Two Reviews

I'm going to post a couple of shorter reviews today, of very different things.

Pensacola Lighthouse and Museum

First, while in Pensacola last month, I also visited the Pensacola Lighthouse and Museum, across the street from the Naval Aviation Museum. The lighthouse dates back to 1859 and is still operational today. It’s on the smaller side, basically just a walk through the lighthouse keeper’s old house and then the chance to climb the 177 steps to the top of the lighthouse. The museum portion was well-done, and I have to give them props for using every available space to deliver exhibits, as there was a display on the chamber pot in their bathroom. There was some interesting stuff on the history of the Pensacola area and the development of lighthouses, mixed with a lot of fairly typical historic house.

Bulbasaur quite enjoyed his visit

Website

The climb to the top of the lighthouse is pretty punishing, as it’s hot and humid and while 177 stairs doesn’t seem like a lot, it is when you’re doing them all at once. I doubt most people can make the climb without stopping at least once to catch their breath. Once at the top, you can see the base of the light mechanism, revolving away, and get the chance to step out onto the catwalk around the top of the lighthouse. The view over the base and the ocean is quite nice (although most of the outdoor planes at the aviation museum are hidden by trees) and it would probably be spectacular during a Blue Angels practice. Just be aware that it is not recommended if you are afraid of heights. On the whole, it’s a nice thing to do if you have a half-hour or so after the Naval Aviation Museum, the weather is clear (we had a lot of fog during the trip) and you feel like climbing a lot of steps.

Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age

Continuing my occasional practice of reviewing naval-themed video games, I took a look at the recently-released Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age, a Cold War-era naval combat game. When it was first announced, my initial comment was “this could be interesting, but why do we need it when Command: Modern Operations exists?” and after spending a couple hours with the early access version, I think that is pretty much correct.

Now, I should be fair to Sea Power. It’s a perfectly adequate game, and I enjoyed what I played of it. It’s probably a bit more intuitive than CMO, and unlike CMO, which is played entirely on the map, it actually has reasonably nice 3D graphics, and it’s fun to watch your ships blaze away at the enemy. It’s also cheaper, $50 vs $80, although CMO does get substantially discounted if you’re willing to wait for a sale. But there are two major problems. First, it’s a much shallower game, without nearly the options CMO gives you. CMO has effectively every plane and ship from 1946 to the present, and within the limits imposed by having two separate databases, broken at 1980, you can basically do whatever you want. Sea Power is basically only for the period 1965-1985, and even within that period, has a far more limited array of ships and planes. For instance, neither the Hornet nor the Skyhawk are in the game right now, although this could be an attempt to descope and get the game out sooner. It also lacks a lot of CMO's more sophisticated systems for things like complicated missions.

The graphics are quite pretty

Second, the graphics keep getting in the way of gameplay. The basic problem is that, given the scales of modern naval combat, the game fundamentally needs to be a map game if you’re going for this kind of realism. There’s a reason that the modern captain fights his ship from the CIC, and the same factors apply here. CMO leans into this, and just has the map. Sea Power doesn’t. The map is treated as an adjunct to the visual display, which means that you have to keep switching back and forth, and for some reason, it doesn’t automatically scale the map to keep the area the same. So you have to redo that every time you go from fullscreen map to minimap, or just live with the minimap being entirely useless. (I am informed that this flaw is carried over from the dev’s previous game, Cold Waters, which makes it even more irritating). It would be really nice if the game treated the graphics and map as something closer to equals and made it possible to, say, embed the graphics as a corner on the map.

To be clear, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t buy Sea Power. It’s not a bad game right now, although there are definitely some rough edges, and as it's still in Early Access, I expect it will get better over time. Specific bright spots are that Sea Power has mod support, which CMO doesn't, and even has a decent array of mods on the Steam Workshop right now, which helps some with the lack of platform variety. It might also get multiplayer somewhere down the line, another feature the consumer version of CMO lacks. But for now, unless you really like graphics or don’t want to deal with the sort of nerdiness CMO requires, you should buy that instead. Not only is it the better game, you’ll also get plausibly the best open-source database of the world’s military hardware with it.