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Old 12-15-20, 02:10 PM   #1
mattlach
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Join Date: Dec 2020
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Hey all,


As encouraged in my welcome email, I decided to stop by and introduce myself.


So, why am I here?


Well, my main computer has been down for a little while (annoying problems with fan control and custom water cooling) so I am on my backup machine, and I was looking for something more lightweight to pass the time.


At first I powered up DosBox and ran some of my old Dos favorites. Some have not aged well, but one of them I still enjoy very much, namely Silent Service II. I played a campaign in it to familiarize myself with the game (hadn't played it since I was 10 years old on my 286) and to my great surprise, despite its ancient graphics and difficult to understand controls, it still had a lot of enjoyment in it. (Great Naval Battles of the North Atlantic, another favorite from back then, has not aged as well)



Then I thought. Wait a minute. What OTHER Sub games might have been launched in the 30 or so years since I last paid attention. Well, google told me "quite a few!". I narrowed it down to WWII era, as for whatever reason I love historical war sims, but really don't like modern warfare ones.



Most of them are set in the North Atlantic during WWII. Its funny. While I enjoyed playing the Germans in the WWII infantry and combined arms series Red Orchestra, and also didn't mind doing so in GNB:NA above, for whatever reason, I just can't bring myself to play as a Nazi submarine.


So in the end I settled for Silent Hunter III. It should benefit from the 15 years of advances in computer graphics from 1990 to 2005 compared to Silent Service II, while at the same time be light weight enough for my older backup PC to run it.


So how did I find subsim? Well, I was looking for a way to change the hardcoded 1024x768 resolution in Silent Hunter III (we were really still doing that in 2005?) and came across this page.


This experience has really re-awoken my enthusiasm for historic submarine warfare sims. When my main computer is back up again, maybe I will give the WolfPack game a try. (More likely to do so if it gets a Pacific campaign though. Still don't feel like playing Nazis)
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