Category: Computer and Video Games
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Old Gamers Never Die: Rainy Saturday & Stalking Japanese Carriers in ‘Silent Service II’
Hi there, Dear Reader. It’s early afternoon in Lithia, Florida, on Saturday, June 11, 2022. It is a dark, stormy, and gloomy early summer day in the Tampa Bay area. As I write this, the temperature is 81°F (27°C) under alternating bouts of rain and cloudiness. With humidity at 79% and the wind blowing from…
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Old Gamers Never Die: My Ten Favorite MicroProse Games of All Time
Back in the late 1980s, my late father’s brother Sixto gave me my first personal computer, an Apple IIe with a color monitor, a joystick, and an ImageWriter II dot-matrix printer. It was to be used for college-related work – I had been staying on campus till 6:30 PM every weekday so I could use…
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Musings & Thoughts for Thursday, June 9, 2022, or: Rainy Thursday, & How I Spent My ‘Hump Day’
Hi there, Dear Reader. It is early afternoon in Lithia, Florida, on Thursday, June 9, 2022. It is a hot, humid, and sometime rainy day in the Tampa Bay area. Presently, the temperature is 80°F (27°C) under rainy conditions. With humidity at 80% and the wind blowing from the west at 6 MPH (10 KM/H),…
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Old Gamers Never Die: Running Silent, Running Deep on a June Afternoon
Well, I still have not watched either The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan, even though I have the family room TV to myself since The Caregiver is spending all day at the Tampa Bay area hospital where her current beau is waiting for a donated liver for a transplant. I thought about it a…
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Old Gamers Never Die: ‘M1 Tank Platoon’ Campaign – Mission Accomplished
As you know, a few weeks ago I discovered that Atari – which owns many of the original MicroProse Software company’s intellectual properties – and Interplay Entertainment had released many of the games I owned in the 1980s and 1990s on Steam and GOG.com. They were, of course, tweaked so they would run on Windows…
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Book Review: ‘SSN’ (originally published as ‘SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare’)
The Inspiration: Tom Clancy’s SSN On November 16, 1996, Simon & Schuster Interactive released Tom Clancy’s SSN, a computer video game/submarine simulator based on the Improved Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack sub USS Cheyenne (SSN-773). Co-produced by Clancy Interactive Entertainment and Virtus Corporation, SSN was a single-player third-person perspective game set in what was then the…
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Old Gamers Never Die: ‘M1 Tank Platoon’ Classic Game Review
M1 Tank Platoon Developer: MPS Labs Publisher: MicroProse Software Released: October 1989 Genre: Real-time Tactical/Tank Simulator Setting: Late Cold War (1989-1991); Hypothetical World War III invasion of West Germany No. of Players: 1 (Human vs. AI) Reissued by: Interplay Entertainment Available on: Steam and Epic “Stand To!” An Overview of M1 Tank Platoon US Tank…
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Old Gamers Never Die: An Overview of ‘M1 Tank Platoon’
Cold War Kids’ Games: A Little Background I was born in the early 1960s. Thus, I was a “Cold War kid” and lived through almost 30 years of tensions between the United States – my home country – and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), aka the Soviets, aka Russia. My formative years coincided…
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Old Gamers Never Die: or, Look What I Found on Steam Today…. ‘M1 Tank Platoon’!
One of my favorite computer games from the late 1980s to early 1990s was M1 Tank Platoon, a Cold War-turns-hot simulation of armored land combat in late 1980s West Germany. Developed and published in October of 1989 by MicroProse Software, M1 Tank Platoon placed the player in the role of – what else? – a…
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Old Gamers Never Die: A Player’s Guide to ‘Crusade in Europe’ (Part Four of a Series)
Hello and welcome once again to another installment of Old Gamers Never Die: A Player’s Guide to ‘Crusade in Europe.’ “You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” – General Dwight D. Eisenhower If you’re new to A Certain Point…
A Certain Point of View, Too 