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Risk 2By: Bill Stiteler Review Date: October 16, 2000
My office here at Applelinks Tower is littered with the detritus of my career as a Mac user: the internal modem from my 5200 (when "75MHz is more than you'll ever need"), disk one from my copy of Aldus (remember them?) PageMaker 4, and the most treasured item: the copy of Mario Teaches Typing from my original Performa.
Not that everything's perfect, I mean, Hiner gets Deus Ex and Baldur's Gate; I get the Mac Kid's Pack and Risk II. Tch... I won't complain too much, however, as I enjoyed playing Risk II quite a bit. As I noted in my preview, I've been a big fan of the board game, having a lot of fun and wrecking a lot of friendships with my, shall we say, offensive style. You can read that however you want. The best thing about Risk II is that in essence, it's just Risk in computer form. Great gameplay is the reason the real-world version became a classic and nothing has been done to tamper with that.
You can also play "mission"-style Risk, where you have objectives other than total world domination, or "same-time" Risk, where each of the players gives their orders to the computer which then executes them simultaneously. None of this takes away, however, from the original; a strategy game which still taxes the mind. Two pieces of advice; take Australia, and don't fight a two-front war in Asia. But that goes without saying. Of course there's multimedia; as wonderful a game as Risk still is, by itself it'd fit on a 1.4 Mb diskette. The biggest whistles and bells come when you go into combat. The overview map zooms into a 3D relief map where CGI soldiers shoot it out across territorial borders. Nifty, but thankfully you can click through it once the novelty wears off.
In a world where the quality of a game seems to be rated upon it's polygon count and number of cheat codes, Risk II is a reminder of what really makes a game great. The deceptively simple rules will suck you in. For those of you who've never played it, check it out; for those of you who have forgotten, it's time to come back.  You'll excuse me now, as I have to go get in line for my preview beta of Halo Teaches Typing.
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Whenever I used to get truly depressed about the state of Mac gaming I'd only have to pull out about that disk to recall the Bad Old Days--when the closest thing we had to decent games for the Mac was an Italian plumber who wasn't dodging barrels thrown by an irate gor-il-il-il-il-a, but rather teaching me how to remember the HOME ROW keys. For all the complaining I do nowadays about how the state of Mac gaming could be better, they are at least complaints about how things could go from good to great, rather than from potential to existence.
In Risk, you take the part of a potential Napoleon or Alexander as you lead your armies in a quest to conquer the world, territory by territory, while your opponents do the same. Larger armies have something of an advantage, but even a lone unit has a chance of standing off a horde--if your rolls are lucky enough. Yes, Risk II even simulates the rolling of the dice for you.
No, the best part of Risk II is the game itself, and the meat of the game is the strategy. The luck of the dice plays a part, but luck will only take you so far. Hone your skills against the computer players first; they're good, but their responses are ultimately built on rational algorithms, and the name of the game is Risk, after all. After you've cut your teeth versus the ones and zeroes, you can play online using