V is for Verbose sleuthing. It’s a fairly safe bet fans of The Case of the Golden Idol and The Rise of the Golden Idol will enjoy the Confidential Killings trial. The game’s short but tangled whodunnits are set in late Seventies Hollywood and are solved by accurately filling-out crime summaries using words collected from crime scenes and witness statements.

W is for Winged nostalgia

I found myself nodding a lot during the second Retro Dogfight podcast. Like “old guys” Brian Rubin, Chase Dahl, and Denny Atkin I’d love to see a modern sim studio competently combine SWOTL’s structure with the kind of graphics, FMs, and cockpit complexity found in the original IL-2.

X is for Xcentric cartography

The price of recognisable coastlines in globe-encompassing hex wargames can be vast expanses of boring blue honeycomb. Judging by the above screenshot and the first developer diary, Kraken Studios, the outfit behind upcoming wargame Total Victory: World Conflict 1939-1945, is dealing with this perennial problem in a pretty unconventional manner. Hopefully, their  solution… “The map uses different scales depending where you are on the map. The Pacific is 4x as large as Europe. So it has a higher movement cost as does the Americas.” …won’t lead to distracting maritime movement anomalies.

Y is for Yellowcake

If you found last week’s interview with Zack interesting, the Yellowcake demo is worth investigating. In this audio-reliant first-person adventure game, you play a blind slave labourer in an underground uranium mine. A supernatural ability to hear the ‘auras’ emanating from obstructions like walls and mine carts, partially offsets the game’s failure to simulate haptic information, but, sadly, doesn’t help all that much when you’re attempting to slip past dozing and patrolling guards. If I was Purse Candy I’d have given players more chance to explore without the added complication of human enemies. I’d also have devised a way to simulate the protagonist’s ‘mental map’ – the pace- and direction-based spatial plan he probably would have had at his disposal after living and working in one place for a spell.

Z is for Zorro-less?

If your game library lacks a Zorro title, now is a good time to address the omission. BKOM’s largely well-received swashbuckle-em-up, Zorro The Chronicles is only £2.40 on Steam until July 10.