$1 Computer, $3 Game

All Fucked Up On The Eastern Front

Some time ago, I inherited a 17" laptop PC from a company that went under, for $1. It's a little old now, and it's missing its battery so it needs the power point all the time, but it works just fine. In its heyday when it was new it was a $5k machine, but depreciation and writing it down and neglect brought the price down to $1 when I bought it off the dying firm.

Since then I've been putting on some old PC games for kicks. Some of them run, some of them don't. It's a shame that I can't run 'Baldur's Gate' 1&2 on it, but I did manage to pick up a copy of  a game called 'Commander' for $2.97 at Dick Smith last week. It's been a while since I've played a strategy game set in Europe, where you fight hard on the Eastern Front. So for less than a McValue meal, I've been having much fun with this game for a few days now.

The game dumps you in on the German side in 1939, so you're committed to marching into Paris and then doing your own Barbarossa, but once you're underway, the Eastern Front turns into a very nasty mess very quickly. Quite frankly, the Western Front is nothing like the bloodbath that takes place in the East, which to some extent is a reasonably accurate reflection of what really happened. I certainly haven't made it close to Stalingrad, but the equivalent stalemate blood-bowl bone-grinders are taking shape.

Once out East, the aim of the game ends up as trying to wipe out as many Russian units comprehensively at a faster rate than they can create units. The rate of attrition is quite horrendous. One imagines this was precisely the kind of nightmare scenario the generals on both sides faced. I know we in the anglophone world are much more familiar with D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge and all that, but what took place out East was probably 3-5 times more ferocious than anything the western allies faced. For the price of a sandwich, I guess I've been given yet another history lesson.