I’ve been a subsim fan fan since Silent Service, although the real fans are over at subsim.com. Silent Hunter 2 and 3 were pretty good for their time (the multiplayer cross-connect with Destroyer Command looked amazing, but I never got to try it), but these games definitely show their age now.
SH4 is good, in my opinion. I think it needs a few hacks out of the box (change the fire control from “Enter” to “Ctrl+Enter” or something you’re less likely to accidentally hit!), and there are oodles and oodles of mods over at Subsim, but I can get lost in that game for days. Full real, for me, I even printed out my own banjo for computing attack runs.
I never got SH5, but I heard so many complaints about it, I’ve stayed away. Seems like Ubisoft circle-ran themselves on that one.
There is a new subsim game I’ve been watching. It’s very very alpha at the moment, but has some great multiplayer potential…with the right crew.
I’ve played a lot of SH3 with a friend of mine over a LAN on cold winter days. For some reason we’ve always managed to almost smash into eachother when convoy attacking… we were not very good at all
I wore out my Jane’s 688-I CD years ago. I understand that Dangerous Waters is kind of the spiritual heir, but it seems so much more complex. 688-I balanced complexity and fun very well. I remember it was easy enough to control with a KB/M combination that I could rock my then 3-mo. old (now 14 y.o.) daughter to sleep with a bottle and play with the sound down low and the lights off. By the time I’d finish a mission, she’d be out like a light.