TSR seems to have produced a number of really innovative games that for the most part went underappreciated, unnoticed or simply disliked back in the 90's and this is, I think, one of them. Although it's understandable why there is no love for this game (the Williams Taint again) and it came off to most gamers of the day, myself included, as pretty bizarre considering the failure of the previous Buck Rogers game.
I'm not going to do an in-depth analysis of the game here, just kinda give it the once over. This is a very lite system. The Rules Book comes in at only 32 pages which is even shorter than the original Marvel Super Heroes game, if you count both the player's and referee's books, which makes this very atypical for a TSR game. Although, outside of AD&D, I don't think TSR ever really went overboard on rules, but the BRAG rules are sparse by any standard.
The world of the game comes directly from the earliest days Buck Rogers in the 25th Century newspaper comic and to their credit does so rather unapologetically. This world is an amusing mix of rocketships, Tom Mix cowboys, Chinamen, Navajo Indians, biplanes and disintegration rays, not to mention a kilt-wearing Canadian Scot. At this point in the comic, no mention is made of Mars or the other planets and just deals with the efforts of the "wild Americans" to fend off the advances of the Han. If you can put yourself in the right mindset, the setting can provide for more than a few entertaining sessions (although the sparse rules may eventually prove to be a problem, but I have yet to put them to the test)
In any case, this game seems to be, as many others have noted elsewhere, a tight little pulp adventure game, with rules that can be easily adapted to other pulp genres of the action/adventure vein. The intro to the Rules Book seems to imply that BRAG was to be the first in the High Adventure series.
It's worth noting that Jeff Grubb wrote both BRAG and MSH- he must have been the go-to guy for rules lite rpgs.
I'm starting to wonder if TSRs marketing department wasn't to blame for the failure of some of their games. High Adventure™ shares many similarities, philosophically speaking, with Savage Worlds, but SW, marketed to gamers who love to party, was a monster success while BRAG was, to say the least, not. I know that the original MSH was marketed to the kiddies, which is not a bad idea in and of itself, but it was quickly supplanted by Advanced MSH, which was not. At least I don't think it was.
I have to wonder if the anti-Williams contingent within TSR (the same contingent that quietly removed any references to Buck Rogers from the XXVc game) didn't construct this game in such a way that it would continue after the moribund Buck Rogers property (and maybe Lorraine Williams) had faded away.
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