A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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.

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

In The Beginning.... : It's hard to believe, but it's been a bit over 16 years since I was invited to my computer-savvy friend Raci's house and "sneakily" introduced to one of the most popular strategy game franchises ever published.  At the time (1991), I owned an Apple IIe personal computer. I used it mainly for word processing; I was then beginning my career as a self-employed copywriter and communications consultant, but I also liked to unwind with military-themed strategy games (Avalon Hill's  Gulf Strike  and MicroProse's  Crusade in Europe ), flight simulators (MicroProse's  F-15 Strike Eagle ), a few sports games (Epyx's  Street Soccer ), and some naval-related sims (MicroProse's  Silent Service ).  Raci, however, was into PCs in a big way at a time when the operating system was MS-DOS, so he owned more advanced games than I did. He was, and still is, a very generous person, so we had an understanding that if I saw a PC game that I re