A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

( Warsaw Pact troops run into heavy fire from NATO defenders in the Runway scenario.© 2022 Bird's Eye Games & MicroProse  On December 25, 2022, East European game studio Bird's Eye Games rolled out the first DLC expansion to Regiments, the Cold War-gone-hot real-time strategy (RTS) game it created for MicroProse, four months after the core game's long-awaited release in August.  The DLC, which will be the only free expansion offered by its developers, added British units and equipment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in this reimagined version of a 1989 in which perestroika and glasnost failed and the Warsaw Pact, led by the Soviet Union, invades West Germany as part of an effort to prevent the collapse of Communism and restore the Pact to its pre-Gorbachev "glory."  In addition, the developers looked at the existing mix of forces and tweaked them somewhat to reflect the real equipment and organization of units fielded by both East and W...

© 2017 Game-Labs Hi, there! I know I haven't posted much here, but between writing posts for A Certain Point of View, Too , working on a screenplay, and gaming every so often, I find it difficult to carve time to post here regularly. If it weren't that I've had this blog for so many years already, I'd probably call it a day and just focus on my WordPress blog. But, since I have already invested a lot of time and work into A Certain Point of View , I will just submit posts here when I can.  © 2017 Game-Labs Speaking of gaming, I have been playing two Civil War-based computer games published by a Romanian company called Game-Labs. One is Ultimate General: Gettysburg  (2014) , and the other is its more ambitious sequel, Ultimate General: Civil War (2014) .  I am not a die-hard Civil War buff, but I know enough about the bloodiest war in American history to at least try out a few wargames set in that conflict. I currently own four such games; in addition to the Ultimate G...

A Soviet warship cruises into battle in Cold Waters. © 2017 Killerfish Games   Greetings, A Certain Point of View readers! Well, it's Friday evening here in my corner of Florida; as I write this, the temperature outside is 88℉ (31℃). With the sun coming down and the wind blowing gently from the north at 5 MPH and humidity at a sticky 67%, the feels-like temperature is 98℉ (37℃). It isn't as hot as it was five hours ago, but it's still not good walking weather, at least not for me. Today was not a productive day here. I went to bed late last night; it was well after midnight when I finished watching two episodes of The War: A Ken Burns Film, that much I know. I'm guessing it was at least 2 AM when I finally hit the sack. I slept well, I think, but because my Significant Other is lax about food shopping, we didn't have milk and we were out of orange juice. As a result, my breakfast - lunch, really - was two slices of pepperoni pizza that someone had taken from the fre...

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...

A few weeks ago - not sure of the exact date now but it wasn't more than a few weeks - I received a Facebook (FB) invite from my friend Leigh to play the FB version of The Sims. Now, unless you have been living under a rock for the past 15 years or so, you probably know that The Sims is a popular series of computer/console games published by Electronic Arts that allows you to create little human-like avatars and be responsible for their happiness, career, health and even (PG or PG-13) sex lives. (I have never owned or played the full version of this series, but I understand that in it, your Sims age, get sick and even pass on after a while.) Because I like interacting with Leigh on Facebook, and because I don't really want to spend $39.99 on the REAL game, I accepted the invite, thinking (logically) that I'd be able to choose my Sim's gender, personality, physical attributes and clothing. And since I'm a straight man in my late 40s, I figured my avatar woul...