Robot Jazz

  Well, this proved to be an unexpectedly short tour of duty for the venerable Haddo. If you recall, after successfully dispatching two Soviet subs in our previous patrol, we were tasked with sinking a Soviet carrier battlegroup.  Now, even with a state-of-the-art submarine, which would be a Los Angeles class boat for this period, that would be a tough mission to accomplish alone. With a dated Permit-class boat, the odds were already stacked against us.  To stack that deck even more against us, I would be taking Haddo  into such a fight with damage to the hull, dive planes, rudder, and one inoperable torpedo tube.  Yeah, I suspect the crew read the writing on the wall as well as I did... Nonetheless, duty is duty. So, we took our position in our patrol corridor. We had to wait a day or so, but the Soviet task force, which can be seen off of Norway above, finally arrived.   The initial sonar picture was busy, to say the least. After deploying the towed array and doing some maneuvering,

  I will always be partial to Cold-War-Gone-Hot wargames for the simple reason that it was this genre that got me hooked on computer games way back when 8-bit machines roamed the land. Titles such as SSI's Reforger '88  laid the foundation for a lifelong love affair with this historic period.  And as the technology of home computers improved, so did the sophistication of the wargames.  One of the best of the subsequent 16-bit period was Microprose's Red Storm Rising . Based on the classic NATO vs. Warsaw Pact war novel of the same name, the game did a banger of a job capturing the essence of modern submarine warfare.