After a morning of driver switching and dll juggling failed to persuade Task Force Admiral’s ‘vertical slice’ to run on my PC, I decided to assuage my disappointment by playing the closest thing TFA has to a spiritual antecedent. In 1994 wargaming visionary Peter Turcan self-published a WEGO wargame that sank into obscurity faster than the Shōhō slipped beneath the waves during the Battle of the Coral Sea.
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.
“They say fortune favours the bold, but they never explain what fortune is likely to do when both sides display equal boldness.” (T. Stone, 2023)
For today’s interviewee, wargames aren’t just entertainment founts, they are educational aids. Historian and wargame designer, Arrigo Velicogna has used interactive guerre sims to help War Studies students at King’s College London “understand the interplay between various dynamics in a conflict”.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, and online tools such as MAPfrappe work out my location.
A small band of industrious content creators keeps giving me new reasons to revisit free eleven-year-old R/C flight sim PicaSim. Although the executable has remained unchanged since September 2019, new user-made aerodynes and venues arrive pretty regularly.
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. All are welcome to participate.
An analogue WW2 U-boat MMO that uses real football results instead of dice, Das Football Boot is capable of producing surprisingly plausible submarine sagas. The catch? Players need to be patient, conscientious, and willing to undertake a little bookkeeping or those sagas have no chance of developing. Last season, I found myself wishing for emailed match reminders (captains must choose a Caution setting prior to every match their chosen team plays) and automatic log updates (after a match, it’s up to you to alter your sub’s stats appropriately). Several decades of intensive video gaming have made me workshy, it seems.