Tom Clancy's SSN

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by Pax Melmacia

Too, IMHO Mr. Clancy is kind of a flag-waver, so it may not be surprising that his hardware is ocassionally endowed with super powers (or the enemy dumber'n lawn cigars).

But that flag happens to be the Union Jack… that traitor! :P

[Linton]

Perhaps Clancy forgot you left the empire in the 1770's!

[AntEater]

That was how I felt on SSN too.
RSR is at least well written, even if the Chicago mission is a killfest.
But keep in mind that Clancy had to do with publicized data about soviet subs.
SSN (the novel) is simply boring. Funny is in the novel Cheyenne killed everybody, and in the game I always got killed

SSN (the game) had one mistake..
It was a helmsman's sim, you had to lay rudder and dive planes and maneuvering the sub really took some skill. I never got to periscope depth without broaching
All that stuff is something no sub skipper has to bother about, he simply orders the helmsmen to do that.

[Etienne]

I'd like to know if anybody has read both SSN and Teeth of the Tiger...

Which one was worst?

[OneShot]

Clearly SSN. Teeth of the Tiger was actually an improvement compared with Red Rabbit which really took some effort to read all the way through without falling asleep every two minutes. Red Rabbit was his cheapest shot in my eyes.

Still he did good with RSR and the Jack Ryan universe, surely wouldn't be up for a Nobel prize in literature, but I have read those books more then once each (with the sole exception of Red Rabbit - Once was more then enough).

[Grayback]

Originally Posted by Linton

Didn't Clancy have help from a royal navy officer?I

Yeah, probably the same guy who ghosts for Pat Robinson

have read the book and it is not good.I have never played the game but the book is just a script of what to do.

I picked up the game about 8 years ago. I knew it wasn't realistic, but the sound and visual effects are still diverting - doppler effects on torpedoes, creacking noises at extreme depths, plant noises, that sort of thing. Those fake newscasts were kind of annoying. Strangely enough, the easiest kills of the game were the supersubs at the end - the Mao & that Chinese Typhoon; the hardest levels were the one where you had to protect that other sub.

[Grayback]

Originally Posted by kschang

Well, let's put it this way. By the end of the book, Cheyenne has sunk the Chinese navy thrice over!

and about three times as many Alfas as were ever actually built.

I have both the game and the book, and the game is a VASTLY simplified sub sim. It's not really meant to be very realistic at all.

I wouldn't have minded if you at least had a 3-D viewer. Since the game was built around a spot view of your sub, they could have jazzed it up like the one in SC - more angles and distances, and on objects other than your sub. The sad thing is that Clancy missed out on the resurgent interest in cold war nuc warfare that coincided with "Blind Man's Bluff". Whether the book is accurate or not is one thing, but it stretched attention spans on the subject, leading to many copycat books and Discovery-Channel shows. Had Clancy gotten his timing right and built SSN around a more historic cold war scenario, he might have sold more games.

You can catch my review on Amazon.com

[Grayback]

Originally Posted by Kazuaki Shimazaki II

Or how about: You are a storywriter. After writing a killfest of Soviet subs by American attack subs, you finally create a smart Soviet Captain that evened out the odds. One-on-one, sonar versus maneuverability. You will:
1) Actually sit down and think of some intelligent tactic for the American so he wins.
2) Be cheap and bring in a Brit sub with MagicWeapon, eliminating your need to think, or maybe because you used your page allotment describing the killfest in excessive detail before this most important section.

The end of the kill-fest actually struck me rather well - it seemed that Clancy actually had your two choices and thought that the first one was more of a "Hollywood Ending" sort of resolution, whereas the other (and chosen) one was anti-climactic and a reminder that war doesn't follow a script with a satisfying ending.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

Originally Posted by Grayback

The end of the kill-fest actually struck me rather well - it seemed that Clancy actually had your two choices and thought that the first one was more of a "Hollywood Ending" sort of resolution, whereas the other (and chosen) one was anti-climactic and a reminder that war doesn't follow a script with a satisfying ending.

That would have been acceptable, if he hadn't been writing a killfest right up to that point.