A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

A Chinese destroyer is hit by a torpedo in this "low-light" periscope view in Cold Waters . (All of the illustrations are actual screengrabs from sessions of Cold Waters, and all game design elements are © 2017 Killerfish Games As you know, one of my favorite computer games of recent vintage is Killerfish Games’ Cold Waters (2017), a submarine warfare simulator that was inspired by MicroProse Software’s classic “subsim” Red Storm Rising (1988). I bought Cold Waters nearly two years ago during Steam’s Fourth of July Sale for 2020. I had added the game to my “wish list” on Steam (just as I have MicroProse’s Regiments and Second Front on my wish list now) in 2017 because I thought paying $49.99 or more when the game was new and buggy was a bit too much for my taste. Eventually, though, Steam offered it at a price that I could afford, and by 2020 all the “bugs” and kinks in the game had been fixed. For the better part of my time playing Cold Waters, I avoided playing the Campaig...

HIJMS Shokaku burns in Silent Service II's An Embarrassment of Riches scenario. © 1990, 2015 MicroProse/Retroism (Tommo)  Hi, there, Dear Reader. As you know, my favorite video games or computer simulations deal with some aspects of military conflict. Whether it’s a flight simulator along the lines of F-15 Strike Eagle II or a land warfare sim like M1 Tank Platoon or a grand-strategy game along the lines of Strategic Command WWII: World at War, if it is action-packed, historically interesting, yet not so complex that you must earn a degree in Military Science to play it, the wargame genre is my favorite. Within that category, there is a sub -category of wargame that I am fascinated by, and that’s the submarine simulation game. "Logbook" of USS Cavalla, © 1990, 2015 MicroProse/Retroism (Tommo) Since 1987, I have owned quite a few submarine-centric games. The first one I owned was Silent Service , which was published in 1985 by the original MicroProse Software. Desig...

A view from the periscope from my not-so-new game "Cold Waters."  © 2017 Killerfish Games  As you might recall, I have a Steam account that I opened when I bought Sid Meier's Civilization V in the Spring of 2015. I still lived in Miami then, and though she only had a few short months to live, my mom was still alive. And because I was so damn busy, tired, and stressed out by my dual role as homeowner-to-be and my dying mother's primary caregiver, I just thought Steam was for that game and didn't bother to learn that it was a company that not only helped Civ V work well online, but it was a source for downloadable games from various developers and publishers.  I started buying downloads of games from Steam directly about a year-and-a-half after I moved to Lithia, Florida, in 2016. I did so because streaming/downloading games in the 21st Century is as routine as buying "in-the-box" games that you installed with floppies (the late 1980s to early '90s) or...