Remember that flight sim that was going to do for the WW2 Regia Aeronautica what IL-2 Sturmovik did for the Voyenno Vozdushnye Sily? Recall that imminent Napoleonic roguelike – the one that was going to let you desert, rustle chickens, and scavenge on corpse-littered battlefields? The Dorset outfit that was looking to raise £250,000 to fund an Eighteenth Century smuggling sim? In today's column I point the Flare Path PBY at patches of ocean where promising work-in-progress sims and wargames were last seen. I find out why titles like Lifeboat Simulator 1875, La Decima, and General Winter are years late.
]]>For the last three years this column has used an ancient bolt-action Lee-Metford to dispense sim and wargame news. This week, as an experiment, we'll be trialling a far more modern fact flinger, the MG 42K. According to its manual, this Mauser-manufactured marvel can fire 20 separate story snippets in under a minute! Obviously, the high ROF comes at a price. Accuracy - “especially at the end of long bursts” - can be “slightly compromised” says the bumph. Give me a second to insert my ear plugs and press my cheek against the porcelain-cool steel stock, and we'll set about finding out what “slightly compromised” means.
]]>Any reasonably competent sim dev can turn heads with a finely modelled Tiger tank, Vulcan bomber, or Schienenzeppelin railcar. It takes a rare talent to do the same with a vehicle so ubiquitous, so achingly ordinary, even a picture of it has the power to... power... to... ZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZ ZZZ ZZZ.
]]>If there's one thing Inca weather deity Illapa hates, it's prayers. They say the moment he hears anything resembling a request, he wraps the world in a snow-white alpaca fleece and heads for the hills. Some sap has obviously been badgering him, because we haven't seen our wingtips in forty minutes. Somewhere down there is a little mining town called Cascada Negra. If we don't spot its flare path soon, Dorado Aviacon is going to be in the market for a new DC-3 and flight crew, and the only ones who'll be reading this shipment of prime sim and wargame news will be centipedes and javelina.
]]>After the disappointing flop of Microsoft Flight, you may well be asking how you should be taking to the skies. Well, if you follow the advice of our Senior Flying Things correspondent, Tim Stone, you'll know Aerofly FS is a good option. Tim wrote about it back in February, where he was gosh-darned surprised by how good it was. And now it's out on Steam.
]]>When Rebecca Teacakes offers Flare Path a penny for his thoughts, Flare Path seldom answers honestly. Admitting you've let your porridge go cold or your pilsner go flat because you've been contemplating questions like “How many looted harpsichords could be squeezed onto the back of a Kettenkrad?” or “What would Boudica, queen of the Iceni, have smelled like?” takes courage. Much better to pretend you were pondering column-related conundrums like “Why does Steam appear to discriminate against wargames and their makers?” and “Why aren't more sims as staggeringly beautiful as aerofly FS?”.
]]>Before I serve newly baked word-cakes in The Flare Path tearoom, I like to leave them by an open window to cool for an hour or two. This week I left stories about the Microsoft Flight beta-tester recruitment drive, the Steel Armor: Blaze of War trailer, and the GTR3 teaser site on my usual sill, and when I came to collect them... THEY WERE GONE! I can only assume rascals took them, or possibly it was scallywags or rapscallions. Rapscallions have been getting increasingly bold of late. My neighbour reckons they're becoming more of a menace than ne'er-do-wells, but he's a big old racist so I tend to take everything he says with a pinch of salt. The point is: What am I going to witter on about this week?
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