Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Precocious, pondering, prattish younger me used to stand in game shops holding Jane’s Combat Simulation games, marveling at the heft of the box, the grandeur of the screens, imagining Jane at her desk, making a game and being so proud she’d put her name to it. I was stupid. Now I know better: Jane is the second name of military enthusiast Fred T. Jane, and he died in 1916. He didn’t make those games, although given that they were basically manuals made into gaming form, with his love of detailing military hardware he’d probably have enjoyed their elegant air battles and cockpit rendering. As for the latest incarnation, Jane’s Advanced Strike Fighters, being released a full decade after the last one, I’m pondering how he’d react. The video below looks fun, sure, but I’m sensing developers Evolved GamesTrickstar have taken a bit of a diversion around realism.
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Trickstar Games has risen from the ashes of Transmission Games (developers of fun shooty plane games Heroes of the Pacific and Heroes Over Europe) and they’re intent on producing more aerial combat, this time with JASF (Jane’s Advanced Strike Fighters), which will be published by Evolved Games. It does sound pretty fancy, with 2-4 man co-op for the campaign, and 16-player online multiplayer, with a bunch of different contemporary aircraft, all hosted in a 65,000km terrain. The site claims that the game will hit this summer, but I guess we’ll wait and see.

Bombastic strategy-FPS hybrid Raven Squad is set for release on the 11th of August, and to celebrate that fact Evolved Games have released a cheese-tastic movie-style trailer, which sets the scene for this unusual take on the jungle man-shoot with some troubling dialogue. There might be a top-down strategy tactics and co-op cleverness in here, but for now they’re focusing on the explosions, of which there are many. The game proper looks moderately entertaining, thanks to the way the action swings between strategy and twitch run-n-gun, so perhaps we’ll take a closer look when it hits. In the meantime, go examine the action with your eyes.
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