Old Gamers Never Die: Trying Out 'Second Front' - My Second Purchase on Steam of a 'New MicroProse' Game

-

© 2023 Hexdraw and MicroProse

 As someone who cut his gaming teeth in the late 1980s and early '90s, I used to own and play many (at least eight-10 titles) games from the original iteration of MicroProse Software, which was originally a Maryland-based company that created and published computer and video games, most (but not all) of them being military-themed simulations and strategy games. 

Founded by Lt. Col. William "Wild Bill" Stealey (USAF, Ret.) and legendary game designer Sid Meier, MicroProse was, for a while, anyway, one of the leading gaming software creators/publishers in the world. Its best-known titles include Sid Meier's Civilization, Silent Service and Silent Service II, Red Storm Rising, Crusade in Europe, and the F-15 Strike Eagle trilogy. 

Then, after co-founder Meier left the company and the company underwent a series of ownership changes, the original Hunt Valley, MD version of MicroProse closed shop in the early 2000s, and its various intellectual properties were divvied up between some of its corporate owners, including Interplay and Atari. 

Fortunately, "old MicroProse" had a huge following, and one of the company's biggest fans was an Australian investor and game publisher named David Lagettie. In 2017, Lagettie, in collaboration with original co-founder "Wild Bill" Stealey, ponied up big bucks to buy the company "brand" (complete with the original logo) and announced the resurrection of the company as both a publisher of games developed by indie studios and, in time, creator of its own, mostly military strategy games and simulations. 

From Regiments to Second Front

Presently, I own two "new MicroProse" titles: Regiments, which was released on the last week of August 2022, and Second Front, which was released on Steam on Tuesday, January 31. 



© 2022 Bird's Eye Games and MicroProse 

The "main title" card from Second Front. © 2023 Hexdraw Games and MicroProse

If you follow this blog regularly, you know that Regiments was the first "new MicroProse" game I added to my game library since the early 1990s. It's a Cold War-turned-hot real-time strategy game set in a version of 1989 when perestroika and glasnost failed and war broke out between the U.S.-led NATO alliance and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact. 

And because I had been waiting for two years for its release, I bought Second Front, which is a turn-based game (also at the tactical level) that is set during World War II and features land combat on both the Eastern Front (fighting between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) and the Western (or Second) Front in Northwest Europe and Italy (fighting between the Americans and the Germans).

I have not played Second Front much yet; I've attempted the infantry tutorial on how to Advance, but even though I get slightly better at it each time I try, I still get my ass kicked by the Germans. 

At least I've learned how to get some of my GIs under cover and get them to fire at enemy troops hiding in a stone house. © 2023 Hexdraw Games and MicroProse

I must be honest. I suck at basic infantry tactics, at least presently. I did better in my first training scenario with tanks, though! 

© 2023 Hexdraw Games and MicroProse


© 2023 Hexdraw Games and MicroProse

© 2023 Hexdraw Games and MicroProse

I must have been a tank commander in a previous life. Either that, or I've played M1 Tank Platoon and Regiments often enough that I understand a few of the basic principles of armored warfare. 

I'll keep you posted on my progress in Second Front in future posts! 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more