A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

  Waging Virtual Combat in the War that Could Have Been   © 2017 Killerfish Games If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that I came of age during the last stages of the Cold War between the United States (land of my birth) and the Soviet Union. That “war in peacetime” between the world’s superpowers dominated at least half my life. My mom was pregnant with me during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and I grew up under the shadow of a possible showdown between the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact. In order to cope with “Cold War-gone-hot” anxiety, I tried to reduce my fear of a war with the Soviet Union by learning as much about Soviet military technology and strategic/tactical thought. I also did the same for U.S./NATO military hardware, strategy, and tactical doctrine. I spent countless hours at the public library branch closest to my house, poring over the most recent edition of Jane’s Fightin...

A screenshot from my Steam account's Screenshots  page.    Hi, there, Dear Reader. If you are a regular reader of this blog or its WordPress counterpart, A Certain Point of View, Too, you know that I lived through the last 28 years of the Cold War and the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I won’t exaggerate and claim that I went to bed wondering if the next day I’d wake up to the news that the United States was at war with the Soviets. The late Cold War period definitely had its dark, scary moments, such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979 and the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 shootdown of September 1983, but my Cold War experience paled in comparison to folks who were kids in the late 1940s and early 1950s and lived through the creation of the Iron Curtain, the establishment of NATO, the Korean War, the various crises centered on Berlin, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, ...

The Battle of the Fulda Gap, August 1, 1985. Actual gameplay screenshot from a session I played of Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm. Images © 2014 Slitherine Ltd./Matrix Games and On Target Simulations Hello again, Dear Reader! Welcome to yet another edition of Bloggin' On, the no-reviews, no-politics section of A Certain Point of View. It's Friday, February 28, 2020, and it's a chilly day here in my corner of Florida. Currently, the temperature in my neighborhood is 58℉ (15℃) a few minutes after noon; it was colder earlier, of course, and I don't think that we'll see anything warmer than 60℉ (16℃). The low tonight is expected to be 46℉ (8℃), which reminds me of how cold my apartment in Sevilla (Seville), Spain, could get in late November or early December 1988. I usually like to start writing early in the morning; it doesn't matter if I'm working on a new script, a short story, a review, or a blog post, but I'm tap-tap-tapping on my keyboard no ...

Title screenshot of Flashpoint Campaign: Red Storm - Player's Edition. © 2014 Slitherine Ltd/Matrix Games and On Target Simulations On November 21, 2014, the UK-based computer game publisher Matrix Games released Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm - Player's Edition, a revamped version of the original turn-based strategy game set in an alternate history of the 1980s in which the Cold War turned hot and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact clashes with the U.S.-led NATO forces in West Germany. Created by On Target Simulations for the merged Slitherine Ltd/Matrix Games studio and inspired by several fictional works about a hypothetical Third World War fought in the mid- to late 1980s, including Sir John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 and Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm - Player's Edition puts you in command of either the Allied or Soviet armies in several campaigns and more than 20 stand-alone scenarios, including many player-...