[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Mikhayl

Das Boot ?

A hit! Yes, Das Boot.


From the review:

Das Boot has aircraft, enemy and friendly submarines, interactive anti-aircraft gun and deck gun firing controls, fantastic ideas for radio (including the capability to decode enemy transmissions), and more. I have never seen a program with so many great ideas come together with such disaster. This is due, in part, to the lack of scope of the simulation. For example, one of the missions is the "Das Boot" mission. It begins in the Gibraltar Strait. You are ordered east through the strait. You are quickly attacked by aircraft, and not permitted to dive. It is foggy and you can't see anything but aircraft. If you are a good shot, you can shoot down all the planes. If you do so, you win, and that is that. This simulator is the only one that uses true three dimensional polygon filling graphics. This type of graphics is usually used with flight simulators. The advantage of this technique is that you get a real three dimensional effect. However, you are unable to show object detail. With fast jet aircraft simulators, lack of detail is fine, since you only see the enemy for a split second. But, for submarine simulators that operate at such slow speeds, lack of detail is very annoying. In Das Boot, it is impossible to determine the identification of a vessel by sight. You must have the XO "ID" the vessel to know what type it is. Other features were the use of time compression, different external views, enemy use of HF/DF against you ("maintain radio silence to avoid detection"), Metox, and different torpedo types. With the ground-breaking graphics, Das Boot had a lot of promise, but the lack of career missions pretty much sank it.

Mystery Subsim #32 is next!

Neal