How did you get into Sub games?
 

Just wondering how we all got into Sub Sims?

My Interest is because of my farther a WWII Veteran. He served on HMS Inconstant (Destroyer)
He was an ASDIC/Sonar operator


His ship was credited with 2 U-boat kills.


U-409 and U-767


He was also on quite a few convoys to Russia later in the war.


I was his little miracle as in only 28, I’m actually honoured to have a farther who served in combat in WWII.


Loved hearing stories of how different the war was at sea. To them the enemy was the vessel and not the men manning it. He said if there were survivors from the U-boat they were taken aboard given fresh clothes and blankets given a hot drink with some brandy or run in. Even given limited access to the ship.


Anyway when I was little I remember him always doing research on convoys he was in and tracking down any survivors ect..
He had dozens of books on U-boats and navel warfare.


Then when I got my Amiga 500 computer when I was about 8. He brought Silent Service II and hijacked my Amiga from then onwards



Over time I started watching him play and got interested, he taught me how to get in close to ships and (try to) escape..:arrgh!:


when I was 14 he got me a 486 with windows 95 and a copy of Command Aces of the Deep



And my interest has been there ever since..


I have spoke about him before on here but here is his picture for those intrested..


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v329/Pappy55/dad.jpg



My farther is on the right


The chap in the middle is 'Cmdr. E.Grenfall' who was lucky to survive the war he was torpedoed TWICE, thrown into the icy Arctic waters and spent some time in a Russian hospital. He is fluent in German and Russian. He also thinks the Germans are the nicent people in Europe. (no hard feelings at all):salute:


The one on the left is J.Hobbs my dad's best friend who died a few years ago.


Saddest part is my dad is now in a care home with Dementia and dosent really know me anymore.:nope:

My story is not nearly as profound. My father built model warships, and I would sit with him and listen to him talk about naval vessels and warfare. I was always interested in submarines, so when I bought my first computer, a submarine game (CAoD) was one of the first things that I purchased. After awhile, I came upon Janes 688(i) and fell in love with the sim. Seeking patches for some of the problems, a Lycos search yielded a link to a little website called SubSim and it's Fix My 688(i) movement. I've been here and playing ever since.

Even less profound: simply have a preference for sims and loved P.T.O. I played on my snes at the time. Finally got a decent computer some 3 years ago, discovered Silent Hunter 3 and soon after that ended up at SubSim to fix the bugger. Never left.

Doesn't mean I'm not aware of the history and reality of the subject though. May not have the interest nurtured first hand, but my preference will always go to a documentary over the nonsense they tend to air on tv nowadays... or a good book, though my habit of reading has really declined, if not disapeared completely.

I went to buy a ST game and the store didn't have any and then I saw Janes 688(i). I bought it and I was my first subsim game (I had early played the old one, 688 was the name I think, but did not know what to do).

Nowhere near as profound, and I thank your father for his service, and give you my condolences, my grandmother had dementia before her passing and it is an incredibly cruel thing.

My interest in sub games first came about through the NES game Silent Service which I borrowed from a friend in Primary school. After that it lay dormant for some time before watching Hunt for Red October and reading and re-reading a book on submarines that my Uncle got for me when I was about seven or so. Following that I got Fast Attack for the PC when I was about fourteen or fifteen, then went on to Sub Command and that was that really. :yep:

I got into sub games because I like sneaking around and blowing things up. Submarine games are perfect for that... until I get caught. :shifty:

I remember like if it was yesterday it happened. I was 7yrs old watching World at War with my dad, saw for the very first time a submarine - german uboat and was hooked from that day onwards. The old man was into battleships, I liked the subs. Dad being a fisherman when I came around he and I went fishing in the family boat best times of my childhood one afternoon the seas became very rough the old man was singing he loved the rough seas I was crapping myself I was only 8 or 9 at the time. :haha: Back then their was no limit on how many snapper you could catch we would come back with 30 or more snapper at times. Great times.

3 games sealed my passion for sub games

Aces of the deep
Fast Attack
Silent Hunter (1)

Like the water and like the idea of stealth. First sub game was Fast Attack, got it in a Bargain Bin and I was hooked. So much so that when I got my next sub game, SH2 :dead::dead:, I still kept at it.

Have been here since mid-06 and have not looked back.

Edit: One more important one, love Military History :yep:

ZX spectrum 128k -The Great Escape, Spitfire 40, and I am pretty sure I had my 1st sub sim Silent Service, all intrigued me. For dos PC AOD, silent hunter 2, 3, Sub Command, SH 4, 5. :)

I was always interested in history, and military history. (I didn't realize the latter went back as far as it did, until I found some reports I had written for school when I was very young. Things like "Major Battles of WWII" and "Military Conquests of the Roman Empire" so I guess it was always there. :haha:)

My dad was also a WWII vet altho he served in the Army (ETO) so it was not the naval side of things I heard the most about growing up. But I'm sure that fueled my interest in military history in general and WWII in particular. Or maybe I just liked the stories because they 'clicked' with something in me that was still coming into fruition.

:o

Well, you got me beat. I'm almost 20 years older than you and I thought *I* was a miracle baby, lol.

That is rough. We are going through the same thing with my mother now, in the last six weeks she has gone from hospital to nursing home to the hospital again. We thought something was 'off' for the last couple of years but sadly she had pretty much pushed my sister and I out of her life long before the illness set in, and the people who were around her every day insisted there was no problem and she refused to go to a doctor for anything else that came up. So it wasn't until she fell and ended up in the ER that the dementia was diagnosed.

I think that's part of the reason I like them too, the only other game I ever played with any regularity was Wolverine's Revenge and my favorite part was the "stealth" level where you had to sneak up behind, like, ten different guards and cut their throats before anyone knew you were there. I used to just play that bit over and over again. :rock:

It's entirely possible that I have, uh, issues. Or something.

Anyway, I got into WWII naval history and then SH3 because I saw Das Boot and fell in love with it and became fascinated by u-boats and the Battle of the Atlantic, which fit nicely into my existing interests. It took me a while to get SH3 even after I knew it existed, but then eventually I couldn't resist especially when I saw that it was an older game and therefore relatively cheap and something I could run without major hardware upgrades. :yeah:

I've said before that another reason I think the game appeals to me is that it has a nice mix of the things I like from 1) first person shooter games and 2) strategy games, but not so much of either that I get bored/frustrated the way I usually do with those other genres.

I like the combat elements of FPS, but doing nothing but running around shooting off weapons at a constant stream of enemies (especially when it involves repeating the same basic scenarios over and over again) gets really boring after a while.

And I like elements of strategy/tactics or whatever you want to call it, but... I don't want to command a whole army, or oversee an entire campaign, or build an empire. That's too much like work, lol.

SH3 gives me a little of both - I have command of my boat, but I'm not running the whole German naval campaign. I get to hunt down and shoot at enemies, but it usually involves giving serious thought to how best to go about it. And it's not like going back and starting a new career in 1939 means I'm just repeating the same predictable 'Level 1' scenario all over again.

I watched Das Boot again, for the umpteenth time, back when I was just starting to use computers ~2000ish. Being half way through the book as well, I thought to my self, 'wow, wouldn't it be great if there was a game where I could command a uboat...'

well what do you know? :yeah: SH2.

Even at their ages they look like a bunch I wouldn't want to mess with.

Sorry to hear about your dad. Mine is 83 and suffers from Parkinson's Disease, but he still gets by okay. On the other hand, my dad was too young to serve in the war and I'm 60, so we're at opposite ends of the 'father's age' scale. :D

I grew up in the shadow of WW2, and saw movies like Run Silent, Run Deep and Destination Tokyo in the theater. In 1986 I got an Atari 520ST and played Silent Service on it, along with some airwar games. I bought my first PC in 1996, and played SH1 and SHCE on it. It barely ran SH2 when it came out, but when I found AOtD it ran it just fine. I bought my current rig in 2005, just so I could play SH3, and it was fine until all the mods kept coming, and coming. It won't run SH3 with some of them. SH4 is better, but I really need a new one.

My grand father served aboard a corvette (the name escapes me at the moment), so my father always had a great deal of interest in convoys, as well as the Battle of the Atlantic.

So, he bought SH2 one day. Couldn't figure out how to turn the sub and gave up on it :haha:. Me being the child who plays with everything, soon picked it up, and at 10 years old was hunting convoys round the Atlantic.

Once we renovated our computer room and disk got lost so I was out of a subsim for a while. It was only after I happened upon Sh4 and then 5 that I really got back into subsimming.

I started much the same as Sailor Steve Atari 520ST playing Silent Service 1 and Falcon by Spectrum Holobyte. Loved both.

I was looking for my Silent Service stuff and didn't find it but found the manual for Falcon 3.0 342 pages, two maps, a cockpit lay out card and a small booklet titled Release Notes. They don't build em that way any more.

Still have the Atari and it still runs.

Laid off games for a long time but still remembered Silent Service and found
Silent Hunter 4 1.0 in 2007, I like the PTO, been playing it since.
Didn't know anything about patches or mods, UBI help desk suggested I try out Subsim.com to get the help I needed. Been here ever since.

I was born in '42 so I'm very close to WWII and have always been interested in it.

Pappy55 I hope we never forget what your father and his friends and so many others did. Salute

Magic

http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/4418/58926544.jpg
This is how i started, on my MS-Dos 3,10. It had 20MB hard disk space and 2 MB internal memory. I was a kid and the first one at my primary school to have a PC with VGA color. (there was one guy who's father had a comadore green/black with casettes as drives). Cant recall what that machine had coasted, but a fortune.....

I dont think i ever hit anything in the game other then with my deck gun and AA. we (me & brother) could not figure out how to shoot torpedoes so did it all with the deck gun :0:rotfl2:

That man is a very good soldier.


You have my condolences. It's a loss for everyone when a man with such experience dies.

Well, that's just about the most awful thing I've heard in along time. I used to work with elderly folks who had Alzheimer's, so I have some context. Never had to personally deal with a relative, or worse, an immediate family member who was affected, but I've seen how it hurts the families.....it's just terrible. Truly, my prayers are with you and your father.
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Okay, so now that I'm horribly depressed, what was this thread about again? How we all got into subsims?

I've been into military everything for pretty much my entire life. My family has a long tradition of military service in every branch and in several different nations. I was brought up with the expectation that I would one day become a US Air Force officer and a fighter pilot. To that end, I spent countless hours learning everything I could about every military that had ever existed on the planet.

Naturally, I spent a lot of time studying the World Wars, and in doing so I developed a great respect for the German military model. No matter where you're from or what you've been told, you have to respect German military achievements; especially those in the past century-and-a-half. The Germans are masters of efficiency and effectiveness on the battlefield, so I took my cues from them. In short, I have a fascination with military history, particularly German military history.

I got into subsims because I admire the strategy behind guerre de course. I've stuck with them because they're just about the only combat sim that has anything to do with reality. Spending the time to detect, track, and intercept a target using nothing but geometry and hydrophones is a lot more rewarding than capping some witless noob at his pre-determined spawn-point.

I came across Silent Hunter in the bargain basement and decided what the heck and give it ago. And from there to SH2 then SH3 & SH4.

There were three aspects of submarine warfare that first attracted me to sub games.

1. Submarines stalk their targets and then they lay in wait. That aspect of gaming appeals to me. That is also why I like sniper games. The requirement to plan an attack instead of going in guns-a-blazin I like in games. The concept of being, from an armament standpoint the underdog appeals to me.

2. In the context of submarine games, the decisions are made by one person, in this case the player. In sub games the player has to do a lot of tactical and strategic planning.

3. Sub games are slow in nature. There is plenty of time to think things through. This help players like me who have very small brains. This may also explain why I suck at flight sims but do ok with Helo sims.


And lastly, I always had an interest in submarine history.

Oh I forgot the most important reason. Chicks.

I was told that chicks dig guys that play submarine games.

Perhaps I was misinformed. :oops:

I don't know what really got me into it, I've been interested in military hardware since I was a child. :)

I guess my real dive into subsim games was Silent Hunter II and later Sub Command. It really took off with Silent Hunter III.


But earlier, in my childhood, I played Silent Service II on the Commodore Amiga.

I also played "688 Attack Sub" on the Sega Mega Drive.
Hehe, I thought the Russian audio sounded funny at the time. "Snål porslin" :haha:
In my head one phrase sounded like that. :D :O:
Swedish words that sounded similar to the Russian phrase.

Started off with the ZX Spectrum then went on to the Commodore 64 then Amiga with that huge 1/2 MB additional chip before acquiring my first PC (486).

Can't remember the first sub game because I've had most of them (never had AOD) so ended up with all of the SH series.