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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. (more…)

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.

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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.

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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. … [visit site to read more]

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. … [visit site to read more]