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Feature: Black Bean Games European Launch
of Dangerous Waters
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For those
who have yet to dive deeper into the background, history and
organization of Sonalysts, here is some info. Sonalysts is
an employee-owned, multi-disciplinary, engineering and technical
services firm. It was founded in 1973 and has currently 400+
employees. Those employees work in 20+ project groups Some
work in more than just one group, and the game department
is just one of those 20+ groups. Jamie for example, works
on 3 or 4 groups with S.C.S. Dangerous Waters being one of
them, and as much as he would love to dedicate all his time
to S.C.S. Dangerous Waters, he has to do some work in the
other groups as well. As you can see in the image below, the
gaming group is housed in a converted garage! A massive 30%
of Sonalysts partners (that's the employees) are former or
retired military, mostly representing the Navy. They even
have an Admiral on Staff. Aside from producing high-quality
games, Sonalysts works in such diverse fields as music recording
(Aerosmith and Lenny Kravitz), video production (most notably,
A Century of Silent Service) and training simulations (for
the military). By-the-way, Sonalysts is short for "Sonar
Analysts" which was the original task of the company.
Jamie started his presentation with
an overview of Sonalysts before moving onto the games Sonalysts
has produced, i.e. 688i Hunter / Killer, Fleet Command, Sub
Command and most recently S.C.S. Dangerous Waters.
The part
on S.C.S. Dangerous Waters covered an overview over the game
itself, with emphasis on the new platforms (compared to Sub
Command) followed by an explanation of the Quick Mission generator,
the Mission Editor and finally a short live display of the
first campaign mission with the P-3.
Following a brief introduction
by Cdr. Jeff Tall,
Jamie Carlson took the stage (and didn't leave for the next
1.5 hours).
Along
the way, Jamie dropped some nuggets of information. For example,
the Mission Brief Format in the Official Campaign Missions
is pretty authentic; a former 688 CO took part in writing
those. And for those who want to know how long the development
of a game like S.C.S. Dangerous Waters takes, according to
Jamie the Development of Dangerous Waters took around 18 months.
He added not all of that time was full-time development, as
members of the group had to work on other projects (government
contracts). I personally was pretty curious about the new
content included in the European Release. The shroud of secrecy
was lifted and here it comes...
Black
Bean has enlisted the help of Bill "SubGuru" Nichols
of SubGuru
web site fame to include a lot of his excellent missions as
well as to create some new ones. The "new" content
will apparently be available for free download to the existing
customers after the release of the S.C.S. Dangerous Waters
European Version.
The New
Campaign: Red Storm Rising. Created and updated for
the European Release by Bill "SubGuru" Nichols.
In Red
Storm Rising you are in command of various playable platforms
for 14 missions, which follow the storyline of the book Red
Storm Rising, written by Tom Clancy. The missions are also
included as separate, Standalone missions for those who do
not wish to play the entire campaign or want to revisit a
particular mission.
New Missions:
The following six missions have already been released by Bill
Nichols on his famous web site SubGuru, but have been taken
offline temporarily until after the release of the European
version of Dangerous Waters.
First
Salvo - The U.S. and Russia are on the brink of war
in the Mediterranean Sea.
Playable Platforms: Akula, Kilo, FFG-7, MH-60, P-3C,
688i
Sicilian
Wedding - You are playing an OPFOR submarine during
NATO exercise SICILIAN WEDDING.
Playable Platform: 688i
We Dive
at Dawn - Routine exercises in the southern California
Opareas
Playable Platform: 688i
Chinese
Takeout - Peacetime surveillance ops in the Yellow
Sea
Playable Platform: 688i
Blue
Dragon - Based on an incident described in H. Jay
Riker's novel, "Silent Service - Seawolf Class".
Playable Platform: Seawolf
Belling
the Cat - A scenario based on an event in Robin White's
novel, "Typhoon"
Playable Platform: 688i
The following four missions are absolutely
new:
Gunboat Diplomacy
(Author: Bill Nichols) - Gunboat Diplomacy in the Indonesian
archipelago
Playable Platform: FFG-7
Wonson Wolftrap
(Author: Bill Nichols) - SOF insertion during the Second
Korean War
Playable Platform: Seawolf
U.S. Naval Blockade
(Author : Markus Kaldenbach) - North Korean subs will have
to attack an U.S. naval blockade to clear way for a friendly
convoy.
Playable Platform: Unknown - probably Kilo submarine(s).
Operation: Last Resort
(Single Player Mission, Author : Landorin) - This mission
takes place in the Gulf of Oman and is based on real life
developments
Playable Platform: 688i
On top
of the new playable content Black Bean has added a Video documentary
about the first Nuclear driven Submarine, the USS Nautilus.
This video is exclusive to the European Release and according
to Black Bean there are no plans to release the video independently.
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