One of the advantages of being completely independent is that I no longer have to persevere with games I’m not enjoying. Back in the days when I wrote for PC Gamer I would have had to play Last Train Home to the bitter end (Vladivostok?). Now, when Ignatius, my lugubrious shoulder-mounted gnome, whispers in my ear “God, this is a drag. Why not pack it in and go play something more entertaining?” I can nod and reach for the Escape key.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View and tools such as MAPfrappe, work out my location.
I’ve decided to give Angola ’86 some space. Publicly grumbling about bugs and interface imperfections a week into its Early Access puberty, feels a tad unfair, and I don’t want frustrating situations such as the one I described yesterday to cool my ardour for 2023’s most unconventional wargame.
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.
Endless village visits, supply runs, and thoroughfare minesweeping… Angola ’86 refuses to sex-up counter-insurgency ops. Unleavened, the daily grind of keeping the land now known as Namibia free of SWAPO troublemakers/freedom-fighters could start to drag after a while. Fortunately, whenever* you’re starting to feel like an over-worked logistics manager, you can form an armour-rich battle group and go hunt Communist big game in the map’s northern region.
Halfway through my last play session, a concerned Angola ’86 metaphorically took me to one side and said “Tim, for heaven’s sake, pull your socks up!”. On reflection, I deserved the wake-up call. At the time it came I was contemplating a Namibian hexgrid dotted with starving/stationary South African troops, and out-of-fuel and immobilised SADF vehicles. I was acutely aware that Resolution 435 wasn’t far off, and I hadn’t trained nearly enough UNITA and SWATF units to cope with the UN-overseen ‘end game’.
I think I learned almost as much from Angola ’86’s fact-stuffed loading screen (see above) as I did from the game’s bare-bones tutorial. Brief, text-reliant, and awfully short on ‘learn-by-doing’ interactivity, the latter isn’t brilliant, but, backed by a good embedded manual, it did ensure my first few hours with this South African curio were largely confusion free.
The news that the third of Every Single Soldier’s novel COIN wargames is finally available on Steam gives me a (feeble) excuse to type a word I’ve never typed before, and have an Omugulugwombashe at THC’s first rolling review. Starting tomorrow, this site will carry short daily articles chronicling my first week with Afghanistan ’11’s intriguingly intricate follow-up.