Silent Hunter III

[SirBruce]

Well, I've been playing this nonstop for the past few days, and if you like submarine sims, this game pretty much kicks ass.

If any of you have played Aces of the Deep, you know that's been the pre-eminent WWII subsim for over 10 years.  Well, Silent Hunter III is essentially the same game, with modern graphics, fully 3D, etc.  It has almost all the same features and nearly identical gameplay.  If you liked that game, you'll love Silent Hunter III.

I won't offer a full review of all the various features -- you can read that other places.  I will provide a few criticisms for those of you uncertain about buying the game.

1. 1024x768 fixed resolution.  There's a config file to change this, which says it's 1024x800, but I don't know what the acceptable settings are or even if it works.

2. No at-sea resupply.  This isn't a big deal, as you can always return to port hitting escape if you run out of fuel, and they are going to add this in the first patch.

3. The game can get really hairy if you get spotted by aircraft.  Aircraft are very hard to shoot down (the AI is better at it than I am), and they will call in more aircraft and destroyers on your position.  I've found it almost pointless to actually use your flak gun, since even if you shoot one down, it just means more are coming and you'd better submerge and change course anyway.  This makes traversing near the English coast very dangerous... I find passing through the channel actually the safer route.

4. Your deck watch crew can be blind as bats sometimes, especially in bad weather.  It's very easy to spot a ship yourself well before your crew does.  Once during a storm I targeted and torpedoed a ship less than 500 feet away that my watch crew never spotted!

5. The game sometimes will reach one of the waypoints along its plotted course and just stop, deleting the rest of it.  Other times on high time compression it will "miss" the turn, stop, and then even if you tell the navigator to resume course, he'll simply go to the next waypoint and the delete the rest.  It's an annoying bug.

6. Your crew does get tired if they stay at a certain position too long, so you periodically have to swap crew around in and out of the crew cabins.  This is okay, except there's no rationality to it.  Resiliant crewembers can stay on station 48 hours or more.  Other times, crew members seem to get "stuck" tired and no amount of rest recouperates them.  And there's no automated process for rotating tired crew, so basically you have to stop every 24-48 hours in-game and check to see if you need to move crew around, and its a tedious chore.  There are some automated buttons for moving the crew automatically according to certain states ("cruise mode", "surface attack", "submerged attack", etc.) but the AI rarely makes great choices when you do this.

7. I find it almost impossible to identify ship flags at a sufficient distance from vessels.  The flags are very small and they flutter and I can't read them until I'm 1000m or less by which time you'll be spotted.  Luckily you can simply use the games defeault map symbols (which you can turn off for adding realism if you like) which automatically tell you on the map - red for enemy, blue for friendly, and green for neutral.  Sinking a friendly or neutral ship is very bad, so only attack the red ones.  Sadly, the manual doesn't tell you this!

8. Your u-boat will have available many upgrades to it as the years pass, but these are not very well documented, either.  So you just have to wait and see what you can get when you pull into port.

9. Extreme time compression can still get rather jerky when the computer is trying to do too much, causing the keyboard to become unresponsive.  My system can't handle 1024x.  512x time compression works most of the time, but sometimes that bogs down as well, and you risk that course-handling bug when you reach a waypoint.  So I often have to slow down to 128x.  Also, if you're in battle or spotted, you're restricted to either 8x or 32x compression, which is simply too slow when you're trying to escape pursuit.  Consequently, it can take many hours to actually play a patrol, which means it'll be a long while before I send the end of the war.

Well, those are the main faults I have with the game right now.  But really, they are minor in comparison to the rest of the sim.

Bruce

[Comstar]

I read that it was DVD only. Is that true?

[SirBruce]

Yes.  If you don't have a DVD on your PC, get with the modern age, man!

Bruce

[Hanzii]

I read that it was DVD only. Is that true?

I read that it won't run well on my 486. Is that true?

[Signe]

You are a smart lad, Hanzii.  I'm sure you can tweak it until it runs like a dream.  On the other hand, you could just buy a computer.

[Big Gulp]

Yes.  If you don't have a DVD on your PC, get with the modern age, man!

Bruce

I have one on my media computer hooked to my tv that I use to do Xvid rips, etc, but not on my main yet.  I've just had no real reason to upgrade it when I have two very good optical drives already in there.  What does this mean for me?  It means I have to install it over ethernet from my media PC which is a pain in the goddamned ass.

Eventually, yeah, I'll get a DVD-ROM drive in my main, but transitions in media type really do suck.

[WayAbvPar]

Last sub game I played was Red Storm Rising (which I loved). Is Silent Hunter a WWII-only sim, or does it go into modern subs? I wish I had time to play it- it sounds like a lot of fun.

[schild]

Last sub game I played was Red Storm Rising (which I loved).

The last sub game I played was Sqoon for the Nintendo.

[SirBruce]

It's WWII-only.  U-Boat only, in fact, although the software seems flexible enough to allow for.. possible expansions?  The whole world is mapped so I expect they might release Pacific campaigns, etc.

Bruce

[Comstar]

Well this would be first game I'd need to upgrade to a DVD player for, and I don't know of any other game that needs it. Any other games on the hoirzion that are DVD only (as opposed to some games like Sims 2 where it's an optional bonus).

[SirBruce]

Most of the "big name" games are probably going to be dual CD and DVD releases since they can afford to do that.  So it's only going to be the smaller name games with lots of content that may be DVD-only.

Bruce

[Flashman]

I bought the game today and now have StarForce copy protection now installed on my computer, with 4 hidden system device drivers from them and who knows what else.

Wonderful.

bleh.

[Tale]

Last sub game I played was ...

The early Sid Meier game Silent Service, in 1985 or 86.

Same gameplay as Silent Hunter III. Loved it.

[Big Gulp]

Great game, but buggy as shit.  I've had one of my save games fail, where it will consistently crash the game 20 seconds after it's loaded, and I've also had it wipe out my saved games.  With patch 1.1, I might add.  Other than that, it's fantastic.  Just needed to cook longer.

And Starforce copy protection is the spawn of Satan.  Had I known that it was a starforce game I wouldn't have bought the damned thing.  Guess I'll know to avoid Ubisoft now in the future.  Too bad, I was looking forward to the new Splinter Cell.

[Shockeye]

And Starforce copy protection is the spawn of Satan.  Had I known that it was a starforce game I wouldn't have bought the damned thing.  Guess I'll know to avoid Ubisoft now in the future.  Too bad, I was looking forward to the new Splinter Cell.

If the new Splinter Cell is Starforce then I won't be buying that.

[Big Gulp]

If the new Splinter Cell is Starforce then I won't be buying that.

Then you won't be buying it, because from what I've heard it's pretty definite that it is a StarForce game.

[schild]

UBISoft put Starforce on the new Splinter Cell? No fucking way. I will cancel my fully paid for preorder and pick up something else.

[SirBruce]

Great game, but buggy as shit.  I've had one of my save games fail, where it will consistently crash the game 20 seconds after it's loaded, and I've also had it wipe out my saved games.  With patch 1.1, I might add.  Other than that, it's fantastic.  Just needed to cook longer.

There might be the problem. Patch 1.1 seems to have made the game worse; I don't use it and aside from the occassional crash I don't have any loss of saves.

Bruce

[HaemishM]

UBISoft put Starforce on the new Splinter Cell? No fucking way. I will cancel my fully paid for preorder and pick up something else.

Or you could just play it on the X-Box. 

[schild]

I played the first two on PC, I'm far too used to mouse/keyboard for Hitman/SplinterCell/InsertSneakerHere.