Two new releases vied for my attention over the weekend. Korea: IL-2 had me reaching for my screenshot key every few minutes, but when it came to seeding smiles and producing the good kind of forehead corrugations, it was Nick Nieuwoudt’s dieselpunk artillery sim that came out on top.
GenAIs such as Grok and Gemini are already perfectly capable of coding the vitals of computer wargames… the GUIs, the LoS systems, the AIs. How long will it be before they can spot promising untapped historical themes the way a human designer can? Judging by my perfunctory research, that time may already have arrived!
O is for On War: Stalingrad. I like the sound of Tomislav Čipčić’s next operational offering. The Croatian dev behind the elegant Attack at Dawn: North Africa believes he can deliver a deep Eastern Front wargame that is also “readable, understandable, and enjoyable”. Presumably, like its parched predecessor, On War: Stalingrad will let players switch from turnless to WEGO mode whenever they please.
Steamed on Friday and esteemed (by me) since yesterday, Pistols at Dawn is an inexpensive (£4) and ingenious turn-based pistol duelling game. By thoughtfully placing numbered tokens and special coins on a clockface-style board, you attempt to move your crosshairs onto your opponent’s silhouette and edge their reticle away from your outline.
To qualify for a Dusty But Trusty article, a game must be old enough to vote in Nicaragua, buy tobacco in Djibouti, and make the beast with two backs in Nepal. More importantly, it must be demonstrably super, smashing, great, ace, wizard, bonzer, the knees of the bee, the testicles of the dog, and the whiskers and pyjamas of the cat. You don’t need rose-tinted pince-nez or a cutting-edge pixel pump to enjoy 24 karat golden oldies like… GT Legends.
There’s arguably not much point in analysing General Staff’s AI at the moment as the code that ensures the game’s Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century soldiers soldier sensibly and believably is still under the rasp. What I can do, having toyed with the current beta build, is give you an idea of what purchasers of Ezra Sidran’s singular tactics game will and won’t get.
Although the stiff throttles annoyed, and the mooring tutorial tied itself in knots after I accidentally skipped a stage, the time I spent with the Professional Ship Simulator demo yesterday passed pleasantly enough.
The Crimson Banner: War of Liberation demo is quite something. Deftly translated, lavishly tooltipped, and unusually generous (including tutorials it boasts fifteen scenarios), it does exactly what trials are supposed to do: illuminate, entertain, and pique interest.