Diplomacy Stalls
I love Diplomacy. I've played it since I was young, and as soon as the email, or "judge" version came out, I was hooked. I play judge games quite a lot, and run a few as well. I managed to get myself on the beta-test team for Hasbro's Diplomacy CD game, and went into it with high hopes. I wasn't able to speak of the results until now, and what I have to say isn't pretty.
Diplomacy is an awesome game. It involves negotiating with your neighbors, stabbing them in the back, constructing plausible strategies on all sides of your borders. There are alread electronic means of communicating, so all Hasbro had to do was give it good graphics for the PC, and they'd be set. Instead, as Gamespot so eloquently pointed out in their review, "Hasbro Interactive's Diplomacy ... suffers from so many problems that it's hard to imagine anyone finding any value in it. " That's for sure!
The interface is clunky. We found this right off, when even basic commands would cause the program to give errors. You'd be negotiating with a country, and they'd leave the room before you finished! There was no "do this and I'll do that" kind of bargaining, and no apparent change in action if you stabbed a country in the back. They'd be just as likely to trust you the next turn ... and the next.
I could have forgiven the horrible AI problems. Really, I don't want to play Diplomacy against a computer, I want it to serve as a way to play against other players, either in real time or via email as in a judge. However, both were horrendously bug-ridden! We couldn't even get through four years without crashing, and these problems still exist in the real version of the software.
If I have the option of playing through a jugde, which works reliably but without cool graphics, and playing through Hasbro's front end which crashes and restricts options, I bet you can guess which I'd go with. Perhaps another release of Hasbro's version will fix the multi-player bugs, in which case I'll gladly use it as a front end to the judge. Until then, I'm quite happy with wooden blocks on the board in my living room. Those don't crash ;)
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