The Background Behind It

In rolled the year of 1996, when we had upgraded our machines to much better pieces of kit. Early on a Saturday morning at around 1am, and after a few "drinks", this mate of mine and I thought "..wouldn't it be great to play North and South?". Up cranked the upgraded A500, and we were struck with the dreaded Software Failure message all-so-many Amiga users are familar with. After a few seconds thought, we concluded that Workbench 2 was to fault. We degraded the A500 to run under Workbench 1.3 - what North and South was originally developed on - and it ran happily.

Even though, this solution proved to be very tempermental - we were only able to play the game once, without it crashing; and sometimes it didn't even start.

We kept on complaining and swearing at each other, and wondered if we could "fix" the game to run better. After discussing that would take forever and copious amounts of coding we quickly dismissed the idea. Instead, being game designers, we thought "..what if we made our own version of North and South?" - that was our first mistake. We didn't get to sleep until about 4:30am...

A month or two passed, and I decided to make this game much better - a real game, with joystick control that works. I designed many new ideas for the game, created a Construction Kit, got some new people on the project and started work on a fantastic new game for the Amiga.

But, why is the game called FUBAR? When I modified the original games source code, I did it so badly it no longer worked, and it was no-where near the original specification of the game; hence it was f*cked up beyond all recognition. Those American Armies - such a tactful phrase... ;)

What is it?

The game itself is designed for 1 to 2 players, but in the future, this will be expanded to support a maximum of 4 players per game over serial link, direct modem play, or via TCP/IP (the Internet).

It is an action/strategy game. There are two sides to the game itself; firstly it has a map screen which shows the whole world on which the players are fighting against each other to conquer. The world is divided into countries, and each country is owned by each player. The game ends when a player captures all the countries and killed off the other players.

When two players' troops meet, they go into battle. Here, you can launch a wide range of artillery at the opposition, and cause complete devastation to the loosing sides troops, artillery and the player's plans.

What makes this game even more interesting, is the fact that it can be fully customised! It has its own Control Centre, which allows you to create entire worlds, armies, battlefields and graphics for FUBAR. There are hundreds of options and variables which can be set to make each object different. All the animations, graphics and worlds can be drawn by the creator, or new weapons can be easily knocked together using a library of graphics which will be supplied with it.

If you still don't get it, combine North and South with Civilization, Chess, Risk, Cannon Fodder and the popular PC game Command and Conquer into one game, add some of our own ideas and you'll result in FUBAR. If you still don't get it - think guns, explosions, plans and World War.