There is this old British movie called "The Dam Busters". In World War II the British wanted to destroy a dam on the Ruhr, whose destruction would flood the main German industrial center. But it was a big dam and normal bombs dropped by bombers would only destroy the top part, which would cause flooding, but not disastrous flooding. What needed to be done was to set off a bomb at the bottom or at least near the bottom of the dam.

But there was no way to do it. Possibly with torpedoes, but water approaches were protected by torpedo nets. So the British invented a skipping bomb. Bomber flies in and drops the bomb, it skips like a stone over the torpedo nets until it hits the dam, the bomb sinks and a timer sets it off. Simple plan which required the bomber to be at just the right speed and altitude to pull it off. But it worked.

One of my Commodore 64 games was also based on this event and it was also called "The Dam Busters". Your objective was to fly a bomber to Germany and blow up the dam and then fly back and land. You controlled the plane from takeoff to landing and could switch from crew member to crew member. You controlled the pilot, bombadier, navigator, chin and tail gunners. I think that was it.

It was a pretty cool game. You'd fly through flak and avoid or shoot down barrage balloons. German fighters attacked you and you had to switch back and forth between the gunners to shoot them down, occasionally switching to the pilot to fly the plane and avoid obstacles. Plane damage could take out each gunner or an engine or the flaps. It was fun being down an engine or two.

With one engine gone you upped the other three engines to max, adjust the trim and you were ok. With two engines gone on one side you'd adjust the trim all the way and that still wouldn't be quite enough, meaning you had to pilot constantly while operating the guns. With only two engines you also couldn't climb altitude so you only had one chance at the bomb run (you only had one chance anyway since you only had one bomb). With three engines gone you were losing altitude no matter what. At that point it's fun to see if you can make it back to base before you crash.

The graphics were simple and good -- it was a Commodore 64 after all. Orange barrage balloons, yellow spotlights and tracers, grey fighters. And then the bombing run. As you fly along the lake you can see the two towers at each end of the dam. There are two searchlights at the bottom of the bomber, angled so that when they merge you're flying at 60 feet (clever!). Then you have to adjust speed exactly (which come to think of it, you needed at least three engines for). Then you get closer and closer and wait for the two towers to reach preset markers on your viewer, which marks the exact distance to let go the bomb.

You let go the bomb and watch an animation as it skips away to the dam and invariably I missed. Man that part was hard and I never destroyed the dam. But after that head back for home, fighting fighters most of the way. There are three dams in the game, with the farther dams being harder. You also had the navigator map which showed a map of northern Europe. A little picture of your bomber showed where you were and there were icons for each dam and I think anti-aircraft batteries. You could fly around trying to avoid flak, though you always had the fighters. But fighters you could shoot down unless they came in heavy on both sides whereas flak randomly destroyed things.

Just one of my favorite games. The drone of the engines. The rat-ta-tat of the German fighter's machine guns and your own guns. The boom boom boom of the AA batteries. I also had a couple of fighter games, where you fly a fighter. But flying a bomber always seemed to me to be more interesting. Just more things to do. A flying fortress cleaving through the sky. Captures the imagination.