I wasn’t a captain. Solo ambushes were my thing. I had a great sense of the angles, distances, and crucially, the timing needed to load the right ammunition and light the fuse when the enemy would suffer most. Point blank sneak attacks with the one-gun raft were my specialty, and how I’d typically get to the battlefield, or plunge to the earth along with an enemy ship and its furious crew.

But one day there was a galleon, and nobody was stepping up. I haven’t played AirBuccaneers since its Alpha state about seven years ago. I imagine it’s very different now. But I remember that one day. That one glorious battle where I took on the duty of steering and organising, and the rando gods blessed me with a crew that understood. With nothing but voice barks, and that rare and special magic of a team of strangers in synch, we became unstoppable.

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Something about the concept of “airship crews try to blow each other out of the sky” made AirBuccaneers popular in the RPS treehouse since its beginnings as a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, when we organised irregular matches with you motley crew. If you too wish to man guns, take the wheel, lead boarding parties, bomb from gliders, or generally murder lots of men in silly ways, good news! Developers Ludocraft have now made their commercial follow-up AirBuccaneers HD free to everyone, so you can grab it on Steam and begin plundering today.

… [visit site to read more]

After a successful Greenlighting, Air Buccaneers (which apparently they’re spelling “AirBuccaneers”, but I’m not) arrives on Steam today. The game that has rather won Jim’s heart, and the attention of RPS’s readers, is officially there for even the likes of you to play. The multiplayer airship FPSing is a historically accurate recreation of the floating battles between the Bucanneers and the Vikings to dominate the Ancient North.

Should you play tonight, the developers will be about on the servers, and will be flinging Steam codes into the chat for people to grab, to get the full version of the game. And once Jim has escaped the mad hell of moving house, he’ll be organising some games for RPS readers in the near future.