Oolite Bulletins

I have been trying to think of the name of this game for a long time now.

It came out towards the later years of the BBC micro.

Tbh it was an Elite clone but the big difference was that it was set underwater and instead of having space-stations etc there were underwater ports and bouys and things.

I bought it and was quite impressed with it to be completely honest. I remember it had U in the title and it could have been an acronym, such as UIM, USM or something like that. It had the wireframe graphics just as Elite and I remember was quite distinctively green. All the usual things such as trading, upgrading, exploring etc.

I have been going mad trying to remember exactly what it was. I can't even remember the company it was by. I was tempted to think Superior, but it may not have been.

Anyone have their thinking cap on ?

I did a bit of Googling and found a likely candidate -- a game called UIM (Ultra Intelligent Machine) from Impact Software. There's a little information on it here.

Thank you very much, that is the one, bingo!

Yes, it did require the 16k sideways ram, that's right.

I very much appreciate your time.

Now I will fire up BeebEm and run the image, just for old time's sake.

ah, nostalgia! the heady days of needing 16 kilobytes!! and here we are a few years later, when Flight Sim X needs 12 GIGABYTES of drive space :-O

Now that was an odd game. Quite fun though. Didn't you have to fly your submarine to the vicinity of other ports? I remeber that one way of making money was to hire some sort of refinery / machinery and try to produce materials. You had to constantly tune the process to get the most out of it. The more complicated the process, the more things to control but the more money you *could* get out the other end.

The manual also included the phrase "Nihilistic Technofetishist" and that's got to be worth some brownie points.

Count zero - goto 1999

I remember a game similar to the UIM, that was released I think just before the turn of the century.
Quite alot more grafical, but it was like a wingcommander/ X type U-sim.
I was impressed with the atmosphere of the game at the time and played a few battles of a demo version.

Around the time you had a TV series about a super-sub too I recall.


Quite actual really, with all the northern countries scrabling to claim the northpole seabed all of a sudden.

ps
heard about the russian claim?
They reputedly used film material from a well known holywood movie to 'document' their historical flagplanting mission.
You guys think this was a
1- placeholder clip left in place error
2- Misplaced attempt to joke about the apollo missions.
3- A sleazy attempt to steal a big chunk of the Earth using stolen movies?

Arexack_Heretic wrote:

Count zero - goto 1999

I remember a game similar to the UIM, that was released I think just before the turn of the century.
Quite alot more grafical, but it was like a wingcommander/ X type U-sim.
I was impressed with the atmosphere of the game at the time and played a few battles of a demo version.

Around the time you had a TV series about a super-sub too I recall.


Quite actual really, with all the northern countries scrabling to claim the northpole seabed all of a sudden.

ps
heard about the russian claim?
They reputedly used film material from a well known holywood movie to 'document' their historical flagplanting mission.
You guys think this was a
1- placeholder clip left in place error
2- Misplaced attempt to joke about the apollo missions.
3- A sleazy attempt to steal a big chunk of the Earth using stolen movies?

I vote 3.
Attempts at being sleazy is about all the Russkies can do these days.
They even tried some laughable attempts to prove they had a lunar mining base, and reverse-engineered alien technology.
Most of that guff was dreamed up by ex-KGB bigwigs-turned-organized-crime-boss with dreams of fading glory and time on their hands.

To be fair (galling though that is), the fakery seems to be in a news report about the ludicrous flag-planting escapade, not the actual LFPE itself. It wouldn't be the first time TV news has resorted to trickery to cook up footage that looks good -- because reality is just so tiresome, and difficult, and just not dramatic enough, and you can't get the lighting right. I think Hollywood started it, in the early 20th century: didn't some film studio fund Pancho Villa, to get him to fight battles in striking locations, in good light, with the most photogenic revolutionaries in the front? Except I think in the end they had to re-shoot all the footage back in California because it didn't look right...

Yup, as far as I understand, the video didn't come from the sub mission, but from some news company that wanted to get some "nice sub footage" for the story.