[nodlew]

I remember the imagination. I grew up playing RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, Melee, and tactical board games like Panzer Leader. My friends and I would even invent our own role playing, military, and sci-fi games, when we weren't in the woods taking enemy positions with pine-cone grenades and sub-machine guns made from vacuum cleaner parts. When I was a little boy, before personal computers I played with plastic army men and I remember dreaming that one day they might be able to make little robot army men that would bring the game "to life," which is essentially what computer games do, except better, because computer army men are a lot cheaper than hundreds of little robots would be, and they never wear out.

Sound effects were something that you provided yourself--I can still produce dozens of pretty decent weapon and battle field sounds with my voice. It's a skill that you never forget. I wonder if little boys can still do that. Not as well I, would guess.

My favorite CC game was Close Combat III: The Russian Front. Actually it was the first one I bought, and I absolutely loved it. I never played II or I because the graphics of III were much better and it put me off. Battle of the Bulge was good. And of course all of the mods for III really kept the game growing and expanding and kept me playing it literally for years. CCIII was actually a pretty good-looking game, for being 2d--without the necessity of 3d it was possible to make nice looking maps and units, all of which moved and fought in very convincing fashion, and it all ran flawlessly on a computer that didn't have enough HD space to even install a modern game. It was of course a quantum leap beyond Steel Panthers which I also played way back when. The thing about Close Combat that hooked me was the realism. The game literally could not get boring because it was like watching real battles unfold, not like trying to beat a computer. You felt like you were trying to beat, not the computer, but the Germans. I felt some moments of real triumph playing that game, like the time I had a paltry force of Airborne Paratroopers with a few measly AT guns, bazooka teams, etc., maybe a Sherman and an M10 and I had to defeat a landslide of German armor including Panthers and King Tigers. You guessed it, Bastogne. Hitting that Panther with a bazooka and seeing that nice big shower of sparks and smoke was like: Yeah! Take that you Nazi bastards! (not propaganda). Learning to play Close Combat was learning to deploy troops on a battlefield, its lessons would transfer directly to the real world.

And of course the units in Close Combat were somehow imbued with something you never find in computer models: character and personality. Somehow, looking down like God on that poor, wounded and bloody foot soldier as he crawled painfully across the frozen, shell blasted map, panicked and trying to find some place not to be shot at, you felt sympathy for him, and you hoped he would make it.

One other thing about Close Combat. I don't remember once ever while playing that game thinking "Ok, this is stupid. Real troops/tanks/guns/cannons/bullets/explosions/...etc. don't work that way." I remember thinking, or shouting, "Stop! The other way, you idiot!" Or, "Oh, crap, I did not think that was going to happen..." But in its terms, the game was completely believable. If I lost, I scratched my head and re-strategized, but never did I want to contact the game designers. It was, in a word, perfect.