Air Goons aren’t short of ambition. The organisers of Under the North Star, a multiplayer wargaming experiment without parallel, want to sim the response to a fictional Russian invasion of Northern Scandinavia using a host of off-the-shelf PC games and a small army of plucky volunteers.
Early Access Ships at Sea came within a cod’s whisker of flunking its 3×3-style audition. Two hours in I was railing against its rigid earn-to-unlock structure and unexpected lack of ambience, and fast losing patience with its improbably choppy harbours and recalcitrant small craft. But then I set off for Vedøya.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, work out my location.
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 with the medieval caltrop he uses as a paperweight.
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.
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 barriers to open, then cross fingers and put pedal to metal”.
SPOILER WARNING. The spat between Corporal Bignon, Team France’s unlucky anti-tank rifleman, and this cocksure cannon-armed Afrika Korps armoured car comes to a lethal conclusion this turn.
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, I and, I suspect, many others failed to give one Astragon release the attention or praise it deserved.