By now, everybody knows that video games are vastly superior to board games apart from a couple of malfeasant outliers who still like to count just for fun. PANZER GENERAL: ALLIED ASSAULT desmontrates this quite well. The board game is good and all, but why would you play it when you can play anybody in the world, anytime, in half the time with the Xbox Live Arcade version? Either way, as this Gameshark.com review attests, PG:AA is a pretty good game. It won't change the world, it ain't UP FRONT, and yeah it's another WWII game but at least it's a fun one and it has some good cardplay elements and an economic system that isn't exactly common for games of this scale. Neither really resembles the original PANZER GENERAL all that much, but that's OK.
CROSS OF IRON has nothing to do with the game, I just like the poster and it's a vastly underapprecaited Peckinpah film. Rare to see a WWII film anymore that isn't all sappy oh woe is us bullshit and jingoistic "my country right or wrong" sentiment. Where else do you get to see James Coburn as a Wehrmacht soldier and James Mason as his commander?
Next week- WARLORDS OF EUROPE.
Michael is a member of the Fortress: Ameritrash staff, and a regular columnist for Gameshark.