I think I’m finally ready. Well, as ready as I’ll ever be. Today I’m going to take on Curly, Virtual Pool 4’s numero uno, for the very first time. Defeat in the first-to-five-frames contest will cost me a cool ten grand – a sum that doesn’t come easy in VP4’s frighteningly moreish ‘hustler’ career mode.
Calling the latest freebie from Wargame Design Studio a demo does it a serious disservice. None of turnless Spanish-American War’s engagements are included in other Naval Campaigns titles, and show me another demo that lets you play, from start to finish, twenty scenarios, and I’ll show you a narwhal tusk with a right-hand thread.
The video game industry’s obsessive interest in WW2 in Europe all but vanishes the moment Doenitz throws in the towel in May, 1945. Bringing to justice the architects of the war and hunting down the worst of their agents? Reconstructing a decimated and divided Germany? Sod that for a game of soldiers! Anyone who’s read about riveting subjects like the Nuremberg Trials, the Berlin Blockade, and Trizonia’s troubled gestation, will probably rue this blinkered view and appreciate Paintbucket Games’ unusual foray into WW2’s complicated aftermath.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, MapFrappe and other tools, work out my location.
Engine roar bounces between ravaged building facades. Battered exhausts cough inky ectoplasm into frigid air. Caterpillar tracks claw at brown snow and frozen rubble… Tally-Ho Corner’s first PvP play-by-comment Combat Mission scrap is underway at last!
Every Friday at 1300 hours, Tally-Ho Corner’s cleverest clogs come together to solve a ‘foxer’ handcrafted by my sadistic chum and colleague, Roman. A complete ‘defoxing’ sometimes takes several days and usually involves the little grey cells of many readers.
Had Italia 1944 been released forty years earlier, the daily post-school battles for control of the Stone family’s TV set would have been truly horrendous. Alessandro Grussu’s 2021 ZX Spectrum RPG has almost everything preteen Tim looked for in a digital plaything, and entertains his over-the-hill incarnation bally efficiently too.
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 OMSI, the 2011 PSV sim that singlehandedly turned me into a bus enthusiast.