V is for Vernal vanguard. For many, the highlight of Steam’s week-long ‘Wargaming Fest’ is sure to be the release of the Strategos demo. Trialists get the chance to road-test three quite different factions – the versatile Late Carthaginians, the punchy Polybian Romans, and the piketastic Pyrrhics – on two maps, and experience first-hand the myriad AI and UI improvements Gabe has implemented since releasing Strategos forerunner ‘Formation Tactics Game’ on itch.io in early 2024.
W is for Weather Gage playtest
Morale seems to be pretty high amongst Weather Gage playtesters at present. Forum reports suggest the immature sample of Aidedecamp’s Hornblower-em-up obtained via the green ‘Request Access’ button on this page, has its share of physics and AI flaws, but is already capable of producing engagements worthy of Forester, Kent, and O’Brian tomes.
X is for Xplicit xplanations
I’ve been thinking about ways in which Early Access Northern Ireland ’74 could de-sanitise its somewhat mechanical depiction of The Troubles, and short historical notes in the manual seem like one of the most practical methods. For example, if the section on rubber bullets mentioned that these supposedly non-lethal rounds caused 17 civilian deaths and numerous life-changing injuries in NI, that would be a start.
Y is for Y do I own no Y games?
Amongst the 985 titles in my Steam library, there are six games beginning with the letter Z, three with X, five with J, and one with Q, but absolutely no Ys. Y is this, and which Y game should I purchase in order to complete my gaming alphabet?
Z is for ZDSimulator now available through Steam
Although PC train sims have proliferated in the thirteen years since I described ZDSim as taking “verisimilitude to a completely new level”, the genre’s most intricate electric locos are still to be found in this Ukrainian effort. As the Steam blurb neglects to mention what’s included in the new ‘improved’ £17 version, I thought I’d take a quick look…
Well, I know what will be occupying my evenings coming up—Weather Gage is very much up my alley.
I looked in my Steam library to see if I had any Y games to suggest, but it appears I’m lacking both Y and Z.
I’ve got some Yakuzas, Ys and You Don’t Know Jacks. Nothing for the pure-hearted grognard, though they are bound to know the answer to a few YDKJ questions.
I do like that Weather Gage has avoided the whole pirate thing. Although my Steam wishlist includes two competitors to it which both embrace the age of piracy. Variety is good.
My steam counts:
J – 19, including Jurassic World Evolution 1 and 2, easily recommended.
Q – 6, including Qvadriga, a game purchase heavily influenced by our host
X – 15, although 80% of those are variants of X: Beyond the Frontier and its sequels or XCOM. I can’t in honesty recommend one of the others, XIII Century as although there’s nothing specifically wrong with it, it just didn’t hook me
Z: 7, although that includes the free Zero-K. Not a sim or wargame, but proper old school RTS. Grab the free Zach-like – https://store.steampowered.com/app/1098840/ZACHLIKE/
So Y: 10. As with HaraldC, a range of Yakuza variants with a few minutes play time each (they’re frequent filler in bundles). Which of the Ys is a THC flavour of game? Erm.
Yes, Your Grace is perhaps the nearest. Run a kingdom, a graphical variant of the games for which you’d find the code printed in the back of VIC-20 magazines or ‘how to program the C64’ books. I don’t recommend it. Buy Warsim: The Realm of Aslona instead.
Which is an obnoxiously long way to admit I don’t know of any good Y games, sorry.
I think I’ve shared this at a previous a2z but the first edition of Dr Johnson’s Dictionary has this excellent entry for X “X, while a letter contained in Anglo-Saxon words, starts no word in the English language.” By the time of the 4th edition (1820ish) which is easier to find online they must have invented xebecs, xylophones and a few others.
In terms of Y games I also have all the Yakuzas with probably a thousand hours between them, Yes Your Grace (which is gentle, fun, with some wicked decisions if you don’t know the optimal path and has a sequel on the way) and the cutesy, childish Yonder.
The Yakuza games are a brilliant mix of po faced crime melodrama main plot (and there’s a lot of plot) and whacky slapstick side content. The entry points are either Yakuza 0 – set in the 80s when Kiryu the original protagonist is a young man (he is 40 in 1 “so he has more gravitas”), or yakuza like a dragon (yakuza 7) which rebooted with a turn based jrpg fighting style rather than the brawler combat of the other games.
You have to have a bit of an interest in/tolerance of Japanese culture (as, for one thing, the maps are nearly perfect recreations of real places)z. They have turned up the wackiness a bit recently (the latest game is subtitled a Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii and you captain a galleon) and there is a bit of very optional fan service in all of them. But I would enthusiastically recommend them, even here.
Yakuza 0 was their first PC port and is pretty clunky to play with keyboard and mouse, but it’s getting a remaster for the switch 2 which inevitably will be on Steam fairly soon. When it does you should check it out.
Y games are indeed rare in my Steam Library. Apart from Yakuza 0, I have Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom. It’s a Mario 62 Platformer like, where you control a car. There is also a demo available, so it can be tested for free.