Trapped news

Looking like a cross between an old-fashioned gramophone player and a glass harmonica, the trusty THC news trap generally catches at least a couple of stories overnight. When I opened it up this morning I found the following five paragraphs fluttering about inside the holding tube.

One day upcoming Pacific theatre wargame Task Force Admiral may let players participate in sorties as well as plan them. Yesterday Drydock Dreams Games released a video showing a prototype pilot mode in action! The flight sim teaser came hot on the heels of another surprise announcement. Assuming an imminent Kickstarter campaign goes well, TFA will eventually be available in both digital and physical forms.

From a distance, the deployed-yesterday Forgotten but Unbroken doesn’t look daring or detailed enough to dethrone my favourite WW2 X-COM-like. However, early Steam reviewers seem pretty content despite the lack of locational damage and destructible walls and floors.

The flawed but fun Wars Across the World has spawned two spin-off series, both of which have inherited their parent’s love of unfashionable history. Until SGS Battle For: Fort Donelson arrived last week, the more intimate of the pair, SGS Battles, offered Twentieth Century scraps only. A recreation of a rarely gamed American Civil War engagement, Fort Donelson does its unscripted counterfactual storytelling with three-hour turns and parade ground-sized map zones. The screenshots suggest Yankee players will need to overcome Jack Frost as well as Johnny Reb.

Wallets are whimpering across Simulatia today. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 unlocks in less than ten hours and will set you back seventy nicker at the very least (the Aviator Edition is a whopping £200). The headline attraction is a career mode that could profoundly alter the way many people use FS. Will FS2024 prove sufficiently marvelous to make it into the next RPS Top 100? I doubt it, but you never know.

This fascinating chat between ‘rival’ tank sim artisans, Radian Simulations and eSim deserves far more than 10K views. Particularly interesting are the sections where Nils talks about the challenges of working for military customers, and the participants admit that a tight development budget isn’t always a disadvantage when you’re making games.