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Submarine Titans

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Submarine Titans

 

I remember playing demo of this game as a kid and recently I have rediscovered this overlooked game from the year 2000.

It's a real-time strategy situated in the future where a collision of Earth with Clark Comet causes enviromental changes which destroys most human communities on land, melts down the polar ice causing rise of the sea level. The only one who survives this disaster intact are undersea colonies build before the collision.

Here is a screenshot of the game itself:

 

submarinetitans006.jpg

 

There are three playable sides and basic gameplay has some resemblance to StarCraft but there is quite a lot of additional features.

The three sides are the White Sharks, the Black Octopi and the Silicons.

 

 

The backstory

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

The game itself is in isometric view and looks very nice. In the background you can often see various sea animals just swimming around. My only complaint would be that because the faction color pallete of ships and buildings is the same they often blend in together.

The weakest point of the game is it's user interface. You can't issue a queue of commands or waypoints and while you can create groups of units and bind them to numbers the interface doesn't show what kind of units are in selection unless the group has only one type of unit. The interface shows it's age here, but it has a few neat feautres like a scouting command (unit moves to marked location and when it is damaged or sees an enemy it returns back to original position), zooming out the game and rotating the game - rotating and zooming is not something often seen in 2D strategies.

 

 

What makes the game special

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

Overall it is a very interesting game filled with features which not only make every faction in the game unique but would also make for a very interesting multiplayer experience where these features would come into full use.

The singleplayer campaign is not very interesting because there are practically no characters but there is at least good mission variety ranging from simple destroy enemy to goals like capturing certain structure or unit and gathering resources.

The game's good soundtrack helps too.

 

 

How to run the game

On todays versions of Windows you can encounter few problems with the game. Namely wrong color palette and low framerate.

 

You can find some solutions to this problems on the internet.

For the color palette issue the most reliable method suggested was to stop explorer.exe process and run it again after you are finished playing.

I didn't find anything related to framerate issues but I found out they can be solved by changing resolution while in game (in an actual mission not just in main menu).

 

However these solutions are awkward to use. What you should do is downloading ddwrapper:

http://bitpatch.com/ddwrapper.html

Put it into your Submarine Titans folder and change ColorFix and ForceDirectDrawEmulation equal to 1 in the aqrit.cfg file. This solves both issues without the need to kill explorer.exe or do anything else. Worked for me on my Win 7 64bit machine.

 

 

Closing words

Unfortunately the game is no longer distributed. The only place you can buy it is places like Amazon where are few used copies and one unused copy on sale. Product details confirms that the game has been discontinued by manufacturer.

According to game's manual, the developer of Submarine Titans is Ellipse Studios, game has been distributed by Infogrames and Strategy First published it.

 

By my own effort of contacting some of the people responsible for game's development I found out that the game sold poorly and quickly lost it's support. Ellipse Studios closed down and the ownership is now in hands of Strategy First.

Well, on http://www.strategyfirst.com/ there is a list of games but you won't find Submarine Titans there. Strategy First currently sits on the rights for it and does nothing with it, not even selling it.

 

The playerbase is also next to none. I found only one fan site (http://www.submarinetitans.com/), which constantly changes hands and hosts either none or even content unrelated to the game.

I tried to put that fan site into waybackmachine.org and found out that this url was used for a web site about that game in 2000, then in the next few years it probably has been taken down and recently (July 2015) someone used that url and put up his own little site about Submarine Titans. But now even that humble website is no longer there.

There are some mentions about the game but most of them are really old, although I found some recent posts on neoseeker.com forums.

It seems there are also no walkthroughs or guides on the internet, only the manual, suprisingly enough it can be found on the Strategy First website, here is the link: http://www.strategyfirst.com/app/webroot/files/files/Sub%20Titans%20Manual.pdf

 

I think it's safe to say that this game is in the state of being abandonware.

Edited by Guest (see edit history)

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I'd love to see this! Submarine Titans is a fantastic RTS and seems to be right up Ross' alley given it's unique atmosphere and state on the utter brink of death. I know it's hard to come by but I believe there are working cracks floating around the interwebs.

 

However, I believe he might have a hard time recording this even if it piqued his interest. Getting it to run on modern systems without being absolutely disgusting looking (inverted colour pallet) is a bit of a challenge itself, let alone getting it to record. If memory serves, DirectDraw is the main culprit; I've personally found you can work around it by killing explorer.exe with the task manager and re-starting the process when finished but trying to record it or even take a screenshot results in all sorts of problems. That being said, Ross is quite savvy and likely knows work-arounds for such problems (or knows people who do).

 

Here's hoping!

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Finding the game for download wasn't hard for me, only the legit copies are hard to come by (or let's just say in limited quantity).

 

Killing explorer.exe was my solution as well, and changing resolution in game solved my framerate issue (for the duration of the mission).

But recently I found a workaround using ddwrapper with colorfix and ddraw emulation settings turned on. Now the game runs on my 64bit Win 7 without any issue.

http://bitpatch.com/ddwrapper.html

 

 

Also I was preparing to make an update here, so I guess this is as good time as any:

 

I tried to contact people involved with the game to find out more about what happened to it. First I tried to contact Strategy First support but I just got ignored.

But then I managed to get contact on one of the game designers, Craig Thomler, and he replied to my email. I'll quote here what he said about the game losing it's support:

 

  Quote
It sold roughly 25,000 copies, which wasn't enough to be a commercial success & the studio (which was Adelaide based) closed down soon afterwards with the various developers scattering to other companies, mostly in the game industry at the time. The development team were largely ex-pat Russians who settled in Australia post the rise of Gorbachev, with the studio owner an Indian who also ran an IT company at the time.

 

Why did the game disappear so quickly? Most games around that time had fairly short lifespans - it was long before modding and editors extended games' lives & only triple A titles had the financial backing for the marketing support needed to breakthrough.

 

He also said that rights for the game would be in the hands of publisher. But Strategy First doesn't have Submarine Titans in it's game list so I suspect it's probably more complicated, because they sell many of their games on their website, even some really old ones.

He didn't reply to my reply yet. From what I found he is very active and therefore probably busy. But one week without reply seems like a bit too long. I think I'll try to send him another email and get from him at least some more contacts.

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Bad news, I got stuck.

 

I asked the founder of Ellipse Studios about ownership of Submarine Titans and he confirmed that they sold it to Strategy First.

Which means they got it this whole time and they do nothing with it...

 

And since their support ignored me when I asked about the game, I doubt that asking them again will change their minds about rereleasing it.

Does this count as killing a game?

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I recently tried playing through the Black Octopi-campaign but got stuck somewhere after the half-way point. Some issue with the mission objectives not resolving.

 

More generally I also had a problem with not being able to scroll at a reasonable speed, but I got used to it.

 

Why this is worth playing:

- Not a lot of RTS' around that take place in an underwater setting

- Nicely differentiated factions

- As described by Enguzrad, some interesting mechanics (resources, depth etc.)

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