“Some of the strangest sorties you’ll ever fly” – Remembering Stunt Island

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 appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Below the jump you’ll find a nine-hundred word billet doux to Stunt Island (£2 at present at GOG) penned in the year the Syrian Civil War began, and Osama bin Laden, Muammar Gadaffi, and Kim Jong Il died.

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Wargame Design Studio is heading for the Holy Land

Quite a few articles on this site could legitimately begin with “You’ve probably never heard of this game before” but until today I don’t believe I’ve ever had cause to commence one with “You’ve definitely never heard of this game before”. You’ve never heard of Crusades Book I until now because prior to the publication of this post, no-one outside of Wargame Design Studio had.

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Clustered

Last night one of my Armored Brigade II BMP-2s had a very lucky escape. Cluster-bombed by a marauding Phantom, it would have been dead as a doornail if the bomb in question had been a standard CBU not a training weapon packed with harmless wargaming news bomblets.

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Sunlight is the best disinfectant

Creative Europe’s latest ‘call for proposals’ is just as daft and unfair as previous ones. For some reason the EU’s grant granters still feel the only games deserving of funding are ‘narrative’ games. Thinking of making an RTS, TBS, or sim that doesn’t spin a yarn “throughout the whole game”? No €200K for you, chum.

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Beware Urban Strife’s un-undead

While shambling cadavers are by no means the least of your worries in engaging turnbased team tactics title Urban Strife (Picking stylish headgear, or deciding whether to belt a melee opponent with a frying pan, monkey wrench, or rolling pin, are more trivial concerns) the game’s zombies don’t focus the mind and quicken the pulse as proficiently as members of rival survivor gangs such as the Gatherers.

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