A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

  © 2024 Triassic Games/MicroProse As someone who came of age during the latter half of the Cold War, I’ve always been captivated by the scenarios in which tensions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact could have escalated into full-scale war. It’s not that I wished for a Third World War to erupt in the late 1970s and early 1980s during my brief flirtation with conservatism. True, I disliked the Soviet Union then as much as I dislike Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation now. However, I desperately wanted sanity and diplomacy to prevail during those tense times. At the same time, I hoped that if a war between East and West did break out, our military forces—especially the U.S. and Royal Navies—would triumph in a Third Battle of the Atlantic. © 1988 MicroProse & Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.  It should therefore come as no surprise that many of the books, movies, and computer games I enjoy, even in my more liberal incarnation, center on actual Cold War incidents such as the Cuban M...

  © 2017 Killerfish Games If you are a regular – or semiregular – reader of A Certain Point of View, you probably know that in July I purchased Killerfish Games’ 2017 submarine game Cold Waters from Steam. I had been wanting to get it for some time, but I waited till it was on sale; I didn’t want to shell out nearly $40 for a computer game, even if said game billed itself as the a spiritual heir to MicroProse’s 1988 classic, Red Storm Rising. Like Red Storm Rising, Cold Waters has Training, Single Mission,  and Campaign modes; unlike Sid Meier’s game, which is based on the late Tom Clancy’s 1986 best-selling novel, it gives players the option to play as an American, Soviet, or Chinese submarine commander in Cold War-turned-hot campaigns set in three distinct eras (1968, 1984, and 2000) in alternative histories which take a turning point in world affairs – say, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of ’68 – and tweak it so that the two blocs that waged the Cold...

Single Mission menu from Cold Waters, with Junks on Parade selected. © 2017 Killerfish Games   Death in the Taiwan Straits If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I've been playing a cool submarine simulation by Killerfish Games, Cold Waters. Released three years ago by the Australia-based game designer behind Atlantic Fleet, Cold Waters is the spiritual successor to one of my all-time favorite games, Red Storm Rising,  Like that 1988 MicroProse classic based on Tom Clancy's eponymous 1986 novel — which I've written about in both my blogs — Cold Waters puts the player in command of a nuclear-powered attack sub in a hypothetical conflict set in the latter part of the 20th Century. Unlike Red Storm Rising, which posited a Third World War in what would have been the "near future" in 1986, Cold Waters examines three different "alternative histories" set in three different time periods: 1968: In this alternate version of the tumultuous year...

© 2017 Killerfish Games Do you like military-themed simulations or games based on hypothetical wars? Do you like submarine games? Are you a fan of Tom Clancy’s 1986 novel Red Storm Rising or its computer game spin-off from 1988? Then have I got a computer game recommendation for you! In the early 1990s, back when the original version of MicroProse was the go-to source for user-friendly military simulations and strategy games, I played a game called Red Storm Rising.  Based on the eponymous 1986 novel by the late Tom Clancy, Red Storm Rising was a nuclear sub simulation set in a fictional Third World War between the still-in-existence Soviet Union and the U.S. led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In it, you played the role of a U.S. Navy officer in command of a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine assigned to seek and destroy surface and submarine units of the Red Banner Northern Fleet to thwart the Soviets’ offensives on land and sea, as well a...

A Mk. 48 ADCAP torpedo is about to make a Soviet Kresta II cruiser's day very, very bad in this screenshot from a session of Red Storm Rising.  (C) 1988 MicroProse and Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd. I've owned quite a few personal computers since the mid-1980s. My first one, an Apple II, was a gift from my late father's older brother Sixto; I remember it fondly because, you know, it was my first real computer. It was the most expensive of all the PCs; with its Imagewriter II printer and color monitor, it cost my uncle $2100 plus whatever the sales tax was in 1987. It was not my first choice; the computer that I'd really wanted to get was a Macintosh, but when my uncle asked the sales rep at Computer Village how much that one cost, the reply was a cool $3200. My uncle said that was a bit too pricey, so I ended up with an Apple II, which was my second choice. (I already used them in my college campus' Apple Lab, so I was familiar with them and liked them well enough....