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, most of which involve 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 – Kohima, Katzbach, Khe Sanh – in chronological order, you probably won’t regret clicking where it says… (more…)

My Chief Foxer Setter isn’t getting any younger. One day, as sure as eggs are ovoid, Roman’s going to be summoned upstairs by Reynard, the setter of The Ultimate Foxer, and I’ll have to find a replacement. To ensure there’s a pool of high-calibre candidates there when the time comes, and to allow Roman the occasional week off in his dotage, I’d like to run high-quality third-party foxers in this slot now and again. If you reckon you could put together a decent missing vowels, wordchain, hive, cluster, rithmetic or collage foxer, for Roman’s sake, have a bash and send the result to me (timfstone at gmail dot com) in ready-to-publish form with answers listed in an accompanying email. Assuming it gets the nod, your effort will appear, fully credited, as a future Foxer post. (more…)

Newegg are holding a Memorial Day sale on loads of PC components this weekend, with deals on everything from monitors, external hard drives, Z490 motherboards and more from now until the day itself, Monday 25th May. The discounts themselves are something of a mixed bag, though, so here are the ones worth paying attention to.

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After a relatively quiet week on the deals front last Friday, this week they’re practically busting out of every available online orifice you can think of, with Epic’s Mega Sale, GOG’s Witcher sale and the last hurrah of Humble’s Spring Sale serving up a veritable deluge of great PC gaming deals. Your deals herald has also rounded up all the best discounts on Civilization VI to help you get the best prices on its new season pass, as well as the newly-released Minecraft Dungeons. Plus, if you missed grabbing XCOM Chimera Squad at half price, Fanatical have brought back their initial launch deal with a tasty 54% off. So let’s cut the chat and get to those deals, because bow howdy there’s a lot to get through this week. Onwards!

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After a bumpy journey with daft amounts of grind and a halting bug, Destiny 2‘s latest quest, The Lie, can be completed. That’s the one where our not-so-benevolent AI overlord, Rasputin, wanted us to grind Seraph Towers and shotgun kills. The final step brings a new bit of story, which is quite nice, and a new shotgun you really might want if you play PvP. Aggressive-type shotguns are superhot at the moment, and Bungie are here offering everyone an easy (albeit grindy) way to get a guaranteed good one, Felwinter’s Lie.

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When Katharine reviewed the excellent WD Blue SN550 SSD last month, she described it as “disgustingly good value.” Well, Amazon seems intent on making her sick, because it’s now even more disgusting with sizeable discounts on the 500GB and 1TB flavours.

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I’m clearly having a weird Friday morning, because I just clapped my hands together and squealed “ooh, this does interesting things” aloud to myself. I’m also clearly playing a very good videogame. This is Monster Train: a deckbuilding roguelike that wears its Slay The Spire influences on its sleeve, while spinning up a familiar formula in a completely different direction. You’re on a train to hell, and have to defend your engine against waves of enemies that come at you on three different levels. It’s like Slay The Spire meets Hearthstone meets Plants Vs. Zombies.

I haven’t been this excited about a deckbuilder since the Spire itself. Which is great, because it’s out right now.

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Technically it should be happy birthday to The Witcher 3, but it’s always better to put a face to an event, don’t you think? Yes, this week we all celebrated the fifth anniversary of CD Projekt’s most favoured baby (until later this year, at least). Join Alice Bee, VidBud Matthew and Nate as they discuss how Geralt would do on Come Dine With Me, if he’d be alright to have a pint with, and also maybe the game itself a bit.

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Listen, never mind that sharks are not the mindlessly violent animals we’ve been trained to fear, and simply additional victims of mankind’s global vertebrate binge. Dismiss, please, the ongoing cultural rehabilitation of this toothy swimmer, who is statistically quite poor at killing humans. Ignore also their adorable habit of falling asleep when you hold them upside-down. Forget it, forget it all. No more lovey-dovey thoughts for these wondrous aquatic beings, more maligned than malignant. This is a list about videogame sharks. And videogame sharks are the baddies. Here are the 9 deadliest sharks in PC games.

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I knew Minecraft Dungeons was going to be fun when I played a couple of hours of the beta build last month. I knew this because, well, it was> fun. It was the kind of fun you can fathom within about twelve seconds of starting a game, and the kind you know will be dependable in its simplicity, even if it might not last forever. And hey, guess what? Minecraft Dungeons is really fun! It’s a charming, lively little looter-bruter, with all Minecraft’s aesthetic elements, but absolutely nothing in common with it beyond that.

It’s not going to change the world of action RPGs (that is to say, Diabloids), as it is a fairly simple beast. And it’s a fairly small one too: with a seven hour single player campaign that a proper clicklord could probably breeze through in half the time, it leans heavily on replay value to deliver its 17 quids’ worth of goods. But it is pretty much what I hoped it would be when I wrote my preview, and I have very little to complain about now that I’ve seen the whole thing.

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