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Epyx's "Sub Battles" was the first computer game that I bought. For my Leading Edge PC. My wife threatened to leave me because I was playing it so much. She is still here and I am still playing too much......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esUQIi9Qv7A

First Computer game I had was B1 Bomber.

The US wet dream of bombing the USSR.

We broke it because we found that you could fly the B1 at below sea level, devs didnt think of that!!, but the SAM & fighters couldnt attack you.

You had to "pop up" to bomb but you could hide again on the way home.

I think we played it 2-3 times and went back to board games.

ORIGINAL: Razz

Another game which I still have is Sea Battle from Mattel on the Intellivision.

Intellivision! First "computer" game I ever played. [:D]

I remember when I was in the Army and on CQ duty. I would ask the First Sergeant if I could bring my computer down to the CQ. He naturally said yes figuring I would be studying some sort of thing related to combat engineering. Once everyone was gone, I'd pop in "Computer Bismarck"!

A friend of my sister's was in the Air Force and assigned to a small radar site in California. He would volunteer for night duty because he could sit there and work on his model planes while "watching" the scopes. There rarely was anything of note. Mostly it was commercial traffic into the local Bay Area airports.

Though he did see something flying parallel to the coast one night that he calculated must be doing about mach 7. It was about 50 miles off the coast and flying at 70,000 feet. He assumes it was an SR-71. Or maybe it was some other top secret aircraft.

The site was on the flight path for Moffett Field, which was actively used by the Navy at the time. On the top of their water tank they painted a giant Air Force logo that said "Go Air Force". The only people who could see it were the Navy guys flying into Moffett.

Bill

Anyone remember IWO JIMA?
I once managed to beat it on hardest level, but I failed to win OKINAWA on two last hardest.
Not that, after mid-game you have anything, except artillery, after dealing with those 20 point bunkers.


DAMMIT, I wish Japan in WITP have such emplacement artillery range advantage, as in those games...

ORIGINAL: Lecivius

ORIGINAL: wdolson

I liked the Great Naval Battles volume that covered the South Pacific. I never could get any of the other games in the series to run.

Bill

Aye, Great Naval Battles - Guadalcanal

Fond & fun memories to this day.

+1

Sold my Amiga and purchased my first PC when I found out about this game - and like crsutton spent hours on damage control [:)]

Can't remember any good strategy game on the Amiga (apart from Civ I).

Guadalcanal on the C64 must have been my earliest Pacific strategy game.

Guess that qualifies me for "Old School"?

But never had any board games - so I'm not "Stone Age" [;)]

ORIGINAL: Capt Hornblower

ORIGINAL: Chris H

I can go even further back to an old Apple IIe game produced by SSI in the early 80s. I no longer have it but I have just found this on YouTube. Just amazing wants out there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u94NfFT4qN0

A friend of mine had SSI's GUADALCANAL (one of Grigsby's earliest), and we used to stay up all night playing it. Another (later but still old) game was WAR IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC, which I had for my Commodore 64/128 and which I believe was also an SSI product (not sure if it too was a Grigsby design).

Forgot that one, so did I again for the apple.

Remember "Midway" on the Spectrum 48K

Spent days on "Arnhem" in my teens, until we found out that massed Allied artillery battalions could destroy German troops with ease. No fun after that as it was always going to end in an Allied win.

Arnhem

I still play GNB II (Guadalcanal) occasionally. It works in the DosBox under XP (even the sound).

I found Pacific War in "Twenty Wargames", which I bought in Stockholm because of GNB III, which was a disappointment. Pacific War however was so good that I continued till Matrix Games appeared.

Sven

ORIGINAL: SvenNyqvist
I found Pacific War in "Twenty Wargames", which I bought in Stockholm because of GNB III, which was a disappointment. Pacific War however was so good that I continued till Matrix Games appeared.

Sven

Me too (albeit not in Stockholm) [:)] - except I bought "20 Wargames" for PacWar and got so hooked I hardly ever touched the other 19 games...

I guess, I am old school. I remember playing Midway on a trs 80. The game loaded from a tape.

Ahh yes, cassette tapes. Sit for 20 minutes while it loads only to find there was a glitch and you had to start all over again. [:D]

ORIGINAL: casmithasl
I guess, I am old school. I remember playing Midway on a trs 80. The game loaded from a tape.

TRS-80. Yup, definitely old-school.

Yes, I played the old war in the south pacific and USAAF in my commodore. Then WITP and WITE in my first PC, an 80/88 IIRC.

ORIGINAL: Capt Hornblower

ORIGINAL: casmithasl
I guess, I am old school. I remember playing Midway on a trs 80. The game loaded from a tape.

TRS-80. Yup, definitely old-school.

How about a Prime mini-mainframe, on an accountic coupler and a dumb Teledyne monitor, with a phone WITH A ROTARY DIAL stuck in the rubber cups, playing a Star Trek game with ASCII symbols for ships on a 10 x 10 x,y grid? In 1977?

Do I win anything? [:)]

Didn't James Dunnigan also have a Pacific theater computer wargame, or did he collaborate with GG?

My fist computer game was Carriers At War. Seeing that in a store prompted me to get my computer geek friend to build me a gaming box.

ORIGINAL: Capt Hornblower

ORIGINAL: casmithasl
I guess, I am old school. I remember playing Midway on a trs 80. The game loaded from a tape.

TRS-80. Yup, definitely old-school.

I seem to recall playing against you in the cardboard game of the same name. If memory serves me correctly , I also kicked your butt by using a flaw in the game rules to massacre your KB with the obscenely powerfull secret weapon of the allies.....the PBY killer torpedo bomber! [:D] (Best 1st example I ever saw of "gamey" in action). [:D]

My absolute favorite game from the "Oulde" Computer games isn't THAT Old, but still won't work on my system now.. It's Zim's Action Stations.. No graphics to speak of except a plotting chart on the screen, and info reported from lookouts, etc. Absolutely great!

The Mach 7 spoken of before reminds me of a contact an RD2, RD3, and an ETR3 said they tracked on our air search that went from just subsonic to well over Mach 4, and disappeared off the height finder scope at 25 miles in less than 20 seconds or some such ridiculously short time. The Chief called it a glitch in the machine, or balloon juice, or sheer BS. It also could have been a sea story - "now this ain't no ****, but those guys stuck by their story!

Ive got an S&T or Moves magazine with an article on how little computers would affect/help the wargaming community.
It implied only the Military would get any value from it.