I installed M.A.X. to study it. Unfortunately, Dosbox-titles never run as they should. The sound stutters sometimes and the performance varies depending on the amount of objects shown.

The interface is clunky. It's a title from 1996, but that does not explain some of the bad decisions, which were made. If you play with time-pressure, you need to give out a lot of commands. Then you have to cope not only with the Dosbox-lag, but with several other issues.

Hotkeys are mostly absent. The manual sometimes even states them wrong., e. g. 'e' stands for enter, not for 'end turn'. The 'enter'-key ends the turn. Most display-filters are missing, except 'g' for toggling the grid. Many more options could have been programmed into it, even if it's a DOS / Win 95-title. The technology wasn't limited in that regard.

The interface is often dualistic and ambiguously structured. Both symbols and numbers are shown for many statistics. Units can build structures without clicking the build button, while structures, which can queue, have that one. There's a question-mark-button and the right-click-option to access information about objects. Their functions are overlapping, but not the same. The interface is bristling with useless functions, although everything should be focused on max overview. Instead, it's often max gimmicks. What about the play-pause-thingy on objects? Just transfer it into the options. The survey-indicator is not triggered, when they surveyor is selected. Surveying numbers are hard to read. Hits, which denote hit-points, have a green bar, as well as ammo.

The pure left-click-interface is a problem. Many miss-clicks can happen and there's no reason, why every command should be given with only one mouse-key. It was probably done, because some people were using a gimped one-button-mouse. But that makes M.A.X. also gimped.

Not only the graphics are ugly, but the presentation is not able to supply the user with the amount of information, which is necessary to assess the situation. Once a few filters are applied, the pixels-mash get overwritten with other pixels. Names are cut, when you zoom out. Tiles on the map are designed in a mis-leading way. What sometimes looks like a ramp is in fact a solid barrier.

That's my first impression after finishing the 15 tutorial missions successfully.

When the performance issues are fixed, I might take a look at the concepts, because that is what's really interesting.

edit: The screenshot shows why it is not advised to play M.A.X. without additional health insurance contracts for eye and vision.

edit2: Only four of nine filters were switched on.

Hehe if you are playing with names of the units ON i m not suprised it looks ugly xD what a guy hehe
You don't have to swich all info on at the same time like hp,ammo,names. I always got on range and scan, rest when needed. Every game looks bad when you swich all filters on, simply too much information.

This. Plus, what "time pressure"? It is a turn based game. If you turn on turn time limit, then you are handicapping yourself more than you should. Pick a time limit that suits your game speed in this game. As simple as that.

If you turn on "simultaneous turns"...don't. In fact, there is no TBS I know that ST can work properly with. They should leave this stuff for the RTS games(with the horrible AI's and the "whomever clicks faster is the winner" kind of thinking).

EDIT: Realizing that each post in this thread is with a lot of time difference from eachother...ROTFL!

I'm just grateful that anyone still play M.A.X. after all these years since 1996!

I still play M.A.X. to this day, no matter where I am.

I still believe 'deep down in my gut' that M.A.X. is the gold standard in computer turn based strategy games ever crafted.

:)

Its THAT good.

I totally agree. It may not be perfect, or as able to predict the future and what would become the standard after everyone else jumped on its bandwagon (hello, total annihilation), but I was there when this game came out and, at the time, it's interface was a bit of a revelation. I still happen to think that, far from being the clunker the o.p. is making it out to be, it's one of the best ever made for a complex game of its kind considering the standards of the time that it was made in. At the time MAX was made, the game and its interface stood out (to me, anyway) as pretty far above the pale.

I mean, I agree that because the game is low-res and people wanted their games to look back then more meaty and thick than they prefer today, looking at MAX's interface today is like looking at steampunk and wondering how all that brass, wood, and pumping pistons could have ever been considered sleek and modern. But in the days of steam and iron, steam and iron were cool, while thin aluminum and whatever were thought cheap and tacky. Similarly, thin lines and smooth, anti-aliased fonts smelled to gamers in the early/mid 90s too much like Windows games, because those things mostly *were* found in Windows games (since Windows supported higher resolutions natively; DOS required the game dev to do all the work for hi-res stuff). And Windows games sucked at that time because Microsoft hadn't entered the gaming market yet. They were working on it, but as far as what the public could see, they were married to stuff like Minesweeper and other deep, complex strategy titles like that which they incorporated for free into Windows. The original Close Combat was, I believe, MS's first foray into serious gaming, and while it was a great first effort, I remember not trusting it enough to buy it at first simply because of the too-clean, too-crisp look of it. It just didn't look like all the other games out there and wasn't what I was used to...an irrational prejudice, to be sure, but one I'll bet I wasn't alone in having until Windows had proven itself capable as a games platform and gotten the green light from the hardcore gaming crowd.

So even if I concede every point of the o.p. (who actually sounded to me like someone grinding an axe, to be honest), I would still disagree about the overall impression made by the interface. At the time, it was a terrific interface for at least the turn-based version of the game--I never even tried Simultaneous Whatchamacallit, so his point may have more heft there, I don't know--and having fired up MAX tonight for the first time in probably a decade, my opinion hasn't changed. In fact, some of the stuff he seems to find fault with--the database-style filtering, in particular--was virtually unheard of in games back then...at least, it was never done anywhere that I can remember as completely and usefully as it was in MAX. So MAX gets street cred for it from me even if it wasn't perfect and didn't live up to what we expect today,

Ali Atabek kicked major ass with this game and deserves to be known and regarded with the same sort of reverence for it that Sid Meier, Peter Molineux, etc. are accorded for their gems. MAX was and is a gamer's game, of the type that is loved and admired not only by consumers, but by other working game developers. It can stand toe to toe with any other computer game out there to this very day,

Mainly "ditto" to danebramage's post, but I just want to also insert a plug for Simultaneous Turns. That was a remarkable middle-ground between strict turn-based and "real time", and I nearly always play ST. It's certainly not perfect, and there are both advantages and disadvantages to the human player in choosing ST, but it was rather revolutionary when M.A.X. came out, and gave it an interesting, unique flavour. It's part of the reason I still pull out this game a couple of times a year.