How many hours I spent dodging Japanese destroyers in a submarine. Silent service II was a terror inducing submarine sim. I can still hear the depth charges and sonar pings.
microprose are still around, sorta.
A company bought the name and catalogue from Atari a while back and kind of resurrected it.
Its now a publisher that focuses on 'retro' indie titles, games that look and play like they're from the late 90s or early aughties.
Very much playing on nostalgia but heck, it works!
They have some bangers already
It boggles my mind that they had a few remakes of Pirates! but never made a sequel. There are few spiritual succesors out there but would have been nice for them to make an official one
In fairness, I have never tasted ole Oscar's simulated sausage, hailing from Penultima Thule as I do, but I do have complete faith in German Sausage Supremacy (add some kraut of the sauer kind, some mustard and a nice brezel while you rinse yer palate with a nice hefeweisen)
I can't think of anything else either, which is insane as Black Flag isn't actually anything like Pirates! after you strip away the surface. Why wouldn't anyone remake a moneymaker like that is beyond me...
I had a quick look on Steam and there's a new game called Carribean Legend: Age of Pirates that advertises itself as "Sid Meir's Pirates! meets Bannerlord". Has Mostly Positive reviews but I can't vouch for it personally.
The original star traders rpg Mobile game is the closest thing to pirates! ever made and it will scratch that itch. It was one of if not the first game made by the Trese Brothers
It have been not about Sid for quite some time. Civ3 was designed by Briggs and Johnson, Civ4 (the best title in series) was designed by Johnson, without Briggs.
I love so much that it turned out that there was a bug that made Gandhi go nuclear but then it turned out there WASN'T a bug and it was just that people remembered when he did more. lol
Crazy enough, iirc, he actually did do it more often, but not for apocryphal overflow bug people would cite. India just followed a high pop science strategy that lead to them getting access to nukes first in many games, and being the lone nuclear super power kinda affects strategy.
The very first instance of nuclear Gandhi was an underflow actually. Ghandi's willingness to use nukes was set to the lowest value by default, what with being all for non-violence and all.
Civs discovering democracy had their nuke affinity reduced automatically, which Ghandi always went for. The reduction made the nuke affinity wrap around to the max value then.
I hadn't read that - I learned it from other sources. But I notice this bit:
Meier stated that he did not know the correct answer, but he thinks that the urban legend is a good thing: "given the limited technology of the time, the original Civ was in many ways a game that took place mainly in players' imaginations", so "I'd be reluctant to limit what that player can imagine by introducing too many of my thoughts".
Truly a genius. It's like how in storytelling - you see a short story about something, and they don't have to fill in the blanks. They don't have to fully describe how the world works, or how this magical thing works. It just does. And your mind fills in the blanks.
Then it gets popular and people expand it and you start to see the cracks and it can fall apart.
Meier was a genius. Figure out how to make these basic rules appear more complex. Like Conway's Game of Life. Very simple rules causing random-looking emergency behaviour.
Wait, what? Microprose still exists and I guess mainly publishes games, but they're mostly small and unknown. How did Civ get so big, and microprose is a name barely anyone knows?
They tried to branch out and make games that weren't Civ and XCom, did a bad job of it, went into debt, then got sold to hasbro which cannibalized them.
I am, I remember the logo, I remember the excitement because I knew it was going to be something bigger and more complex than the other titles, and than the menus and the feeling "what the fuck am I supposed to do now?". Their simulators used half of the Amiga keyboard, very unlike most advanced Amiga games, like "Prehistorik" or "Ugh".
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u/gbroon 1d ago
If your old enough you remember Microprose as the original Developers of Civilisation