Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising

Tom Clancy's book have often been accused of having shallow plots and a fetishistic love of all things techno and war-y. Thankfully, those same tendencies have no bearing whatsoever on the quality of this computer game. Here, donning the role of a submarine captain, we have an uncomfortably accurate simulation of World War III, played out between the US (alright, NATO too, I guess) and the Russkies. You get a huge map to float around in, pretty much just looking for trouble, while the battle between East and West is represented by red and green splotches of paint that react to the outcomes of your missions. So, if Russia kicks your ass in one battle, be prepared to see a big red imaginary line start encroaching into West Germany. If only CNN would show global conflicts as the cartoons they really are.


Oh my god, get the turpentine, the forces of redness are overcoming our defenses! These stains will never come out! God damn you, Russia!

The best part of this game were the cut scenes which were all laughably odd. If you were captured, it showed you working to death in a gulag. But if you were merely injured, you recuperated in a VA hospital watching endless repeats of Wheel Of Fortune. This did little to put to rest the absurd notion that Russia is the evil Empire from Star Wars and the USA is a paradise where even Pat Sajak can find work. Failing the entire game and one could bear witness to the chilling sight of the Russian flag replacing ol' Stars & Stripes over the nation's capital, complete with a change over from America the Beautiful to some god awful militaristic Russian piece of crap song. Too bad they couldn't utilize the hallmark of all wacky turnarounds: the harsh record scratch. Never has something so plausible and frightening been reduced to a more comically absurd level. Wait wait wait, I forgot the one cut scene that was just a caricature of Gorbachev banging his fist on a desk over and over and over again. See they were all the equivalents to today's gif animations. Both endlessly repeat themselves so, if you wanted to, you could watch old Mikhail totally fuck up his office for hours. And I did.


Islamic religious fundamentalists. How ahead of its time. Clearly Tom Clancy can see not only through enemy bunkers reinforced with lead and into the hearts of all commie bastards, but also into the very future of humanity.

The battles were mainly moving about, getting a firing solution on another ship, and then blowing it up. To be sure, there was a shitload of technical minutiae like managing sonar, hiding your own sound signature, conducting damage repair, managing weapon stores and so on and on and on.


I have no idea what half of this shit means.

I, however, remember this game being amazingly easy and I was not far removed from my borderline retarded Gorillas sessions at this point. The battle animations made it worthwhile anyway though. Who knew that torpedoes launched at ships came up to the surface and ran in an identical straight line every single time?


Look everyone, it's the lone torpedo firing animation. 10% of the game is spent watching this over and over again.

For the level of ease in the game, it's really surprising how meaty the manual was. It had detailed schematics for every sub in use at the time that were, I suppose so, helpful if you...somehow made the game a lot harder on yourself? Reading it, halfway through I was pretty sure that I had mistakenly received a Department of Defense briefing by mistake. The offhand remarks about the crampness of certain Russian subs or how this one handled versus that one only reinforced my opinion that Tom Clancy is creepy as all fuck.


This actually did double duty as an old fashioned piracy preventer. If you didn't have the secret dossier that was smuggled out of the Kremlin (aka the manual), you couldn't even hazard a guess as to what ship the game was throwing up there. Unless, of course, you were Tom Clancy and your wet dreams are solely composed of Russian ship schematics.