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 THE GLOBAL DILEMMA: GUNS OR BUTTER

 With the previous successes and standard-setting precedents of Chris Crawford's
games, we've come to expect good things from him. Unfortunately, THE GLOBAL
DILEMMA: GUNS OR BUTTER suffers from several key weaknesses, as well as a level
of playablity that can only be described as tedious. (This review is based on
the IBM-PC version.)

 The object of the game is to balance your nation's economy in order to
ultimately conquer the other nations that inhabit your continent. In order to do
this, you are forced to basically choose between two options: Military (Guns),
or Food (Butter). The first allows your nation to defend itself or attack its
enemies. The second allows your population to grow or decline. Perhaps this is
the first weakness of the game: It boils down to only two real and effective
options. Although there are several different ways to produce guns and butter,
your alternatives are still very limited: Either you build military, or you
build people.

 As you are attempting to balance your economy, you must allocate a certain
percentage of workers to each of the factories. Using simple and primitive bars,
you increase or decrease the percentage of workers by moving the bar to either
the left or right. But allocation is not that easy: Once you alter the
percentage of one factory, your total worker pool is decreased. This forces
other factories to lose personnel; consequently, a shortage of that good is
almost always the result. You then must go to the factories that were reduced
and reset their percentages.

 Once these factories are correct, you may very well find that others have been
altered in the same way. In the process of trying to get all the factories
(there can be literally hundreds in the advanced game) balanced just the way you
want, you might have already spent one hour: That's one hour of tedious bar
manipulation and economic frustration. Crawford attempts to reduce this by
implementing a "lock" feature to prevent your worker pool from being altered.
This works to an extent, but there are still several instances in which it's not
very effective.

 After your economy is balanced, the military portion of the game begins.
Distribution of your "guns" occurs among the five to eight provinces in your
nation. You have no control over where the forces are built. Any territory that
had armies in the previous turn has priority over unoccupied areas. This is yet
another weakness in the game system: As an avid wargamer, I was disappointed to
see that I had no control over a territory's armed production. You are forced to
mobilize your forces by (once again) manipulating bars to the left and right,
and then pointing in the direction which they should go.

 As you're attempting to carry out your military plans, you must attack your
enemies and ignore your friends. What makes this so very hard is that GUNS OR
BUTTER is 95% black-and-white. There is absolutely no distinction between your
nation, your enemy's nation, or your friend's nation. In order to find the right
nation to attack, you must call up a black-and-white map of the continent, and
display in black the territories the other nation controls. You are not able to
see more than one nation at a time. In the advanced game, you are playing
against seven other nations. All of these nations could quite possibly be
adjacent to you in some way or another. Therefore, in order to see who controls
what, you must display all seven maps and attempt to keep the pictures in your
mind for comparison. It's not impossible, just difficult. It's amazing to think
how much easier it would've been if Crawford had implemented simple color in the
military portion of the game. At the conclusion of the military phase, the ranks
of the nations are displayed, and you begin the tedious process of balancing
your economy again.

 What makes this game so disappointing is that simple, easy-to-implement
features could have made this Crawford's greatest accomplishment. In the manual,
he mentions several features or functions that were removed "at the last minute"
because they're weren't fun: Color, the ability to trade between nations, and a
monetary system were all cut. Had they been implemented, this game would have
stood a chance.

 Another apparent problem involves a consistent memory error. If you have _any_
TSRs, or you're using a customized DOS, then you won't be able to play the
advanced level. Even with 2Mb of RAM and no TSRs, the game tossed me out with a
memory allocation error. It seems that the only way to play is to remove your
CONFIG.SYS file and use absolutely no RAM-resident programs -- a simple problem
that could have been avoided had more substantial playtesting been conducted.
(I'm curious to know just who _did_ playtest this thing....)

 Economic fanatics will more than likely find this game enjoyable. Others will
probably be disappointed. GUNS OR BUTTER suffers from a lack of playablity, poor
design, and a total disregard for the practice of pre-publication playtesting.
Mark this as Crawford's first (and hopefully last) dud.

 THE GLOBAL DILEMMA: GUNS OR BUTTER is published by Mindscape and distributed by
The Software Toolworks.

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