Footplate fiends fêted
If there’s a more contented species of gamer around at present than the Lesser Spotted Train Simmer, then please point them out to me.
Category Sims
The trouble with combat trousers
If you’re a regular wearer of cargo pants you’ll know the importance of a thorough pre-laundry garment frisk. This morning while searching the numerous pockets of my battle breeches in preparation for a forty degree Easy Care cycle, I came…
The Gorgeous and the Gormless: A Black One Blood Brothers photo album
My Black One Blood Brothers screenshots collection now includes more than 300 jpegs. Although the vast majority of the grabs reflect the fun I’m having, and the game’s talent for producing striking special ops tableaux…
Review Reprise: Aces of the Deep
I’ve written hundreds of reviews, previews, and retrospectives during my twenty-odd years as a games inspector. As many of these appeared in the British version of PC Gamer magazine and nowhere else, now and again something from my archive may…
Meet Ghost Recon’s grandson, Black One Blood Brothers
Last night, Uncle Steam, noticing I was at a loose end, whispered in my shell-like: “Players like you love Black One Blood Brothers”. After I responded with a sceptical “Is that so?”, he realised he still had work to do.…
Trapped news
Looking like a cross between an old-fashioned gramophone player and a glass harmonica, the trusty THC news trap generally catches at least a couple of stories overnight. When I opened it up this morning I found the following five paragraphs…
Febrile Forums: Farming Sim 25 and Sea Power hit Steam
The Steam forums of Sea Power and Farming Simulator 2025 are as busy as midsummer beehives at the moment. Given that both titles launched yesterday, abuzz messageboards are probably a good sign even if, currently, a fair portion of the…
Glorious Clutter: ISS Simulator needs a ‘hunt the thimble’ mode
ISS Simulator, a fetching freebie made by a Japanese outfit called SpaceData, is one brainstorming session and a few weeks of coding away from being one of Steam’s most unusual hidden object games.
Pure Rock Crawling’s rocks rock
While I can’t tell you whether Pure Rock Crawling’s depiction of rock crawling is superior to BeamNG.drive’s and Expeditions’, I’m hoping at least one THC reader has the necessary expertise and time to answer this question via a comment. What…
Dusty But (Fairly) Trusty: European Air War
Since THC stumbled into being, I’ve been itching to grant MicroProse’s 1998 chart-topper European Air War, Dusty But Trusty status. Only a nasty bug that delights in crashing careers in both the GOG and on-sale-at-the-moment Steam version has stopped me.
Under the North Star needs pilots, grunts, generals, and… truck drivers?
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…
Ships At Sea (Sea legs and Protestant work ethic not included)
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…