Q is for Quick Topps card. Unlike many of the trade cards that appear in this slot, I’ve probably owned this 1978 Superman card from new. I say ‘probably’ because there’s a chance it was actually pulled from its flimsy packet by a school friend then acquired by me in a playground trade. Apparently, each packet contained ten different cards, a sticker, and a stick of bubble gum. I can still smell, taste, and feel the gum, but weirdly have no recollection whatsoever of the stickers.
Every Friday, Tally-Ho Corner’s cleverest clogs come together to solve a ‘foxer’ handcrafted by my sadistic chum and colleague, Roman. A complete ‘defoxing’ sometimes takes several days and usually involves the little grey cells of many readers. All are welcome to participate.
L is for Liftoff: Micro Drones leaves Early Access. Lugus marked 1.00 by equipping their moreish tiny whoop sim with a track builder, two new maps, and an extra flyable. Just about the only significant things this £16 delight lacks now is wind simulation (in the pipeline) and flypaper.
G is for Great War game = great wargame? I remember a time when you could count WWI PC wargames on the fingers of one hand and it was rare for a year to pass without a new WWI flight game release. Today, devs seem far more interested in trenches than triplanes. The latest title to tackle the “meat grinder that is the Western Front” without a first-person camera is On the Western Front. Eight quid and studded with numbers, its screenshots shout “dense and desiccated” while its ‘Very Positive’ review ratio hollers something quite different.
A is for Alphabetised game news. There’s nothing especially original about the way I gather game news. Like other reporters, every so often I set cage traps baited with chunks of old telephone directory or stale urinal cake in likely places (roundabout islands, amusement arcades, deconsecrated churches…) and return the following day with crossed fingers and an empty Sack For Life.
Corporal Whitehand ends turn 2 surrounded by armour. Fortunately for him the close-range stuff is bipedal, medieval, and empty, and the more distant specimens are currently unaware rogue American POWs are at large in the castle.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, work out my location.
When I put down my microphone last Friday we were just about to plunge into Shildon Tunnel. In Locomotion, the Dr Who script I’m almost ready to pitch to the BBC, navvies digging this hill hole in 1840 unwittingly rouse the monstrous Shildon Worm sparking four episodes of creepy/claustrophobic capers involving animal-loving S&DR financier Joseph Pease, no-nonsense loco engineer Timothy Hackworth, and the sixteenth Doctor (who reliable sources at the Beeb tell me will be played by Basil Brush not Billie Piper).