Comment on favourite gameboy family games?
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 weeks ago(and the incredibly obscure Blue Empire II - I doubt there’s anyone here who has even heard of it).
Google only shows Age of Empires 2, trying “blue empire” game gives unrelated results. Couldn’t find anything on Mobygames either. Was that a mod?
DdCno1@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
Not a bad guess, but this is actually a freeware turn-based strategy game from ~2004 (at least version 1.1 is from that year, according to file dates).
Essentially a slightly enhanced computer version of Risk, set in Europe and played against three other human or AI players, the former either in local hot seat or e-mail multiplayer. You conquer countries with your troops (there’s only one type of unit). Larger countries provide more funds per round, which are needed to maintain your existing troops (a large army can quickly drain your coffers), train new ones and build factories in countries so that you can troops closer to the front lines. The unique mechanic is that the success of your troops in battle is determined not just by numerical superiority, but also by how much support they are enjoying in the country where the fighting is happening. You start out with 100% support in your starting alliance of countries, but every other country will have 0% support for your noble cause at first, which means your troops will suffer high losses against the entrenched neutral (don’t attack, don’t replenish their troops) and AI players. Only after you have conquered a country (by reducing its defenders to 0), you can slowly increase your popularity through occupation - the more troops there are in the country, the quicker your population will grow. Hearts and minds and all that. What you end up doing is forming chains of troops marching from one country to the next each round (visible as arrows in the screenshots below), because factories are expensive and also because you want to maintain a large number of troops in countries close to the front lines. You’ll primarily produce in your starting factories in the beginning and then send them from e.g. France to Germany, Germany to Poland, Poland to then maybe a few other European countries you’re defending or attacking.
It’s simple, yet addictive. The AI is just competent enough at the highest difficulty to not be a complete pushover. If you’re anything like me or my friends back in the day, you’ll want to play “just one more round” a few times in a row. Blue Empire II was developed by a young brother-sister team. It was only ever available in German (hardly an issue, given how self-explanatory the game is) and primarily distributed as a free bonus on gaming magazine discs - at least that’s how I got it.
Here are two playthroughs, a single- and a multiplayer game, documented on a German Civilization forum (with screenshots):
www.civforum.de/showthread.php?69914-Blue-Empire
www.civforum.de/showthread.php?66664-Blue-Empire-…
I have seen it offered on freeware games sites in its heyday, where it used to occupy top spots with tens of thousands of downloads (the Internet was small back then), but those appear to be all down at this point. Since there are literally no downloads of it available anywhere anymore (the above two playthroughs are the only mention of the game I could find - and not even with all search engines), I’ve decided to uploaded it to the Internet Archive for preservation:
archive.org/details/blue-empire-2
In order for it to run on operating systems newer than Windows XP, enable compatibility mode for Windows XP SP2. Don’t be alerted by your task bar briefly flickering on startup - that’s “normal”. It should work on Linux through Wine, although I haven’t tested it. Inside the zip file, there’s a “spielregeln.htm” file that explains the rules and provides helpful hints. Use a translation service of your choice, if necessary.
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
Awesome work on archiving it! I guess it not having an english version, even if there isn’t much text, makes it significantly harder for non german speakers like myself to have heard of it.
I see that the game was made using Delphi/Pascal, as there’s a number of .bpl files, so maybe it’s possible to attempt a translation using Lazarus. This also probably explains why I could run it straight away on Windows 10, no need to turn on compatibility mode.
DdCno1@beehaw.org 4 weeks ago
Since my last experience with anything Pascal was decades ago and hardly in-depth, please excuse the noobish question: Would it be as simple as modifying the files with the right IDE or is there more to it? I’d totally be down to translating the game.
ICastFist@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
I’m not the best person to answer, as although I have programmed in Pascal a decade ago, I also never really fiddled with anything outside school. I do have a interest in the language, given it tends to be as fast as C, has object orientation and other goodies, and seems to be able to compile to just about any architecture with minimal fucking around or code wrangling.
Anyway, according to the Freepascal wiki, “The compiled file is called .bpl in Delphi. This is effectively a (special) DLL. In other words its linking is finalized. The needed metadata (.ppu, inline function and weak packaged units (see next point) go into a .dcp file.”
According to Embarcadero Delphi’s help page, the .bpl is a binary file built from source, so it’s probably not a simple matter of just telling Lazarus or Delphi to open it.
Maybe, and this is me being hopeful, using something like this, IDR, will make things simple and straightforward.