A is for Alphabetised wargame, sim, and site news. Now and again, assuming I can persuade Austerity’s Blackburn Cirrus Bombardier engine to perform the miracle of internal combustion, I spend a few days scouring Simulatia and Grognardia for stories with the potential to fascinate, startle, cheer, dismay or amuse. Those stories are then dehydrated, alphabetised and delivered, via articles like this one, to people who’ve got better things to do than plough through puff and platitudes.
This week’s handmade co-op puzzle won’t defox itself. If you’re a dab hand at quizzes, lateral thinking, and search engine sleuthing, why not help out.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, work out my location.
This week’s handmade co-op puzzle won’t defox itself. If you’re a dab hand at quizzes, lateral thinking, and search engine sleuthing, why not help out.
As Ada and I have been 800 miles apart for most of the past week, and the only gaming I’ve done has involved analysing cryptic imagery, I’m afraid there’s no Friday Feature today. What I can provide is three ancient articles from my personal archives. All three appeared on RPS circa 2009, subsequently losing their images during the Great Pic Purge. They’re republished here with original illustrations restored.
FASA Corp tentatively blowing the dust off their Crimson Skies licence? Splendid news. I can’t think of another interwar-inspired, zeppelin-crammed, fantasy flight-sim that deserves a rebirth more than Zipper’s classic. Well, apart from Rowan Software’s Air Power, obviously.
Clive Sinclair’s be-rainbowed brainchild cast a long happy shadow over my boyhood, but I’m struggling to single-out one game as a personal landmark. Should it be Arnhem, my first computer wargame, or Fighter Pilot, my introduction to flight simulation. Should it be Battlecars, in recognition of the afternoons me and Matt spent chasing each other round autodromes in oil-pissing, flame-spitting death sedans? Or Blockbusters, an improbably moreish quiz game ‘won’ by my sister when she competed on the TV show of the same name? Maybe Atic Atac, Arcadia, Deathchase or Wheelie for just being so utterly brilliant?
I was up at Farnborough International Airshow yesterday, and, while having a crafty fag round the back of the Fuel-Air Weapons Marquee, was lucky enough to run into one of gaming’s most elusive genres. Dishevelled and smelling slightly of wet ferrets, Flight Simulation was in a surprisingly talkative mood. During the course of an hour-long chat we covered numerous topics, none more fascinating than the changing fortunes of the gent himself.