Corner Confessions is for sharing guilty gaming secrets. The series will, I promise, contain the odd bombshell, but I’m going to kick it off with a thunderflash: Although I’ve been playing truck sims for nigh-on twenty years I’m still pretty hopeless at reversing HGVs.
A is for Awfully big snap. In 2006 six artists turned an abandoned USMC hangar in California into the world’s largest pinhole camera and used it to create the world’s biggest print photograph. While free sim The Great Picture doesn’t shed any light on the technical challenges the artists overcame (lightproofing the hangar required 24,000 square feet of black polythene, developing and fixing the image 1,800 gallons of chemicals and a stupidly large tray) it does let you inspect the giant snap and roam the camera’s interior pondering the silly things humans do in the name of art.
Derelict factory environment? Check. Container-cluttered port? Check. ‘Woodpecker’ over-the-horizon-radar array? Check. Three of Early Access Acrodrift’s half-dozen drone playgrounds are a little hackneyed. Fortunately, a couple of the others are unforgettable.
I wish my two current squeezes, Dagger Directive and Infinite Orienteering: The Hiker’s Path, could get together and produce a kid. As gratifying as it is to round a boulder or barge into a clearing and find the orange-and-white control point I’ve been seeking for ages, I think deep down I’d prefer to be hunting for weapon caches, rendezvous points, and camouflaged OPs.
U is for Undeserved neglect. Sometimes I’m so busy searching out the obscure and quirky, I fail to give the megafauna of the sim and wargame fields the attention it deserves. SCS Software, the studio that almost singlehandedly created the truck sim genre, is in the process of sidestepping into two adjacent genres. The following vids suggest both Road Trip – a new car-based exploration mode for American Truck Simulator unlocked through purchase of add-ons like this one– and Coaches – a self-explanatory ETS2 DLC – are going to be unmissable.
La Forge du Code doesn’t seem to have profited greatly from a week-long advertising stint on the Corner (After an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign the French dev behind the unusually foggy Kriegsspiel ~ 7 Years’ War is now considering his options). Hopefully, the site’s latest advertiser, Kudos Games, will see some benefits. The $20 Cold War Battles launches on Thursday, and, like Kriegsspiel, has numerous endearing qualities.
Yesterday evening command of the Sabre-rattling 12th FBS squadron passed to Major Furnace Amberwick after Major Terence Torrance, my alter aero for much of the past week, failed to return from a bomber interception mission near Old Baldy. The fact that Torrance wasn’t killed by MiGs or flak (he perished in a mid-air collision) is significant. Right now a number of factors conspire to make career-mode sorties in the eminently likeable, exceptionally handsome Korea IL-2 less dangerous and less exciting than they could be.
A unique sub-themed commenter tile to the Cornerite who has explored the most real, intact submarines (List the visited vessels in a comment, please). I’m ashamed to admit I’ve only ever roamed the compartments of one actual sub – HMS Alliance. I’m sure there are THC readers who have bagged many more.