 BASIC version.

 

Game 473: Bomber Man 

 

 

Created as a demo to show off Hudson Soft's own BASIC interpreter, this initial version is not great. I was expecting it would be barebones, with no powerups, no multiplayer, no music, only one enemy type, and fiddly movement controls in typical PC-8801 fashion. That last aspect can become a real pain point here; you move in half-step increments, but there is no input latching and instead the game just polls the keyboard a few times each second, leading to dropped inputs, Bomberman getting stuck mid-tile, and bombs put down in useless positions.

But I wasn't expecting a Bomberman game where the bombs themselves are not barriers to your enemies or yourself, and this completely changes the dynamic. There's no trapping enemies with bombs here; instead you need to lay arrays of bombs, often with an angry red balloon monster in close pursuit, and then dodge their line-of-sight and manipulate their movement patterns so that they move into your blast patterns.

My best attempt - and I can't say I had a whole lot of patience to try to do much better -  made it to stage 4 and scored 6730 points.

 

To score well means searching each level for the hidden treasure, which is found in one of the bricks along with a hidden exit. After that, the next-best thing for your score is killing all of the enemies as quickly as possible for a time-based bonus. The stairs themselves, which are also hidden in a brick somewhere, are to be avoided; you'll forfeit the bonus on the current level and advance to the next, more difficult one, and as far as I know, the game is endless.

Bomber Man does seem to have some room to improve performance with strategy. I expect that mastering enemy movement manipulation is key to clearing higher rounds. The balloon monsters cycle between four different colors, and each one has a corresponding degree of aggression, which I'm sure comes from Pac-Man. But there's an unavoidable element of luck, as sometimes the AI or the controls just don't cooperate, and on occasion, the level just begins with an enemy right on top of you, giving you no chance at all.

GAB rating: Below average. Borderline bad, really. Bomberman's classic formula was never great in singleplayer mode, and this clumsy first go at it is no exception.

 

Game 474: Binary Land 

Finding a copy of this game was hard! The Famicom and MSX ports are widely available, but they're not quite the same as the Japanese micro original. Thankfully I found a Sharp X1 copy in a dark corner of the Archive which seems to be more or less a first edition.

 

Binary Land is a world of mazes and spiders in which a boy and girl, Gurin and Malon, must navigate and arrive at the goal together, simultaneously. The twist is that you control both at the same time, and one's movement always mirrors the other horizontally. It's honestly not very difficult, even when the mazes are asymmetrical. Spiders are your only hazard, and their webs aren't fatal; it can be a valid strategy to trap one in a web on purpose while the other clears the rest of the nest with unlimited bug spray. Most of my deaths were due to unresponsive controls. Never presume you can change direction and immediately start spraying; the input poll will most likely skip the direction and you'll be stuck spraying the wrong way as a spider creeps up behind you.

Around level 30, the difficulty does spike a bit, but patience, and a little luck, will get you through. At level 32 you're rewarded with what I think is supposed to be a baby.

 

GAB rating: Below average. It's better than Bomber Man, but not very interesting, and doesn't do very much with its two-player simultaneous control gimmick.

 

Game 475: Nuts and Milk

 

Nuts & Milk is an objectively awful video game title. Unlike Bomberman and Binary Land, this one is almost completely unrelated to its Famicom remake the following year.

You control Milk, the white blobby thing, and have to collect a bunch of fruit in a maze while running away from Nuts, the cyan blobby things, who mainly just encircle the mazes in predictable patterns but can certainly catch you off guard if you don't plan ahead. Parts of each level are filled with diggable dirt tiles, but beware; dirt returns after a few seconds and will kill you and any Nuts trapped there when it does. Plan and time your fruit snatches accordingly.

 

There are 24 levels, plus, interestingly, a level editor, but I got stuck on round 6 and I suspect that in order to pass it I would need to attain a mastery over Nuts manipulation which I am not interested enough to pursue.

 

GAB rating: Average. I'm being a bit generous because I didn't really give this one as much of a chance as I gave Binary Land. I can say that this is certainly the best of the three games I played for this retrospective, but didn't feel very compelled to really explore it and find out how much better.

The 10 most influential video games as of 1985

I've been reworking my DDG grapher program - the one responsible for that chart in the Data Driven Gamer banner and others which I used to use more frequently in retrospectives. On the surface, it doesn't appear any different, but the data sources are normalized. On the downside, this means I had to discard about a hundred corrections that don't fit the format, but on the upside, I can run queries on it now! And I thought it might be interesting to query this - what games, measured by both breadth and depth of influence, have been the most influential?

I won't go into the exact formula, but it is points-based, and the main factors considered are - what games did it influence, how strong or direct are the lines of influence, and how important are they? Magnavox's Table Tennis, though it directly influenced Pong, didn't really impact anything else of importance, and it itself is therefore not ranked as highly as Pong. Pong, conversely, directly spawned hundreds of clones, but the vast majority are irrelevant today and do nothing for Pong's score.

You'll need to click on the charts in order to read them legibly, and then probably only if you have a pretty big monitor! You might even want to open them in a new tab.

 

10: Asteroids

 

 

Atari's most successful video game of all time plays like an update of their own Computer Space, which in turn drew heavily from SpaceWar, which I consider the first important video game, and in turn is the MRCA of that genre, and nearly anything that features 2D space physics.

Apart from the success of Asteroids steering Atari's own direction, and very likely giving vector games a lease on life, there have been dozens of Asteroids clones, and some of them by pretty notable developers. The Stamper Brothers debuted with Vortex in 1980 and led to Ultimate Play the Game, and Rare. Jordan Mechner's first game Deathbounce copied Asteroids, and if nothing else, Broderbund's rejection encouraged him to be more original. Sega's early output included an Asteroidslike Space Fury. And Defender, one of the best and most original arcade games of its era, undoubtedly carries Asteroids in its DNA with its controls, its focus on inertia and wrap-around geometry.

 

9: Pong

By some criteria, Pong is arguably the most influential video game of all time. It's not the first by any reasonable definition, but it proved the industry was commercially viable, and in the earliest years of it, one could say the industry was Pong.

Other games had longer-lasting influence in terms of gameplay mechanics; we don't see all that many Ponglikes past 1980, but before that, Pong launched Atari, where its rebound mechanics would be seen again in games like Breakout and Combat, and hundreds of adaptations and clones, including Sega's Pongtron and Nintendo's Color TV-Game series.

 

8: Space Panic

Described by Chris Crawford as the first ever platform game, Space Panic isn't anywhere near as famous as Asteroids or Pong, and in my estimation, it isn't very good, but pioneering gameplay elements still in use today makes it more influential than either by my metrics.

The ladder-based platform traversal and trap'em up mechanics launched Broderbund into the Apple II era with its weirdly successful Apple Panic and came full circle with the smash hit Lode Runner. Universal themselves would also come full circle, releasing the far superior Mr. Do's Castle in Space Panic's image after years of uninspired shooters. Other notable games made in its image include BurgerTime, Floppy Frenzy, and very possibly another.

 

7. Scramble

Here, we're starting to enter the realm of concrete genre forerunners. Space Panic is a bit, well, alien to the modern concept of a 2D platformer, lacking even a jump mechanic. Konami's Scramble has some quirks that are foreign to the scrolling shmup formula, an arcade mainstay, but it is unmistakably part of that clade. It's these quirks, like bombs, emphasis on terrain, and fuel pickups which help us identify its direct descendants, and few are more direct than Konami's own Gradius, which had to be removed from the graph to keep it readable. Universal's Cosmic Avenger, SNK's Vanguard, and Anco's Cavern Fighter & Skramble copy it unapologetically.

Others take it in some interesting directions; Irem's Moon Patrol is, in my mind, very clearly a Scramble inversion that places the ship on the ground and swaps your bombs for SAM rockets. Alpha Denshi's surreal Jump Bug, also removed from the graph, is said to be the first sidescrolling platformer, but being a multistage autoscroller that runs on Galaxian hardware, I'm pretty sure it owes something to Scramble. Namco's Xevious undoubtedly took direction from it, featuring the same forward-firing guns and surface-targeting bombs but translated to a now-ubiquitous vertically scrolling format. Sega's Zaxxon goes in an even more daring direction, albeit a dead-end one, with a 3D axonometric perspective, which funnily enough winds up feeling more Scramble-like than some of its 2D descendants.

 

6. Donkey Kong

 

A game both massively successful and massively influential, Donkey Kong established Nintendo's dominance and defined platforming for years to come, especially on personal computers where smooth sidescrolling capabilities just weren't ready yet. Atari games Miner 2049er, Jumpman, and Bruce Lee are obvious descendants, as is Electronic Arts' Hard Hat Mack, and a whole bunch of ZX Spectrum platformers, starting with Chuckie Egg.

 

5. Colossal Cave Adventure

Not many games have an entire genre named after them, let alone a mainstream one, but this is the game that adventures get their namesake from. No text adventure but the earliest and/or most obscure have not been influenced by Don Woods' Adventure. Adventureland, a 16KB BASIC reduction was the first, we see multiple points of entry into the catalogs of Infocom and especially Sierra On-Line, and we're by no means done seeing its influence in this blog, even as graphic adventures start becoming viable enough to make text adventures commercially obsolete. Rogue, another, nicher game lending its namesake to a genre is known to have been influenced too, as is Atari's Adventure.

 

4. Breakout

We're reaching the point where I need to really start pruning back items from the graph to keep it from being unreadably cluttered. Several branches are omitted entirely.

Breakout was the first DDG whale, and even more so than Pong, it seems like every Japanese developer of the era, big or small, got their start with a Breakout clone. Sunsoft, Namco, Konami, SNK, Sega, Nintendo, Universal, Irem, you name it. Atari themselves would expand on the formula with Avalanche and Super Breakout, which influenced other games in turn, notably Activision's Kaboom, and we're not done with Breakout clones yet.

Breakout also steered the direction of the Apple ]['s hardware and firmware capabilities to some extent, as designer Steve Wozniak wished to recreate it. It also is known to have been a direct influence on one of the most significant video games of all time.

 

3. Pac-Man

Everyone knows Pac-Man, right? It's only the most profitable arcade game franchise of all time. Like Breakout, Pac-Man has an obscene number of imitators, but if Breakout clones were almost universally unimaginatively derivative, Pac-Man had a refreshingly diverse spawn of games that were clearly following in its footsteps, but also distinguished themselves in a variety of interesting ways. Oil's Well had its break-neck pace and pipeline-laying gimmick. Lock 'n Chase had its maze-reconfiguring barriers and a layer of strategy that came with them. Lady Bug had revolving doors and a pinball-inspired scoring element. Blueprint (again with the Stampers!) had its machine assembling and that bizarre, googly-eye-filled aesthetic that Rare would be known for. Bomb Jack took Pac-Man's scoring system and developed it into an intricate and complex system that challenged you to navigate its bomb-filled stages with precision and grace. And, of course, Midway's Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Junior took the formula in their own distinct directions without overcomplicating its purity.

Namco's own Tower of Druaga would also springboard off Pac-Man's mazes and powerups to inspire a whole new aspect of gaming, but we won't be seeing that come into its own for quite some time.

 

2. Galaxian

 

With its colorful graphics and its comparatively elaborate attack formations, Galaxian might be an iterative improvement on Space Invaders, but enough of one that it quickly became the new go-to title to clone, both for the arcade industry and for bedroom micro programmers. Which leads right into our #1,

 

1. Space Invaders

 

Come on, you had to know this would be #1. Even in the brief few years it took for Galaxian to replace Space Invaders as the new standard, Space Invaders had spread its influence far and wide and at a pace faster than Breakout before it could dream of. Companies that copied Breakout now copied Space Invaders. Companies that didn't exist before copied Space Invaders. And in the years following Galaxian, the industry had gotten mature and diverse enough that blatant copying was beginning to get slightly blasé.

Space Invaders permanently affected the direction of video gaming, perfected the mechanic of "shoot things with your laser," introduced round-based difficulty curves, and to this day there is virtually no action game which can't be traced back to Space Invaders in some manner.

I expect that as my master graph continues to grow into 1986 and beyond, many of the games on this top ten will lose rank, especially Galaxian. But not Space Invaders. I've argued that Space Invaders' importance is often exaggerated, but never that it isn't the most influential game of all time.

Take the A-Train: Won!

I did it - I delivered the president, safe and sound and on time, from Washington D.C. to Hartford. Or maybe it was from Mar-a-Lago to D.C. The game is not specific about its geography or time. And not only did this trip have a body count, but I'm pretty sure it was supposed to!

 

In the south of the map, I have a stable cargo unloading loop-and-switchback system, and in the middle part, a stable revenue-generating passenger train loop. I'll need to make a few trips all the way up and down the map to retrieve more materials to finish the one-way presidential line, but I don't mind too much; the passenger loop already goes 40% of the distance, and three more full 490t loads ought to do it.

I could, in theory, shorten my travel time by incorporating the cargo train's route into the passenger loop and have it deliver rails closer to the front, but there's no way to do that without slowing down the passenger trains and therefore slowing down the revenue they bring in. The cargo train has to return to the yard, and the passenger trains don't, so I'd need to build more train stations and use time signals to keep the cargo train from crashing into the passenger trains as it enters the loop. Less trouble to just manually locomote myself back, using sidings to avoid crashing into my own trains, and pick up the goods myself, I think.

Plus, the south end of the loop is really cramped already. How would I even build more here?

Back at the front, all I have to do is keep building the line northward. For the most part this is not complicated.

A few screens up, and there's an apparent dead-end - but you can actually tunnel through the thin part of the woods. 

 

More track!

 

Eventually, there's another natural barrier, and this one's nasty.

This part actually ruined an earlier attempt, because the tunneling mechanics are so damn obtuse. It's really not clear where you can enter the woods, nor where you can exit, and once you go in, you're operating blind because the trees obscure the rails and your train. And since you can't see what you're doing, you'd better build your tunnel correctly the first time - which is a pretty unfair ask when you don't even know where it should exit! Create a junction here by accident, and you'll never know until the president's train goes off it and derails.

 

This will work, but you'd better not enter this tunnel during the day - you might construct a junction by accident. Best to only go back through at night when construction is impossible. 

90% of the way there. Gotta make one last cargo run.

Finally, the president's destination is in sight... but there's a problem. The way forward is blocked by some farmland!

 

Unless there's some other way of removing buildings that I don't know about, the only way through is violence. Violence and a carefully constructed series of junctions with the buffer stops removed.

 

This is why we needed so much money. As it turns out, I overprepared by about $100,000, but still, there's plenty of time left to complete the rail. It takes three train crashes full of passengers to clear a path through, but I do indeed make a path through.

Finally, I lock my cargo train into the switchback, wait for the remaining passenger trains to clear the southern loop, and connect the rails - this signals the president's train to start moving in 24 hours.

3x speed, transitions choppily edited out

 

GAB rating: Below average.

The first Take the A-Train is more interesting as a sign of things to come than a complete game experience in itself. It anticipates aspects of automation games, and largely achieves what it set out to accomplish, but the game just doesn't offer all that much to do, or much reason to explore the full extent of what its railroad engine allows, and between the interface friction points, the limited paths to victory, and the cramped map layout, actively discourages the sort of freeform play that these games would be known for.

Game 472: Take the A-Train

Artdink's initial entry in the A-Train series is weird. I was expecting a primitive version of Transport Tycoon, but what I got feels almost more like a primitive version of Factorio.

It hadn't helped that I couldn't find any full copies of the manual. The PC-8801 version of the game, and a digital manual, are available on the Nintendo Switch Store, but I don't have a Switch to view it on, so I'm stuck with the first page of it.

At least the in-game language barrier is thin. About half of the game is in English despite never being released outside of Japan, and the other half is terse enough that I didn't need a translation guide.

I chose the FM-7 version of the game, which launched first in December 1985 according to various sources (though the ingame copyright states 1986), using eFM77 to emulate.

Before writing this, I went through a lot of trial and error to figure out just what exactly I'm supposed to do and how to do it. Early on, there were a lot of crashes, derailments, and general frustrations with the interface. Then there were bankruptcies. And then there were crashes and derailments again. But now, I think I have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing.

The ultimate goal here is to transport the president's train, seen here outside the white house and marked with the star symbol, several screens north within 365 days. You have $100,000 and 750 tons of materials, which isn't nearly enough, but it's a start.

The A-Train, the circle marked with the letter A, is your construction vehicle, and you directly control it. Or at least you will once the weird controls start to make sense. Rails follow the vehicle in insert mode, and are picked up from behind you in delete mode, but both modes are subject to a lot of edge cases which can set the rails in unexpected ways or just cause the game to yell at you that you can't do that. The A-Train can't derail, but a collision with any other vehicle is an immediate game over.

The first challenge is the controls. Even now, I often find myself fighting with them, not being able to move in directions I think I should, laying down tracks where I don't mean to, not laying down tracks where I think I should be able to, or not being able to remove tracks that I do mean to, wasting a lot of time and money. Compounding the problem is a day/night cycle; a full day last just under 30 seconds, and construction is impossible from 7pm to 5am, during which time the controls also immediately shift into an automatic rails-follow mode. Too often, I'd be struggling for several seconds to connection a junction or delete an erroneous piece of track, only for night to fall and force me to wait until morning to try again. And that's before the other trains start moving.

Also, inexplicably, signals at junctions and stations can only be changed at night. If dawn breaks before you're finished, tough luck. Hope you didn't need a train there today.

What the. I don't even want a junction there!

 

The next challenge is procuring more building materials. Money isn't a problem yet, though it will be. Trains IV and V are your cargo vehicles, and there's plenty of rail supplies at those stations, but they are inaccessible to you. You've got to use these trains to deposit those crates somewhere you can retrieve them from.

Planning this is crucial. You can put the receiving depot just about anywhere, but you need a loop that gives enough room for you to maneuver in and grab materials from the receiving depot, while also leaving you room to build a passenger line with all those materials you're about to get. Several of my games failed because I built myself into a corner here. Two rules to keep in mind - only three rails can ever meet at a junction, and never at 90 degree angles.

This design should work pretty well.

Once the rails are connected to a rail yard, the train parked there will be scheduled to start moving in 24 hours - just enough time to set the signals. Train IV will deliver cargo to the station on the west, loop around and return to the switchback, back up into the yard for more cargo, and repeat.

 

Now we have to worry about money.

This is the only place where you'll see how much cash is left.

The red window is the important one right now - we have $90,070, we've spent $390 today (so far), $1,190 yesterday, and $520 the day before. The numbers below are revenue, and so far we've made none. Everything costs money - moving, building, demolishing, operating trains, even switching signals. The more track you have laid down, the more you'll need to spend every day on maintenance and trackage fees, and the farther up north you build, the higher the rates get.

Your only revenue stream is passenger fares, collected by the trains marked O, I, II, and III. Passengers are picked up at stations in proximity to villages, and dropped at other stations - doesn't matter where, all passengers get off when the train stops, and the farther the arrival station is from the departure (measured by latitude, not track length), the more money you get.

I'm sure you can get fancy with an elaborate system of loops, junctions, and switchbacks, but I don't really see any advantage to anything more elaborate than a simple loop that goes between two villages fairly spaced apart. Fares seem to be directly proportional to the distance between stations, so having four stations in the loop instead of two means you get paid half as much twice as often, only it takes longer because the trains stop twice as often. And a complicated routing system that gets different trains to different destinations without any collisions is tricky to design in the map's often cramped terrain, and for very little benefit I can see.

Leaving the starting screen

Ah, a village!

Station positioning is important. Maximize the houses in proximity and minimize impassable terrain.

Periodically, I must return to the start for more track. Not a big deal.

Just passing through the next town.

 

Halfway to Hartford. I think this little hamlet will be my terminus.

Making a return loop

It's done!

Cash is down to $35,000. Weirdly, the does not show this on the main screen. But we're nearly ready to start bringing in some revenue.

With a simple two-point passenger loop, we can deploy all four passenger trains right away. First I wait until nightfall and divert the cargo train into the switchback so that it doesn't get in the way. Then in the morning, I connect all of the passenger trains, making sure to stagger them at least two hours apart so that they do not collide.

 

And they're off!

At this point, the best thing to to is sit back and wait. I will need a lot of money, and these trains are money losers at first. I am spending $3000 per day just waiting, and the trains are pulling in about $1500 each on a round trip that takes two and a half days. That's a $6000 loss on each trip. But keep waiting; with each delivery, the towns grow, and the revenue grows with them.

This hamlet is getting bigger!

 

A bustling metropolis.

 

Revenue starts to cap at about $16,000 per trip, certainly profitable, but not amazingly so. By day 100, I've got just over $100,000 in the bank. And I keep waiting because I will need more. By day 150, I have $200,000, and this, I feel, is enough.

No need to expand the loop - from here on, we are building the presidential line.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Won!

My greatest foe is dead. My next-greatest hasn't got half the forces I do. Time to finish this.

#37 goes down by the end of the month.Yuan Shu had been killed in combat, and his subordinate Wang Ping was already on the ropes.

 

I'm not going to spend any more time micromanaging provinces or babysitting generals. First thing, Sun Ce's red provinces in the middle are going down. I can mobilize crushing forces easily; I just need to get generals there and transfer soldiers to the loyal ones (i.e. away from the ones I won in battle) before going in. 

This can also be tedious.

Sun Quan's (Ce died) last stand

 

Next target -  Yuan Tan. Regrettably, he breaks through my wall, but I know he won't be able to expand quickly enough to escape a multi-point invasion.

Sending reinforcements to #50

Which isn't to say he (or his eventual successors) make it easy for me. Where he is weak, he withdraws into unoccupied territory when attacked. Where he is strong, he attacks where I am weak. Where he must defend, he utterly abuses smoke and fire to delay the inevitable. I have so many useless generals that I wind up sending them back into southern China for some personal development and recruitment. And one summer, Cao Ang dies, depriving me of a loyal general, and worse, 20,000 soldiers.

The state of China in 203AD.

 

But they're fractured in a few months.

 

Looking grim for them by September.

 

I finish by conquest of south China by winter, which delays my final conquest of the north a few months.

Spring 204 brings more disease, and Yuan Shao dies, leaving his son Yuan Xi in charge. So does one of my generals and another 20,000 soldiers with him. By now I don't really need them.

I begin mobilizing troops northward.

Summer brings poor omens - locusts for me, which are bad news, and rebellion for Yuan Xi, which I didn't even know could happen.

In May, I begin my final attack on the northeast. 747,000 soldiers against a combined roughly 200,000 between both remaining masters, and this time I don't need to reserve all that much to protect my own lands from counter-invasion.

The old monkey rice trap formation. It never fails!

 

Yuan Xi's last stand. He dies in September after foolishly charging into the rice trap.

 

Winter. So close to victory! The inaction is painful.

 

Finally, at the end of February, I catch and behead my last rival in his castle at Youzhou.

 

Sure! But not this one.

GAB rating: Average.

I am so glad to be done with this one. 

On paper, this is a much better game than Nobunaga's Ambition (the 1983 version). It's a more complete and cohesive game, better designed and balanced around its expanded systems. And you no longer get wiped out or set back irrecoverably in the first turn. War, in particular, is a massive improvement, with meaningful tactical options that give the underdog a chance, and the economic and diplomatic layers are meaningfully broader. There's still some illogic carried over from its predecessor (arms/training are independent variables of army size, provisions travel anywhere instantly but armies travel one state per rotation, etc.) but overall this aspect is still a major improvement.

I also have to give some credit to the game's localization. I can't speak to its accuracy or efficacy in capturing nuance of the original, but this is, by my estimation, one of the first Japanese video games with a significant language element to be translated into English, and shows none of the awkwardness that plagued so many of its contemporaries and games released well beyond.

It isn't a great game, not even at its best - even though it's deeper than its predecessor, the systems and their interactions are still more broad than deep, and outside of combat, many gameplay options just aren't worth using. Castles are the only decent revenue source, so you just build them whenever possible, and then your economic concerns become a lot simpler. I never saw any point in levying taxes, searching for gold mines, or borrowing from the merchant or rivals. I also never felt it necessary to explore diplomatic options beyond "pay/marry off rivals who you don't want to fight yet" (though admittedly these options - including some subterfuge strategies, might be underexplored on my part). And for all the stats on your generals, none mattered nearly as much as the two loyalty stats, which are trivial to maximize.

But Romance of the Three Kingdoms' biggest fault is an incredibly tedious endgame, where you know you're going to win, but you still have to manage 30-50 states and make decisions for them every single turn. For the most part, these were extremely trivial decisions too, especially in winter when the game's already slow pace comes to a halt. I'd estimate it took me at least nine hours to get through the final twelve months.

The game is aware of this and gives you the option to authorize a state to make decisions for you, but the implementation is so flawed that I didn't want to do that.

• For one, only the master can automate (and de-automate) states, so you still have to wait for his turn before the option is available. And you might want the master to do something else, since there are options only available to him.
• Second, there's no way to know what an authorized governor is actually doing, so the option might as well be an auto-skip function. That's bad on a newly conquered territory, or one held by a general with even the slightest hint of disloyalty, because mutiny and rebellion are ugly things. Toward the end, that described most of my territories and generals, because I needed the loyal ones for war.
• Third, if an army moves through an automated state, that army ain't going anywhere else until you de-automate it.

The game was somewhat enjoyable at the start, but never all that satisfying. Building up a state isn't much of an accomplishment; only conquest actually feels like a major progress event, and even that part takes forever.