(North) American games...

In message <850490734.54840.0@basil.acs.bolton.ac.uk> "Joseph A. Noll"
writes:

> > What other fertile SF genres are there? Car duelling? Unfeasable
> > Giant Robots?
> 
> Giant Robots ala....Mecha.  Well Heavy Gear by Dream Pod 9 is the best
> Mecha game I've ever played, it would be very hard to beat.  Come to
think
> of it HG has alot of the same concepts that FMA does except it is
> exclusivly D6 based, but you gain dice for skill levels.

Funny that you should mention Heavy Gear, it strikes a chord with
one or two things that have been on the list here, as well as the
musing of an Australian fellow that was sent to me privately. I
would recopy what he wrote to the list, but that would be extremely
rude to him.

Anyway the point was: could GZG games ever have been written by an
American? I don't want a nationality flame war here, but I say not.

Heavy Gear is a (North) American game that nicely represents what
the publishers Dream Pod Nine's fellow-Canadian Allan Goodall was 
saying about what distributors and shops like about games over in 
(North) America.

For those who don't know it Heavy Gear is, at heart, a pretty smart
little mecha game... which has been bloated into a dreadfully
over-written RPG-cum-skirmish game with a titanically overblown
design system for all the minimax spods to slaver over. The fat, 
square-bound rules are also hideously done-over by some graphic-
design-reject (but *very* nicely illustrated). The game is 
"supported" by a constant stream of pointless and expensive glossy 
supplements churned out by the design team. Like, you can buy 
"field guides" containing, maybe, twenty mecha, half of which are 
completely useless (being obselescent designs, or construction 
'gears or whatever) and most of the rest being minor varients on the 
designs in the basic rules. Many of the designs in the guides for
the two power blocks, North and South, are functionally identicle,
but feature in both supplements.

Value-for-money, it is not.

GZG simply doesn't work like this. It can't work like this... as a
one-man-band JMT physically couldn't churn out all the pointless
bullshit to generate the required quantity of product drivel.

...Gotta love that man...

-- 
David Brewer