Radio Commander

After decades of stasis, the landscape of computer wargaming is beginning to change. Here and there desert hexagons are greening... dry arroyos are becoming rivers again... the accumulated dust and debris of forty years of conservative thinking is being sluiced towards the sea. Tired of threadbare, truth-blurring conventions, imaginative devs are looking at war and warriors in fresh, arresting ways. In today's column, I talk…

Tagged with interview, New Wave wargame, The Flare Path, Radio Commander, Rebel Inc: Escalation.

A is for Anticipating awesome AI. General Staff's AI sounds smarter than a sack of weasels. In a recent blog post Ezra Sidran describes how MATE, the upcoming American Civil War game's ersatz commander, works out which section of an enemy line it should “Schwerpunkt” during an attack. It “identifies the opposing force that must be dealt with to achieve its assigned objective, does strength…

Tagged with Blocks: Richard III, Campaign Series: Vietnam, Close Combat: The Bloody First, DCS World 2, Derail Valley, Firefight, Libertadores, Metro Simulator, Model Builder, Radio General, Rebel Inc: Escalation, SAM Simulator, Sean O'Connor, Second Front, Shadow Empire, Taghia, Task Force Admiral, The Flare Path, WarPlan, Wolfpack, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Radio Commander, Unity of Command 2.

Radio Commander is a lit thunderflash tossed through a barracks doorway at two in the morning. It's arriving at the firing range and finding all the rifles in bits at the bottom of treacle barrels. It's John Wayne dressed as a coelacanth conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. It's Dad's Army dubbed into Swahili. It's Polio The Musical... wasabi toothpaste... a Slush Puppie enema... Ho Chi Minh kicking…

Tagged with review, The Flare Path, Radio Commander.

A is for Aircraft Carrier Survival. Having researched WW2 flat-tops for their due-in-2020 damage control game Aircraft Carrier Survival, developer CFG clearly felt that torpedoes, bombs, shells, mines, kamikaze attacks, accidents and cyclones, didn't constitute a sufficiently potent calamity cocktail. Captains will also have to deal with sabotage, mutinies and nervous breakdowns.

Tagged with Aircraft Carrier Survival, Cliffs of Dover, Close Combat: The Bloody First, DCS: World, Derail Valley, Dirt Rally 2, eSail, Flying Circus, Graviteam Tactics, helisimmer.com, Nantucket, Naval Battles Simulator, Terminal Conflict, The Flare Path, Trans-Siberian Railway Simulator, Ultimate Admiral: Age of Sail, Way of Defector, We. The Revoultion, Wings Over The Reich, Radio Commander.

When it comes to theme, structure, and expectations, the two upcoming wargames Flare Pathed below have flip-all in common. Unity of Command II, the highly anticipated sequel to a WW2 wonder that managed to be handsome, historical, friendly and fierce, is hexy and turn-chopped, a refined relation of that great populariser, Panzer General. Radio Commander, on the other hand, is a real-time enigma, a Vietnam…

Tagged with interview, The Flare Path, Radio Commander, Unity of Command 2.

A is for Altfuture's abject apology. From the tone of Altfuture's last announcement you'd think unconventional, timetable-shunning train sim Derail Valley had run over the last northern hairy-nosed wombat or trumped during an audience with the Queen. Jan 18's “very bad” news turned out to be news of a piffling seven-day release delay. The rescheduled ribbon-cutting should happen today. Expect some thoughts on the sim's 200km…

Tagged with Air Hauler 2, Barbarroja, Cube Control, DCS: World, Grand Tactician, IL-2 Sturmovik, il-2 sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, iRacing, Lotus Simulator, OMSI 2, Open General, Panzer Corps 2, Rattenkrieg, Rule the Waves 2, Steel Heroes, Tabletop Simulator, The Flare Path, Wars Across The World, Waterloo 3D, Wings Over The Reich, Wolfpack, Zulu Dawn, Radio Commander.