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Cannot swim? That is you knackered then.
Game: SUB
Publisher: Thalamus
Authors: Mercury Projects
Price: £30
Release: Out now

There is a thing about life, and the thing about life is this: it is immensely complicated. No matter how long you stick with it, there is always something you cannot quite get to grips with or, indeed, begin to understand one tiny bit at all. Unfortunately life does not come with an instruction book, but if it did, it would undoubtedly be a badly translated instruction book with lots of sentences that had a very good but ultimately unsuccessful stab at making sense. And, d’you know, in these respects life would be a lot like this game.
So wrote Stan Wallpaper in his now standard textbook ‘101 Extremely Contrived Introductory Paragraphs’. Thanks, Stan. It changed my life. But anyway: SUB. This (erk) strategy game – the acronym stands for Strategic Underwater Battles – is one of those post apocalyptic survival numbers.

In this case the apocalypse has left the Earth’s surface one hundred per cent water and wiped out everybody but (a) those few thousands living in prototype bases on the ocean floor and (b) two surprised lovers by the names of Olive and Desmond who were in the process of romantically jumping off a mountain rather than have their feuding parents forcibly separate them. You have to trade, mine, expand, fight off pirates and generally behave in a typically post-apocalyptic manner but luckily not worry about Olive and Desmond, whose elation at realising they were suddenly free to live out their lives together was cut short by drowning.

OH YES, THE GAME
In a nutshell, a SUB session consists of buying a submarine, fitting it with mineral detectors and following it up with a cargo ship carrying mining rigs, founding a base to develop new equipment and selling the results to other traders, and doing it all again to build up a steady income and a strong fleet in order to deter pirates.

Even for a strategy game, SUB is sedate – most of the ‘action’ comes in the form of rows of fluctuating digits and although there is a communications network you can only receive messages and not, say, ask if anybody has seen any pirates recently. (And the messages you need to read are hidden among endless jokes about dolphin taming contests and the sub ‘Nostrodomo’ constantly discovering an alien ship filled with eggs).

You can declare war, in which case every trader’s hand is turned against you, but this is not really the spirit of the game and in any case combat just consists of clicking on a few squares until something goes boom so there you go. The most demanding part of SUB is improvising a way to decipher the ridiculously small numbers crammed on the screen.

By far the biggest problem with the game, and ho boy is it a biggy, is the manual. It is spectacularly bad. Putting aside the hopeless translation (see, Stan’s lessons do pay off in the end), it does not even cover everything you can do in the game, and it took the combined efforts of three people to sort out exactly what I was supposed to be doing. As well as the manual and those impossibly small numbers, you have to contend with dark blue icons on a black background. How terribly amusing.

Getting the thing up and running is a frighteningly tricky affair, but it is kinda fun in a laid-back way. Perhaps Stan puts it best in his follow-up book, ‘101 Agonising Metaphors to Close a Review’- Strategic Underwater Battles is a game pitched firmly in the field of complicated strategy and unlikely to be visited by the casual tourist of average gameplaying, but provides a satisfyingly earwig-free environment and succeeds in staying away from the large charred tree of disaster. Or perhaps not.
JONATHAN NASH