Maybe I am misremembering, but I don't think he was enthusiastic about Korea and I'm fairly certain he was dead against anything later.
If that is indeed his opinion (and I think it's a reasonably accurate recollection), he would not be alone, because it describes
my opinion perfectly.
I remember I had to point out something like "It's called 'Advanced Squad Leader' not 'World War 2 Advanced Squad Leader'" in a post.
Which is a pretty fatuous statement, Paul. It doesn't matter what the game is
called, what's important is what the game can (and cannot) simulate well (within the limits of ASL's ability to "simulate" anything, of course), as well as what the individual player's particular interests are.
I can tolerate Korea as an expansion to ASL (without any real enthusiasm for it) because I know that (mostly) that war was fought (on the ground, at least) using WW2 tactics and weapons systems. Pre-WW2 engagements were obviously not, and yet the existing game system can simulate the proto-WW2 tactics and systems tolerably well, at least back to the early '30s, say. Post-WW1 engagements earlier than that are probably less plausible (when depicted as ASL scenarios) -- you can put counters on a map and say that the counters represent this and that, and use ASL rules to move them around, and even have fun doing it -- but I'm not at all sure that you're coming very close to depicting how the real action actually played out.
Post Korea, take that problem and magnify it by a large factor. The core game rules don't well represent how the various military forces were trained and deployed, nor the support weapon systems available and how they were used. Again, you can put counters down and move them around, and it can work as a
game (maybe) but by that point you may as well call the game
Hillbillies vs. Aliens -- you've pretty much lost the (already somewhat tenuous) connection to history in the core game. It's not just a matter of writing a bunch of new rules, the entire philosophical underpinnings of the game system are all pointing in the wrong direction. If I wanted to play a game of tactical Vietnam (or Middle-East, or whatever) battles -- or, for that matter, an actual
HvA -- I'd want the game to be designed from the ground up to capture those eras, not an unwieldy bolt-on to something else quite different. It's perhaps not as monumentally stupid an idea as CH's "Advanced Civil War", but it would still be (IMO) pretty stupid. I wouldn't want a bar of it.