A2J
A is for Abbreviated A2Z. My mammoth monthly news round-ups are on hold, but truncated digests like this may appear from time to time.
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Friday Foxer #131
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.
Bloody hell (Battle Tactics 2025 is going to be brutal)
The Bangladeshi dev behind Battle Tactics 2025, an upcoming Unreal Engine-powered Combat Mission-like, refuses to draw a veil over war’s grim realities. Combatants in his high-fidelity RTT/TBT are going to lose limbs and buckets of blood in the line of duty.
Review Reprise: Apache Air Assault
I’ve written hundreds of reviews and previews 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, and involve titles largely forgotten today, now and again something from my archive may appear as one of THC’s daily posts. Below the jump you’ll find my take on Apache Air Assault, a classy light helicopter gunship sim from 2010 that, sadly, still hasn’t made it onto Steam or GOG.
Alex Williamson is a one man wargame factory
Over the past decade the proprietor of Asymgames.com has crafted around seventy computer wargames. All are free, equipped with competent AIs, and playable online, and many explore the kind of relatively obscure conflicts, ops, battles, and historical events that bigger devs often ignore. Assuming you can live with utilitarian graphics, and are willing to learn the ins and outs of Alex’s various self-built engines (there are eight families of games), his Aladdin’s archive is well worth a visit.
Traction inaction (Where are the traction engine sims?)
The steam-powered tractors/tractor units of the Victorian era and early 20th Century have reason to cast resentful glances at fellow transport forms like the aeroplane and automobile. Bar a few flimsy Farming Simulator mods, they’ve been completely ignored by sim smiths. The neglect would make sense if these clamorous dinosaurs lacked charisma and interesting quirks. As they’re actually anything but dull, their unsimmed status feels – to me at least – rather unjust.
Where am I?
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, work out my location.
Nuclear Option has a NovaLogic feel
As Prigozhin seems to have cancelled his insurrection, I think I can drag myself away from Twitter and the TV for long enough to type a few lines on Nuclear Option, a ‘coming soon’ combat flight sim with some seriously eyecatching attributes.