There was a nasty moment early on in my relationship with HMS when I thought me and Johan Nagel's latest weren't going to get on. In my first hour with the beta of this highly original turnless Hornblower-em-up I experienced five game-curtailing mutinies. Even on the lowest difficulty setting I couldn't make progress. Baffled disbelief was fast becoming sulky defeatism when the doubloon finally dropped. An email exchange with the designer and a second look at the tutorial and suddenly I was out of the doldrums and surging ahead.
]]>A is for Another Automobilista. Automobilista, the sim that stormed to victory in the single-player portion of the inaugural Flare Path Grand Prix (a popularity contest for race sims) is to get a sequel in December and interestingly the sequel will rely on an engine last seen in Project CARS 2. As Reiza explained to www.racedepartment.com, the graphical prowess and “smooth as butter” fluency of Slightly Mad's engine were a major attraction, as was the prospect of unrestricted code access. From statements like "We didn´t actually have access to the rF2 code beyond information that Studio-397 would supply to us on a need-to-know basis to get our content to work in their engine." it sounds like the Brazilian devs weren't completely happy with their previous engine provider.
]]>The man currently sipping a Koskenkorva and consulting his cue cards in the U/S Williams X-Jet The Flare Path uses as a dais is Ilja 'Zipuli' Varha. Our second 'atypical simmer', Ilja has very kindly agreed to talk about his journey from juvenile M1 Tank Platoon fan to 33-year-old brigade simulator officer in the Finnish Defence Forces. Whether your polygonal battle wagon of preference is a Steel Beasts Leo, a Steel Fury T-34 or a World of Tanks Tiger, the following paragraphs should prove interesting.
]]>In the alphabetical news round-up waiting like a pre-pounce puma beyond the break 'A' is more likely to be for 'airship' or 'angry house' than 'apple'. Stripy ungulates probably won't feature in the entry for 'Z' but simulated Bf 110s or Mitsubishi A5Ms might. If you've an eye for a shapely engine nacelle or a finely chiselled turret – if you've an interest in the bloodier bits of history - I guarantee your curiosity will be piqued by something in the 26-compartment specimen drawer below.
]]>Meet Unimog, the Flare Path mouser. He owes his name to his love of clambering and off-piste adventure. Why, this very morning I spotted the little scamp nosing around inside the turret of a Steel Beasts Pro Personal Edition story, sharpening his claws on a free chunk of Combat Mission Fortress Italy: Gustav Line, and enjoying a nap atop the warm fuselage of an obscure chopper sim demo.
]]>A hopeless nostalgic, The Flare Path always finds year ends troubling. On one hand, The Past is about to get a little fatter; on the other, the extra girth means 1692 - FP's favourite year - is even more likely to get overlooked by historians. What's so special about 1692? That was the year Thomas J. Halthrope invented the Alliterating Alice, a donkey-powered 'worde gin' capable of producing bespoke sim & wargame news preambles at the touch of a lever. This very intro was produced on a 1692 Halthrope that works as well today as it ev///<$> Assetto Corsa <$$> Scourge of War: Antietam. <$$$> Steel Beasts Pro <> hereendethpreface///
]]>What's General Paulus' take on splendid recent releases like Achtung Panzer: Operation Star and Unity of Command? Does Genghis Khan play anything other than Mount & Blade? Does Oliver Cromwell still believe the lack of English Civil War wargames is the result of a fiendish Popish plot? In an effort to answer nagging questions like these The Flare Path has acquired a SpiritMaster IV ouija board. I'm still ploughing through the manual and tutorials at present. Early experiments haven't been wholly successful. In preparation for this week's pieces on the the first Combat Mission: Battle For Normandy module, Steel Beasts PPE 2.6, and Eagle Dynamics future plans, I attempted to contact Michael Wittmann and Chuck Yeager, but ended-up chewing the ectoplasm with Florence Nightingale and Samuel Pepys instead.
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