I’ve just driven my first route in Croydon: London Bus Simulator, and the twenty minute ride has transformed the way I think about Roblox. Although the complete absence of AI traffic is a big pill to swallow if your usual PCV plaything is OMSI or City Transport Simulator, the quality and size of Croydon’s map, the choice of vehicles available, and the way in which they behave, combine rather effectively to discourage snobbish sneering.
An hour after firing up RotorSim, Immaculate Lift’s SimCopter-reminiscent chopper game, for the first time, the campaign progress bar is a third full, and I’m wondering whether I’ll have seen all there is to see by lunchtime. While I don’t expect weeks of entertainment from a six quid offering, a day or two of diversion would be nice.
Allen Gies, the writer behind much of Burden of Command’s vivid prose, has penned a 900,000 word interactive novel about tank warfare in North Africa. Hopefully, the excruciatingly daft moment early in World War II Armored Recon where you get to choose your character’s gender by selecting – I’m not making this up – the pitch of their voice, isn’t indicative of the game’s historicity or general attitude to women.
Using the following clues (the map above is purely decorative) in combination with Street View, work out my location.
A combat flight sim that forewent flak or a sub sim that didn’t include death-by-depth-charge would get ripped to shreds by reviewers, so why aren’t firefighting sims taken to task for leaving out two of the most dangerous aspects of firefighting? Well, when it comes to fatal heart attacks – the number one cause of on-duty deaths in the fire service – the answer is pretty obvious. Harder to explain or justify is the genre’s reluctance to model building collapses. Half price until July 10 on Steam, Firefighting Simulator – The Squad is the only game I’ve played this week…
Every Friday, 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.
Deep down I doubt any armchair hose jockey wants a totally realistic fire brigade sim. If forty percent of in-game call-outs were false alarms caused by confused or malfunctioning fire alarms, extinguish-em-ups would alienate all but the most patient and dedicated PDQ. That said, I like the fact that the consistently entertaining Into the Flames occasionally sends me on wild goose shouts.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this title turned out to be the simmiest firefighting diversion I play this week. Not only has Bochum-based developer Crenetic faithfully reproduced German firefighting techniques, it has created remarkably detailed facsimiles of the equipment used by German blaze battlers. £20 (until July 10) Emergency Call 112 is almost worth buying just for its fab fire engines.