Sub Culture

Sub Culture is a submarine action/adventure computer game, developed by Criterion Studios and published by Ubisoft. It was released on 1997, and was often praised as a solid title, but received little recognition and had only limited sales.

Story
In the opening sequence of the game, a soup can discarded from a boat smashes the home of what seem to be (and are) a race of tiny submarine humanoids. The player takes the role of the survivor of this disaster, a freelance sub captain who must buy, sell, trade, and pirate his way to the top in a cutthroat world of underwater adventure. When you start the game, you discover that the Bohines, a nation in the game, are at war with the Prochas, another nation.

To survive and prosper, you can engage in various mining or salvage operations, recovering enormous bottlecaps, cigarette butts, thorium crystals, and pearls, all of which are valuable commodities sellable in cities. However, one must watch out, as both mutant fish and dastardly Pirate subs lie in wait for the unsuspecting. Once the player has built up enough cash, they can begin to exploit a form of 'stock market' in which various commodities can be purchased and resold at other locations or times for higher prices.

Should these mundane activities begin to become boring, the player can also take on various missions for either of the two warring nations. As the game progresses, these missions become progressively more difficult and dangerous, ranging from dropping depth charges down the air vents of an underground base to attacking nuclear-powered torpedo-firing walking tanks. Eventually the two nations come to terms in order to meet and defeat their mutual foe, the Pirates. The final mission consists of an all-out assault by both nations against the concealed Pirate city, with the player shooting their way through heavily guarded tunnels to plant a bomb next to the city.

Gameplay
The gameplay is rather straightforward, placing the emphasis on buying and trading goods found in the environment for weapon, shield, and utility upgrades. There are also missions available, but they serve only to give the player more money, and have no value to the plot.

Graphics rendering
Sub Culture was one of the very first games, if not the first game to support both Direct3D and the most popular 3D-accelerators of the era straight out-of-the-box. Not only is there support for software rendering and Direct3D, but also native 3Dfx Glide, Rendition Verite RRedline and PowerVR PowerSGL. This plethora of options allows the game to be run in hardware-accelerated mode on almost any platform, provided operating system and graphics card driver issues do not arise.