Previous Next

D-day 1944 and the landings begin! The British 6th Airborne Division are parachuting in, detailed to secure the east flank of the beach-heads. Their main objective is me bridge over the Caen Canal, later renamed Pegasus Bridge in their honour after their divisional emblem. Pegasus Bridge has certainly been well researched - in each turn British Airborne units land at the spots where they really landed on that eventful day. German troops and other British troops arrive by road. If you command the British side, your task is to capture and preserve certain bridges, destroy or occupy others and to capture the tactically important Merville battery. If you play the German side, your aim is to hold off the Brits for 18 vital hours. Plenty to think about and some interesting tactical simulations.

The game is for 1 or 2 players - single players can command either side, the computer commanding the other. Command is by keyboard or joystick (Kempston, Interfaces I and 2 supported). Graphics consist of a very large scrolling map, with a small-scale map on which the outline of the target map moves as it's scrolled. Dots on this indicate the position of your units. These flash until you have moved or fired them, so it's easy to find your way about. The glossy-paged handbook includes a detailed map of the area, full instructions and plenty of info about the forces involved. A panel on the screen displays full details of all units on the Cursor square. The game follows the usual sequence at phases for each side, including a Support Phase in which you call up fighter or bomber strikes, and naval gunfire on any target.

We thought this game sounded just the ticket and were excited as we sat down to give the Jerries a good going-over. Probably we could have done, for suddenly, in the middle of our (true blue Brits) turn, we found that the computer had handed control of the German forces over to us! Being Brits we were obviously too gentlemanly to take advantage of such a situation. In short there was a bug in our version (and in the replacement copy sent us) which lets the game go its own way, jumping from one phase to another inexplicably. What with that and the excessively high speed at which the messages flash on and off the screen we just gave up trying to play.