Crisis! Geoff, the retired sailmaker who usually stitches together FP news stories, phoned in sick this morning (housemaid’s knee). We’ve experimented with alternative fastenings – velcro, staples, bulldog clips, ant-head sutures… – but none of them are strong and flexible enough to join this week’s selection of topical sim and strategy snippets. Unless Irma’s ongoing porridge experiments prove successful, I fear today’s column will have to take the form of an index finger inconveniencing gallery. Read the rest of this entry »
I remember the days when you could get a hundredweight of hand-picked sim and wargaming news delivered to your door by a man in a tailcoat and a velvet top hat for sixpence. Now look at us. You, peering into your digilink screen like a person who’s dropped their monocle into a bowl of consommé. Me, stripped to the waist in a bomb-damaged Pat Garrett, shovelling raw press releases into the maw of a humming Wordshine 6000. If this is progress, you can keep it! Want to know what 777, Panther Games, Old Brown Dog, and John Tiller Software are up to at the moment? Unplug yourself and head down to the abandoned liquorice processing plant on Canal Street. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes. Read the rest of this entry »
A flurry of local airshows and BoB commemorative events meant Spitfires and Hurricanes were regular visitors to my corner of Southern England this summer. Seeing six Messerschmitt maulers fly over in formation on September 15 really should have been my aviation highlight of the season, but that accolade actually goes to an encounter a few days earlier when, tramping along a Wiltshire footpath, I was repeatedly buzzed by a P-40 intent on entertaining crowds at a nearby display. The sound of a Merlin in full spate is a wonderful thing, but the whistle-threaded roar of Lulu Belle’s supercharged Allison V-12 left me beaming like a lottery winner. Read the rest of this entry »
No man is a Britten-Norman Islander entire of itself; Every Manston is a piece of the continent, a part of the main plane; If a CLOD be washed away by the Sea Fury, Eurofighter is the less, as Wellington as if a promontory were, as Wellington as any manor of thy little friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes Me 262, because I am involved in Grummankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the Bell JetRanger VTOLs; it VTOLs for thee.
Forestry was one of the industries the Industrial Revolution forgot. The tools used by a British forestry worker at the start of the Twentieth Century would have been instantly recognizable to a forestry worker of 1700. It would be another two decades before the oil dripping, smoke breathing dragon of progress appeared in the UK’s pine stands and oak woods. First came the lumbering tractor, then the chainsaw, an increasingly portable petrol-fuelled marvel that quickly saw off the crosscut saw and eventually banished the axe too. Finally, in the 1990s, something truly remarkable arrived. A machine that, in favourable terrain, made a hard-working chainsaw flourisher look like a hopeless slacker, an anachronism, an irrelevance. Read the rest of this entry »
Are you ‘feature complete’ yet? Have you written that novel, made that parachute jump, found that special someone? By my calculations my own personal beta test still has about 250 years left to run. Circa 2264 the handful of people that backed my 1970 Kickstarter campaign will get an email thanking them for their patience. The email will include the following changelog.
Today’s column bestrides Europe like an unusually colossal colossus. Quite why an unusually colossal colossus would be standing with one foot on Fort William, Scotland and the other on Volgograd, Russia is, frankly, anybody’s guess. He could be doing his pre-breakfast callisthenics. He could be admiring the Northern Lights. He might have got a sudden urge to urinate on Finland or Algeria. There’s just no way of knowing for sure. Read the rest of this entry »
Ever since witnessing an unfortunate accident involving a home-built Fieseler Storch and a cement works chimney, I’ve made it a rule never to go aloft in incomplete flying machines. When it comes to incomplete flying machine simulations however, I’m a little less Beardmore Inflexible. 777 Studios and 1C Game Studios claim IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad is now 70% finished. In an effort to find out what ‘70% finished’ means, I’ve spent the last few days yoyoing Yaks, pranging Peshki, and sending He 111s to He ll. Read the rest of this entry »
IL-2 Sturmovik blew me away at Gamescom last year. With only a couple of weeks until I fly out to Cologne again, I’m enthusiastic about the prospect of another unexpected champion of gaming emerging from a cloudbank and peppering me with excitement. A year has passed since I took to the skies and development has continued at a steady rate. New planes are appearing and the modelling of existing ones is improving, but it’s the dynamic campaign I’m most excited to see. Glorious great maps. Two new videos below.
“Another helping of Enigma machine gibberish from Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s resident sim gimp.” The Coventry Herald
“As usual, Stone switches subjects with the gracefulness of a derailing freight train.” The Aldershot Bugle
“The last time I saw that many commas that close together, I was visiting the National Museum of Printing.” Caravanning Today
“After reading this week’s pieces on IL-2: Battle of Stalingrad and BOMB, the fatwā calls suddenly made a lot more sense.” Contemporary Crochetist Read the rest of this entry »
When a Flare Path Friday falls on November 29, the 333rd day of the year, it’s traditional for all the stories to have a topical tripartite slant. Back in 2002 that meant detailed scrutiny of a just released Fokker Dr.I add-on for MSFS, coverage of Bronze Tide, a WIP Battle of Arginusae wargame, and an interview with Trilobyte Interactive, the makers of Lucy Lyme, a Spelunky precursor inspired by the activities of Victorian fossil hunter Mary Anning. Today it means words on Prepar3D, N3V’s plans, and IL-2: Battle of Stalingrad’s early access LaGG-3. Read the rest of this entry »
I didn’t believe in the Oculus Rift. Not in the way that I don’t believe in Derek Acorah, the phantom of credibility, but in the way that I don’t believe in matter transporters or eating only one biscuit. The Rift had seemed like an impossible dream, a product of improbable technology and the overly forgiving impressions of excited humans. Now I believe and all it took was a flight over Stalingrad in a Sturmovik.
Flare Path knows Eastern Europe like the Baku of his hand. In 2011 he hiked the length of the old Iron Curtain. In 2012 he unicycled the entire Bordurian coastal path. This year he’s planning to fly to Moscow, hire a C-65, and do a tour of all of the grads – Leningrad, Kaliningrad, Svetlograd, Retrograd, Upgrad, Downgrad, Biodegrad etc. He’s particularly looking forward to Volgograd/Stalingrad having spent the last few days contemplating and consuming games set in that famously blood-steeped city. Read the rest of this entry »
I would have written this post a great deal more quickly but I accidentally got Stoned while doing a quick spot of research. Fear not – nobody’s been pelting me with rocks and I haven’t decided that the only way to write about flight sims is in a herbal haze. I did make the mistake of checking the writings of Tim Stone in historical Flare Path briefings and that was, as ever, like entering a world of exciting things that I know so little about. Did you know that pilots in WWI flight sim, Rise of Flight, have sidearms in the cockpit with them? 777 Studios were behind that game and 1C have handed them development duties on the WWII Eastern Front sequel.
