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 ...

  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.

  [This was supposed to be posted for the week of Halloween, but my writing muse can be a stubborn thing! Sorry! Stay tuned for my entry on what games I am playing for Thanksgiving. It should be published in time for New Year's Eve!] One of the most underserved subgenres of science fiction is sci-fi horror.  Despite such iconic shows as The Twilight Zone  and The Outer Limits, and such popular movies as Alien and Event Horizon, sci-fi horror is the rarest of gems.  I suspect this is because in a genre that has, of late, been dominated by the so-called "hard science fiction" crowd that is so busy making sure that every test tube is polished that they leave no room for the metaphysical.  As horror classics such as The Exorcist  demonstrate, horror without metaphysics is just...the day's news.  

  It's the spooky season again!  With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to recommend some games I like to play when scares are in the air!  First up: PUBG. You might not think of PUBG as a scary title, but I've always believed it was the most traumatic experience in gaming ever.  That visceral emotional reaction is probably due to me being simply awful at this game. I mean, seriously bad. I was reminded of this just last night when I got the drop on another player and emptied half a magazine of ammo and missed almost entirely! Ha! This is the only game that I find so intense that I have no doubt my blood pressure measurably increases while playing it. 

  ("Cyber Dreams" - created by StarryAI and named by ChatGPT. How cyberpunk is that!) Sci-fi novelist Jack Womack referred to the term 'cyberpunk' as "a facile adjective for the working vocabulary of lazy journalists and unimaginative blurb-writers" and I couldn't agree more.  I love cyberpunk not because it is some sub-genre of sci-fi, but simply because it is just another face of the "hard-boiled" or "noir" genre of literature and film.  Don't believe me?  Okay, here's proof: go watch the classic noir, "The Asphalt Jungle. " The plot of that classic 1950 film noir has everything that most cyberpunk stories have, specifically, a cadre of criminals hired by a shady "fixer" to pull off a heist that, inevitably, goes wrong.  Heck, I just described Act I of CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077 !  Sure, hacking and transhumanism are missing from that movie due to the, er, limited nature of that decade's tec...

  Even though I consider myself a dedicated, lifelong gamer, I am also one of those gamers who rarely ever complete a game. For me, games are more about exploring possibilities and settings rather than completing a campaign. In other words, I just dabble, content to immerse myself in whatever alternate reality the game developer has created.  For me, it is the moment-to-moment experience, rather than any sense of accomplishment that I seek when I play a game.  This is why it is a truly shocking development for me to return to a game that I last played when it was new - I'm talking back in 2013!   The game is Suspicious Development's (aka Tom Francis's) Gunpoint .  And like a femme fatale, I just couldn't let it go.