A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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...

© 1985, 2022 MicroProse/Atari   The last time I played the Operation Market-Garden scenario in Crusade of Europe - before my Apple IIe's monitor died on me - I was either 31 or 32 and it was still the mid-1990s. I recently bought the reissued Crusade in Europe by Atari (they took a 1985 game and tweaked it a bit so it would work on modern PCs) for $6.99. I still remembered how to play - heck, I spent countless hours playing that game when I was in college - but until today I stuck to the Normandy scenarios. © 1985, 2022 MicroProse/Atari Tonight - since I really don't do anything exciting here - I decided to try Operation Market-Garden: "A Bridge Too Far." © 1985, 2022 MicroProse/Atari I thought the computer would beat me since in real life the Allies did not gain a victory in Market-Garden. When I played the game regularly, sometimes I won, but most of the time I lost. Well, tonight I can honestly say...I did what Montgomery could not do in 1944. © 1985, 2022 MicroPr...

© 1986, 2022 MicroProse/Atari  Back in the late 1980s, when I was in college, my father’s brother Sixto gave me my first computer, an Apple IIe with a color monitor and an ImageWriter printer. I had learned to use Apple computers at Miami-Dade Community College’s Apple Lab, so naturally, when I had an opportunity to get a computer of my own, I chose one that I was familiar with instead of what was then the less user-friendly IBM PC. I used my new computer primarily for college-related stuff; when I got it, I was already two-thirds of the way into the Spring Term at Miami-Dade and had a paper due for my Music Appreciation class. (As I recall, it wasn’t a term paper but a comparison of two recordings of a theme by John Williams from the score of The Empire Strikes Back. ) I received my Apple IIe only a few days before it was due, so it proved extremely useful to my academic endeavors right off the bat. Obviously, I also used my computer for gaming. Hell, I’m nearly 60 years old ...

#80sChristmasList The 1980s coincided with my high school and college years. They also coincided with the last decade of the Cold War, the advent of new technologies, and the emergence of Tom Clancy and the technothriller genre of popular fiction. The following is a sampling of various Christmastime lists from across the decade, although the default year is 1985, which was my freshman year at Miami-Dade Community College. I eventually ended up owning all of them; if I didn't receive them during the holidays, I'd get them later as birthday presents or, as in the case of my first personal computer, an out-of-the-blue gift from a relative. And, of course, once I got a few jobs, I'd buy things on my own. Personal computer (I was given one in 1987, an Apple IIe that cost approximately $2,100, or $4,774.56 in 2019) New-release VHS tapes of feature films (average cost in 1985: $79.99, or $190.85 in 2019) Novels by Stephen King Novels by Tom Clancy Music albums on...

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...