A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Hello and welcome to another edition of Old Gamers Never Die, the section of A Certain Point of View in which I talk about one of my long-time hobbies - computer games. In this installment, I'll review Order of Battle: World War II, a turn-based strategy game developed four years ago by Britain's The Artistocrats and Slitherine Ltd.,  and published by Matrix Games. Order of Battle: World War II is touted by its developer as the spiritual heir to Panzer General, a 1994 operational-level PC game published by the now-closed Strategic Simulations Inc. of Mountain View, California. Like Panzer General and its sequels, Order of Battle allows players to command either Allied or Axis units in either single battles or campaigns that take place in all the major theaters of the Second World War. Order of Battle consists of a basic free-to-play game called Boot Camp, which is a single campaign in which the player takes command of American land, sea, and air units during a series of t...

Screenshot of  Unity of Command II's  main title page. Graphics © 2019 2X2 Games and Croteam Hi, there! Welcome to another installment of Old Gamers Never Die, the section in this blog where I talk about computer and video games I either own and play now or owned and played on other platforms or computers. Today I'll be talking a little about the latest addition to my modest collection of games – Unity of Command II, a brand-new game from Croatia's 2X2 Games and Croteam. It was released on Steam on November 12, and it's the long-awaited sequel to 2X2's 2011 game  Unity of Command, a turn-based operational level (as opposed to tactical level) game set during World War II. I've never played Unity of Command, but from what I've learned from watching the  thehistoricalgamer's channel  on YouTube, that game is a simulation of the German-Soviet war on the Eastern Front and covers (in the core game, anyway) the campaigns that led up to the Battle o...

Main Menu screen from Strategic Command: WWII: World at War. © 2018 Fury Software/Slitherine Ltd.  Well, Dear Reader, it's Saturday, October 12, 2019; it's Columbus Day in Spain (which celebrates the occasion as "Dia de la Raza") and Latin America, while here it is a warm and humid early autumn Saturday. In my little corner of Florida, the current temperature is 82℉ under partly sunny skies; with the humidity levels at 66%, the feels-like temperature outside is 85℉. I was going to watch my new Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Blu-ray today, but the gaming bug bit me sometime before noon. I don't play video games on my PC often; I love writing more than I care for gaming, but as the old saw goes, "All work and no play makes Jack...er, Alex...a dull boy."  And after looking at my small selection of PC games, I decided to try my luck at Strategic Command: WWII: World at War.  The war begins! Actual gameplay screenshot from my first session of Strategic...

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...

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...