The developers of multiplayer aerial combat sim War Thunder have apologised after a picture of the real-life Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which killed seven crew members when it exploded just 73 seconds after launch in 1986, was used in artwork promoting the game’s recent Seek & Destroy update.
]]>A player of free-to-play vehicular combat game War Thunder has claimed that the game's representation of the British Challenger 2 tank is inaccurate. This is an everyday occurence for the messageboard of any videogame striving for realism.
What sets this apart is that the player claimed to be a Challenger 2 commander and proceeded to post classified documents to prove they were right.
]]>A is for Alphabetised wargame and sim news. Every four weeks or so I hang up a streamer of industrial strength fly paper in The Flare Path water closet and see what wargame and simulation news items stick to it. Below is this month’s bag – 25 stories involving virtual vehicles and surrogate slaughter. If you've visited a transport museum or heritage railway in the past twelve months, or can put these battles – Bunker Hill, Bataan, Borodino – in chronological order, you probably won't regret clicking where it says…
]]>Ordinarily straight-laced free-to-play WW2 combat sim War Thunder is well known for its silly April Fools events. This year, it's an impressively well fleshed-out UFO combat scenario named Earth Thunder. With a HUD full of incomprehensible alien text and instructions that aren't much more helpful, two teams of UFOs clash above a besieged modern-day city. Being advanced alien craft, they're capable of operating on the land, in the air or even underwater, each with different attack modes, making for an arcadey but very unusual fight. The event runs until April 5th, and Below: A trailer FROM BEYOND.
]]>After a lengthy closed beta, Gaijin's free-to-play multi-sim War Thunder has finally rolled out its naval combat component. The game now allows players to shoot holes in each other in the air, on the ground and now at sea in around 100 different ships. While the British navy is still in paid, closed beta testing and Japanese ships are still a ways off, ships for America, Russia and Germany are now a standard feature, along with helicopters. The full patch notes for update 1.83 - Masters Of The Sea - can be found here, and a trailer below, mostly showing off the in-testing British ships.
]]>Helicopters! And just like that, you can hear Wagner already, right? As of today's big update - "The Valkyries" - they're now in free-to-play vehicular combat sim War Thunder, joining a legion of tanks, a swarm of planes and a slowly growing bathtub of boats. Five choppers (and a fistful of variants) are now available to fly, though access to them is limited at present.
While helicopters are the headline feature of update 1.81, they're currently in beta testing, accessible only if you buy a premium helicopter pack or complete objectives in-game to earn your way in. Thankfully, there's plenty left for the rest of us, including a sack of tanks, a couple planes, and a bushel of maps. Check out the patch notes here, or the ten minute update trailer below.
]]>War Thunder may have started life as a pure World War 2 air combat sim, but developers Gaijin Entertainment don't seem like they'll be satisfied until the free-to-play game encompasses the entire history of vehicular warfare. Next on the cards for the game: Helicopters, coming in patch 1.81 as announced at Gamescom. Naval combat has been in beta testing for some time now, but rotary-wing aircraft always seemed like a dream, only teased in an earlier April Fools event. Turns out they were just hovering overhead. Check the debut trailer and some streamed footage below.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>Despite Gaijin's free-to-play omni-sim War Thunder starting out exclusively as a game of World War 2 aerial combat, recent years have seen it take the fight to Wargaming's rolling festival of tankitude, World of Tanks, offering its own accessible yet semi-realistic take on armored ground battles.
Sneaking in just a week before World of Tanks' v1.0 overhaul, War Thunder has refreshed itself with a shiny new graphics engine and a slew of iconic Cold War era tanks to drive, including that chunky American workhorse; the M1 Abrams.
]]>Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months.
Below is the full, hundred-strong roster, complete with links to our coverage if you want to find out more about any of the games, or simply to marvel at how much seemed to happen in the space of 52 short weeks.
]]>Back when simulated man Tim Stone declared War Thunder [official site] one of the best sims, it wasn't even out of beta. Now, after four years in open beta, Gaijin Entertainment have declared their free-to-play aeroplane-a-tank battler is... well, not done, but officially 'released' and out of beta. War Thunder is still missing several long-planned features, like proper shipfights, but they are coming.
]]>Alphabetia is a miserable disease. Like Malaria its symptoms come and go without warning. I realised I was having an attack early this morning in the shower. Usually, when it comes to lathering - apologies for the following mental image imposition - I'm a conventional head-to-toes sort of guy. Today's ankles-buttocks-chest sequence was a sure sign something was amiss.
]]>War Thunder [official site] - A Poem
O succulent tank porn and its lusty armour My heart is like an empty field and you its farmer Your tanky face, those tanky eyes Those tanky breasts, your tanky thighs And a farmer hat that rests on your head evermore For this is needed for completion of the metaphor
]]>World War II multiplayer plane-o-tank battler War Thunder [official site], which sadly bears no relation to Tropic Thunder, has received a big new update. Titled Cold Steel, it brings a veritable armament of changes and improvements, 20 new vehicles, and everything in between. Before we launch into the nitty-gritty, come watch the pretty trailer first.
]]>Ready to discover once-and-for-all whether X-Plane is better than FSX? Whether Falcon 4.0 is better than Milk Float Simulator 2012? Ready to read the word 'realism' 46 times in a single hour, and spit feathers on discovering that the sim that caused got you through your divorce has been cruelly cold-shouldered by an idiot with a bus fetish and a sci-fi blindspot the size of the Crab Nebula? You are? Splendid. You're in the right place.
Which is better, PC or PlayStation 4? There's only one way to settle this: realising that it's a daft question and a petty argument entirely unworthy of your precious time. Why war over platforms when you can war across platforms? War Thunder is bringing PC and PlayStation 4 together for a spot of friendly murdering, introducing cross-platform multiplayer "very, very soon." Why bicker when you can be united in a shared love of destroying vintage tanks and aeroplanes?
]]>Everything I know about tanks, I learned from Brendan. My understanding is that tanks are big and made of metal and that some people like them quite a lot. So huzzah! After being in paid beta for a while, War Thunder's tank-adding expansion Ground Forces has launched into open beta. Watching the launch trailer, I am intrigued to discover that the pokey-out bit on a tank is actually a big gun, and that tanks are used for fighting.
]]>War Thunder: Ground Forces is rolling towards an open beta, but for now the competitive multiplayer game remains open only to those who have a key. We have keys. Would you like a key? There are 3000 keys.
War Thunder is like World of Tanks but with planes; small arenas, short matches, free-to-play, and a persistent tech tree to advance through with your hard-won XP. While the makers of World of Tanks created a whole new game to incorporate planes, War Thunder: Ground Forces puts the tanks into the same maps as the planes, so the two can interact (by shooting at each other). Read our preview of the game for more detail, or find a trailer and the first-come, first-served keys down below.
]]>So, here's a quick refresher: World of Tanks had tanks and War Thunder had planes, and then World of Warplanes had planes so now War Thunder Ground Forces, currently in closed beta, has both tanks and planes fighting in the same world. I feel like these free-to-play World War II MMOs are in an arms race, and soon they'll be adding submarines and blimps and, I dunno, flying saucers. Anyway, if you're wondering if Gaijin Entertainment is as good with tanks as they are with planes, I just spent a couple days rolling around in the Ground Forces beta to find out. Let's tank a look, he said, vowing it would be his only tank pun.
]]>Hello! The War Thunder Ground Forces beta - that means games of multiplayer tanks, as is so popular in these modern internets - is about to bombard these lonely shores, and Gaijin have sent us over a big batch of keys to give away.
You can grab them (and all the requisite info) below.
]]>The chaps over at Gaijin Entertainment are still waxing their moustaches and sewing cool patches onto their jackets, not quite yet ready to roll out War Thunder's tank-adding expansion Ground Forces. This weekend they plan to invite "a really large number" of new players to join the closed beta testing, rewarding pilots who've been completing daily tasks in the base game. Oh, life's always easier for the teacher's pet.
Or you could simply be at EGX Rezzed in Birmingham this weekend, where Ground Forces will be playable by all and sundry. Even Adam and Graham.
]]>There was a young Panzer called Peter, Who fancied himself a great defeater; But because of his haste, and his tendency to waste Panzergranate 40 Armour Piercing Composite Rigid ammunition, He was often disgraced in the War Thunder: Ground Forces beta.
]]>"Load the platinum cannons with the world's largest diamond!" *Ker-chunk* "Loaded, sir! But we don't have anything to fire it at." "You're right, Jiggingtons! We've already blasted a hole where the Mona Lisa's smile should be, and knocked the arms off the Venus de Milo. I need to purchase more art to destroy. Gentlemen, stand down. Amuse yourselves while I'm at the super-secret auction." "Expositionally well done, sir. Sir, can we play some War Thunder while you're gone? There are tanks in the closed beta, and all you need to do get in is buy a ..." "Don't be bloody stupid, Jiggingtons! I'm not made of money! Now hand me my ivory backscratcher, and get the man who tells the man who tells the other man to open the door for me. I'm orf."
]]>Just as World of Warplanes takes flight, so War Thunder is crashing down to earth. In a good way. The free-to-play flight sim is launching a Ground Forces beta on December 4th, letting tank fanciers join the fight.
]]>By 1945, though the U-boat threat had greatly diminished, Britain's reserves of weather-related aircraft names were dangerously low. Spurred into action by scathing press criticism of the Boulton Paul Breeze, de Havilland Drizzle, and Bristol Beaufort Scale, in early February the Air Ministry took steps to address the issue by organising a summit of leading aircraft designers and meteorologists. Tragically, the meeting never took place as the Airspeed Anemometer carrying 9 of the key participants to the venue was struck by a Republic Thunderbolt while manoeuvring to avoid a Fairey Fogbank.
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