A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

The "main title" page from Second Front . © 2023 Hexdraw and MicroProse  Hi, there, Dear Reader. Well, this is just a quick update about my progress with Second Front, a new turn-based tactical level game set during the Second World War created by Hexdraw and published on January 31 by MicroProse. Dislodging this German squad proved impossible the first time I played the Advance tutorial. © 2023 Hexdraw and MicroProse I’ve only played Second Front for - according to my statistics on Steam – 6.4 hours since I bought it last week when it dropped. Most of that time has been spent on exploring the various tutorials for Infantry units and Armored units; I tried one “real” battle to see if I could get by without “basic training,” but I found out – the hard way – that I’m not ready to lead anyone into combat. I had a tough time with the first Infantry tutorial, but I eventually figured out how to advance properly without getting my squad killed on the first turn. I also learned

© 2022 Bird's Eye Games & MicroProse    Two Lessons I Have Learned from Playing ‘Regiments’   Oh, look! A current blog post from me! As you know, I purchased my first game from the “new” (Australian-based) version of MicroProse since the 1990s over a month ago. The game in question is called Regiments, and it was developed by a small European studio called Bird’s Eye Games. Regiments is, like Eugen Systems’ Steel Division and Wargame series, a real-time tactics game that depicts 20 th Century warfare – especially land combat – in fast-paced, adrenaline-laced battles ( Steel Division is set in World War II, while Wargames is Cold War-turns-hot and superpower conflict-oriented) on the ground and in the air. It's so good to see this classic logo on brand-new games.  I play all those games, and even though Regiments is its own thing, some of its features do resemble those in Wargame, especially when it comes to Objective Zones and how units are made available if you ha

Title screen from M1 Tank Platoon. © 1989, 2020 MicroProse/Interplay Entertainment  If you read my last post in A Certain Point of View, you know that this weekend I purchased M1 Tank Platoon, an armored warfare sim developed and published in 1989 by the original MicroProse Software and reissued by Interplay Entertainment two years ago.   This was one of my favorite games when I started playing computer games programmed for MS-DOS/Windows. Since I didn’t purchase it until 1990 – I had to “share” my copy of M1 Tank Platoon with a friend that owned an “IBM clone” – the common term for MS-DOS-based machines at the time – I can’t claim I acquired it when MicroProse first released it, but I did own/play M1 Tank Platoon during the runup to Operation Desert Storm in 1990 and for years later – in my own PC then – after the collapse of the Soviet Union. M1 Tank Platoon isn't just an M1 Abrams tank simulation; it's also a primer in armored land combat in the 1980s. © 1989, 2020 MicroPr

A screenshot from my Steam account's Screenshots  page.    Hi, there, Dear Reader. If you are a regular reader of this blog or its WordPress counterpart, A Certain Point of View, Too, you know that I lived through the last 28 years of the Cold War and the (mostly) peaceful collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I won’t exaggerate and claim that I went to bed wondering if the next day I’d wake up to the news that the United States was at war with the Soviets. The late Cold War period definitely had its dark, scary moments, such as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979 and the Korean Air Lines Flight 007 shootdown of September 1983, but my Cold War experience paled in comparison to folks who were kids in the late 1940s and early 1950s and lived through the creation of the Iron Curtain, the establishment of NATO, the Korean War, the various crises centered on Berlin, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Senator Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare, and the Cu