Best Submarine Games

[Vox]

Re: 1914: Shells of Fury.   I  occasionally tinker around with this. I have the original disk, sometimes listed on ebay. Gamergate lists at $15. The game runs in Windows 7 and 10 / 64 bit and there are mods available.  Graphics are what you expect from an older game.-Not Silent Hunter's  standards.  Modeling has a certain historic charm. I've mod it for HC manual targeting and re-scripted scenarios for better simulation. Has some novel feature like minelaying. The game's  campaign is good depicts the historic periods and changes. IMO biggest problem  is you can not save individual patrols.

[Staggerwing]

There was also a sim back in the 2010's that had subs and frigates (IIRC) in a hypothetical war based on an alt WW2 involving some kind of Euro alliance v a Pacific power and perhaps the US? I don't recall the details but I'm sure I have a digital copy in one of the online game repositories.

That was it, and I'm just misremembering the factions and release date (20 years ago!). It does have a Japanese/English alliance though. I had tried to find it on mobygames but struck out, not knowing the title. No luck figuring out what online store library I have it in either.

Maybe back then you actually owned on a cd as online stores weren't as popular yet.  I see it available at Amazon and such for a physical copy.

Ah, it's all coming back to me... Enigma was one of the games that had Starforce DRM included on the CD. I think I ended up shelving it because of concerns about Starforce messing with my system.

[Pete Dero]

Ah, it's all coming back to me... Enigma was one of the games that had Starforce DRM included on the CD. I think I ended up shelving it because of concerns about Starforce messing with my system.

I tried to install a game from CD that contained Starforce some years ago and spend the next day restoring my system because my PC didn't start up anymore.

[JasonPratt]

Wolfpack, iirc, requires multiple players (it was built for that purpose).

I can second UBOAT, which has been shaping up to approach being a Silent Hunter-esque successor.

That said, the videos I see (from Wolfpack345 for example), continue to suggest that Silent Hunter games modded up to current standards are still the best for WW2.

The latest entry in his current Med campaign, for example.

The recent UBOOT board game, for what it's worth, is getting a digital adaptation soon!

[Gusington]

Thanks Vox. Joke is on me since my current rig does not have a CD drive

[Skoop]

There's a ton of mods and optional settings in Uboat that allow you to configure the game any way you want.  I wouldn't say it makes the silent hunter series obsolete, but it's a strong alternative.  And with all the mods loaded via steam work shop, me personally, I wouldn't even bother with sh3/4/5.  But if  your a sub enthusiast, you might disagree.

[FarAway Sooner]

The Best submarine computing game ever was also the first one released in the US:



1976 says hello!!

[SirAndrewD]

There's a ton of mods and optional settings in Uboat that allow you to configure the game any way you want.  I wouldn't say it makes the silent hunter series obsolete, but it's a strong alternative.  And with all the mods loaded via steam work shop, me personally, I wouldn't even bother with sh3/4/5.  But if  your a sub enthusiast, you might disagree.

I echo this. 

It's a great change of pace from Silent Hunter and has a few offerings that it doesn't.  Great mod support.

[Sir Slash]

Hey Sooner. I played the hell out of, "Sub Hunt" for the Mattel Intellivision back in the day. Loved that sub game.  That was mid-eighties as I recall.

[Gusington]

^Intellivision...HIGH FALLUTIN'

[JasonPratt]

Oh, I can go older than Seawolf! -- one of my BASIC game programming manuals featured code (as its largest game in the book, or nearly, as I recall) for "Sea Battle", which I renamed "Seabat". It was a variant of the old ASCII Star Trek game, except you couldn't warp from one map quadrant to the next, but on the other hand it had one much larger volcanic island map in the South Pacific. The old Star Trek mechanics transferred well to sub mechanics with some extra abilities, including a limited number of tactical nukes to hit enemies if you detected them in a sufficient cluster. This would also destroy any parts of the island in range, so the map could be altered during gameplay!

[FarAway Sooner]

So, not to pull Old Geezer Seniority Rank on you, Jason, but the SeaWolf to which I refer predated personal computers (unless you were coding that onto your college's mainframe and storing it on cards?) and cost a quarter to play.

Sir Slash, on the other hand, MIGHT have Seniority rank on me.  My first computer game was Wampus Hunt, loaded onto the University of Oklahoma's mainframe by a card reader during Christmas Break by a neighbor (it was too busy running other jobs during the rest of the year). 

But the first personal computer game was the ASCII version of Space Warp, played on my friend's TRS-80 III.  His dad was a math professor (and thus the closest thing to a Computer Science teacher at the time in all but a handful of colleges nationwide).  It sounds almost identical to the Star Trek game that you describe--might even be the same one.

Didn't mean to hijack this frame.  SeaWolf had the best sound effects of any game invented for the next 15 years, including Pac Man.

[Sir Slash]

Yeah, Seawolf was great but I couldn't afford quarters back then. My first computer sub game was on my old Commodore 128 , can't remember the name. It wasn't Silent Service though it was about that same time, Up Periscope maybe?

[Toonces]

If you're a fan of Red Storm Rising then you have to give Cold Waters a try.  It's my go-to submarine game when I'm in the mood.  The mods have really expanded the original gameplay, although I always found vanilla and unmodded to be pretty awesome.

[JasonPratt]

Re the arcade game Seawolf and the BASIC language game Sea Battle (aka Seabat): yes and no. I programmed it on a KAYPRO II, which was a portable business computer (cost more than $8000! -- but our business barely used it.) However, the program was designed for college and other business mainframes originally -- no screens, only printers -- albeit no farther back than the BASIC language of course. (Which I originally learned on such a college mainframe, at Union University in Jackson, on a summer class, in the very early 80s, while I was in junior high school or maybe late elementary.)

So I don't know how far back the Sea Battle program itself goes, other than (a) after BASIC was designed and implemented; and (b) after the stereotypical star-trek grid battle game was invented (which we also played on that college mainframe printer computer, btw.)

Having said that, of course I wasn't programming "Seabat" into anything in 1976, so "Seawolf" definitely predates that!