Monthly Archives: January 2017
Order of Battle Pacific: US Marines – AAR, Scenario 8 Part 1
Now that the holidays are in the rearview mirror, Airboy’s battles through the Pacific continue ~
Avery Abernethy, 7 January 2017
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Scenario 8 – Saipan
Saipan is huge compared to the Marshall and Gilbert Island targets. I used two landing zones because the city in the middle was too tough to take on D-Day. My initial objectives are: 1] link up the two landing zones; 2] seize the southern airfield; and 3] secure all Southern Saipan so I could fight on only one front. But achieving these three objectives was not easy. I continue my strategy of concentrating my forces and landing my artillery in a second wave. The Japanese make multiple counter-attacks including several led by armor. It takes many turns to seize the southern airfield and land air support. It takes even longer to eliminate the Japanese snipers and infantry in Southern Saipan. The infantry allocated to eliminating resistance in the South never catch up to the main battle until the issue is decided. Much of my heavy artillery was allocated to the South and had to be shipped north. Central Saipan is mountainous which is excellent defensive terrain. The heights must be secured by infantry and the going was slow until I got all of my heavy artillery up from South Saipan.
Saipan D-Day
Gaming Nostalgia – Attactix Games
#TBT at GrogHeads!
So who ever owned any of these?
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The Tuesday Interview – Bob Smith of Oriental Empires
Bob Smith pays GrogHeads a visit~
Lloyd Sabin (and Boggit!), 3 January 2017
You clearly have a long, proud history in historical PC gaming, which younger readers may not know about. Games like ‘Arnhem,’ ‘Desert Rats,’ and ‘Operation Vulcan’ are remembered very fondly. What is your favorite game of yours from that era and why?
Of the wargames, probably Desert Rats, because I like big sweeping games. Of all the games I did in my first stint as an independent developer, my favorite is probably Armada 2525, because I had so much fun playing it with my friends (who usually used to beat me).
What were some of the difficulties you faced in the 1980s when producing those early games?
The machines were very limited, you had to think about every byte of RAM. I remember being up at 3am trying to find 3 bytes of memory to finish Desert Rats, with a bike coming at 7 to take the master tape to the duplicators. The development environments were very limited too. I used to write everything out on paper, because the editors were so bad, and once your program got too big to fit into RAM with the assembler, it could take as much as an hour to make a new version.
