V is for Very well received Fulcrum. It’s not often a new DCS flyable gets a reception as warm as the one the new MiG-29A has received. Perusing the forums, praise of the flight model and framerate impact is particularly easy to find. Evidently, although cheaper faux Fulcrums are available, finer facsimiles are not.
W is for Wanted 3D: Dead or Alive
Nonlinear, tense, and atmospheric, the Outlaws demo is one of my all-time favourite game trials. I was hoping to get a similar buzz from the gratis bit of Wanted 3D: Dead or Alive, but the tempter for Pavo Entertainment’s upcoming Old West shooter has yet to get under my buckskin. While the level design is outwardly Outlaws, the gun-play and the badman behaviour bring to mind Doom as readily as LucasArts’ classic. I miss ‘fidget AI’ and one-shot demises.
X is for Xceptional honesty
AFV interiors… tutorials… better performance… numerous bug fixes… although Tank Squad has improved considerably since May, even DeGenerals think it may be too early for disappointed customers to return. In a couple of recent forum posts, the studio has warned people to wait a while before reinstalling or investing. Given their financial situation, this unselfish frankness is really rather remarkable.
Ironically, the more wary Panzer Elite and Steel Fury fans that heed DeGenerals advice, the less likely it is the Polish dev will have the funds necessary to bring their exciting campaign plans to fruition. Op map decision-making, and large steppe battlefields sprinkled with infantry, tanks and AT guns are all on DeGenerals’ drawing board.
Y is for Your fault, Misha Glenny
I blame BBC Eastern Europe expert Misha Glenny for the two hours I wasted last Sunday afternoon. After listening to The Butcher and the Poet, obviously I had no option but to seek out the only PC game dedicated to Hungary’s unsuccessful Nineteenth Century war of independence. A lot of water has flowed down the Danube since Hussar Games released 1848 in 2006, and getting this Hungarian hex-em-up to work properly on a modern PC is – I now realise – impossible.
Or is it? At the risk of wasting your time too, maybe someone reading this can suggest a way to fix this frustrating display issue.
Z is for Zodiac Legion
In production for around a decade, Zodiac Legion, a fantasy TBT/RPG inspired by the likes of Laser Squad, X-COM, and HeroQuest, should finally haul itself over the finish line early next year. Generous, good-looking, and tactically rich, the latest trial shows dev Alexandre Boureau to be talented as well as dogged.
Hey there, thanks for mentioning us here – indeed I think we needed at least few months more to develop a better game but money was no more. After four months the situation is better and stable – we just need to continue doing what we’re doing – patching and optimization – and content will come. My dream would be adding western front and normandy – the commonwealth struggle in eastern sector with waffen ss divisions as well as just add more gameplay modes – some career mode with generated missions. First things first
Being somewhat immersed in DCS, I’m always entertained when people comment on flight models (pro or con)- as if your average PC flight simmer knows exactly how aircraft X should feel in a variety of different flight conditions, and better than the SMEs (i.e. actual pilots of that aircraft) that DCS gets extensive feedback from before releasing most every aircraft.
Re: 1848
You could try dgVoodoo
https://dege.fw.hu/dgVoodoo2/dgVoodoo2/
which involves copying the appropriate .dlls into the correct game (sub-)directory, and running the configurator then pointing it at the same directory. (I can’t remember too well; it’s a while since I’ve had to do it myself. I mainly used it to limit the fps in 3-D games to prevent physics-breaking bugs).
Who knows what architecture a game {yet another, eh, Tim!} bankrolled by Hungarian taxpayers runs on?
You can also fly a MiG-29 as part of the Falcon Gold pack, which is Falcon 3 and two of its expansion packs. 😉
https://store.steampowered.com/app/429520/Falcon_Gold/
The LucasArts’ Outlaws + A Handful of missions game is available on GOG. Here is the page to the game:
https://www.gog.com/en/game/outlaws_a_handful_of_missions
It is also on Steam and there is even a remaster coming November 21, 2025.
Different style and random eras, you could try The Tome of All Tales.
Here on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3059350/The_Tome_of_All_Tales/
I’ve tried to get 1848 working a few times, as I think the Transylvania Campaign is one of the best intro-to-hex-wargaming games out there. Small scale, enough turns, highly-visible terrain, simple unit formations.
I’ll try to give dgVoodoo2 a shot over the weekend and hopefully can report back with success.
Re: 1848, I had an encouraging step forward with WIneD3D: https://fdossena.com/?p=wined3d/index.frag
Putting these dlls from the latest version’s .zip into the 1848 folder: d3d9, ddraw, dxgi, libwine, wined3d. No compatibility mode, although set to “run as administrator”.
It gets the display working at least, although something is a bit wonky with the dialog boxes / menus. Most (all?) of them don’t pop up properly, and you have to press Alt-F4 to kill them and unfreeze the screen.
Oh, it actually seems the dialog boxes pop up under the action, so you can actually alt-tab to them, then alt tab back to the map once you’ve closed them.
I opened up 1848.exe using Ghidra to figure out what DLLs it was using for rendering, and it looks like it’s using GDI for screen blitting. There’s a tool called DxWnd that can try to run the game in a window and bypass the screen timing issue that causes the display to flicker or the buffer to stay white, but sadly it resulted in the game opening the size of a postage stamp and saying “the game can only be run at 1024×768.” I got past that hurdle, but it turns out the game actually launches a second window from the main menu, and it wasn’t possible to hook into that one.