Talk:Theatre Europe/GA1

GA Review
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Reviewer: J Milburn (talk · contribs) 13:00, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Happy to offer a review. Josh Milburn (talk) 13:00, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * "It was later released in France by ERE Informatique in 1986, and was released in the United States by Datasoft for all platforms later that year." Unclear- are both of these releases for the same platforms as the UK release?
 * I see how that sounds unclear. I removed "for all platforms" in that sentence to hopefully make it a bit clearer as it was released in the US and France for all platforms mentioned (with the exception of Tatung Einstein) JAG  UAR   14:38, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * " and will only end once either side is forced to surrender or if the entire population of Europe perishes" Presumably, it's the game that ends rather than various cities
 * Rephrased JAG  UAR   14:38, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * " The game takes place over a period of 30 days." As written, this is real-world days; is this what you mean?
 * Changed to "in-game" days JAG  UAR   14:38, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I think you need to establish earlier on in the gameplay section that this is round-based. Or is each day one round? I'm not fully clear.
 * One day is each round. I've established to make it clearer JAG  UAR   14:38, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * "If the action screen is not operational, the battle is decided on merits of air superiority, supplies and armament." It's not fully clear to me what this means.
 * Rephrased to make this clearer (hopefully). There's a separate screen in the game which shows the action during battles, however it can be turned off in the settings by more "serious" gamers. If it's turned off, the battle will be decided in a different way JAG  UAR   14:38, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * "options for allocating air superiority include" Is "superiority" definitely the word you want here?
 * Could be better! Changed to "air forces" JAG  UAR   14:38, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm struggling with the Development and release section. The first paragraph gives some interesting background about the company, but the second paragraph jumps straight to criticism the game received. There doesn't actually seem to be the "middle bit", about the development and release of this particular game. There is a good bit about the various consoles etc. in the lead; shouldn't this be in the article body?
 * It was originally named "Background" (which makes more sense), but I changed the section to development once I figured I could find a little more info for this game compared to the others. I'm not quire sure how to tackle this, so I've renamed the section to "Background and release". I'm open to suggestions though! I've also added the releases on various consoles in this section JAG  UAR   21:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * You don't need accessdates for courtesy links' if you're citing the print magazine, an online scan of it is just for convenience.
 * Removed access dates for scans JAG  UAR   21:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm a bit concerned about the presence of four separate non-free images. Are they really all needed? A screenshot is only required if readers are going to have difficulty understanding the topic without it; especially with the latter two, I'm struggling to see that this is the case.
 * There was a discussion a while ago about the use of more than one non-free image in a section, and it turned out that it was acceptable to use if the screenshots showed very different aspects of the game. In this case, an image of a map and text are different, but I do see your point about overusing three images in one section. I've always used two images in the gameplay section for these strategy games, but I do understand how two on top of each other can be overdoing it. I can removing one or two if you like? If one had to be removed, I'll remove the one with the text. JAG  UAR   21:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Removed one JAG  UAR   21:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I'd be inclined to say that the best move all things considered would be to switch the image of London being destroyed with a recording from the phoneline. Josh Milburn (talk) 22:01, 5 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Google Scholar and Google Books are throwing up little (this may be worth a cite as a retrospective review), but may be worth digging through if you're pushing to FAC. On the other hand, it looks like the broadsheets picked up on this game to a certain extent- looking through Nexis, I'm seeing the following which might be worth a cite (apologies for the lack of page numbers):


 * Armageddon was launched by Visions (Software Factory) in 1983. It vanished almost without trace. So did Visions. Two years before that, Eastern Front, 1941 fared almost as badly. The game represented several years' work by Atari's top programmer, Chris Crawford. But Atari saw no commercial value in a game it took three hours to play and which you lost.


 * Eastern Front was released, eventually, bagged in polythene with photo-copied instructions, along with the amateur games in the APX (Atari Program Exchange) line. Today it's on cartridge as befits a star product.


 * Just like Lady Chatterley's Lover was read by hordes who would never have bothered, had it not been banned and then became the subject of a celebrated court case, so war games have been boosted to unprecedented popularity - partly by the publicity generated by attacks on them.


 * It all started with an innocuous, unrealistic game called - with no great subtlety - Raid Over Moscow. CND supporters demonstrated outside the offices of the British importer, US Gold. Monsignor Bruce Kent described it as 'barbaric and disgusting.' Questions were asked in Parliament. US Gold prospered hugely, and now about 100,000 copies of the game have been sold.


 * Raid Over Moscow wasn't a war game, but the kerfuffle made nuclear war a hot topic (sorry) for games designers.


 * PSS's Theatre Europe was next to benefit. There was a repeat performance of 'outrage in the press.' Boots the Chemist found the game 'morally offensive' and wouldn't stock it. Nor would John Menzies. It became another top seller. Neither Smiths, Menzies nor Boots would take US Gold's similar Nato Commander. 'Basically,' says Gold's Tim Chaney, 'because CND got to them first.'


 * The idea of having to call the hotline in 60 seconds in order to get nuclear codes is incredible.




 * The problem with war games, whether set in past or future, is balancing authenticity with playability. Ideally the game should be realistic, but allow you to play either side with a reasonable chance of winning.


 * Eastern Front, 1941 chooses realism. It stimulates the Barbarossa campaign, when Hitler invaded his Russian allies. As you command the German forces you are bound to lose, but your aim is to maximise your score. 'Don't be alarmed when your point score steadily falls through the winter,' the handbook says. 'This is the normal result of Russian winter offensives.'


 * The Russian offensive in Easter Front is a frightening experience, but in Germany 1985 it is worse. 'When the computer plays the Russian side you can expect some rough handling.' If your forces seem inadequate, it's because they are.


 * Theatre Europe solves the problem by cheating. Alan Steele researched the relative strengths of the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces, and found that when these were programmed, the superiority of the Warsaw Pact was so overwhelming it won every time. PSS had to fiddle the figures to give NATO a chance, otherwise, they say, it wouldn't make a reasonable game.


 * But eventually - if you have chosen to play NATO - you are driven to the 'nuclear option.' The game then gives you 30 seconds to dial a Coventry number to get an authorisation code. Your sensitivities are then assaulted by snatches of 'Give peace a chance' (John Lennon), a nuclear explosion, and the sound of a baby crying before you are given the code that enables you to send enemy targets to oblivion ...


 * Being a fairly realistic simulation, this option leads to global nuclear war and the destruction of civilisation. The advantage of the game, as against real life, is that you can simply press the space bar to start again.


 * Although it must be classified as a conventional war game, like Eastern Front, Theatre Europe is educational and moral in its message. It does not glorify nuclear war so much as put the case for peace, albeit by implication.


 * The kind of thinking behind Theatre Europe is taken further in Chris Crawford's most recent and most unconventional effort, Arms Race. He describes it as an 'unwar' game - 'a simulation of how to avoid war. You lose if you nuke anybody.' The game presents a map of the world on an Apple Macintosh screen. You play either the US president or the general secretary of the Soviet Union. Your task is to monitor events during crisis after crisis from 1986 to 1993, and to try to enhance your standing throughout the various super- power intrigues ..


 * So far Crawford has not found a publisher for Arms Race. Random House has declined it, though it paid Crawford a dollars 15,000 advance. Perhaps the fact that Arms Race sees the world's problems as 'militarily insoluble' counts against it - that and the game's lack of bombs and explosions.


 * Or perhaps the problem is that Arms Race is far too serious. Computer games are, after all, only games. Not even the simplest child is simple enough to take them for reality. It might be nice if more games - whether for children or adults - were educational, but unless they are fun to play there is no point in having them at all.


 * Theatre Europe is published for the Commodore 64 by PSS. 452 Stony Stanton Road, Coventry CV6 5DG. Amstrad and Atari versions are due shortly.

Table-top war games have been around since the 17th century at least. But if recent software recent software releases are anything to go by then the home micro equivalents are still in the dark ages - not as regards technical excellence, but in the dubious choice of subject matter; nuclear war.

After last year's release of Raid Over Moscow, whose title must win the Kenny Everett award for subtlety, comes Theatre Europe, from the software house PSS, based in Coventry, showing that we British can hold our own when it comes to bad taste. This one allows the player to have fun and frolics by launching nuclear warheads at the city of your choice, or by indulging in a little harmless chemical warfare.

Raid Over Moscow - 'play it like there's no tomorrow!' - loads to the sound of The Star-Spangled Banner and is based on the supposition that the Russians launch a nuclear attack, unprovoked of course, against a US city, giving the players just a few minutes to retaliate by nuking the Reds.

First you get to blow up Minsk, Leningrad and Saratov, and then you're let loose on Moscow itself, where 'Your mission is to blow up the Defence Centre. If you are successful, you will get Soviet military strength back 10 years!'.

If you prove a little slow in dealing with the 'red menace' then you'll just have to sit back and watch that old mushroom cloud obliterating Dallas or New York in multi-coloured high-resolution graphics.

Just a game? Well, it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to know what the response from President Reagan or Mrs Thatcher would be if it were reported that Russian children were being sold copies of Nuking New York or Raid Over London, nor to imagine the Russian reaction to the release of these 'games' in the West.

Theatre Europe cannot be accused of being one-sided, as it does allow you to choose sides in its scenario of a Third World War centred on western Europe. You can represent either the Nato European countries (with a bit of help from Uncle Sam) or the Warsaw Pact nations, the latter, naturally, being marked on the map in brightest red.

Equally predictable, the instructions tell you to choose the Nato side in guiding you through a sample game, although there is a remarkable similarity in graphics between the screens which show nuclear warheads raining down on Moscow or London.

Adding to the controversy and attendant publicity has been the inclusion of a few bars from John Lennon's 'Give Peace a Chance'. This is played over the title screen, and again, if you dial a special phone number requesting the code you need in order to launch a nuclear attack.

It is to the credit of PSS that it has used the music legitimately by obtaining a license from the publishers, Northern Songs, but there can be little doubt about whether the license would have been granted for this purpose had Lennon had control of the copyright.

The booklet with Theatre Europe includes the statement: 'This program is dedicated to the people of the world that the game is never played for real.' The necessary code word is only given to you over the phone after the sound of a baby crying, when a prissy female voice tells you: 'If this is really what you want the code is ..'

But if you think these games do not go far enough, why not fill in the Wargaming Society membership application that comes with the game and answer the question about which era you'd like to see covered next in the Wargames series by ticking the box marked Vietnam. And after that, what? Belfast? Lebanon? After all, it's just a computer game, isn't it?

I love the idea of the phone number (I wonder if it still works!?) and it looks like it may well be this and the very strong anti-nuclear message (see William Knoblauch's contribution to this book, for example) for which the game is best remembered- the latter could perhaps be stressed a little further in the article, perhaps. Josh Milburn (talk) 14:32, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the review and the journal extracts! I spent hours researching this article and couldn't find those. I would like to push this to FAC soon, but in all honesty I'm worried about it because of the lack of comprehensiveness. Even though that sort of thing is expected from these sort of games as not only are they 30 years old, but I think they were made in people's bedrooms back then, so information on development is just impossible to come by. The fact that you had to call a telephone number to order a nuclear strike is cool to think about even for today's standards! I was going to upload a 30 second sound clip file for this article but I couldn't figure out now (copyright). I could only find it on YouTube and there was no reliable source to use. Basically the audio was a nuke going off and a baby crying, followed by a voice saying "if this is really what you want... the code is 'midnight sun'". Shame, I would have loved to put that in this article. I know for a fact that UK numbers had one less digit in the 80s, so I doubt it would still work today. I can't find the journal extracts from Google Books, otherwise I would have put more information in the background section. Despite this, I'll definitely add a bit more if I nominate this for FAC. JAG  UAR   21:33, 5 January 2016 (UTC)
 * I think a clip of the audio would be excellent- it'd really hit the "this is a game which hates nuclear war" thing. Josh Milburn (talk) 22:02, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Concerning the book sources that you couldn't access: Josh Milburn (talk) 14:23, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

THEATRE EUROPE 1985 Commodore 64, PSS [2 out of 5 stars; according to p. 2, 2 stars indicates "Fair. Run-of-the-mill. Some good qualities, but nothing to get too excited about."] This dated war game pits NATO allies against the Warsaw Pact in an all out war for control of Europe (or at least most of Europe, as the static screen map doesn't stretch to Spain and Italy). Theatre Europe may be rather too simple for hardcore war gamers, but it did include a couple of intriguing features, like a real-life phone number to call for nuclear strike authorization and a musical recording of John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance. Also on the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Apple II and Atari 800.

Preventing nuclear war was a common video game trend in the atomically tense 1980s, especially in Europe. With Soviet and US medium-range ballistic missiles still pointed at each other, mid-1980s Europe was a Cold War hot spot. In 1985, the British company Personal Software Services published Theatre Europe, a video game in which NATO and the Warsaw Pact battled for control of the continent. Players who choose to launch strategic chemical attacks are warned that "civilian deaths will be numerous." Those brazen enough to order a nuclear strike need to call a 1-800 number to get a secret launch code. Follow through with this option and you'll hear an alarm siren followed by a digital mushroom cloud ... but not victory. As one reviewer noted, "As you play this game, it becomes increasingly clear that the war cannot be won with nuclear weapons. Only lost." [Comparison to the 1985 Balance of Power, which apparently has a similar message.]

...

While all of these 1980s games share a thermonuclear war theme, they differed in tone. Wargames, High Frontier, and SDI gave a gung-ho message - that nuclear defense in pleasuble, and that with the right technology and drive, the apocalypse is avoidable. By comparison, Mindscape's Balance of Power and PSS's Theatre Europe present nuclear war as a losing proposition, a scenario to be avoided at all costs. Pundits might have called SDI far-fetched, and "Star Wars" may not have been realized in the '80s, but in the emergent video game age, it was a technological vision with powerful appeal.

...

As the Cold War fades further into history, Americans have grown more alarmingly comfortable with nuclear weapons. In 2003, George W. Bush threatened to use "mini-nukes" and "bunker busters" in the war on terror. Video games similarly incoporate tactical nukes as usable weapons of war. Iterations of Civilization, Command & Conquer, Call of Duty, Mercenaries, Crysis, and Supreme Commander all offer tactical nukes with few apocalyptic connotations - they might create a little radiation, but so what? It's quite a shift from 1985's Theatre Europe and the 1-800 hotline for the nuclear launch code. Perhaps this trend toward atomic ambivalence is natural; with few cultural reminders of the nuclear threat, video games are abandoning such fears while still keeping their apocalyptic appeal. While the Fallout series continues to entertain gamers, today's most prominent apocalyptic storyline is the outbreak narrative.


 * Thanks! I tried searching "Theatre Europe" video game in Google Books but couldn't find it. I'm thinking of making a bibliography section and converting some refs to harv-style as I think I'll be looking at a FAC soon. In the mean time, I'll see if I can implement that content in the article. The fact that Boots used to sell video games is astonishing!? JAG  UAR   16:59, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
 * is there anything else you feel that needs to be done with this? JAG  UAR   15:53, 15 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Ok- well there are a few bits outstanding (use of other sources, some open questions about non-free content use) but I'm happy that this meets the criteria at this time. We can leave the rest as some bits to think about before FAC. Josh Milburn (talk) 16:26, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I'll definitely implement the new info before I nominate it for FAC (I have a FAC active at the moment, so it'll have to wait). Thanks for your review, it really has helped me out! JAG  UAR   17:20, 17 January 2016 (UTC)