A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The wreckage of a Soviet tank platoon burns on a West German battlefield after an airstrike carried out by two A-10A Thunderbolt II ground-attack jets. © 2022 Bird's Eye Games/MicroProse  On Tuesday, August 16, the revived software publishing company MicroProse released Regiments , a new real-time tactics wargame set in a version of 1989 when perestroika, glasnost,  and the collapse of the Soviet Union never happened, and the Warsaw Pact invades West Germany. Developed by indie game studio Bird's Eye Games, Regiments is a look at combined-arms warfare at the brigade/regimental level that allows players to command units from either the Russian-led Warsaw Pact (WP) forces or the Western alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a searing, life-or-death struggle to determine which side will win this Cold War-Turns-Hot after internal pressures within East Germany push Communist hardliners in Moscow to use force to preserve the Communist regime in East Berlin - and settl...

© 1989, 2020 MicroProse/Interplay Entertainment  As you know, this old grognard cut his wargaming teeth back in the 1980s. First, of course, with strategy games such as Avalon Hill's 1984 Gulf Strike, SSI's Conflict 1985, and MicroProse Software's Command Series trilogy ( Crusade in Europe, Decision in the Desert, and Conflict in Vietnam ). Later, when I made the transition from my first computer (an Apple IIe that I received in 1987 from my dad's brother Sixto), I started playing simulations of modern aircraft ( F-15 Strike Eagle III, Red Storm Rising, and F-117A Nighthawk: Stealth Fighter 2.0. ) One game that I played a lot between 1992 and 1995 was MicroProse's M1 Tank Platoon, a simulation of armored land warfare in the late Cold War period set in a World War III scenario pitting a U.S. Army tank platoon against Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invading West Germany.  Designed by Arnold Hendrick and programmed by a MicroProse team led by Scott Spanburg and Darrell ...