Be Excellent To Each Other

Such realism in such an old game. Impressive.

I like games where you can kill everyone. Even if it's shit, this ability is improves any game.

I think I may have the biggest bodycount, as me and a mate repeatedly pushed the entire world into nuclear war in old Amiga world-strategy game Defcon. And then when the game displayed a sombre message along the lines of "everyone died in the war and we're not going to reward you with a cool picture" we stuck a crudely drawn mushroom cloud onto the screen and giggled like idiots.

Also, Populous. I would regularly hunt down and exterminate every last worshipper of my opponent gods, instead of playing for conversions, and would often e.g. trap them on islands then rise the water level so they drowned.

You are me playing Dicewars, and I claim our £5.

I know that game you're talking about as 'Balance of Power'.


BANG.

That'll be because I got the name wrong then. This also explains why my googling for that screen failed. Thanks for that.

You are me playing Civ IV AICMFP.

I really used to chortle when I wrapped up spear-wielding cavemen with laser guided missiles, regardless of the game. Mostly Civ1/2 and the superb Amiga game Mega-lo-mania though. WE'RE RUNNING OUT OF ELEMENTS.

I love those old political sims. There should be more in that niche.

Shadow President was fun, if a little sketchy. I almost got away with nuking Ireland once.

Global Warming in Civ4 pisses me off (and I've read much debate about what causes it, there are some people who reckon using nukes will do it, but other people say it makes no difference), and it ultimately means all of your cities will fail and starve, which then makes it pretty crap. Plus the 'global warming' noise is really annoying, and hearing it every turn starts to piss me off. moanmoanmoan.

Stardock, makers of ace recent 4X game Galactic Civilisation II and space RTS Sins of a Solar Empire did The Political Machine a little while back which I have read is very good.

This one is my fave, on the Amiga. And, helpfully, finally gives me an on-topic answer

MLM was great, though it was bastard hard! I could (and cannot to this day, fact-fans) gt past the 3rd or so mission. I just don't see how it's possible to evenly spread your forces out over all those islands, and so on



I never had a problem with it, though I played with both the expansions. Are you doing thusly?

Floor 13 was excellent. When it worked. There was one mission that when it came to a certain point would always break the game.

I have vanilla + warlords.

CG, you need to GET BEYOND THE SWORD.

I know that I, for one, am already looking forward with great and genuine excitement for the time when Retrogamer do their feature on it. Why, I can imagine it now...

"CIVLIZATION IIV: BEYOND THE SWORDS - the best expension ever?"

(There are no embellishments in this - Silent Hunter 3 is so fucking awesome after installing the Grey Wolves mod, and the dynamic campaign is so inherently brilliant, and the detail so rich you even have a gramaphone with over 100 wartime classics and a BBC 1939 news station to tune into - that I don't have to embellish...)

September 18th, English Channel mouth just above Ostend. Sky is filled with cloud and lashing rain, the waves pile up on each other. I'm listening to Das Ist Musik!, the latest top Nazi pop song when...

ALARM!

I race to the bridge and scan the heading posted by the lookout. Through the binoculars of the UZO I see a destroyer. Thanks to the wave height she hasn't seen me yet. Normally I'd slink away but fuck it, I've only sunk a merchant vessel so far this war. I plot a course parrallel to her, moving at nine knots to her eight. At the end of the line I hook in to place myself within a thousand yards from her. As I near the two thousand distance mark, I dive to periscope depth.

I'm in place, flick open the recognition manual. Draft is 5.9 metres. Due to heavy seas I forego the magnetic torpedoes and switch to impact. Set depth at 3.5 metres to be sure that lifting swell doesn't make my torps run under. I have my weapons officer work out the trigonometry, due to me being crap at it. I make sure that I'll be as close to 90 degrees to the target as possible, and have a nice flat horizontal target to hit to make sure the torpedo doesn't bounce off. Flood tubes one through four.

I could do it two, but I'm paranoid about missing, because he'll see the wake and come after me. So I set one slightly ahead, one under each of the two turrets fore and aft and one in the extreme stern. Closer, she comes closer. I lower the periscope and rely on hydrophone to alert me when ready. Less chance of detection that way.

The sound of propellor screws flicks round to ten degrees. I raise periscope.

Thanks to a slight course deviation she comes within 800 yards. Steady... steady...

LOS!

The four torpedoes launch after one another. I start the stopwatches. At one minute twenty the first one misses, passing in front of her prow at a mere dozen yards. The destroyer abruptly slows and is clearly going to home in, but it has realised its danger too late... too late...

A torpedo hits her stern. A vast plume of water shoots up and the destroyer lifts visibly out of the waves a moment, before crashing arse first back into the water. She still has momentum. Seconds later, a second torpedo slams under her funnell, causing the boilers to explode and a fireball to tear through the centre of the ship. A mere two seconds after that the last torpedo hits under the forward gun turret. The magazine explodes and the back of the ship breaks, and she slides into the deep within seconds.

I tell myself I had been insuring against a miss. That I was reckoning on one - maybe two hits maximum and a slow demise, giving at least some of the crew time to get to the lifeboats. But in these heavy seas even one properly placed torpedo can be immediately fatal. She slips beneath the waves and I go to the hydrophone to listen to her last moment. No longer the sound of screws, but the rending tear and howl of metal as bulkheads give way, and the sound of a ship's shattered hull reverberating as it hits the sea bed at thirty five metres depth.

I surface to briefly scan for lifeboats, but there are none. I make a new bearing to off the coast of Norfolk, order my torpedo room to make good the expenditure with a new load and send out a radio message of contact, sinking, and a patrol status report.

Das Ist Musik finished long ago. I'm on the song 'Tipperary' now.

I feel sick. I love this game. Now to find a Lusitania, an Athenia.

...

Four days later I find a cargo liner in calmer seas...



Muah ha ha ha!

Of course CUS! Why don't I play SH3 from my bed. I can balance the monitor and keyboard at the head of my bed and pull up the quilt over the top and it'll feel like I'm really in a tiny submarine! Atmospheric! Eye hurty! Fantastic!

*rubs oil off hands*
Nope, it's no good, it's broken. You'll have to get a new one.