Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for stealing the Sunday Papers format from under Kieron’s nose, then using it to share simulation news.

• Gaijin forget to invite an evil aunt to the christening of their latest air combat sprog. The old bag retaliates by gatecrashing the ceremony and naming the newborn herself. ‘Henceforth, this IL-2 spin-off previously only available on consoles will be known as…  Wings of Prey!’ Not since Microprose’s Ailerons of Adversaries has a flight sim been so grievously monikered.   Read the rest of this entry »

As excited as I am at the prospect of scrambling through the fetid interior of a fully-modelled U-boat, a small patriotic part of me is sad that Silent Hunter 5, like its predecessors,  won’t be flying the White Ensign. It was our turn, dammit! It didn’t have to be British subs – a single captainable RN corvette class would have sufficed. Hunting the hunters now and again can be a barrel of fun as Enigma: Rising Tide, recently released in free, StarForce-stripped iso form, proves.

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The sea is a cruel mistress. Forget her birthday and she’ll cut up your clothes, write ‘bastard’ on your front lawn with weedkiller, then drown you. Personally, I feel much safer doing my seafaring via salty software like Virtual Sailor. While VSTEP’s Ship Simulator enjoys a much higher profile, I find myself reaching for VS – ten years old this year – more often.

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Mathijs Kok has balls the size of Catalina blisters. The head of internal development at Aerosoft is talking about taking-on undoubtedly simulation’s scariest task: building from scratch a Microsoft Flight Simulator successor. If you’ve got a feature suggestion that doesn’t involve blue ice, ornithopters, or lawn chairs and helium balloons (already included in my petition) Aerosoft want to hear about it.

Around the age of seven I caught the cartophily bug real bad. Tea cards were my particular passion and one 50-card set fascinated me above all others. Brooke Bond’s The Sea, Our Other World with its haunting images of bathyspheres, coral reefs, and whale sharks, spoke to a part of me that craved adventure and mystery. In those magical scenes I saw a glimpse of my future – a future in diving and marine exploration, a future as a professional… games reviewer? Oh well, with the help of free frogman sim eDiving, I can still dream. Read the rest of this entry »

Discus Games, the brutes that inflicted Phantasmagoria (”the most terrible game which left on PC”) and Harry’s Adventures: Prooves Under Underwear (”the funnyman and the ladies’ favourite named Harry undertakes investigation”) on Russian gamers, are just about to make amends by giving them a surprisingly decent WWII tank sim.

A fresh-from-the-smelter ingot of Steel Fury: Kharkov 1942 can be found here. Play is a little confusing to begin with (hence the brief guide after the jump) but give-up and you’ll miss out on some vintage armour drama. I won’t give too much away, but my first three attempts at holding Sovkhoz Krasny Gigant ended in dismal failure. In one my trusty T-34 toppled into a shellhole. In another I was sniped after sticking my head out of the hatch to observe a trench-line. Then there was the time I ran out of AP shells and resorted to ramming Fascist war machines while singing ‘Konarmeiskaia pesnia’ at the top of my lungs. (With luck they’ll name a Moscow Metro station after me.)

For the Steel Fury basics…

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The RPS guide to staging your very own Sputnik Commemorative Event.

You will need:

- Five minutes of preparation time.
- One copy of freeware space flight simulator Orbiter.
- One copy of the equally free Project R-7 add-on.
- Appropriate sounds (I recommend Bach, Glass, or this).
- Vodka (optional).

Got all that? OK, now… Read the rest of this entry »

If these people find messing around with cranes, and tumbling down hillsides in jelly-tyred juggernauts half as entertaining as I do then Rigs Of Rods should sweep the board at next year’s IGF.

The version the judges will be playing was unveiled yesterday. Bigger, better, and beautiful-er than before, it’s one of two excellent freeware automotive sims released this month.

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