A2F

Instead of making you wait until Friday for the first A2Z of 2025, I thought I’d chop it into five roughly equal portions, and post a portion a day every day this week.

A is for Arresting teaser

Unsurprisingly, the final section of the above vid has generated plenty of debate in the DCS community. Excitement at the prospect of a ‘full fidelity’ F-35 has been accompanied by lots of astonishment and some cynicism. Given the Lightning II’s modernity, can ED really produce a faithful facsimile? Dino Cattaneo, a developer who has created a version of the stealthy strike fighter for FSX and P3D, thinks much of the scepticism may be misplaced:

“Contrary to popular belief, much of the required information on the F-35 air vehicle is publicly available (e.g. academic papers) and there are dozens of videos of cockpit simulators, showing the avionics and the pilot interface in great detail. Moreover, a lot of the official aircraft documentation is APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE or UNCLASSIFIED (although some of the unclassfied documents, like pages of the flight manual, are actually parts of RESTRICTED documents) and can be easily found online.

Long story short, the F-35 is actually better documented than most people think – and it IS better documented than the F-22, and even (to a much lesser extent) than the Eurofighter. There are, however, some critical areas in the development, such as the actual performance of the radar and the sensors (that is CLASSIFIED) and the actual radar cross section (which can be, to some extent, simulated with commercially available tools such as HF-SS or CST).

So, yes, there will be areas in which ED will have to guesstimate some things – so il will not be (OBVIOUSLY) 100% REAL. But (spoiler) NO SIMULATION IS 100% REAL. Can it break the game balance? Definitely YES. But that is what the F-35 can do in real life too.”

B is for Be Prost

Peruse Marcell Baranyai’s YouTube channel and Twitter feed then tell me his upcoming Eighties F1 sim doesn’t look bally promising. An industry veteran, Marcell clearly knows a thing or two about coding convincing race sim AI and physics, and crafting atmospheric tracks. Completed back in November, his impressive version of the Monaco circuit took 25 days to build.

C is for Crunching landings

I’d be interested to hear an experienced RC chopper pilot’s take on Hover Here. Gratis and great looking, it’s the most demanding miniature whirlybird sim I own, but is it the most realistic? Carelessly handled, the game’s helis have an alarming tendency to enter VRS and plunge to the ground. As the hoverers in aerofly RC and RealFlight Evolution seldom stall in this way, I’m slightly concerned I might be acquiring bad habits by relying on these two sims for most of my heli training.

D is for Daydream #9491772

In Talk Them Down, a flight sim I was picturing while out on my Sunday constitutional yesterday, you play a flight instructor in a pretty desperate situation. Not only are you not sharing an aircraft with your airborne instructee, your student has never landed a plane before, may be disorientated and short of fuel, and possibly doesn’t know their way around the cockpit they’re in. Bombard them with too many radioed instructions and they could end up confused, but fail to provide timely guidance and they might end up purchasing the farm. Panic-stricken… calm… talkative… taciturn… hamfisted… injured… too short to reach the rudder pedals… naturally, TTD’s accidental pilots would come in many different forms.

E is for Eccentric opinion

Wargame and sim devs, thinking of putting ‘historically accurate’ in the feature list of your next release? Don’t! “Appeals to historical accuracy are [] innately reactionary because they assume a singular, static incarnation of the past that needs to be reclaimed and restored, even when the past in question isn’t being held up fervently as a ‘golden age’ when women and ethnic minorities were either invisible or knew their place.”

According to RPS editor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, in a gaming context, the phrase ‘historically accurate’ is often used by “people who want to exclude certain people and perspectives, and to exclude the role of discussion and interpretation in historiography.” This unevidenced, and, frankly, rather insulting take doesn’t tally with my experience. In my experience the devs behind serious historical fare, understand better than most that history isn’t carved in stone and tends to be written by the winners.

F is for Find and free an abducted teenager in two hours

The demo of an adventure game with an intriguing premise and an eye-catching aesthetic, hit Steam yesterday. Like Apache Canyon, Encounter is a genuine 8bit game not an imitation one. It was designed on one of the ZX Spectrum’s more obscure competitors, the Oric Atmos.

6 Comments

  1. I was so sure the RPS article is going to at least take a passing hit at Kingdom Come: Deliverance before even clicking so I took a deep breath and yeah.

    So to anyone reading this I totally recommend the Kingdom Come series. Even if may not be typical tallyhocorner material, you don’t get often a historical fiction RPG without any kind of fantasy stuff and with this level of detail.

  2. Without commenting on the source (let alone bothering to read it) historical accuracy is fairly straightforward.

    Take D-Day. All the games depicting this are horrifically androcentric, a vicious betrayal of the female participants and victims of this brutal recreation of toxic masculinity.

    Except.. let’s just check the historical record. How many women assaulted Juno, Sword, Utah, Omaha or Gold? How many women manned the fortified defences? What? None? Clearly misogyny from both belligerents, exacerbated by the uncaring gaming industry in its representations of that fateful day.

    Yeah. Fuck off. Historical accuracy doesn’t mean shoehorning ‘the global majority’ into the things that involved ethnic and sexual minorities. Men are a global minority, not least because they make life-ending sacrifices on behalf of their communities. The people fighting fascist oppression were of all skin colours, yet.. one was massively overrepresented.

    Pretending otherwise denies historical fact. Attacking computer games for recognising historical reality is malicious denialism. Claiming the moral high ground by doing so is reprehensible and exactly why so many people stopped reading that discredited hate filled website.

    Thank you Tim for your objectivity and common sense. It’s such a delightful counterpoise.

    • Thanks, cederic. While I don’t see eye to eye with RPS on some significant issues, and doubt I’ll ever be able to completely forgive them for the way they dealt with Terfgate in 2020, I wouldn’t describe them as ‘hate filled’. ‘Narrow-minded’ and ‘short-sighted’ maybe.

    • I agree. I live in Slovakia, been to Czechia several times, even to the locations depicted in KCD. And even today the majority of people in the villages here in Central Europe haven’t seen black people in they life. Well I mean eye to eye. So shoehorning them into KCD is silly. Yet there are lot of people who are angry and demand that they should be included. Even gypsies, which are pretty much only people of color we have here in any significant numbers (sadly less significant after ww2 for obvious reasons) would be very scarce in the timeframe depicted, although some would be present, but the major migrations happened slightly later after the game timeline.

      As for lgbt+ well, they were there, as pretty much troughout of all of history. I mean was there homosexuals during middle ages? Sure. But making someone openly gay in a game set in middle ages would be wrong. Kinda like setting your game in Saudi Arabia and making your MC openly gay (hint: he/she wouldn’t last long).

      And honestly I’m tired of media industry and game companies including people of color and lgbt+ everywhere just for the sake of them to be there. If you want to include them, make it mean something, not just a tickbox on your checksheet.

      Should there be more games representing said minorities? Absolutely, but the games should be made with that purpose in mind.

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