The Contacts Game
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…
Category Sims
Heavy cargo = heavy responsibility
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…
Rhine maiden voyage
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,…
Bijou Brilliance – eight modern games that do an awful lot with precious little
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…
Barnacle Bill (NAUTIS Home is pricey and flawed)
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.
Unreal Tournaments – An hour with Joust
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.
HeliNews
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…
OVRLRD isn’t quite ready for keyboard mechwarriors yet
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…
Train Sim World 5 teething troubles
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…
Star Trucker makes a great first impression
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…
R.I.P. Ilan Papini
I’ve just learned that Ilan Papini, the chap behind thoroughly likeable sims such as Virtual Sailor and Vehicle Simulator, died in February from injuries sustained in a plane crash. The ICP Savannah piloted by the 60-year-old developer, suffered a bird…
An irresistible simpulse
Me and Roman spent a small portion of last weekend in a thorny corner of Wessex, chucking plastic platters at chain-draped metal baskets. We’d decided to give disc golf a try after enjoying the demo for FLEX Disc Golf. Has…