L is for Last night I unwound with the help of FLEX Disc Golf. Recently bolstered with several new courses, this budget-priced offering manages to scratch multiple itches simultaneously. I enjoy its bucolic outdoor spaces, its dash of aeronautics, and blend of skill and luck. Threading a disc through a distant stand of conifers can be incredibly satisfying, especially if you managed to land one in a lake or behind a tree on the previous hole.

M is for Mend muskets and marshal musketeers

Like your handguns and longarms smoothbore and muzzle-loaded? The latest releases from Wargame Design Studio and GameHunters should be right up your street. While most of the scraps in War of the Austrian Succession take place on the Continent, the scenarios I’ll investigate first if I manage to blag review code, will probably be Scottish ones: Prestonpans, Clifton, Inverurie, Falkirk Muir and Culloden.

N is for Name this game

The first person to correctly ID the mystery game in the above screenshot wins the right to pen a one or two paragraph game recommendation for THC. Your mini review doesn’t have to be of a wargame or sim. Assuming it reaches me (tim at tallyhocorner dot com) in time, it will appear with a credit in Friday’s V2X.

O is for Ogling alps will be obligatory in Glide…

…an upcoming paragliding sim with very sophisticated CFD-based weather modelling.

P is for Punctuality matters if you’re a driver on the Praha Metro

Relatively cheap Early Access metro sim Back In Service gets the THC seal of approval, despite the fact that, currently, the Metrovagonmash Ečs trains aren’t deeply simmed, and Line A is provided in its original short form.

Runs from Náměstí Míru to Dejvická (or vice versa) take about ten minutes and involve five intermediate stops. If trains, stations, and tunnels weren’t so fetching, keeping to the tight timetables so tricky, and endless to-and-fro shuttling wasn’t possible, the paucity of content at launch might be an issue.

Dominik Vojta has done an amazing job of capturing the ambience of one of the world’s most stylish metros, and plans to enrich the game’s already excellent audio in the near future (A line extension and a new EMU type are also on the way).

While he doesn’t force us to engage with BIS’s light narrative and extra-vehicular tasks, he does quietly encourage punctuality with experience points and cash rewards.

In-game, the made-in-Moscow single-lever trains are very easy to operate. Pass a signal at danger or exceed a speed limit and you may find yourself crawling up to the next signal with the red light of an automatic safety system glowering at you from the dash and a digit firmly pressed on an override button, but apart from that, keeping to timetables is essentially all you have to worry about in this uncommonly evocative train sim.