A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

My latest Achievements to Date report.  All game elements in this and other screenshots are © 2017 Killerfish Games.  After I completed the South China Sea 2000 campaign late last month, I told myself that as fun and rewarding it was to finally complete a “tour of duty” in Cold Waters, it might be a good idea if I waited a few months to tackle one of the other two campaigns in the game – North Atlantic 1984 and North Atlantic 1968. The Strategic Transit Map. It's a much-refined version of the one in 1988's Red Storm Rising . I had several good reasons, including the need to focus on a new screenplay for Popcorn Sky Productions, the fact that I spend way too much time at my desk 24/7, and the realization that I’m not in my late 20s and early 30s (which is how old I was when I played MicroProse Software’s Red Storm Rising, the game that inspired the designers of Cold Waters ). And, more relevantly, I was bothered by my performance as a submarine skipper in the South China Sea 2

  Screenshot of the New Campaign page on Cold Waters .  © 2017 Killerfish Games As you know, last summer I purchased a copy of Killerfish Games’ Cold Waters, a submarine combat simulator based on the premise “What would naval warfare have been like, from a submariner’s perspective, if the Cold War had gone hot?” Cold Waters was released in 2017 as a spiritual successor to the original MicroProse Software game Red Storm Rising (1988), which was designed by Sid Meier and is based on the submarine-related parts of Tom Clancy’s eponymous 1986 novel. Indeed, Cold Waters has many features that RSR veterans will recognize, such as the game’s mix of missions ( Training, Single Battles, and Campaigns ), as well as the basic setting that puts the player in command of a nuclear fast attack submarine in a hypothetical Third World War. In the eight months since I bought Cold Waters on Steam, I have slowly worked my way up the mission tree from Training to Single Battles to the full Campaign. It

Final Outcome screen in Cold Waters' South China Sea 2000 Campaign game. (All game design elements in this and other screenshots are © 2017 Killerfish Games.) The South China Sea conflict between the United States and the People's Republic of China has ended in a victory for America and its NATO allies and a humiliating defeat, and I can now say that I successfully completed my first Campaign in Killerfish Games' 2017 submarine game Cold Waters.    © 2017 Killerfish Games After 114 days of the war, the loss of five submarines — out of six total — under my command, and quite a few frustrating war patrols, my career as a seagoing combat officer in the late 20th Century U.S. Navy has come to a conclusion. The boats I commanded, along with their crews, did their part in destroying much of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) between October 2000 and February 2001 and ended (momentarily, at least) Beijing's aggressive foreign policy in East Asia and the Weste

A Chinese warship's topmast and some smoke from her funnel can be seen above the horizon in this periscope-view screenshot. (All of the graphics elements in these screengrabs are © 2017 Killerfish Games.)  Hello again and welcome to another installment of Old Gamers Never Die, the section of this blog where I talk about computer games and gaming in general. Today we return to my series of updates about my playthrough of Cold Waters' South China Sea Campaign, which depicts a hypothetical war between the People's Republic of China - which is allied with Vietnam and a Soviet Union that never vanished - and the United States in an alternate version of the year 2000. A Mark-48 ADCAP torpedo hits home, as seen from USS Jefferson City's periscope.  An aerial view of that same ship. Note the shock wave (in the water) and the fireball as the enemy vessel's magazines explode as a result of that torpedo hit.  It is now late December 2000, and USS Jefferson City has returned to

A Chinese frigate sinks in the East China Sea after a hit from a Mark-48 ADCAP torpedo. All game design elements in these screenshots are © 2017 Killerfish Games  Hello, again, Dear Reader.  As you can tell, I am still playing the U.S. vs. China South China Sea 2000 campaign in Cold Waters, a submarine simulation from Killerfish Games that its designers tout as the spiritual heir to MicroProse's 1988 classic Red Storm Rising. As in that sub sim — which was designed by Sid Meier and is based on Tom Clancy's 1986 novel about a conventional war between the Soviet Union and NATO — Cold Waters depicts undersea warfare in an alternate timeline with three different iterations of the Cold War turning hot at three distinct periods; 1968, 1984, and 2000. A beautiful shot of USS Jefferson City, my third command in this deadly war between the U.S. and China.  Since this is my first serious attempt at playing a Campaign game, I think I am holding my own even though I am not winning outright