I was just reading this post at TechCrunch about the looming battle in the social gaming space. I'm not normally interested, because I'm one of those unhip people who have yet to see the value of spending a lot of time and effort on those sites. But as I was skimming the article (TechCrunch and TechDirt are two of a very few blogs that I actually try to get the gist of EACH post from), I saw this:
"It’s most popular game is Texas Hold’Em poker (with 609,000 daily active users in Facebook alone), followed by Blackjack, Attack!, Scramble, and Sea Wars. At least on Facebook, it appears that Zynga has more daily active users."
I have no idea what this company's version of Sea Wars is like. I don't know anything about the game. But all I could think about at the moment was the old (and I mean green-screen old - forget your fancy 8-bit characters) Sea Wolf arcade game. I remember fondly the rest of the family happily enjoying their meal on a Friday night in the dining room of our local pizza joint while I bathed my retinas in the blue glow of line drawn ships in the first arcade game to introduce a stored high-score. I had an idea.
We could do this on the Internet. The game could take up about 2 vertical inches of screen real estate, edge to edge. It would consist of the old style view port, a few keys to pan left and right, move forward and back, and a radar screen on which to track enemy ships. Here's the cool part: the other ships are other users. Their location on the playing field (the Earth) indicated by geo-IP. Ok, geo-IP isn't very accurate, but work with me here. There would need to be some concentrations of targets anyway to produce decent game play.
The very simple controls would take your Sea Wolf! attack submarine under the surface toward where your radar, and or signals intelligence, indicated there were enemy ships. Attempt to maneuver in undetected to within torpedo range, fire and escape.
Of course, most players are going to want to drive a Sea Wolf attack sub. But there should be options for surface vessels as well. Destroyers, Carriers, (the game used P.T. boats as the enemy),etc. Anything that can pose a plausible threat to submarines. Players could form battle groups, steam in convoy for protection, and have to approach safe harbors for repairs or supplies as warranted. Players could sign up to represent their home nations. There would be ongoing point totals, tournaments over time periods of days or weeks, allies, enemies...all the great things that helped the cold war spawn the birth of electronic gaming in the first place!
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