{"id":1007,"date":"2008-07-27T09:40:28","date_gmt":"2008-07-27T13:40:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/07\/27\/kharkov\/"},"modified":"2008-07-28T17:27:35","modified_gmt":"2008-07-28T21:27:35","slug":"kharkov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2008\/07\/27\/kharkov\/","title":{"rendered":"Kharkov"},"content":{"rendered":"

SSG and Matrix Games have released Kharkov: Disaster on the Donets<\/a><\/em>, the latest game in the developer’s Decisive Battles series.<\/p>\n

I haven’t played it yet, but Kharkov is an interesting battle. In spring 1942, the Red Army tries to take some initiative in response to the German offensive and ended up getting trapped in a Wehrmacht pincer, with hundreds of thousands of casualties and prisoners.<\/p>\n

As for the game itself, it’s interesting that the Matrix site redesign includes a Youtube video of Kharkov<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Does this video really make anyone want to play this game? I mean, SSG makes great stuff, so if you are familiar with the high quality of their games, then I guess this blurry movie of a mouse moving around won’t change your mind. But it’s not exactly clear what exactly is going on.<\/p>\n

To be entirely fair, videos of turn based games are pretty dull. If it was a board game video and one guy was yelling at another guy for taking all the castle building slots in Caylus<\/em> that would be one thing, but this is a narrator droning about the game and SSG while a mouse pointer moves around a screen.<\/p>\n

I understand the temptation for a small publisher to use all the new marketing tools at its disposal, so kudos to Matrix for trying. But it doesn’t really work. The game ends up looking terrible, nothing at all like the colorful – even garish – SSG template. You can’t read any of the text.<\/p>\n

EDIT:<\/strong> It has been brought to my attention that you can download a hi-res version of the video from the Matrix website. It looks better, but it’s still not a very captivating movie.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SSG and Matrix Games have released Kharkov: Disaster on the Donets, the latest game in the developer’s Decisive Battles series. I haven’t played it yet, but Kharkov is an interesting battle. In spring 1942, the Red Army tries to take some initiative in response to the German offensive and ended up getting trapped in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78,99],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5GFeQ-kharkov","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}