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Old Gamers Never Die: Learning (or Relearning) Strategy in 'Crusade in Europe'

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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

Old Gamers Never Die: Looking back at MicroProse's 'Crusade in Europe'

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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