A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The Strategy Map in Strategic Command: WWII: World at War. © 2018 Fury Software/Slitherine Ltd. Okay, so I've been trying out Strategic Command WWII: World at War, a relatively new (it was released by Britain's Slitherine Games last December) computer game based on the Second World War. I haven't devoted a lot of time to playing this strategic-level wargame because I do have to write every day, but so far I've played it enough to give you at least a few first impressions. As you can see from the screenshot above, this is not a first-person shooter game a la Call of Duty or Medal of Honor ; it's a global-warfare level game where land combat is fought by corps- or army-sized units, with maybe a few independent armored, mechanized, and supporting arms units tossed in for good measure. Only in naval warfare do we see one-on-one duels between individual warships and subs, albeit in a stylized "board game" kinda way. The game has different unit di...

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...