Air Goons aren’t short of ambition. The organisers of Under the North Star, a multiplayer wargaming experiment without parallel, want to sim the response to a fictional Russian invasion of Northern Scandinavia using a host of off-the-shelf PC games and…
Early Access Ships at Sea came within a cod’s whisker of flunking its 3×3-style audition. Two hours in I was railing against its rigid earn-to-unlock structure and unexpected lack of ambience, and fast losing patience with its improbably choppy harbours…
It has been this way since the cock-up in Cologne. On the day before a deployment, King Dormouse summons me to his office, and we play ‘the contacts game’ while he wipes the nicotine film from his gig-lamps or toys…
I can’t look at Heavy Cargo – The Truck Simulator screenshots without thinking of one of the UK’s most idiotic rail accidents. In the released-yesterday-to-luke-warm-Steam-reviews, HCTTS, I presume the procedure on arriving at a level crossing isn’t “Wait for automatic…
Street Cleaning Simulator, Garbage Truck Simulator, Utility Vehicle Simulator, Stone Quarry Simulator, Underground Mining Simulator… in 2011, German publisher Astragon was pumping out so-so sims like a Flakpanzer Gepard pumps out Shahed drone shredders. Confronted with this deluge of dross,…
Old prejudices die hard. Although Ada’s hard drive is as capacious as a Zeppelin hangar, and download speeds in rural Wessex are no longer narrowboat slow, I still wince when I go to download a game and see double digits…
Spare a thought for simmers who prefer their rudders and propellers immersed, their rails and bridges spray-flecked. Compared to a Parker Knoll plane or train operator, the armchair ship/boat skipper has few choices and relatively high outgoings.
Best known for enabling French speakers to chinwag with Napoleon without the aid of a Ouija board, Vestigia, a games studio founded by three historians, is also keen to explain and shatter the finer points of jousting.
The HeliNews theme tune is crafted from a selection of whirlybird sound samples. The HeliNews anchor sits behind a desk made from an AH-64 stub wing, and, after delivering his topical snippets, is winched out of shot by a Pegasus…
When developer Niall Slater fixed the bug that was preventing me and other keyboard & mouse users from starting up OVRLRD’s bipedal steeds, I jumped straight into a clickable cockpit and hotfooted it to the weapon range. Unfortunately, I’d only…
My first taste of just-launched TSW5 hasn’t exactly inspired confidence. Over breakfast I had a wander around Euston Station – the London end of the sim’s fairly short stretch of West Coast Main Line – and chanced upon a couple…
Decades of playing games that strive to replicate real vehicles and real battles has rewired my brain in ‘interesting’ ways. The other day, while pushing a wheelbarrow down a garden path, I found myself mentally interrogating the realism in Star…