15 years on, I would sell assorted body parts for a whole bunch of features from AOD to be in Silent Hunter...

This game still rocks 16 years later. LIVE ON !

Well, there is that. I like the modern way of watching the harbor stuff in the newer games. But AOD still gets my attention from time to time.

Gosh, who cares about purdy graphics. It's all so relative anyways. In just a couple years time, a kid will post how SH5 looks so dated, then a few years after that SH6 will look old, etc.. etc.. ad infinitum.
The best graphic card will always be your mind's eye anyways. A quick example; the AOD crew are just static pictures, yet they are as real to me (if not more so actually) than the fully animated 'robots' in SH3. All I needed was a static picture, and my mind's eye did the rest. Kinda like reading a book. :yep:

edit: and I'm about to lose it soon if I see another 'SH5 is an amazing subsim' followed by a screenshot :haha:

Well, there are people who like submarines and history, and there are gamers, who want nothing more than to play the latest coolest bestest looking eye-fest.

This is why I much prefer The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan.

My problem is I have been to sea, and I've been to war, and I would rather sail through the harbors than go sink things. So, while I agree that AOD is still the best sub sim available, I have to have my SH fix just so I can relax by dockside and look at the sights.

Also I get jazzed by the whole ships-getting-names thing, and I've spent hundreds of hours cataloging thousands of ships for SH3 Commander, with many of both still to come.

So I'm a graphics whore and I spend all my time working on a mod for SH3. What can I say? That makes me biased. :sunny:

Good post, IanC you have achieved a target round!

I suppose a majority of computer gamers place their imaginations on hold when the monitor lights up. They expect the programmers and graphic artists to build their virtual world rather than using their own brains to do so.

Jusy plain lazy? Looking for the quick and easy audio-visual fix? Programmed by TV and computers not to think for themselves? Something else? Who knows? For many it is far easier to let somebody else, total strangers worshipped as Game Developers, to create the details of their virtual worlds but I prefer to do as much as possible for myself.

For me immersion is all about what is going on rather than merely what I am seeing. I find nothing immersive about a computer generated crew resembling nothing more than mobile dummies in a programmed diorama. I will trust my own imagination to create an immersive gaming experiance and AOTD, SH3 and SH4 can certainly deliver the means to do that, non-state of the art graphics and all.

Being hunted by a late war Hunter-Killer ASW Group that is more than capable of executing your destruction in AOTD can be a rivetting and absorbing experiance without being a sound and light spectacular.

____________________________________________
"Oh! Stupid TV ruined my imagination."
Bart Simpson when banned from watching Itchy and Scratchy cartoons.

I never knew there were so many features in AOD. Admittedly I just played it for the sake of sailing around and sinking ships (I was 13 when I played it). Sadly, most games are going the route of Hollywood where flashy eye candy replaces substance. SH5 is a damn good looking game, but I have far more fond memories playing AOD or Wolfpack where there was only the interface screen. Now I'm going to have to dig up my old copy and dust the old girl off.

What i like in AOD are these moments, when you have looked around a convoy, saw no escort in it, and too focused on the convoy you have not made a 360 with your periscope.
So you decide to target one ship and begin to move at flank speed at periscope depth because you were a bit too far.

Then you hear some pings, followed soon enough by the sound of a destroyer engine roaming the sea and suddenly you see in the periscope in a different direction from the convoy :
http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/6...pboard01vf.jpg

And you hear "something" being dropped in the water, 3 or 4 times .
There are few games that can bring you into that feeling of panic mode :)