Glorious Mud: Spintires Squelching Out In June

A large part of PC gaming, to me, is developers combining several niche passions to make dream games--games that may not have mass appeal, but will be adored by people at the intersection of their niches. Off-road driving with fancy terrain deformation might appear on any platform, but in a sim where all the vehicles are honking great Soviet-era military and industrial hardware bristling with squillions of wheels? That's a PC game all right. And that's Spintires, which is finally almost ready to roll out after years of teasing us with its pretty pretty mud.

A new trailer reveals that Spintires is due on June 13, and shows more of that lovely mud. How exciting is it? Enough to warrant a dubstep soundtrack. Apparently all those parody trailers for sims made enough of an impact upon the scene for developers to now wub in earnest.

Spintires will send drivers out into Soviet forests to sploosh through mud and water and gravel and mess on missions like delivering a felled logs or rescuing trapped vehicles. I had no idea this interested me until I saw a stuck tanker being hauled out of the mire by a chunky eight-wheeled truck resembling a mobile SAM launcher.

Developers Oovee released a tech demo last year, which you can still download if you want to play in the mud yourself. It's quite outdated by this point, mind.