There is an interesting article originally from Gamespot over at the Civilization fanatics site about Sid Meier's days at Microprose it mentions Pirates, RedStorm Rising & Silent Service amongst other classics.

I remember a task force mode built into 1942: Pacific Air War. Was that essentially Task Force 1942?

Since 1942: PAW is a flight sim, I don't think so...

They had a surface ship / task force campaign mode that you could play. You had the option of flying, if you wanted to, but it mainly focused on directing your fleet(s) and aircraft to intercept the other fleet(s). I remember playing the battle of Midway and sending out my PBY and B-17 search planes to locate the Japanese fleet. AI was pretty smart.

TF1942 concentrates only on the Solomon Islands campaign and you directly control your Task Groups and Ship Squadrons/Divisions in a battle (And you can order land-based air around in the campaign too), So it's pretty much the opposite, I guess

sweet! once you got the range, you'd demolish pretty much anything.

that was a great game with a surprising amount of depth in the campaign mode. ah, the memories...

Many of the elements, the control map and ship models were carried over from TF1942 to 1942 PAW and indeed it used an updated TF1942 engine.

As Raptor correctly points out 1942:PAW was primarily a flight sim and allowed you only to direct your fleet on the map and man the aircraft, unlike TF1942 where you could man the ship's bridge views , gunnery torps etc. If you never played TF do yourself a favour and seek it out & try it uder DOSBOX, for my money it's still the best surface sim to date. I hope Dan & the team at Ubi take a long hard look at this classic should they ever decide to give us a surface sim.

I'd be more than will'n to buy an updated PAW to go with my updated copy of TF1942. Both games were awsome back in the day. :up: :up:

I love Microprose games. You could always tell a Microprose game by content.

In fact, you could blind fold me, and put an MP game in one hand and just about anyone elses game in the other and I could tell you which hand held the MP game just by the weight of the package. They always were well thought out and they never skimped on content.

But my favorite MP game was Darklands.




A fantasy RPG that substituded magic with religion and potions.

One of my favorite gaming moments was when I was playing this and a group of tree-like forest creatures emerged from the wood and demanded the purest female in the party.

Mine were the gargoyles. On the open road they had my party for lunch.