Microsoft Train Simulator, BVE, Trainz… in 2004 the PC rail simmer had far fewer choices than they have today. Oddly, one of the most realistic options available to desktop train drivers back then featured South African rolling stock. If you’re…
Forty plus years of WW2 tactical wargaming leaves an indelible mark on a person. Like most long-in-the-tooth desktop generals, I’m now so used to parsing battlefields, assessing weaponry, and weighing up odds, the process is almost instinctive. StuG there…. dead…
Like a bone-white ember quietly ticking amongst the feathery ash of a burned-down bonfire, Firefighting Week still has some life left in it. Yesterday, a Cornerite tip-off (Thanks, phuzz!) led me to try blaze battling in Teardown, a voxel-based demolition…
Gosh, where did that hour go? Tearing about in a polygonal Laser dinghy courtesy of the free Storm Sailor prototype is a blast, and you don’t need to look much further than the sim’s strong hydrodynamics, helpful AI, and friendly…
Foolish Mortals, the Saskatoon studio that gave us the splendidly foggy Radio General, is presently beta-testing a WW2 operational wargame that looks every bit as revolutionary as RG. If you’re a fan of Panther Games’ output, or frequently find high-level…
Reykjavíkian dev Baldvin Albertsson doesn’t simply want to make an entertaining WWI game, he wants to make a thought-provoking and insightful one. In the following Q&A the ex-actor and theatre director describes some of the ways in which upcoming management game…
Hanging up my axe, hose, and hydrant spanner at the end of Firefighting Week proved harder than I’d anticipated. Not only am I still exploring new (to me) extinguish-em-ups, battling all those virtual conflagrations seems to have altered my attitude…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…