Sleeping Gods Lie (1989)

Name:Sleeping Gods Lie
Number:140
Year:1989
Publisher:Empire Software
Developer:Oxford Digital Enterprises
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:3/5
Time:11 hours 40 minutes
Won:No (48W/50L)

Sleeping Gods Lie was an interesting experience. Very buggy, easily broken, but interesting. I'm starting to suspect Oxford Digital Enterprises are just one of those companies with a buggy output. The game's Amiga version glitched out on me, the ST refused to run, and the DOS eventually glitched out too. All together, not too surprising a title.

There's a complicated backstory, in how 7000 years ago the gods created the world, and then left humans to their own devices. Kingdoms rise and fall, but for the past 4000 or so years the world has been under the control of a great empire. Its current emperor under the sway of a corrupt priest called The Archmage, while its subjects fall into decay, banditry and plague. Frequently, you get notices saying the author is going to free the people, attempts that obviously fail. One night you hear a thump at your door, its a kobbold, a creature that once brought forth trade between kingdoms. The dying kobbold tells you with its last breath to awake the sleeping god, N'Gnir, with some mysterious artifact.
The game puts a large amount of storytime towards the backstory, the detailed in-game calendar, and the design of the world. Here's the thing, none of it is really important. Even if I made it to the end of the game, I couldn't possibly get past the second month. Further, all fictional calendars ever seem to do is confuse me. Is it spring? Summer? Winter? Surely you would save a bit of memory if you just kept a clock instead of a calendar. Its unnecessarily work on the developer's part.

Like the look of this? Don't get used to it, its from the Amiga version, I had to play the DOS version

Both game and manual put great effort towards describing the 8 kingdoms that make up the world. The 8 kingdoms are really just the 8 levels of the game, further divided into sub-levels or landscapes. The game gets a little more out of itself because of this. Maybe, the game advertises that it has some 70+ levels which isn't too far from what people were already doing. There's less effort put into the levels, since there isn't that much going on in them. I imagine that even back in the day it didn't take too long to design a level.

You start off in your home. Its somewhere between Wolf-clone and Ultima Underworld in terms of controls. You get three options for controlling the game, keyboard, mouse and joystick, but they all work the same way. You can aim over a certain amount of the screen, and moving the cursor to certain places moves you. Its not as bad as a lot of the games I've played. I might be biased because of that, in saying that while awkward, its perfectly serviceable and that's been rare for a while. Its a bit slow, but that's not really because of the controls themselves.
Otherwise you get the ability to switch weapons (but not ammo), sleep, speed up/slow down time and saving and loading. Its a very basic interface, and despite all the items you can pick up over the course of the game, you don't really get to do anything with them.

Birds, once again the most annoying enemy in a game

The back of the box makes a big deal out of the game's flight sim technology, but there aren't any hills or noticeable Z-axis for the most part. A few enemies take advantage of the Z-axis and you can definitely miss an enemy by throwing too high. The only thing special about it, is that its about four years before Wolfenstein 3D and manages to run smoothly. Finally, the technology is here, now it just needs to be refined.

I'd wager the big appeal of this game these days is due to the strangeness of seeing an old-style 3D world. That oddly charming nature of the old-school 3D and a lack of people around. Well, not as much as even a crappy title from a few years from now, but its still there. Flat endless plain isn't really the appeal of that. Each kingdom tends to have one friendly NPC, and then a lot of respawning enemies. There's just something about these kinds of games that I enjoy seeing.

This is really cool, I just wish there was more of it

That said, the game squanders a lot of its early goodwill. There's a building in the early part of the game, as in, an actual 3D building you can see and enter, and that's it for until at least the 7th kingdom. Every other interior is a sprite you approach, and yes, there absolutely is an issue with what the size of everything is supposed to be. You know how RPGs always feel much smaller than they should be, and the further back you go, the more reasonable it is? Yeah, this feels smaller than the space actually in the game.

The first kind of enemy

...and the first NPC

Despite the big backstory, most of the game is spent wandering around. You just have to get smaller objectives to keep the game going. Sometimes the game is forthcoming with this, in the first area, you meet with a beggar who wants you to return his map. Then you have several kingdoms who have vague objectives, or you can't tell what you were supposed to do until after. Basically just wandering around for a few hours hoping you do the right series of events.
This leads into the game's puzzles. They're not great. The whole implementation of them is questionable. Basically, you have no method of interacting with the environment, as I mentioned. So that means solving a puzzle consists of walking up to the right object when you have the right item in your inventory. This sometimes borders on illogical, but the game at least tries to tell you what you have to do. Either way its not fun.

Note that the ground color is the same here, from a video online I know it changes on each kingdom

Combat is the meat of the game. Most weapons you get and use are projectile weapons. Each has its own little quirks. Starting out, you have your hands and various slings. You can deal pretty good damage with these, but it can be tricky aiming it, since you have to aim very high. Then you get proper weapons, bows, crossbows, these have flatter arcs and hit much harder. It feels like you have real progression in this game, but its clearly the RPG style of weapon progression. There's little reason to switch weapons in combat, and little reason to switch back to weapons. In the end I found myself with a hitscan weapon, which while it had a low ammo supply, also regenerated itself, making little reason to swtich to an earlier weapon except in large combats.
Ammo is a big factor, but you don't get a lot of control over it. Every weapon gets a base ammo, and some have fancy ammos. Only...you don't get to pick which ammo you use, so if you have fancy ammo, you'll be using fancy ammo. This sounds like a silly complaint, but I found myself in quite a few situations where I would be in better shape if I could have saved up those fancy shots. For instance, while a lot of weapons don't regenerate their ammo, you do find items that give them that ability. You can switch back to an earlier weapon, but I found that past the first couple of areas this started becoming more and more useless and annoying, as enemies started attacking further and further away.
I erroneously said that the game allows you to shoot pebbles with the crossbow and other weapons, apparently it kept the picture of a crossbow on-screen, it just had you throwing the stones with your bare hands.

Fighting against villagers, because I'm a hero

Like the weapons, enemies increase in strength over the game. Roughly, each enemy does more damage over the course of the game, and everything keeps in rough pace with each other. Instead what makes each enemy different is that some take more damage, and some move faster. This isn't entirely logical from a gameplay perspective. You start off fighting bandits, but their leader isn't anything special. Nor are the guards and magicians you fight later. Instead the most troublesome from my perspective were the demons. You can tell this version was done badly because they have transparency in the middle of their body.

I hate these guys

The demons are faster than you, so you can't easily chase after them, they're hard to kill, and they barely drop any ammo. In short, an exercise in tedium. But they appeared in the 3rd and 4th kingdoms, which is fairly early on. Meanwhile, afterwards you fight guards and magicians, who tend to drop pretty quickly and don't run faster than you.
Even though individual enemies don't have much going for them, I liked the game's AI. It felt like they were playing on the exact same ruleset as the player. Not moving around and shooting, making understandable misses, and retreating quite a lot. After attacking or when they're in bad shape. While it wasn't always great chasing after them, they didn't feel like mindless killing machines like so many other FPS enemies, especially at this time.

I didn't get a really good look at these guys until now...wow...

You get XP for damaging enemies. What's the purpose of XP? You get increased health and magic power. What's magic power? The game says that it increases your presence to demons or something like that. In practice, I'm not quite sure, it increased to around 3/4ths full when I finished, but if that did anything, its subtle enough that I never noticed it. If it did increase the range that enemies became alert to me, it hardly matters when you get new enemies every kingdom. What I did notice is that it was always damaged, like my health becomes, and never fully recovered, even after resting.
Resting is supposedly necessary to continue the game, as there's some penalty for not doing so. I don't know if that's true, because I never went more than a day without sleep. In some places I suspect this could really screw you over, because the game doesn't have a lot of safe places for you to rest. Healing is also done by picking up various foodstuffs you find on the ground.

The game makes an awful lot of assumptions about my character between the start and now...

As you've seen from the screenshots and my own implications, the level design of this game isn't great. Early on they tried something clever, but eventually it all degenerated into endless green landscapes dotted with various objects and enemies. A hide-and-seek kind of game. Another loss in the DOS version, because I know the ground color changes in the Amiga version. Just walk around this place hoping to find someone or something that'll advance the plot. It gets really bad as time goes on, because you can get completely screwed if you don't figure out where one object is in on small section of an area.
I just think this all is missing a lot more polish. The first kingdom is nice. You have to find ways to open up sections, there are optional puzzles, and the game actually feels like thought and effort was put into it. And after that...its just kind of gone. You do get the option on whether or not to return a crown to a prince, but all it changes is whether or not you get gold to pay for some ferries later. Yeah, that's what the big important part of the HUD is for, paying ferries. Could have solved this with a ferry pass.

If only all games were this polite

This game is just so very buggy. I suspect this is a consequence of the game being a FPS at a time when having a stable framerate was an impressive thing. The Amiga version broke on me at the end of the first kingdom/level, whereas the DOS version merely complained that it ran out of memory, and allowed me to save. Not being an expert in coding, I suspect there's a memory leak somewhere. Eventually I ended up quite a ways into the game, with the triggers for the game's next events simply not happening.

I've seen RPG and adventure thrown at this game quite a bit. I would have to say that while I don't think the game is a full-blown RPG, it leans towards that more than it leans towards adventure. As I said during the playthrough, adventure games require proper interaction, not just walking into anything that looks slightly interesting. The game at least has the bare minimum of what makes a RPG a RPG.

Weapons:
While the game does a RPG-style progression of weapons, as in there's rarely any point to using older weapons, at least until the part I quit on, I did like the progression. Going from lobbing shots high in the sky to being able to actually point at a foe felt nice. 3/10

Enemies:
Curiously, the enemies don't quite follow the RPG progression, some are obviously stronger than earlier areas, but others get weaker. I did like how some of the important enemies taunt you before combat, though you do have to go slightly out of your way to hear it. I did like how the AI in this game functioned, as it seemed very human, having the same limitations and making the same mistakes I did. 4/10

Non-Enemies:
None of the NPCs ever really anything to help me beyond giving me what amounted to a key. Some followed me, but this was annoying, so much so that even the developers knew this. 1/10

Levels:
From a gameplay standpoint, I disliked most of the levels, basically only existing as a featureless green void. They try to be clever with this by adding features sometimes, or interior areas, but its still obvious this is the bare minimum, and all they could do. 1/10

Player Agency:
The controls in this game felt considerably more tolerable than most. Having the aiming reticle and movement controlled by the same method at the same time is less than ideal, but it could have been a lot worse. I didn't feel like the controls were too unbarable, but I did dislike the function keys having everything not controlled by the mouse. 4/10

Interactivity:
None, just walk into anything. 0/10

Atmosphere:
I can't say this is quite the impression the game went for, but I thought it did a good job of creating a fantasy world in deep decade, despite obviously being worse than the Amiga version. Lonely, open terrain, saving the odd person left alive amidst hordes of demons and bandits. This feels like a predecessor to all those Myst-clone adventure games, just with slightly more people. 4/10

Graphics:
There are flashes of brilliance here and there, like the skyboxes and enemy sprites, but mostly it just looks like what it is, a featureless green void. 2/10

Story:
That was a lot of backstory that didn't really come up at all. I do like the in-game characters, though their triggers seem to be broken at times. Far too much of this is effectively pointless. 3/10

Sound/Music:
Your usual PC speaker sounds. 1/10

That's 23.

Now, I just rated this based on the DOS settings, for a very good reason. The Amiga and ST versions are clearly superior in every way, so its not fair to those to combine these ratings together. The DOS version does have the advantage of being more stable, but I still ultimately couldn't beat it. If I managed to get that version to continue playing, I suspect this game would get to 29, couple points each in atmosphere, graphics and sound. As such, I would only suggest that version.

The next we'll see these guys is far in the future, with their tank simulations, starting with Team Yankee, which is based off some comic book I've never heard of. Or a book, as I was only told about the comic book. Why do they keep making games based off books? Why do they keep licensing titles? I think this is the only original title, and everything else is really weird.

All in all, a rather disquieting end to the '80s for FPS titles. Seems fitting considering more often than not, the decade has been full of disappointment. Still, I am happy that the decade is over, because the future is bright and interesting.

Game 10: The Hunt for Red October

 Tom Clancy. It seems so strange that twenty years ago the man was popular and we were all on the train for freedom and justice and bringing democracy to the world. Now all I ever see popularly consumed is James Patterson and other kinds of mystery novelists who judging by the content of their books I wonder why people call video games violent. A lot of romance novels too, have tons of stuff that proves anyone who throws stones at video games are living in glass houses. I'll stick to my Agatha Christies, my sci-fi and fantasy novels. Yes, Robert A Heinlein is never going to do any of that weird stuff*.
I'm strangely nostalgic for Tom Clancy despite not being a fan, he reminds me of the schoolboyish fascination I had with military equipment back in my youth, and something I associate with people from a more optimistic era. Its funny calling a series of decades in which we were afraid of nuclear war or terrorist attacks happening at any moment, but today despite having the greatest communication tool of all time, we are constantly told lies about our politican opponents in order to make us gibbering paranoid wrecks with no consideration for the past or the future. Its only natural I have some form of optimistic nostalga for a man who wanted to write about spies and submarines.
The Hunt for Red October is, of course, the first novel by Tom Clancy, it was made into a movie starring Sean Connery and James Earl Jones, and I was bored to tears by it. This is not based off the film, although there are games based off the film adaption. You can tell because they have the mug of a greatly beloved British actor on them. This does not. This has the same dry cover you'd expect to find on the original novels. Its the story of a Soviet commander who defecting to America with the submarine Red October, a experimental prototype nuclear sub with an advanced caterpillar drive, which is silent. He acomplishes this by on her maiden voyage with him as commander, he provides a bull explaination to the crew, his officers are in on it, and sets sail for Virginia, then Cuba. Of course, Cuba isn't in the cards.
A MINOR NOTE:
Just as I was ready to call this quits, I accidentally deleted all my screenshots. As a result, the new screenshots are not entirely in line with what I've written.

GETTING IT TO WORK:
I played the Amiga verison, at first. That's a bit more complex to explain than just telling you to do X and Y. It does work just fine with a seemingly standard imitation of an A500. The DOS version works just fine as is, although I had to play in CGA because the EGA version freaked out.

Firing up the game reveals it should be a bit outside of my bailey-wick, but I already wrote the intro to this and I want to keep it. Besides, it'll let us know what's up with Red Storm Rising** and 688 Attack Submarine later on. The submarine is already an instrument of stealth and strategy and this game takes that even further, you are supposed to use stealth and strategy to escape the oppressive Soviet Union and join the freedom and democracy loving Americans. Your men do not know of this plan, so you must be careful.

The main game takes place at this here map screen, with additional help from a short-range map screen. (telling you where your enemies are) Because I am once again playing this without a manual, I do not know if the Soviets are already aware of my plan or if the boat following me thinks I'm on his side. Well, no matter, let's see how our missile compliment handles.

Let's see what to put this under, shall we:
[  ] Playing a shooter
[  ] Playing a shooter badly
[  ] Playing a strategy game
[X] Playing a strategy game badly
I'm glad to see I'm only nine games in and we've gone pretty far off the reservation. I'm playing a game where I thought I'd be shooting things, and as it turns out the shooting part isn't first-person nor very possible for me to aim. I fired off like five missiles at this guy who may or may not be my enemy. Ultimate Submarine Combat Simulation my buttocks. So that leaves stealth and speed. As to speed the slowest Soviet craft at the time of this game is something like 29.5 knots...we can reach...37 knots. Interesting.
Starting over, in case I need those missiles for some reason. One thing I have to say is that this game is very slow. Sound, despite not being very sound-y, is very important to the game experience, so I can't exactly put on some music. I can't read or anything or I'd miss something vital happening. This leaves me with staring at a single screen for long stretches of time. Riveting, isn't it? I'm now essentially describing paint dry. Fitting as the start of the game has about an hour of dead time. Its about three seconds per in-game minute and I've got a full couple of days ahead of me.
There are two engines and two propellers. Nuclear and Diesel; Caterpiller and Propeller. The later of course, create more noise, but the propeller is faster than the caterpiller. You have four missiles, two fire straight ahead and two more which seem to just drop out of your sub. These, of course, are probably completely useless to me. Other ships fall under various categories, but I find it safe to assume that engaging with any of them will result in my death. There are also mines, but that's an assurance, not a safe assumption.

It takes me til 8:16 or something in-game to finally get away from the high tips of Norway. Next stop Iceland. A few more mines. Hey, I can get through these, so I gun it. As it turns out, gunning it through mines is a terrible idea. I die a few more times, once instantly after I reload. Thanks, fellas, thanks a lot. Too boring to solely focus on, too involved to not solely focus on. Thusly, I assume that saving only saves time and location. Thanks for making the game so exploitable. Hopefully I won't need it.

Now I guess would be as good as time as any to discuss essentially the main screen, the nearby map. It contains varying colors of blue, which I believe measure the depth of that particular area. The lighter areas make it less safe for you to gun it, which seems to be the primary attempt at limiting your speed in this simulation, as otherwise you could just go full speed all the way to Virginia or whatever. Beyond the mines and hostile ships.

Its December 8th 15:10 at this point and I've been playing this off and on for several days. Finally reached a point where its all dark blue. Progress. Just off the point of Iceland. Still at the point where I could literally play a different game in another window. I'm reading something while playing this, which you know, is just what we always wanted to hear about a video game. I mean, I tend to read books during other slow strategy games like Dwarf Fortress, but at least then I'm just doing it because there's downtime in the game. Here I'm just waiting for something to happen at all.
Since I'm on this neverending journey, I found a manual for the Apple II version. The site says its the manual for the Apple II version, anyway, but the manual says its for all versions. This proceeds exactly according to the book, I have to somehow meet with the US somewhere, where I will be able to defect to the glorious USA with Ronnie Reagan, apple pie and blue jeans. I also discover that soon I will have to deal with a leak in the nuclear power plant on-board. Soviet engineering, eh? The good news is I figured out how to make time go faster. Ah, progress.
Well, thanks to the time trick and a lack of anything underneath, I can go at full speed towards America. Three days in and I'm halfway there. And nothing's happened since Iceland beyond me seeing a ridge sometimes. A ridge here and there, requiring course adjustments. This leads me to question if I will see any action at the end. The game says I'm going to find Soviet subs near the US's bases, and the novel does involve an explosive confrontation with a sub after the ruse has almost been completed.
Now, its worth pointing out that the combat in this game is properly garbage. I know I explained the manual firing of torpedoes, but when you're near the surface, firing torpedoes against a ship on the surface, supposedly guided, it still comes out garbage. I could miss Mt. Everest twenty feet away from it. My previous experience is Battleship and Down Periscope, but aiming is legitimately hot garbage. Is this just a general problem with submarines, or is this a problem with Red October?
Of course, as I write this the nuclear drive gets thrown out of commission. I don't know whether to blame quality Russian engineering or the story. The Diesel engine requires frequent trips to the surface. I presume this is due to toxic gases building up inside the sub. I don't under how subs work at all, is what I'm saying. At this point I think I'm just going to give a token effort towards any subs that try to sink me and resort to save-scumming.
It doesn't take long for me to get close to the coast of America. So close, but how far away am I? Answer?

Ah, Maine, just how I remember it.

Right on the coast. I have touched America and no one has done anything about it yet. Now what do I do? Am I too low? Too high? The manual is useless. Something eventually happens. I can't pass time quickly. Who is it? Who knows. I switch to stealth mode.

The ships that approach are American. Only took me so long. They send info on how to proceed and win this thing. I even get info on where the Soviets are. Or is it the American fleet? No matter. If nothing else, this is a really enjoyable minute and a half. Let's see where I have to go...
This seems easy. Will it be easy? Will I be able to find them? Is the game just jerking me around despite having no actual provisions to finding out where the real 33W and 75N is? Am I throwing all these questions out merely to pass my own time and pad out this review's word count?

A lot of ships arrive. They're not really doing anything. I'm not actually close to the contact point, having missed it slightly. I'm starting to get antsy. Surely the Soviets know roughly where I am and roughly where the US ships are. They're going to send someone after me, and I know that according to the manual any combat against Soviets while the US are in range will result in the US deciding I'd look good if I was Swiss, if you know what I mean. I don't know what's happening. I keep circling the contact zone and nobody tells me anything. None of the ships contact me. This goes on for much, much, much longer than it should. Actual hours. I get impatient and eventually end up beaching myself trying to find wherever it is I'm supposed to go to end this game already. I'll give the developers credit and say the long wait was something they couldn't fix, but this is objectively garbage. I'm pretty sure this has already reached the point where I've hit the eight hour mark. Another trip across the Atlantic it is then...By the way, this is roughly a two hour real-time experience with the proper speed.

Comrades, it was just a joke. Comrades? Comrades?

This time I follow the curvature of America. Sure, if this game was anything close to realistic I'd cause a bigger scene than a bunch of K-Pop fangirls locked up with their idols. Then, if it was realistic, something would fricking happen when I blow across the Atlantic full speed. Go past Florida...where's everybody? What happened? I'm about to hit Cuba. I think its Cuba, I don't know anymore with this map. By the way, when you use the periscope near land, it doesn't show anything other than sea. Quality work guys. You know, I've heard a lot of negative things about '80s British computer games. Like lots of absolute garbage that no one would ever play if they saw in-depth beforehand. This is mostly regulated to bad action games. Usually platformers or fighting games. This is really new ground I'm breaking here. I don't like it. Its more of a challenge to make an unfun and uninteresting strategy game.
After a while it starts to occur to me it may just be a problem with the Amiga version, we're not exactly playing the highest quality gaming experience here or anything. DOS it is. For some reason the EGA setting causes the game to crash so the CGA setting.

Make your own jokes here, I can't see anymore.

Kill me now. Its one thing to play a game made for CGA, but its another thing to play a game made for EGA downgraded to CGA. There's a reason why it took until EGA for the PC to take off as a gaming platform. I won't be rating this based on the DOS versions graphics and sound, but it is worth pointing out that both are terrible. I don't find anything I'm looking for and at this point I'm ready to call it a day. Ross Scott of Accursed Farms may like to finish games for his internet thing, especially for obscure ones without the ending documented online, but he's lucky if he gets through twelve games a year. He can afford to wait. I wanted to be done with this a long time ago. That's what I would like to do. Unfortunately, I deleted all my Amiga screenshots by mistake, so I get one final shot for this.
Now, I obviously didn't win this time around either. The game's a straight shot once you know what you're doing. Only two hours of waiting. The problem is you absolutely have to find US ships before you hit the US coast. They're obviously not patroling anywhere around the obvious route for a Soviet submarine to invade. I'm sure if I cared I'd check more along Greenland or France for some, maybe further south along the Atlantic than I've been. I'm sure there's a way for the game to be beaten, I just don't care to enter the developer's head to find out.

I guess its time to rate it, as part of my grand shooting game project. You might be saying, "But Morpheus, this isn't a shooting game, why are you rating it?" Well, three reasons, I spent time on it, I started this with the knowledge that it would be the first Amiga game I play for the blog and I don't really care, we've got some other submarine games coming up, better start with something. Even if its garbage.

Weapons:
You get torpedoes. Non-specific torpedoes. Ultimate Submarine Combat Simulation my buttocks. 0/10

Enemies:
Effectively, there are no real enemies, in the sense that there's nothing you have a decent shot at killing. Some technical effort was put in making each individual ship, but, these are functionally the same in combat terms. You fight an enemy, you will probably die. 1/10

Non-Enemies:
The US does or does not qualify depending on circumstances. They're...something... 1/10

Levels:
Each time you reload the game you get a different scenario/layout. Meaning you can save just before a thousand missiles are about to hit your vessel, but you reload and nothing is there. The opposite can happen too. The game itself is a long slog across the Atlantic that never changes beyond layouts. Effectively, there are no levels. Also, the terrain is extremely questionable and I can go across the green area much longer than I should be able to. 0/10

Player Agency:
You have a great many options available to you, even if most of these are solely useful to whatever situation you are in. I didn't really use most of them, but it is better to have some options that might not be so useful rather than lack options that would be. There's no real way to measure what direction a particular area is from you, however, which is a minus. 5/10

Interactivity:
There is no interactivity with the game world. 0/10

Atmosphere:
I don't feel like I'm on a submarine, I feel like I'm playing a simulation of what someone thought a submarine would feel like. If I have to spend time doing something else while the game is going on,  0/10

Graphics:
While it does look nice on a surface level, when you get down to it it looks rather questionable. The geography on the main map looks wrong. The sea map is just a blur of blue color. I'm sorry, but I just look for more in my games. 2/10

Story:
There's not much story happening in the game, in fact, you mostly only get story whenever you crash. If I randomly came across this, I'd wonder what the hell was going on. 1/10

Sound/Music:
Bloops for shooting missiles, a buzzing sound for the propeller. 1/10

That's 11. Let's just adjust that down to 9. That being this really isn't a good strategy game either. It is the very definition of a video game as a pointless time-waster. How ironic it's the adaption of a novel. Thinking about it, I don't know how you would adapt the novel into a good game. Oh, sure, you could certainly make it into a competent game. Fix the ending issues, map, maybe something happens New Yorkers or Icelanders see a sub barrelling through. That'd make it competent. But good? Maybe in the downtime try to ferret out any moles. I mean, you still got problems, but then its just a crummy Covert Action-type of game, without a career mode.
Hmm, maybe as a single scenario...

Next time, the finale of A-10 Tank Killer. Probably.

*This is of course, sarcasm. Science fiction and fantasy, being the domain of weirdos, has just as weird sexual and violent content as James Patterson's novels and most romance novels. But the point is that the more popular novels frequently contain content that people might actually imitate, as opposed to the content in Friday or Neuromancer. Mostly. Weirdoes being weirdoes, there are the crazies who take the absurd into the real.
**Also a Tom Clancy adaptation.