A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

As an occasional computer gamer, I often find it difficult to find a World War II strategy game along the lines of the late and much lamented Microprose Software's 1986 game Crusade in Europe.  Created by the now-legendary game designer Sid Meier with Ed Bever, Crusade in Europe was a map-and-icons simulation of the Allied campaigns to liberate Northwest Europe; as the product's promotional blurb put it, it put players in command of either the Allied or German forces  "from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge!" Cover of the user's manual for Crusade in Europe. (C) 1986 MicroProse Software I've already written several posts, including a reminiscence , about Crusade in Europe so I will try to not repeat myself much here. I will, however, try to make a case for asking Firaxis Games (where Sid Meier holds court now) or any other game developer to follow up that classic with a modern-day sequel. Now, there are plenty of computer strategy games with Wor...

Actual screen shot from my first session of Crusade in Europe since 1994. Back in the late 1980s, before I acquired my first MS-DOS-based PC, I owned an Apple IIe that I received from my father's brother, Sixto Diaz-Granados, as a gift. I was in college and majoring in journalism then, so I mostly used my Apple for school-related projects such as ENC-2301 essays, articles for the student newspaper, and term papers for the courses that required them.  But even though academic work was my primary focus, I'd be lying if I said I didn't play computer games on my Apple computer. Being young and with not much of a social life, I was, at least for a while, a bit of a gamer while I was in college and even for a few years after that. In my previous post on the topic of gaming and MicroProse's Crusade in Europe , I wrote about how much I enjoyed military-themed strategy games and simulations when I had my Apple IIe. Sure, I also attempted to play games from other g...

The manual cover art for the Commodore 64 version of Crusade in Europe. The Apple II version had identical artwork. (C) 1985 Microprose Software.  I'm not much of a computer gamer these days, but when I got my first personal computer (an Apple IIe computer with a color monitor) back in 1987, I spent countless hours at my desk playing various games. Some, like Epyx Games' Summer Games and Street Soccer, were sports-themed video games. Others were simulations of military vehicles, planes, Navy warships, and even submarines; some of my favorites in this category included Silent Service, Silent Service II, Strike Fleet, the F-15 Strike Eagle series, M-1 Tank Platoon, and Red Storm Rising. I also spent a lot of time as a keyboard general, immersing myself in purely strategic map-and-military symbol simulations along the lines of Avalon Hill's Gulf Strike, a "top-down" computer version of the eponymous board wargame about a U.S.-Soviet confrontat...